James Fallows

My wife and I have spent the past several nights at a hotel in Beijing, and we've just arrived at one in Shanghai. Both of the hotels are very nice and welcoming, and on check-in each of them provided a special notice about communication problems guests might encounter during their stay. Here are the notices side-by-side. You probably can't read the tiny print, but there is an explanation below.



It's fun to be back in Shanghai. And if you're at the M on the Bund Shanghai Literary Festival tomorrow (Friday), please be sure to see Deborah Fallows at noon. I'll be there on Sunday.

From a reader in Seattle, the front page of the Seattle Times on Saturday:

Our new issue is on the newsstands and in mailboxes. It is full of interesting articles, plus some new design touches. And so ... subscribe!

I have two short items in this November issue, before a long story in December. One is a tech column q-and-a with David Allen, the creator of the Getting Things Done, or GTD, approach to modern life. The magazine article is here; some outtakes from our interview are here; and some other GTD news is here.

In this issue I also have a brief appreciation of Chen Guangcheng, the civil-liberties activist from China who sought asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing earlier this year and whom we have recognized as one of our Brave Thinkers of the year.

While researching that essay, I had a chance last month to interview Chen Guangcheng about the motivation for and significance of his work, and about his long-term aspirations for China. We spoke by telephone for about half an hour. I asked questions in English, and he answered in Chinese; an interpreter sitting with him in New York, at his new base at New York University, rendered each side's words into the other's language. The explanations in brackets below, [like this], are insertions by me where I thought extra background might be needed.
 
Mr. Chen made clear ahead of time that he would not discuss personal details of his detention by provincial authorities or ultimate escape from China. He will go into these in depth in a forthcoming book. But he did discuss the overall prospect for political reform in China, and why in the face of great adversity he remains optimistic. On a day when the New York Times has published David Barboza's revelatory front-page piece about the family-business empire that surrounds even the most "kindly" and "socially aware" of China's political leaders, Chen's assessments are particularly timely. (For another view on the NYT expose, see China Daily Show.)

___
Telephone interview with Chen Guangcheng, September 4, 2012.

Q. As you think about the overall situation for the rule of law, and development of civil society and individual liberties in China, would you say that things are on the whole getting better? Or getting worse?

Chen Guangcheng:
    My answer is two-fold. First, from the perspective of civil society, I would say that we have been witnessing a rising awareness by the Chinese people of the rule of law, of their rights, of rights-consciousness. All of those are on the rise, and it is an accelerating process.

    This is an inevitable trend of history. There is nothing that can stand in its way. With the help of advanced technology, and the experience of Chinese people, this rise in rights-consciousness is something that must happen, and will happen.

    In the past, people might hear only about themselves and their situations. Now this has been transformed into a situation where people do not care only about themselves but also about others, and they help each other.

    In the past, people largely relied on government officials to achieve the goal of justice. But now people have more and more relied on themselves to achieve this goal.

    I also have to say that from the legislative perspective, there has been a lot of improvement. A lot of progress has been made. The basic structure of the legal system has been established, in terms of having laws governing every aspect of the society. Nonetheless, most of the time those laws are just empty words in the eyes of the rulers.

    So Chinese people have come to realize that in order to realize their rights, and to have their rights protected, they have to go to the root of the problem, instead of just focusing on individual cases.

    It is becoming apparent that Chinese people who used to focus only on their individual cases, have now been paying more attention to the institutional changes that are called for by their rising rights-consciousness. For example, a call for the abolition of the notorious re-education through labor system. [JF this is a reference to prison-work camps.]

    In the face of these calls by the public, the rulers -- they just ignore those calls. They ignore the problems. They refuse to right the wrongs. They try to cover mistakes with even more mistakes.

    So the conclusion I would draw, from all of the above, is that in terms of the role the law plays in the society, the rule of law is absolutely sliding back. Even to the age of the Cultural Revolution.

    I think China has taken the first step, which is to make sure that there are rules and regulations and laws that govern the society. China is not doing a great job of the second step, which is to make sure that those rules are implemented and complied with in practice. Law enforcement generally speaking cannot function in today's Chinese society. That is what has given rise to all these numerous cases in which the government ignores the rules that they themselves have set up. For instance, the case of my nephew [Chen Kegui, arrested after Chen's departure], and my own case. These are all examples of the government's blatant ignorance of the law.  The government acts contrary to the law, tortures people, 'disappears' them, does all sorts of things to the innocent people without any legal basis,


Q. You say that the evolution of individual rights, and rights-consciousness, in China is "inevitable." If that is so, do you think this transformation of China will be a natural, relatively calm process? Or do you expect it to be difficult, even violent?

Chen Guangcheng:
    First, I think the shift of the Chinese society to democracy and rule of law, and of constitutional operation - all of that is definitely the trend, and there is nothing that can change this trend.

