Iran, China Block Outside Sites to Muzzle Mideast News

Found on Wired on Wednesday, 02 February 2011
Browse Politics

Tehran and Beijing are doing their best to spin the protests in their favor, when they talk to the world. But at home, they're pursuing a different strategy: trying to muzzle anything but the official line on the upheaval.

Iran has sought to graft its own ideology and history onto the protests - as seems to be popular these days - painting the movements as the Egyptian version of the 1979 Iranian revolution that ushered in its theocracy.

At home, China has blocked internet searches for "Egypt" and reportedly ordered Chinese media to follow the state-run news service Xinhua's line on the protest movements.

It probably doesn't help that the Western press keeps mentioning Tahrir Square in the same breath as the 1989 Tiananmen square protests and subsequent crackdown, It's a chapter of history banned from discussion in China.

It's only normal that dictators all over the world are afraid of the current political changes in countries where the regime was considered stable, although hated. The longer this goes on, and the more dictators fall, the worse it gets for the remaing ones. Granted, China cannot be compared to Egypt, but it still is not impossible that its people revolt; and the extented censorship proves that the poltical body has realized that too.