Former “Seasteaders” Come Ashore To Start Libertarian Utopias In Honduran Jungle
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This is very similar to the German city-states that were set up along the baltic and northern sea some 800 years ago. I recall reading a very interesting article about this in some magazine, maybe I can dig it up. This model is a win-win because the settlers get to make their own very liberal rules (that the host state doesn't necessarily agree with) while the host still reaps some of the benefits of wealth and education coming into the area. Excited to see where this goes.
Edit: Found the article. It's called "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty" in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-poli...
Catherine the Great invited Germans to settle near the Black Sea when she won the territory from the Ottoman Empire. She gave them land in a similar way to the Oklahoma Land Rush: work it and it's yours. The problem came later when Russia changed its mind about being hands-off.
And that's my concern about this plan too. Honduras today is cooperative, but there is no guarantee it will remain that way. In fact, I'm sure it'll end poorly if poor Hondurans see wealthy "Americans" homesteading next door and not paying any taxes.
So, I don't think there will be jealousy that aliens are getting a better deal.
Also, if the cities are successful this will increase business opportunities for Honduran businesses.
The same principal is the enemy of the Honduran policy to allow autonomous zones within the country. Either the agreement to guarantee Hondurans residency within these enclaves will be ignored/suppressed, or there will be clashes if the enclave is successful - people without jobs move to where there are jobs - just so they can eke out a living.
Possibly the end-sum will be like the rich neighborhoods in US ciites which basically use the nearby poor areas as cheap labor pools and crime sinks.
Why do you think the BNP, Front National and Golden Dawn have so much traction? It's not just the currency and banksters (leftist parties are equally against those). It's the sudden impact of uncontrolled immigration as well.
Venezuala can nationalize the state oil company a lot easier than Honduras would be able to nationalize my software company (which, by the way, will be legally domiciled elsewhere, most likely) and unless they kidnap me, such actions would cause me (and anyone wise) to leave.
Looking at the history of SEZs around the world they have done pretty well. Panama tried an experiment on the atlantic side of the canal and it has boomed... But if Panama were to "nationalize" it, all they'd have is a bunch of warehouses (and maybe the goods in them, but that wouldn't last very long.)
If this model works, and more countries see it working and adopt it, it's an incremental path to trustworthy courts and healthy entrepreneurial environments for dozens of poor countries around the world. That's what it takes to end extreme poverty, and now there's a new contending path to it. If this model works, Paul Romer and Patri Friedman could be the new Norman Borlaugs.
I seriously think that anyone currently sending money to Africa for insecticide-treated mosquito nets (previously Givewell's top recommendation for efficient philanthropy) should consider switching to sending money to this instead, from a utilitarian perspective.
From a utilitarian perspective, there's zero proven benefit to sending charity to first world people playing utopia.
But your last paragraph ... Ouch. I had to rewrite this post three times to keep it civil. I guess your point is you think this idea is just that good, but if you take a step back and consider that on the one hand we have a very, simple, proven, and cheap way of saving huge numbers of lives and on the other we have something very ambitious but as yet unproven, you might conclude that they should not be competing for the same dollar.
Really, it's a choice between the near certainty of saving a life and the possibility that one could save many more. It beats donating to the Society for Curing Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies.
Something like this would be like a culture attack in Civilization. It would show that something better was possible and not an ocean away, completely destabilizing the status quo. I am not surprised so many African leaders denied it - they would not try something that has such a high risk of eroding their power base and the iron hold hold they have over the path of revenue.
Will this work? Well it either will or it won't. If it doesn't then things are no worse beyond a few bitter people. And if it does? The implications extend beyond Poor countries if the richer ones all of a sudden have to start competing for the flow of talent. If they run slightly different versions in different areas they can even do some optimization on the best features of an economy and government. I can't see this as anything other than a good thing.
What would it look like if we could throw everything out and start over in the age of the internet? Laws under version control? Online direct democracy? GetSatisfaction for local government? One thing I can guarantee is that many, even most, of these ideas would be terrible and ruin the hard-won stability that most democracies currently enjoy.
So what's a large and slow-moving organisation to do? You want the benefits of a fresh slate, of innovation and iteration on all the crazy ideas your best and brightest can come up with, but you don't want to lose what you already have.
So in the time honoured tradition of generations of risk-averse innovation seekers before it, Honduras is starting a skunkworks. The Honduran government skunkworks. Damned if that isn't the coolest idea I've heard in a while.
