The answer is that nobody should be:

China Cracks Down on Blogs, Search Engines
Jun 30 2:26 AM US/Eastern

China’s Internet regulators are stepping up controls on blogs and search engines to block material it considers unlawful or immoral, the government said Friday.

“As more and more illegal and unhealthy information spreads through the blog and search engine, we will take effective measures to put the BBS, blog and search engine under control,” said Cai Wu, director of the Information Office of China’s Cabinet, quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency.

The government will step up research on monitoring technology and issue “admittance standards” for blogs, the report said, without providing any details.

China encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to block access to obscene or subversive material. It has the world’s second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 111 million people online.

China launched a campaign in February to “purify the environment” of the Internet and mobile communications, Xinhua said.

Unfortunately, it’s a safe bet that technology from the various members of the BizzyBlog Internet Wall of Shame is making the processes of finding and punishing the offending bloggers and censoring the search engines easier.

For the Wall of Shame member search engines, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword, isn’t it?

Why Are China’s Limits on Covering Disasters, Riots, and Demonstrations Not Getting More Media Attention?

Imagine reporters being told by the government that they can’t write about or investigate Hurricane Katrina, the Sago mining deaths, or antiwar rallies.

The equivalent is happening in China:

The word from the village of Dongzhou was growing dire last December 6. Security officers were clashing with residents over the local government’s seizure of land for a power plant. Official force, villagers said, was escalating.

“I called them every hour, and it kept getting worse. First it was tear gas, then there was shooting, then two dead, then more,” said Ding Xiao, the 23-year-old Hong Kong-based reporter who broke news of the violent crackdown for U.S. broadcaster Radio Free Asia. The crack of gunfire could be heard in tapes of her phone calls to residents of the village near Shanwei, in southern China’s Guangdong province. “They were asking for help. They said, ’Please call the central government to ask for help. We have called, but there was no response.’”

Following Ding’s report, the crackdown got wide attention outside of China. But print and broadcast media on the mainland were instructed to carry only a belated official account defending the use of force against the protesters. The death toll is still unknown; the government reported that three were killed, but human rights organizations have said the actual number may be much higher. Dongzhou villagers have been under tight surveillance since December and have been warned to keep silent on threat of punishment.

This policy of enforced silence has come to define the central government’s approach to widespread rural unrest, China’s most salient domestic issue. Fearing that news of land disputes and other civil discontent could fuel a united threat to its authority, the Communist Party government has undertaken one of the biggest media crackdowns since the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations.

Now China is in the process of preventing coverage of any and all disasters without an okey-dokey from the government:

New York, June 26, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by a proposed law that would subject news outlets to fines for reporting on natural disasters, riots, and other emergencies without official approval. The draft law is under review by the country’s legislature, according to state media.

“The media have an important and potentially life-saving role in reporting health crises, natural disasters and other incidents of public concern that officials often have an interest in concealing,” CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said. “We stand by our colleagues in China who have urged authorities to scrap this proposal and allow journalists to do their job.”

Under the draft law, news outlets face fines up to 100,000 yuan (US$12,500) for the unauthorized reporting of public emergencies. They would also be fined for falsely reporting news of disasters.

The proposal stipulates that officials would be fined if they failed to report emergencies to their superiors. It goes on to say that the news should not be released to the public if the information could “jeopardize the handling of emergencies,” Xinhua News Agency reported. These events could include news of health and environmental crises, mining disasters, riots and demonstrations, and natural disasters, according to international news reports.

Several bloggers and media critics in mainland China blasted the proposal.

That final sentence leads to Question 2, which will appear at about 2 PM this afternoon.

As to Question 1, I don’t have a good answer to the relatively sparse coverage of an extraordinary crackdown. Google News late Friday night only had 124 links to stories, which is a very small number for a story that has been out there since early in the week. Maybe the WORMs (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, known to most as The Mainstream Media) are too busy trying to figure out how to expose the details of our terrorist apprehension operations to pay attention to the clampdown on their professional brethren.

This is from Anna at A Rose by Any Other Name — actually, from her father:

….. With the advent of World War many of our actors went to fight rather than stand and rant against this country we all love. They gave up their wealth, position and fame to become service men &women, many as simple “enlisted men.” This page lists but a few, but from this group of only 18 men came over 70 medals in honor of their valor, spanning from Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, Distinguish Service Cross’, Purple Hearts and one Congressional Medal of Honor. ….. I would like to remind the people of what the entertainers of 1943 were doing, (60 years ago). Most of these brave men have since passed on.

Read the whole thing. The fact that the Anna’s post compares current celebrities unfavorably to those in the past doesn’t alter the positive contributions of those from yesteryear cited in the e-mail from Anna’s dad.