    As for how China will achieve this shift, it depends on a rich combination of factors. There are lots of things to take into account here. These include the approach taken by the leadership [in the Chinese government], the role played by human rights activists and by other people in Chinese society, and the attention the international society pays to these issues. And what kind of assistance the international society is willing and able to provide. For now, the leadership has shown no willingness to take this approach to make the shift happen. If that is the case, I believe that there will be more and more cases like Wang Lijun appearing in the near future. [Wang Lijun is the Chongqing police chief, previously allied with Bo Xilai, who broke with him and attempted to defect to British and American authorities.]

    I personally think that international society has not been ready for this shift in Chinese society. If that is really the case, it can make things worse.

    So given all those possibilities that we are facing, I think that if China remains the way it is now, that it is possible that a lot of good things will develop. But it is also possible that things will be getting worse.  But I think that this kind of uncertainty is itself exactly the sign of this coming trend and shift. It is what we would expect given what the Chinese government has been doing in terms of its lawlessness and blatant crackdown on civil society.

    Other issues that will face China in terms of how it manages its transformation include the following three: The public's loss of faith in the government. Also the loss of credibility, or lack of credibility, by the government. And the third is what has happened because of the internet censorship that China has launched with the great firewall. This has blocked information that could have gotten into China and could have affected the transformation.  What is really critical for the transformation, which will eventually determine whether the shift will be gradual and peaceful or difficulty and violent, is whether Chinese society can get itself back onto the right track.

Q. I know that there are limits to what anyone outside China - individuals, organizations, or governments - can do to affect this process. In some circumstances outside pressure or "interference" can even make things worse. What do you think outside individuals or organizations who support China's evolution to a rule-of-law society can most usefully do?

Chen Guangcheng:
    I think that for the United States - and not just the United States but also other democracies in the world -- there are a couple of things they could be doing.

    They should be aware of the coming shift in the Chinese society. And they should get ready for it. For instance, we have seen more and more mass "incidents" [demonstrations and protests, sometimes suppressed with violence] happening in China. What if the government had another massacre like the one 20 years ago [at Tiananmen Square]. What if this kind of thing happened again? What would be the international society's reaction to it? This needs to be considered.

    The Chinese government has not been performing its obligation to maintain the fairness and justice of Chinese society. The power is basically in the hands of the elite, and it has been manipulated by them. The least the international society could be doing is to exert more pressure on the Chinese government to make them deliver on whatever promises they have made to their people. The fundamental principles of fairness and justice- they don't have boundaries. They should be universal.

In May this year, the Chinese government openly promised, not only to me but a promise made to the whole world, that they would launch an open investigation into my case and make sure to bring to justice those perpetrators. [The local authorities who had arrested and abused Chen and his family.] But so far there has been no sign whatsoever of any progress on that front. This kind of blatant ignoring of one's own promise is something we should pay attention to.

    In the face of all these kinds of violation of universal values and social justice, I think that countries, including the US should, not worry about "offending" the perpetrators [in the Chinese government] if they take action. They [Westerners] should make their stance clear. They should stand behind the principles they claim they believe in. They should not ignore or turn a blind eye to the obvious social injustice, with its cost for humanity and for universal values. That is something we [Chinese people] don't want to see here. What we want to see here is our hope that the US can, as it always does, take the lead in this case to show its long standing adherence to the universal values and the international norms.

    So, we should do whatever we can to improve China's situation in protecting human dignity, and realizing the rule of law, and achieving social justice and social fairness. We should not do anything or the basis of whether the rulers of China will be pleased with it or not. And anything that runs contrary to the values I have just enumerated, the United States should not do that -even if that is what the Chinese leadership hopes they will do.

    This brings up a very critical point. The government of the United States should ask the U.S. companies that operate in China to realize that they are not only earning money in China. They should also earn the confidence of the Chinese public.

    Take Google as an example. It really has played a model role in this respect, even though its withdrawal from China may put it at a disadvantage in terms of its economics.  So far I believe that Google has earned the confidence of the Chinese people.

    I want to deliver this message to people in any democracy in the world. I want to let them know that every effort they have made in this respect will make a huge difference in China. I urge them to have faith in their ability to make changes in China.   Be confident and speak out.  The sky won't fall just because people speak up on their own opinion.

This is another fascinating installment in the exercise of Chinese "soft power." For my Big Theory on the nature of Chinese soft power, see this essay and this book. For a few previous installments in the Soft-Power Watch, see this, this, and this with related links.

Today's news: representatives of China's Foreign Ministry and environmental agencies have blasted foreign countries for "interfering" in Chinese domestic affairs by publishing real-time pollution readings in Beijing As the Reuters story put it:

"According to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations ... foreign diplomats are required to respect and follow local laws and cannot interfere in internal affairs," Wu [told a news conference.

"China's air quality monitoring and information release involve the public interest and are up to the government. Foreign consulates in China taking it on themselves to monitor air quality and release the information online not only goes against the spirit of the Vienna Convention ... it also contravenes relevant environmental protection rules."