The model you are talking about is terribly easy for anyone with a sufficient lust for power to control. You see it all the time in Africa and the Middle East. Warlords gain a bit of power and start taking over territory and eventually build a small army. With said army, you take over transportation or simply rape and pillage.
Even without physical violence, economic control is equally possible with a sufficient monopoly (which, with no regulatory system to prevent dumping, tying, etc., isn't that hard to build). Control shipping, an important bridge, a major highway, waste disposal, etc. and you can effectively blackmail any of your neighbors' "sovereign" lands.
The big question is would it have worked? Was the fledgling country so republic-loving that it would have overcame a despotic Washington?
In other words, how robust is freedom when the general populace really wants it (and has somewhat of the means to back it up)?
That's what the difference between a government and a business is. They are otherwise the same.
I don't see how this is a necessary requirement of government. Instead of answering you directly, I'd suggest reading this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Political-Order-Revolution...
I simply said it was harder.
A government has a much harder time being exploitative than a business does. To the extent that a government's personnel are involved in businesses, the government is corrupted and its resistance to exploitative desires will break down.
Why not try it again? I think even in developed countries there are a lot of struggling cities that could experiment (I guess Detroit, or the whole of East Germany).
Personally I wouldn't conflate a political philosophy, which Libertarianism is, with democracy, a form of government. A libertarian government could be fascist, democratic, or anything in between.
I'm not sure why democracy isn't "cool" in of itself - sure, it isn't a be all and end all, and you can argue that X's implementation is wrong for Y and Z reasons, but fundamentally I can get behind Churchill when he said "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried".
I'm more a fan of his father, Milton, who was very pragmatic and not totally against gov't.
I'm pretty willing to disagree with Churchill and say that democracy is actually an extremely good form of government. It's easy to frame it as the "least worst" by saying the problems with other forms of government are even worse, but if you turn it around and ask what it does right, it scores very high.
I could imagine that democracy provides a more steady form of mediocrity whereas for example kingdoms might have more ups and downs depending on the current rulers.
Here's my notes from a related talk he gave on the subject:
http://library.mises.org/media/The%20Costs%20of%20War/World%...
"in europe, during monarchy taxes were 3-5%, during democracy 25%. during monarchy debt was paid down during peace time, democracies increase debt during war and peace. during monarchy, price level fell century after century, and in democracy price level has risen. in monarchy interest rates fell, in democracy interest rates have risen. in monarchy money supply grew modestly (6x in century), in democracy it's grown enormously (1000x in century). govt gdp expenditures are much higher under democracy than monarchy. very little redistribution of wealth under monarchy. very little interference. very few new laws. most wars are limited to territory under dispute often bc of inheritance/marriage."
I honestly only meant philosophically. I don't really buy the assumption that economic measures are the most valid way to justify governmental forms. Most other measures are a lot more tenuous in terms of quantifiability.
> I could imagine that democracy provides a more steady form of mediocrity whereas for example kingdoms might have more ups and downs depending on the current rulers.
Mediocrity of what, though? See, the question of what form of government is best depends a lot on the question of how you make that determination. The story we've been told is one of governmental self-doubt. You say you can't trust what you've been taught, but that's exactly what you've been taught.
I mean, really. Think back to what you've been taught about democracy by The System. What methods did they use to indoctrinate you? What effects did those methods have? I was taught it in history as an inevitability and in civics as a mechanistic bureaucracy. I didn't take any college courses on the matter. And my conclusion, until 2.5 years ago, was that democracy was the least-worst, because that's what I had been taught. Everyone hates it, but they hate it least of all.
This is how I've been looking at it: instead of doing a "comparative politics" survey, approach it from first principles. First, let's say that pure anarchy is unviable: human beings will naturally cluster into hierarchies for the sake of efficiency, and will naturally develop some kind of administrative organizational paradigm. So there's some government. But what then? What matters, and how do you protect and encourage it? What does the shape of the result look like?
I guess for me democracy is not a value in itself, and that it is is one of the lies we have been taught. If a democracy sends me into war and gets me killed when a monarchy wouldn't have, why should I think democracy is better (just a hypothetical example).
I also think about tragedy of the commons type of problems, which a democracy should have an especially hard time of answering.
