Chinese-language Wikipedia presents different view of history

IHT / NYT ^ | November 29, 2006 | Howard W. French

[baseball_fan]

Just who was Mao Zedong?

According to the English-language version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, he was a victorious military and political leader who founded China's modern Communist state. He was also a man many saw as "a mass murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese."

Switch to Wikipedia in Chinese, and one discovers a very different man. There, Mao Zedong's reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s, or for what many historians call the greatest famine in human history.

In recent weeks, the Chinese government has demonstrated its hostility toward the emergence of a credible source of reference material that escapes its control by frequently blocking access to Wikipedia, whose Chinese version, though still far smaller than its English-language counterpart, is growing by leaps and bounds.

But on sensitive questions of China's modern history or on hot-button issues, the Chinese version diverges so dramatically from its English counterpart that it sometimes reads as if it were approved by the censors themselves.

This gulf in information and perspective comes across powerfully in the entry on Mao, which is consistently one of the most frequently searched and edited topics in the Chinese version, and in the entry on historical watersheds, like the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Chinese Wikipedia users and critics say that the differences highlight the resilience here of a system of information control whose reach goes well beyond simple censorship.

In each of its language versions, Wikipedia is collaboratively written and edited by online enthusiasts…

[baseball_fan]

"A parallel, and purely homegrown, effort at creating an online encyclopedia in China, Baidu Baike, skirts controversies like these altogether. Baidu Baike, which is owned by the biggest Internet search engine company in China..."

Can this article be seen in China?

[Gay State Conservative]

Gee,there's a surprise! I've read that if you look up "Tienanmen Square" in China just about all you get are sites that tell how beautiful and historic it is.

[baseball_fan]

from article: "The English-language version of the encyclopedia speaks of a Japanese shipwreck off Taiwan in 1871, in which 54 crew members were beheaded by Taiwanese aborigines. Japan demanded compensation from China, only to be told that Taiwan was not within China's jurisdiction. The Chinese-language entry on Taiwan, meanwhile, is silent on the jurisdiction question."

learn something new every day

[cmdjing]

Wikipedia is useless for anything but sports statistics.

For a detailed account of the shipwreck of the Okinawan sailors in 1871 and the political issues involved (They technically werent Japanese citizens since Okinawa would not be part of Japan until nearly 2 decades later), you'll need JSTOR database access, but there is a summary available here.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-749X(1983)17%3A2%3C257%3ATQIEAJ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G

[baseball_fan]

very useful link; hope it will get added to wikipedia so it can be part of the conversation