The "foreign diplomats" they're talking about are those in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, who for the past few years have had a monitor on the roof of the embassy to measure levels of a pollutant very damaging to human health. This is so-called "PM 2.5" pollution, or very small particles that can go deep into the lungs. Every hour, that monitor sends out its readings via a Twitter feed, @BeijingAir. Here's how it looked this afternoon:

MSNBC's photoblog has pictures from Hong Kong this evening, June 4 China time, that are quite stunning. For instance, in Victoria Park a few hours ago:

Just off the long-haul Shanghai-Newark-DC National route and stumbling into our house. For another time, perhaps even tomorrow: why Newark has become my new favorite airport for trips into and out of China, apart from the Cory Booker factor and the welcome fact that it's not Dulles.

In this original item on the significance of China's "slow" internet, based on this NYT essay drawn from this book, I argued that the speed of internet access in China, relative to the super-quick networks in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, was a useful proxy for China's openness and modernization overall. It has some modest direct effect on China's ability to nurture first-rate world research centers, and it is more important as a marker of the ongoing tensions between the security-state and the entrepreneurial forces in China's leadership.

Then in this reply, a number of Chinese and Western tech officials said that the subtler and more intriguing aspect was the difference between (very high) communication speeds inside the Chinese "Great Firewall" and (often very slow) speeds across the Firewall, to sites in the outside world. As one tech official in China wrote:

The big question is not whether or not China can build a world-class society while fighting the internet, the question is whether or not it can do so while building a giant intranet that is China-specific. China is big enough that I think this is something of an open question.

I am going to double-down and say: if, in the long run, internet users in China suffer penalties reaching sites outside the country, then no matter how big and important the Chinese web-o-sphere becomes, it will not be "world-leading" or "world-class," because much of the world will be walled off. To be clear, I hope for China's continuing more complete integration with the rest of the world. That would make some Chinese firms more profoundly "competitive" to Western incumbents -- Apple, Google, GE -- than they are now, but it would also suggest that the "Chinese system" as a whole, and most Chinese people, would more easily interact with the rest of the world.

Now, several further installments on the longer-term significance of this proxy for Chinese openness.
1) From a Chinese-American reader:

I was from China.  I came to US to pursue graduate study and have since settled here.  I am working and raising family in Northeast.

It seems to me indeed Internet speed in terms of accessing servers outside China may not be much of an issue for the first wave of outsourcing (the manufacture outsourcing) which has been going on for the last 15-20 years.  After all what matters at the end of the day is the speed to transport 'goods' across pacific (US centric view (:-)).  

However, perhaps we are now witnessing the second wave of outsourcing (office work, research and development) where the product is no longer goods, rather it's data and information.  Computer systems and applications are integral part of this type of work.   Internet speed in terms of accessing servers outside China will likely matter.

2) From the CTO of a Western tech firm that is expanding operations in China (emphasis added):

Our company runs a service with [several tens of millions of ] subscribers out of California and recently launched a China-only version of our service out of data centers there. We are adding around [tens of thousands] of new Chinese users per day....

The firewall issues going in and out of China get a lot of attention, but the state of networking within China is a bit hairy as well.

There are a small handful of network carriers in China, all with state-backed status (e.g. China Unicom, China Telecom, etc.).

In spite of the state backing, these carriers frequently refuse to carry network traffic from each other. I've even heard unverifiable stories from Chinese Internet professionals of these carriers cutting each others cables when they encroach on each others' turf. [JF note: this resembles some of the stories I've told about trying to create a truly nationwide air-travel network.]

This means that any Internet service in China needs to connect individually to each of these network carriers. You can't just connect to 2 or 3 high-quality carriers and expect them to route traffic properly to the others like you do in the West. Instead, each service needs to deal with direct connectivity to each provider.

The top Internet Data Centers (IDCs) provide some aggregation and intermediation services that allow you to pay them to connect your service to all of the networks, but this costs about 10x as much as comparable Internet connectivity in the US.

In addition, network performance within the country varies widely by geographic locale. East-west networking tends to be much better than north-south. Our users in Guangzhou say they get better performance to [our site in the US] than they do to our servers in Beijing.

All of this translates into some significant inefficiencies for Chinese Internet companies that their western counterparts don't have to bear, independent of The Firewall. I.e. paying 10x as much for unreliable bandwidth as well as higher network engineering labor strikes me as the sort of problem that may eventually result in some market pressure from businesses on the government to provide some level of deregulation of internal network telecommunications.

I.e. it's as if factories in China had to pay 10x as much for unreliable state-run electricity compared to competitors in Mexico or Thailand.

3) From a Western academic with extensive experience inside China and with the Chinese language:

Having [recently] suffered through a year of living and teaching in China,  it is all too painfully obvious to me that the internet controls are harmful to the Chinese people.  My own students often complain, and they do everything they can to circumvent the controls and restrictions, but with only partial success.

