GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA: Massive Mythomania

Communist China building its own version of Wikipedia so citizens ‘are not corrupted by the West’
By Felix Allen

CHINA is building a massive online encyclopaedia to rival Wikipedia – but the public will be banned from making edits.
Some 20,000 academics have been hired to write 300,000 articles, each around 1,000 words long, to create the nation’s first digital “book of everything”.

China’s digital ‘book of everything, overseen by propaganda chiefs, is unlikely to include an article on the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The secretive Communist regime currently bans citizens from reading about politically sensitive subjects such as the Dalai Lama (left)

When published next year it will be twice as large as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and roughly the same size as the Chinese language version of Wikipedia.
Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the Chinese Encyclopaedia, hailed it as a “Great Wall of Culture”.
He told senior scientists in Beijing last month China was under international pressure and felt an urgent need to produce its own encyclopaedia to “guide and lead the public and society”, reports the South China Morning Post.
The ruling Communist party has struggled to manage public opinion in the internet age, when anyone can comment on current affairs and post photos of protests on social media – at least until they are scrubbed away by China’s army of censors.
China regularly blocks overseas sites including Facebook and Twitter, and has periodically blocked Wikipedia‘s English and Chinese versions.
Currently, the Chinese Wikipedia is inaccessible in the mainland, meaning citizens cannot read about politically sensitive subjects such as the Dalai Lama or the current president Xi Jinping.
Qiao Mu, an independent media analyst in Beijing, said the Chinese Encyclopedia would be “quite different” from Wikipedia because of the need to toe the line on political taboos.
He said it is likely to exclude subjects such as the 1989 massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square and the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group, which “never exist on the internet”.
The project is approved and overseen by China’s powerful propaganda chiefs to ensure only the official version of events is included.

Xi Jinping is said to have approved the project to create a Chinese version of Wikipedia
Bai Chunli, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said it will showcase China’s cutting-edge technology, promote the national heritage, increase “cultural soft power” and strengthen the core values of socialism.
The hand-picked scholars working on it insist their editing and review process is rigorous and guided by "truth".
Senior editor Jiang Lijun told they plan to have entries on political leaders, the history of the Communist Party, and subjects including virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the European Union.
She said it will focus primarily on entries that are less likely to change as opposed to recent events “while also trying to strike a balance between that, being timely and what people are searching for.”
Ms Jiang added: “There is Chinese content on Wikipedia too, but sometimes it is not as accurate as it could be.
“We try to eliminate self-promotion and inaccuracy as much as possible.”
Wikipedia, with more than 40 million articles in nearly 300 languages, is edited and maintained by hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world.