This is just ridiculous. This goes way beyond what they originally intended with stopping suspected IP Theft or backdoors by Huawei. This is a black day for academic progress and research in general.
Google Scholar or Wikipedia websites has been banned in China for a decade, Do you think this is ridiculous?
No, that's not great either. That's the Chinese gov wanting to block knowledge from outside about political events, probably. This is something worse though in my opinion, since it actively halts innovation standardization which shouldn't have anything to do with politics.
With all due respect to academics, banning political opposition is far worse. Freedom is more important than new IEEE standards.
It is a mistake for China gov to ban wiki or google scholar. It is a mistake for US gov to ask IEEE to ban Chinese as well.However, you can not say that US gov is right in this way because China gov has done something wrong.
...I have to say, we can log into Google Scholar and Wikipedia in China. I even donated once for Wikipedia.
One is caused by an authoritarian government, the other one is applied to individual researchers and academic freedom as whole.
yes, it is. and it's perfectly reasonable for US gov to be stupid since Chinese had been :D
Actually, Chinese government don't want us to know more about the real history of the Cultural Revolution and something sensitive in politics.
Actually, I have to say, lots of people are able to use Google and Wikipedia in China even though Chinese gov officially bans them, including me. There are dozens of methods to cross the "wall".
Why is that a reason to ban academics?
These Chinese gov did't intend to ban academics, but political materials. But since they value their own benefits much higher than the benefits of academics to the Chinese people, they ban all the things, maybe because it's not technically easy to just ban individual pages given the huge amount of the materials. That's a very bad thing to ban the free Internet access.
Hi all,
For those who are not familiar. Google is indeed banned because the CHN gov does not want us to see political adversary contents. However, google is available in the University I am working at for accessing research materials, especially scholars.google.com.
I guess you were right, politics are banned, but academics aren't