I would estimate that well over half of the capability of the internet is unavailable to the Chinese people.  Surely that has a negative effect on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the PRC.

4) And from another person familiar with the Chinese tech world:

I agree, throttling (or mismanaged setups of DNS that unnecessarily limits speeds)  is certainly an issue for power users who depend on hi-quality, consistent internet speeds. And combined with the censorship in China, it's just another reason for outside firms to not even bother trying to crack the Chinese market or to invest it in. It's certainly a boon to local firms since.. there is no net neutrality in China and firms with guanxi or money might be able to purchase better internet speeds.

The big picture, once again, is that so much is happening so fast in China, and we're all trying to make sense of where it might lead. More -- and on a variety of backed-up topics -- after a bout of Eastern Daylight Time zone sleep.

Over the weekend the International Herald Tribune ran a version of an opinion piece I'd had in the NYT Sunday Review section, itself a version on an argument in my book, about the next stage in China's development. Its main point was to ask whether the strategy behind the huge Chinese achievement of the past thirty years -- that of alleviating poverty on a wide scale through an emphasis on construction, infrastructure, and low-wage manufacturing, was likely to be a help or a hindrance as Chinese companies tried to become high-wage, high-value, international brand competitors. How would we know whether the Chinese system was becoming capable of competing with Apple, rather than outsourcing for Apple.

[A view in Shanghai today, which is looking very nice.]



In my book I lay out a number of markers indicating whether Chinese companies and the Chinese productive system were moving in this higher-end direction. In the article I mentioned this one:

After another several-month stay in China last year, I came up with one proxy for China's ability to take this next step: how slow its Internet service is, compared with South Korea's or Japan's.

In much of America, the Internet is slow by those standards, but mainly for infrastructure reasons. In China it's slow because of political control: censorship and the "Great Firewall" bog down everything and make much of the online universe impossible to reach. "What country ever rode to pre-eminence by fighting the reigning technology of the time?" a friend asked while I was in China last year. "Did the Brits ban steam?"

Several people have objected and responded, with good points that make me clarify my own. For instance:

1) At his China Hearsay site, Stan Abrams asks where it is really fair to claim that China's growth is suffering to any serious degree because of Internet controls:

How much is China's GDP suffering because of lower Net speeds? Is that comment about the Brits banning steam fair?

First answer: I don't really know....

Second answer: I have a feeling that the conclusions on this issue are overstated to some degree....

My point is that it's too easy to say that China's Net speed is slow and therefore its economy is taking a significant hit.

Actually I agree. I'm not claiming that at this moment China's output sags to any real extent because of the delay in reaching firewalled sites outside of China. My point was that when looking for indicators of a general opening-up of the Chinese system -- of how the balance stands in the ongoing struggle between the security-state forces and the economic-development forces that is underway in so many parts of China's policy -- a reduction in the Great Firewall handicap would be an important sign.

2) A Western reader who lives in China and works in the Internet industry sends a long and very detailed reply. I quote it in full because it raises several different points about current levels of Chinese control and the reasoning behind them. Emphasis added, in this and the subsequent note:

You are correct that access from inside China to websites outside of China is slow, and this is because we have only a few entry/exit points for the intertubes in/out of China.

 I also spent a lot of time in the past on off-the-record analysis and scanning of the ISPs and bandwidth in China, and until 5-6 years ago, a large amount -- but not most -- of the speed issues in China were a result not of blocks, but rather of poorly-configured DNS, slowly updated DNS, and poorly-trained Chinese ISP technicians. I have given lectures in places like [..] to ISP chief admins on how best to configure and work with DNS and allow for faster speeds. China's Internet is held together by duct tape, as it is in the other parts of the world.

Another reason for speed/connection/interoperability/latency issues is very capitalistic in nature: business competition. Simply, there is no Net Neutrality in China. I can write books on this, so I'll leave it at that for now.

But inside China, the Internet is "fast enough" for what netizens do now. I can view Youku videos with no buffering while sitting on my toilet viewing my iPad connected to a wifi modem a few rooms away connected to a mediocre adsl connection to China Telecom in Beijing.

I also routinely hold GoToMeeting.com video and audio meetings with people from around the world with rare speed-related problems.

My wife routinely does Skype-based audio interviews with guests from around the world, again with rare speed-related problems. She also uploads data to her servers in the US, and also her videos to YouTube, all without major speed problems (the latter of course via a proxy).

Most importantly: Internet access in China is truly ubiquitous. In the calm of Jiuzhaigou's towering trees, my mobile phone signal is at full bars. At the top of a ski slope in Jinan, I can download my email. Driving my car from Beijing to Xi'an, I have uninterrupted streaming Internet music via my iPhone on long stretches of highway. I can walk into (most) elevators in China and continue talking on my phone without the signal dying. These things are rarely possible in America with its deadzones. 13-14 years ago I could easily go to the corner newspaper stand in Beijing and buy a card for dial-up Internet access, but when I visited the US I had to register with AOL and go through hoops to get online. Getting online in China has always been easier, albeit content more restricted, than the USA. It is still easier today in China to get online than in the US.

