In Love with Ignorance

What I read 

Authorities do not want citizens
woken from "the China dream"

According to Kerry Allen in "China gripped by censored essay on Beijing" (2017), an essay that Zhang Guochen published on WeChat, "Beijing has 20 million people pretending to have a life", has been deleted. The apparently censored essay was very popular: Allen tells us that there is widespread guessing by Chinese citizens that Chinese authorities forced Zhang to not only delete the essay, but to apologise for publishing it. Allen writes that such censorship is typical of the Chinese government, which wants only good things to be said of its rule. It does not like criticism or negative reports about how it governs or the social consequences.  Allen says that Zhang's description of Beijing as "a tumour" where many are only "pretending to have a life" likely annoyed authorities.

_______________________________________ 

My response 
I came across this article in the "Asia" section of the BBC News website when I was looking for examples for us to practice writing reference citations. One of the things that is great about democracy is that it allows citizens to be informed about national matters that are important, such as the controversial issues that Allen tells us were raised in Zhang's essay. I think that people should be allowed to have opinions that are well informed, and that have been tested by healthy public debate. When governments censor, they only ever do that for one reason: to keep people ignorant of something, and that suggests to me that they are hiding something rotten, perhaps corruption, perhaps abuse of power, perhaps a failure of official policy, or something else.

As I read the BBC News story, I was also reminded of a recent article in The Bangkok Post. In "Censure the censors for too much vaseline" the Post's regular opinion writer Wasant Techawongtham argues that government interference by rule of law to stop Thais seeing things that those holding power claim to be "immoral" or "harmful" is the same bad reasoning as the anti-democratic idea that Thai citizens "are not mature enough to behave responsibly in a democracy, and therefore their democratic rights must be curtailed" (2017). This seems to me totally wrong. I would go further and say that the pervasive censorship of sex scenes, of drugs such as alcohol, cigarettes and others on Thai TV and elsewhere shows that the laws that constantly talk about "good morals" are in fact morally wrong and only harm the Thai nation by keeping Thai people ignorant of things that healthy adults should know about. It is certainly a lie that such censorship can promote "good morals among people": it obviously does not when we look at Thailand's violent crime and other statistics compared to countries that do not have such censorship.

_______________________________________ 

My question for readers 
What do you think? Should governments make up laws to censor what adult citizens can see or speak in order to keep them ignorant of truths about their nation and society?  

_______________________________________ 

Reference

• Allen, K. (2017, August 1). China gripped by censored essay on Beijing. BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-40778384 
• Techanwongtham, W. (2017, July 29). Censure the censors for too much vaseline. The Bangkok Post. Retrieved from http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1295867/censure-the-censors-for-too-much-vaseline