Actually, it doesn't. A perfect monarchy is much better at settling conflicts than a perfect democracy. That's the appeal of the Benevolent Dictator approach: there's only one Decider and he Decides things and everyone is happy with his Decisions. It is a secularized faith system, with King Solomon deciding to cut babies in half to provide some Zen satori moment.
A democracy has no such mechanism. To the extent that we do (see our obsession with elections of public servants), it is a measure of its imperfection. The fact that we permit so much weight and meaning to go into who becomes POTUS or who becomes mayor or the the senator of New Mexico or whatever: these are indicators of the weakness of our democracy. They're fracture points.
> But it might have other problems, for example minorities will probably be disadvantaged. More able people will be exploited by the less able people, too.
One of the advantages of democracy is that egalitarianism (one of my values; as a liberal, I'm individualist, egalitarian, melioristic, and universalist) is possible. It's not possible in any other system we've come up with so far, not even an anarchistic lack of system. In an anarchy, government will naturally arise. In a non-democratic system, the government is necessarily in a power imbalance with the people.
Here's the thing. The greatest myth of my generation is that votes matter. Votes do not matter. A poignant scene? The Joker's ferry dilemma in The Dark Knight. The civilians voted. What did those votes matter? Votes are a way to excuse yourself from a democracy. They do serve a purpose, and that should be clear when you realize why they don't serve a purpose.
What is a democracy? It is the assumption that people are trustworthy. It is the system of government that assumes that the individual citizen is capable of giving respect to her fellow citizens, is intelligent and knowledgeable enough to comprehend possibilities of "where to go from here", and is compassionate enough to understand and wish the end of the plight of those who are less fortunate.
These assumptions are not true. This is why democracy has such difficulty: because it relies on the respect, intelligence, and empathy of citizens who simply have not been able to give it. There are reasons why they have not been able to, and arguments why they could, now and in the future, but that's about how to fix a democracy, not why we should have it to begin with. So I'll table that. Here's why:
A democracy says that every citizen must contribute to its governance. A government is, by its nature, a subset of the people. In a monarchy, the government is 1/N of the people. In a democracy, the government is N/N. In reality, this is a lot less simple: the monarchy needs a bureaucracy to which it delegates authority, and a democracy's population will never have 100% participation, not least because it's impossible to actually have 300 million individual people in your head. (Through this lens, the big government / small government debate becomes particularly insidious.)
A democracy says that you are a capable governor. That your voice should be at the table when policy discussions are had. If this isn't true, that's a failing of the education system, whose purpose is to provide useful adults who are capable of contributing to those policy discussions intelligently. That's a little chicken and egg, I'll admit, as is the fact that it's an infrastructure failing for you to (1) not be aware of the discussions, (2) capable of being present for the discussions, or (3) too busy making a living to join in.
These arguments shouldn't be a huge surprise. The concept of democracy is not terribly complicated. The difficulty comes in implementation, and in keeping the concept reasonably unpolluted from that implementation. The question of "Why democracy?" comes down to "Can you trust your fellow citizen?" Democracy relies on an affirmative answer. To the extent that you say no, the reasons for the negative are the things that need to be fixed: either the reason is wrong ("he's subhuman nigger; how can you trust him to make a good decision?") or the reason is right ("he doesn't even understand that two is bigger than one; how can you trust him to make a good decision?"). Democracy's job is to transmute "no"s to "yes"s.
Strangely enough, yes: that does sound a lot like getting votes.
> I also think about tragedy of the commons type of problems, which a democracy should have an especially hard time of answering.
To put it shortly, that's what the rule of law is for.
Sid Meier is the guy behind the Civilization line of video games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier In Civilization you can research various forms of government for your society, including Democracy. But for game purposes there's plenty of reasons why other systems work better under certain circumstances.
Note: "City of London" is not the same as "London", where the Olympics were held.
And perhaps it will provide some foundation knowledge to guide the governance of a Lunar 'city/colony' which, if it is too closely aligned with a single nation state might create more problems than it solves.
Maybe with Honduras it is close enough to equal to make it work. I hope it does, because, as padobson said, "What the hell?"[1].
This arrangement strikes me as the Company Town on a massive scale. Without a legal framework that exists outside of their own best interests, I don't see how this kind of thing doesn't devolve into the Company Town.
But once you understand the reason you may realize it's a bad one. Many countries seem to be getting crushed by cultural and political path dependence.