Of course the trade-off to having full bars at the top of a ski slope in Jinan is that I am now trackable on that ski slope in Jinan.

I do not mean to be an apologist (or marketer) for China's Internet. But for 99% of Chinese netizens, they can do without constant access to non-Chinese websites and services hosted offshore. So while I too often lament (bitterly and frustratingly) that the slow Internet is killing China's growth abilities, I also calm down and then realize that China's Internet bubble (sic) works for all the participants currently operating within that bubble. Complaining about slow access to sites in the West is mostly a Laowai Dilemma. I do feel your pain.

3) And similarly, from a western reader in Shanghai:

I think you are uncharacteristically missing something. The internet in China is way fast *as long as you stay in China*. China is not fighting "the reigning technology" at all; as  you know sites like TaoBao and Weibo, and now Weixin, are at least as significant as their counterparts in the US both technically and in their effect on society. It is easy for foreigners to assume that because they can't get on Facebook, or Twitter, or Youtube, or Hulu (oh wait, Hulu and Pandora are blocked *from the US* - separate rant) and that Google doesn't work half the time that Chinese can't use the internet, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Some Chinese certainly would love to get to those sites - but it's not clear that it's a significant number in the context of the Chinese internet.

The big question is not whether or not China can build a world-class society while fighting the internet, the question is whether or not it can do so while building a giant intranet that is China-specific. China is big enough that I think this is something of an open question.

Please don't get me wrong; I think the GFW is absurd and repugnant. And it is indeed hard to think that any nation that is scared of Facebook could be called great. But it's certainly misleading at best to say China is fighting the internet.

I'll just say: these are important points, and I agree. As I argued several years ago in my piece about the Great Firewall, the brilliance of China's internet control strategy is that it is not airtight. People who want to, badly enough, can find ways around the controls. But doing so can be costly, and is a nuisance -- and an increasing one, as the government more and more often interferes with "VPN" services that let you evade the firewall. It's a nuisance resident foreigners are willing to put up with -- but that the vast majority of Chinese internet users will not bother with, since so much is available to them so easily within the (monitored) Chinese-only internet world, in which you really can get coverage anywhere. (I've used a four-bar-coverage cell phone from deep down inside a Chinese coal mine.)

I agree with these points, and thank the readers for spelling them out -- while still maintaining that a variety of measures of fully international openness, like those I mentioned here, are significant in measuring China's progress toward fully featured, soft-power-plenipotentiary, rich-country status. As reader #3 says, "the question is whether or not China can build a world-class society while building a giant intranet that is China-specific." By my lights, the answer to that question must be No. Everything I have learned about the world tells me that "world-class" powers must be open to the world. I agree with the reader that China's scale makes it an open question -- and if the answer turns out to be Yes, many of our (my) other assumptions will come into question as well.

This is why the place is interesting. And to close out, the People's Square view just now, from ground level and above:

The proudly nationalist Global Times has reassuring news for those concerned about the denial of a visa for Melissa Chan, the (excellent) China correspondent for Al-Jazeera, who will soon be leaving Beijing and closing the Al-Jazeera bureau behind her:

From the Guardian just now:

(See update below.) As soon as you can, try this link to an article on the site of the state-run and usually very nationalist Global Times newspaper in China. It is hard to believe that the story will stay up very long. (And if it does, that will say something surprising in itself.) Here is the way it looks as of around 9am Tuesday, March 20 China time - although I see from the dateline that it's been up for a while already:


Here's the reason this matters: it concerns a spectacularly horrible fatal car crash over the weekend in Beijing. At around 4 in the morning, a Ferrari driven at high speed along the Fourth Ring Road crashed and burned, killing its driver and seriously injuring two women in the car. The Chinese social-media-sphere has been full of speculation about who was in the car, how "connected" they might be, what kind of people (top officials' children?) end up with Ferraris, whether the story will be hushed up, and so on. In short, every exposed raw nerve created by the gaping economic and power inequalities of today's China was touched by this episode.

And for Global Times to say that the story is being hushed up! It is like Fox News undertaking an expose of Bush v. Gore or the business interests of Clarence Thomas's wife. This is at face value brave, possibly reckless, and without doubt extremely interesting. Here is a screen shot of the end of the story as of right now.  After the jump, a text version of what the story says. Thanks to BB in Beijing for spotting it. And I say, with none of the usual sarcasm, that I am very impressed by what this part of the Chinese state media has done in this case. (Seriously, read this story! It's amazing.)

UPDATE: Some of my China-sophisticate friends say I am overreacting to this, and that an English-language story like this is meant strictly to play to foreign sensibilities. Perhaps, and perhaps I am quickly misreading these events. But -- if that is so, why are English-language broadcasts on CNN or BBC blacked out whenever they mention "sensitive" topics? Why do the English-language China Daily and Global Times usually present such a chipper "harmonious society" face? I don't know -- I'm just saying that this is different from what I am used to seeing as the for-foreign-consumption face of Chinese news, from the state-run media.