Try importing a piece of equipment through customs. The process is truly Kafka-esque. It's like the government is actively working to prevent its citizens from acquiring the tools to, you know, lift themselves out of poverty.
My closing comments when I left Honduras are here: http://www.advrider.com/forums/showpost.php?p=8366876&po...
(you can browse a few posts earlier for more pics - sadly I didn't take a lot during my customs experience)
I guess what I'm saying is that it's not clear you can separate "the people" from "the government" here. The cruft that is the Honduran civil system just accumulated over decades - it wasn't imposed by a dictator or anything like that.
Yes, but the ease of paying for government cooperation and special privilege may be better for established large multinationals. Once the "tenants" become as big as or bigger than the holders of sovereignty, there is a sea-change in the relationship, if not an outright reversal.
You might be able to avoid taxation, if you renounce your US citizenship, or a handful of little laws like personal drug use if you hermit up, but I don't see what's stopping the US government from just doing whatever the hell they feel like if you piss them off by exporting things they don't want exported or even running a data haven.
Seal Team Six wasn't authorized by anyone but the US government, but that doesn't make Osama bin Laden any less dead.
Any nations ability to operate independently is a function of their conflict with other nations in the same sphere of influence.
International law is largely a joke of a construct since the only way to hold a nation accountable if they violate some "law" is via sanctions or military action. Even then, a nation doesn't have to bother itself with seeking approval for its actions against another if none of the others cares enough to make a stink about it.
Right now the US is straight-up executing people in foreign lands via drones. They sent a team of foreign soldiers to Pakistan and conducted a raid deep within their territory. What did Pakistan do? What did the international community do?
Nothing.
Probably more accurate with this qualification.
Accuracy? Close to 9000.
If you're going to shelter the world's most wanted criminal within your borders, and refuse any chance of bringing him to justice, you probably shouldn't be too surprised if justice ends up coming to him instead.
But my point still stands: if the sea-steaders thought they could escape into some "international law" zone, then they were sadly mistaken. It's more like a "we dont really care...until we do" zone.
IIRC Greenpeace found this out when commandos (French) boarded their ship.
Plus, there's no reason to create a charter city just to try and export drugs--- you have competition from people all over the world who are doing it without being a very public charter city, and you have no competitive advantage.
The competitive advantage of a charter city is only worthwhile to legitimate businesses.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
And that's not even getting started on the whole "tragedy of the commons" thing.
Perhaps the confusion stems from mixing two different levels of abstraction. What we're talking about here isn't a free market within countries, it's a free market in countries themselves. Since there is no true global sovereign, we arguably already have this, but due to various factors (including high barriers to entry, high switching costs, and the quasi-sovereign US) there is currently not much choice in governance. With few exceptions, pretty much every country runs some variant of Anglo-American representative democracy. Perhaps, with a little competition, we can do better.
Maybe in the future, the barriers to entry and switching costs will be lower, and people will be able to move as freely around the globe as money does now.
Yes, the Framers were a sort of political entrepreneur. They were the type of political entrepreneurs who allowed slavery to exist and came up with the 3/5ths compromise.
I'm a supporter, though. The difficulty of gathering like-minded people and starting a new sovereignty without having to modify entrenched, monolithic, slow-moving institutions is tragic.
All I'm saying is that if this guy Lobo makes a mistake and gets himself thrown out of office and replaced by another old-school communist then things are going to get really ugly really fast, just check Venezuela and tell me I'm wrong.
And besides you can't "lead by example" because that doesn't works in politics, demagogy does! which is why all the hardcore leftists that are dead-against libertarians are going to use the old formula of "we are poor because they are stealing from us!". I know that's not always true, but you go tell them and see if they even want to hear you.
BTW "neoliberal" is a dirty word over there, don't describe you as one.
Minerva was more of an eccentric joke than anything serious. I mean what kind of libertarian is going to build an island and then let the Tongan "navy" take it over because he had no guns. IF you're building a country and you have no guns, you aren't really building a country. Hell, Sealand, has successfully put off a german invasion, and, having been recognized by the UK and still standing for decades now counts as a success.
Honduras is in the starting stages. But unlike the FSP they have the endorsement of the federal government. Sure it has its risk- no joke- but I'm glad to see they are trying.
I count Sealand as a win, disqualify minerva, and claim the free state project recognized it wasn't viable and didn't try.
Ignores the numbers...sounds like politics as usual.
> I count Sealand as a win,..."
I observe that the bar for "win" is very, very low.
There wasn't a deadline or anything; the FSP is still active.
Sealand doesn't count since it wasn't a libertarian, just an eccentric who wanted to call himself a prince. And he succeeded in persistently squatting on an abandoned fortification in the English Channel, not creating a new society.
I didn't know about Minerva--I was talking about the Seasteading Institute, actually.
No, there was a deadline, and a contract. That deadline passed, and the contract became null. The FSP is dead, according to its own bylaws. What continues to this day is a fraud. Of course, since that deadline was almost a decade ago, and the people running the FSP took down all the info from the website, and have been pretending otherwise, most people have never heard any of this.
Some aspects have worked out better than others.
I followed "Laissez Faire City" which was trying to do something like this (a "Gault's Gulch") in the 90s and 00s in Costa Rica and Nicaragua but I don't think got too far.
At the same time, there's also a dynamic where desirable states (those with thriving economies, liveable cities, talent pools from top Universities) end up taxing more and more, simply because they can. For many companies and individuals, the benefits of operating and living in high-tax states still seem to outweigh the costs. Although in the last decade New York and California have been losing people (partly due to companies leaving, partly due to cost-of-living and real estate prices).
Kool Aid.
They might fail miserably, but (as pointed out by others) this kind of thing has succeeded in the past.
Even if this experiment succeeded, it would be under different circumstances from previous stories. Even though Hong Kong and Singapore were British colonies, it seems like that rule had greater legitimacy than the current Honduran government, which arose through coup.
I hope they are successful. If their offering ends up being competitive with the alternatives, we'll locate our startup there (I already have talked it over with my cofounders.)
We're currently engaging in jurisdictional arbitrage to find the best home for us, as we can do what we do from anywhere that has the internet. So, we're choosing from a list of countries based on what kind of environment they will provide us.
The problem so far hasn't been finding a country that is more hospitable than the USA, but in selecting from the dozen or so who are more hospitable, and trying to figure out which one is the most hospitable.
Imagine that-- we're struggling with too many choices for good places to locate our business, all of whom offer at least one key benefit over the USA, and most of whom offer many such.
Many people think the USA is hospitable to business, and assume that there's something shady about what we're doing that we don't just go to the bay area and be done with it. Well, here's our "Crime" in the eyes of the USA: one of our founders is from Britain while the others are from the USA. This means, while we can spend up to 6 months in Britain, and 3 months in the USA, neither country will let all three of us live there to do our startup without a great deal of hassle.
Contrast that with Chile which gave us a year of residency without any more hassle than showing up at a consulate with an application, some passport photos and a fee. We can renew that for another year, and after that first renewal, we could renew it for a final time-- and have permanent residency in Chile!
And chile is a perfectly fine place to run a business. It is a first world country, with a much more pro-business government than the USA. We'd be comfortable staying here and running our business for the next several decades.
So, I hope that Patri and the competitors to his company are all very successful -- lets make honduras one of the competitors. Already we've seen Panama grow dramatically as the best and the brightest fled Venezuela after Chavez took over.... there's still huge opportunity for jurisdictions that offer good terms.
Mobility is only going up over time!
But here's some links: http://www.spencerglobal.com/chile-immigration-law/32/120-ch... http://www.allchile.net/chilewiki/index.php?title=Immigratio...
Here's a good forum to ask questions about Chile: http://www.allchile.net/chileforum/
But I don't think we need to find people local. I believe in telecommuting, and I think that talented people want to live in nice places. For instance, I know one american company that has several employees in Thailand and asia, simply because that's where the employees want to live.
I think letting people telecommute will be a competitive advantage for us in hiring. The office is such a mind numbing place to work, they seem designed to kill productivity. (we don't have an office, the founders share an apartment, having a larger apartment is still cheaper than having a separate office.)
But we're also working on businesses with a great degree of leverage. I think many businesses see themselves as mostly selling the product of their employees productivity, and thus more employees=more business. We're selling the product of ingenuity... and so a lot of places where other people would hire employees, we will outsource. For instance, when we can't do support in house, we'll have an employee or two who is in charge of customer service, but the primary front line customer service people would be employees of a customer-service-as-a-service provider.
But which country is better depends very highly on your preferences... for instance, Dubai and Singapore are good climates for business, but a gay person might not feel comfortable in either. (and we've considered both, fwiw.)