More »

For the record, like nearly everyone else who has thought about the importance of a freely operating Internet to the cultural, political, and economic vibrancy of the United States, I take a dim view of the Orwellian-named "Stop Online Piracy Act" being considered in Congressional hearings today.

For more of the reasons why opponents of the bill have declared today "American Censorship Day," go to the ACD site, or Fight for the Future, or Mozilla's site. And for a how-to of Internet censorship a la Chinoise, there is this Atlantic piece from three years ago, still basically true to the operations of the Great Firewall. In the NYT Rebecca MacKinnon makes the Great Firewall-SOPA connection.

The Vimeo clip below does a very clear and concise job of explaining the commercial, technical, and political issues at stake. Short description of the problem: in the name of blocking copyright-infringing piracy sites mainly outside the United States, the bill would make U.S.-based Internet companies legally liable for links to or publication of any pirated material. This would be technically cumbersome, economically and commercially dampening, and potentially politically repressive. The video tells you more. 

   

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Every developed society has had to work out the right balance of how far it will go to ensure that inventors and creators will get a reasonable return for their discoveries. If it does too little -- as in modern China, where you can buy a DVD of any movie for $1.50 from a street vendor -- it throttles the growth of creative industries. (China both over-controls political expression and under-controls commercial copying.) If it does too much -- encouraging "patent troll" lawsuits, arresting people for file-sharing music or video streams -- it can throttle growth and creativity in other ways. There is no perfect answer, but this bill would tip the balance way too far in one direction, to defend incumbents in the entertainment industry.

And for a wonderful illustration of the completely unexpected ways in which technological, political, commercial, and social creativity can interact, by all means read Alexis Madrigal's item on "OWS as API."

Over the past day and a half Google has begun rolling out its "Google+" social networking features*. And immediately this response from the government of the country where more people use the internet and social networking systems than any other on Earth:



Yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival I was on a panel with other people who have been dealing with China for years or decades -- Orville Schell of the Asia Society, Robert Hormats of the State Department, David Schlesinger of Thomson Reuters, moderated by Josh Tyrangiel of Bloomberg Businessweek -- on the topic of "How Much Freedom is Enough" for China. Obviously a lot depends on the definitions of "Enough" in that question -- and of "Freedom," "Is," and so on. Obviously too some of the most familiar bromides** about the interaction of freedom and China's development are wrong or oversimplified. But it is a question that struck me with special force on seeing this latest instant reflex from the government.

In an article coming out soon in the magazine I go into some aspects of the tension between the growing maturity of China's economy and civil society, and the recently tightened controls on discussion, association, and citizen activity in most forms. This is also a theme in the book I've been wrapping up this year. When I saw this morning's announcement, I thought of an interview I'd heard in Beijing early this year, when official nervousness about contagion from the "Arab Spring" led to a new tightening on internet controls. From part of a description for my book:

>>Between brownouts on my internet connection, in the spring of 2011 I listened to an analysis by a Western tech expert of how Chinese university officials rationalized the blockage. "They are kind of embarrassed," he said. "It suggests a kind of second-rateism for the country, even now. It also suggests a kind of profound defensiveness about legitimacy."

The reaction [among the globalized "thinking class"] on the Chinese side, he said, "may instantiate itself as embarrassment, since they think it makes China a little bit backward." But the real issue, he said, is that in any line of work that depended on international communication, "there was a sense that this could make China second-rate. If you're an internet professional, this is not the place you'll want to work if you want to be competing with the best. This will be a place where people can make money. But they will go to Silicon Valley -- or India [or other countries he could have mentioned] to be part of innovation."<<

This is a huge and complex theme that will play itself out for a very long time. I'm not trying to resolve it today, just noting a particularly stark illustration.
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* Which I've started using and will say more about in a while.

** The main bromides:
     The Arc of History bromide: that increasing wealth and technological sophistication will "inevitably" make China a freer society;
     The Efficient Authoritarianism bromide: that Chinese officialdom has figured out a sustainable way to have both a creative, innovative economy and a controlled political/media/intellectual system;
     The Material-Minded Chinese People bromide: that the Chinese public has well and truly internalized the idea that a rising GDP is the only thing that matters;
     The Rise of the East, Decline of the West bromide: that the Chinese model is proving its basic superiority to squabbling Western democratic systems that can't pay attention to big problems. This one is often illustrated with gape-jawed accounts of the latest Chinese infrastructure achievement.

And so on. There is something to each of these, and a lot that they all miss. Some day I'll compile a master bromide list.

1) Cancer. Today's report, from the Earth Policy Institute, that cancer has become the leading cause of death in China. As the report says:

The usual plagues of poverty--infectious diseases and high infant mortality--have given way to diseases more often associated with affluence, such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer.

While this might be expected in China's richer cities, where bicycles are fast being traded in for cars and meat consumption is climbing, it also holds true in rural areas. In fact, reports from the countryside reveal a dangerous epidemic of "cancer villages" linked to pollution from some of the very industries propelling China's explosive economy.

As anyone who has traveled inside China knows, pollution and environmental devastation really are the nation's number-one emergency, and the main barrier to continuation of the past 30 years' economic boom. The government has started working hard on this problem, but it is a more serious one than is generally publicized.

2) Communications. As I noted several times in my most recent two-month stint in Beijing, internet disruptions, via the Great Firewall, are much more extensive and harder to get around than in the innocent "pre-Jasmine" days. (The "Jasmine" movement was an embryonic Chinese version of the "Arab Spring." To be sure it never got beyond embryo stage, the government has gone all-out in controlling domestic communications and organization. More on this later.) For days on end I found it essentially impossible to contact the outside world via normal channels, notably including Gmail. The crucial difference is that the government began seriously and systematically disrupting VPNs -- the Virtual Private Networks that previously been a costly but near-certain way of getting around restrictions.

A report today says that VPN interference is becoming the norm. This is bad news on many fronts -- not least its impact on Chinese-based scholars, businesses, designers. More on this later, in the magazine.

3) Surveillance. A grim but realistic report today from Al Jazeera's excellent Melissa Chan, about what it means to try to practice journalism inside China. Plus, the video below, by Stephen McDonell of Australia's ABC, is quite vivid in showing what it is like to be trailed by Chinese authorities at every turn. This was in the course of his reporting a story about underground churches in China. Believe me, this is worth watching.



I should say that this never happened to me (although everyone obviously knew I was a foreigner), probably because I didn't have to traipse around with a camera crew. Also, a point that will be evident to people in China but perhaps not to those outside: the highly-obtrusive team trailing after McDonell is almost certainly from the local or provincial government, not the central authorities. Often the problems journalists have are worst with local potentates.

This is all part of the endless simultaneously good-and-bad, promising-and-discouraging mix of trends inside China. Essay question: the Chinese government's response on issue #1 is fully suitable to an ambitious, advanced nation. But the other two? Is this the way a "rising power" is supposed to behave, even while still in the developing stage? Discuss. Extra credit essay: analyze the consequences to future high-value industries of preventing your nation's people from using Google. As part of this essay: Explain whether using Baidu is quite the same.

Earlier this month I quoted the views of Shi Hongshen, a young friend in Shanghai who explained some of the ambitions and curious nostalgia of members of his "post-80s" generation in China. A number of reactions, from Chinese and Americans alike, have come in, which I'll (try to) quote from in the next few days.

For the moment, the views of one of Shi Hongshen's contemporaries, a Chinese-born woman who did much of her growing up in the United States. She wrote to take angry exception to an item in which I discussed the current security crackdown inside China and asked whether it showed the Chinese government's over-confidence -- or its paranoid insecurity. In that item I quoted "The Peking Duck," Richard Burger, on the same insecure-arrogant paradox of the Chinese government's behavior. The reader disagrees with us both.

I present very long excerpts from of her even longer dissent as a sample of the kind of conversation I sometimes had in China, with people who felt they had tried harder to understand Western perspectives than most Westerners were trying to understand theirs. Obviously I don't see things just the way the writer does -- but in a sense that is precisely her point. If you have wondered what it is like to have a late-night talk in the Haidian university district of Beijing with a Westernized Chinese who feels comfortable with but also aggrieved about the United States, this is one very good illustration:

>>Even though I've lived in the US most of my life, as a half-generation Chinese American, I've had to deal with a lot of these issues. I think a lot of times Americans understand 'the China issue' from a very much American perspective, and similarly, Chinese people understand their issue from a very much Chinese perspective...

To be honest, I've always felt somewhat defensive towards China which I understand to be a part of my up bringing. I've seen many many half generation Chinese American kids struggle with this part of their identity....

We were kids who came to the US in the late 80s to early 90s, kids of parents who grew up during Mao, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, kids of the first generation of parents who graduated from an University. Some are kids of parents who have strong nostalgia towards the Mao-era, others, not so much. Not only that, many of us lived a number of years in China and have palpable memories of those days. Lastly, we are kids who grew up in an America that was hostile to China and still is. I say all this to point out an identity issue, an issue that White Americans rarely think about in their adolescence or in their adulthood.

A few years ago, I was watching one of those competitive cooking shows on TV. They had a Korean American on who decided to cook a fairly traditional Korean beef dish for the final contest. The judges all thought that the beef was too tough, she explained that is how the dish is suppose to be made. That the chewiness is what people desire. Of course, none of the [American] judges desired this, and she did not win the competition.

A similar thing happened on a blog I read about a White American who brought his in-laws to visit the US. He thought for sure that if the in-laws just tasted the sweet, succulent American corn, they would never go back to the dry, chewy corn that you buy in China. [As roasted by a street vendor, above, photo from flickr.] They didn't [behave the way he expected]. My mom doesn't either, she hasn't in the 20 years she lived here.

My point here is not our taste buds, but a point about a perspective. From the one point of view, some of these things are unquestionable, of course they would automatically like the sweet corn only if they had it. Or why would anyone want to eat this chewy beef? In the case of the corn it doesn't matter so much. In the case of the beef, it did. She didn't win because the panel of judges were all Americans (if not all white Americans) who had a more westernized palette. But in front of this panel of judges, how would one explained that this dish is cooked to perfection? How would one explain to a whole lot of people out there, it is a dish that is strongly desired? After all, it's not a test on identity, it's a test on who can cook the best - based on a westernized sense of what food should taste like.

More »

If you'd like to take several steps ahead in understanding the current crackdown and repression in China, I recommend a post that appeared a few minutes ago on the reliably acerbic site The Peking Duck.

The post's author, Richard Burger, is an American with long experience inside China -- and working with Chinese authorities to more effectively "tell their story" to the outside world. As I've written before, the way official China "presents" itself to the outside world makes conditions look considerably worse than the mixed realities of the country itself. When criticized from outside, the government typically stonewalls (as with the ludicrous assertion that most of the world agreed that the Nobel Prize for Liu Xiaobo was illegitimate). When criticized from the inside, in recent months it has taken simply to locking the critics up. The political situation now is objectively bad - and looks even worse because of the government's belligerent tone, which makes it hard to for outsiders to bear in mind the vast other areas of Chinese life that are ticking away open and uncontrolled.

That is why "The Peking Duck's" testimony is so valuable. He describes up-close contact with one part of the core of the government's propaganda information machinery, a paper called Global Times that you could think of as the pro-Communist Fox News of China. Richard Burger's account begins:

>>Nine days ago, Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of The Global Times, assembled all of the Chinese staff into the paper's large conference room and shut the door. As is nearly always the case with such meetings, the expats, known as "foreign experts," were not permitted inside.

Hu had a direct and simple order for his shock troops staff: They were to go to their desks and seek out any Chinese comment threads, any discussions on Chinese BBS's and portals and blogs -- any discussion on the Internet at all -- about the detention of Ai Weiwei and counter them with the party line, as expressed so clearly and ominously in a recent Global Times editorial, namely that Ai Weiwei is a self-appointed maverick who deserves to be detained, and who is being used by hostile Western powers to embarrass, hurt and destabilize China. This was not a request, it was a direct order. It was compulsory. <<

OK, you may be thinking: "Censorship in China, we know all about that." But the real value in the post is what comes after, in explaining the mentality that leads to official China's scorched-earth uncompromising stance, notably in that Global Times editorial. Burger describes a discussion with a senior Global Times editor about the daily realities of life in still-developing China, which leave many ordinary people, not just government-security officials, placing a premium on "stability" and "order." Burger contrasts that complex, "here are the realities" view with the hysterical stridency of official statements and the harshness of the current wave of arrests. He says (emphasis added):

>>This led to a very long conversation -- over an hour -- in which I explained that if only China would actually engage in a dialogue about these issues with the outside world instead of sabre-rattling and always sounding like a misunderstood and petulant child, maybe then China would advance its cause and help people outside China understand what China is really all about, how human rights are seen through Chinese eyes...

"Maybe, as you keep saying, the West truly doesn't understand China. Well, you are focusing now on soft power. The Global Times itself is actually an outgrowth of China's thirst for soft power, for global reputation and respect. And look at how you're failing. You are driving away foreign talent and making China look worse, not better -- in precise contradiction to the paper's stated goals. If your media and leaders could articulate China's point of view as clearly and calmly as you just did in this conversation maybe then China could get somewhere in fostering understanding.

"But railing against Ai Weiwei at the top of your lungs -- a man seen as an artist and a celebrity -- is exactly what you should not be doing. Why not throw the West a bone and let him go, declare an amnesty and then explain why he was detained in the first place."

This evoked quite a response. "Let Ai Weiwei go? But Richard, how can we do that? How can China admit to the world it is being defeated, it is bowing to international pressure and not doing what is right for China? How can we humiliate ourselves like that?"<<

A debate has gone on among everyone involved with China: how much of the current crackdown reflects over-confidence by the government? How much reflects its nervous insecurity? And in practice is there any real difference between the two? Statements like the one highlighted above are so revealing -- and in my experience so typical. No one in the outside world would take it as a sign of "weakness" or "humiliation" for the Chinese government to let Ai Weiwei go -- or not to have arrested him in the first place. But nearly everyone in the Chinese hierarchy seems to fear that it would be seen that way.
 
That's a problem, to put it mildly. For now, the Peking Duck's description is useful on-scene testimony for understanding the mindset behind the current hard line.

By the way: If you think you can help, I notice this just now on the GT's home page. Opportunity abounds.