It also depends on your nationality- a treaty between the USA and the Netherlands gives us an opportunity to get residency in the netherlands much easier than it would for others.
So, any list I might give is going to be a bit too personal to our specific interests.
But people should consider chile. Panama has a new program which gives residency for anybody from certain countries (and there's a long list) who starts a business in Panama. (Panama City is the new miami- the cultural and financial hub of the region, or so I've been told.) Costa Rica has a lot to recommend it, such as a culture very supportive of americans, and no national military (if that's your thing). Nicaragua is poor, and thus your costs would be really low there, akin to thailand or cambodia. Thailand is really nice, but you can't easily get residency so you're border hopping to keep your visa up to date. Cambodia, though, I hear has a new residency program, but I don't know the details. Paraguay and Uruguay are also ones to consider, as relatively inexpensive and relatively pro-business countries. For some people estonia might be the right choice and for others it might be shanghai, even though china has aspects that others wouldn't like.
I've found a great deal of useful information in Sovereign Man: Confidential, and his free email list you can join at http://www.sovereignman.com
This is a good point. Living on $500/mo in a lush tropical paradise sounds fantastic.
Until you realize there are no like minded people around - you'll have no one to bounce ideas off of. This is one thing that interests me about dubai over generic-cheap-tropical-place, it's very much a driven environment.
Thailand is great for a vacation, or retirement. But I wouldn't want to hire technical talent there.
It very much a pick and choose your tradeoffs sort of situation. Can you find low living costs with a good, cosmopolitan urban core nearby? If so I think you've found shangri-la.
I suspect Buenos Aires might be on that list.
We just held the largest Javascript conference on the planet in Porto Alegre, with 900+ attendees, while RubyConf was simultaneously happening in São Paulo.
We do have excess bureaucracy for business, but it's getting better.
Santiago is a great cosmopolitan urban city, and it has quite the concentration of startups-- Startup Chile brings in 100 new startups three times a year, and that's on top of the startups that were already here (though Chile is not as entrepreneurial as the government would like it to be, Chileans seem to be very attuned to world pop culture -- anime, american bands, etc. This includes a subculture of startups that was blown up by Startup Chile.)
And Startup Chile is just one of the government programs. There are many of them, of a wide variety of types.
One bonus about Chile- some big summer movies premier here first. For instance, I saw The Avengers a week before you guys did. And usually they are in english with spanish subtitles. (I suspect the Chileans would not like the cheap acting of the spanish voiceovers that many movies get.)
But this isn't a "live on $500 a month" situation- cost of living is about what it was on the west coast of the USA. But then, I suspect dubai isn't either (but I cant' comment on Dubai having not been there.)
There's almost a need to start a wiki on this subject.
> The problem so far hasn't been finding a country that is more hospitable than the USA, but in selecting from the dozen or so who are more hospitable, and trying to figure out which one is the most hospitable.
Can you list the dozen you are considering if not the complete thought process? Are you considering perhaps places in Asia like Thailand and Singapore?
Working in Thailand on such tourist visa is illegal. Getting a business visa (and thus work permit) is not easy at all. Foreigners are not allowed to hold majority in a Thai company (just as they are not allowed to own land in Thailand). Thailand is a very xenophobic country, and its laws reflect that.
Working around the visa system illegally is not difficult, and many people do that (incl. IT freelancers). But contrary to the popular image of a "care-free tropical paradise", Thailand is one of the more difficult choices to run business in/from.
The government has been trying to pass this bill: http://www.ipd.gov.hk/eng/intellectual_property/copyright/co...
It means that satire of existing works are now illegal if done without the express permission of original copyright owner. And even more worryingly, the law allows the government to take action on the copyright owner's behalf, if the government can obtain permission from the owner. If you are a licensed television station and the government comes to you secretly threatening allow more television licenses, of course you will give the government permission.
Also, read about government's attempt to introduce "education" about the Chinese Communist Party in primary school. The textbook contains only praises of China's authoritarian regime with barely a mention of atrocities in the 50's, 60's and 70's. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-19472918 http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/04/world/asia/hong-kong-natio...
"The contents of the booklet inflamed longstanding fears of Beijing's encroachment into Hong Kong's affairs and freedoms by stating that China's ruling party is "progressive, selfless and united," and ignoring major events such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre."