China thinks it knows the downside, we’re just beginning to understand the upside

OP-ED: “‘I Know Who My Comrades Are,’” by Emily Parker, The Wall Street Journal, 27-28 January 2007, p. A8.

The never-ending debate on the impact of the Internet in China: are we connecting the masses toward freedom or is the Party staying ahead of that curve?

We get so fixated on the content that we tend to downplay the connectivity. The CCP bans this or that discussion, yes, but the bigger point (made well here) is that, while freedom of speech is still quite limited, freedom of assembly is taking off.

Here in America, freedom of assembly is easy to take for granted. In China, where large groups may be met with suspicion--or worse--it is not.

That’s the key thing to remember with Falun Gong. Even more than official China’s paranoia about religious groups/cults and their potential for political destabilization, there is the event that really ticked them off: the seemingly spontaneous mass rally in Tiananmen that FG pulled off through web-based coordination. It’s the horizontal connectivity that the CCP fears most, and that connectivity is becoming a natural part of life inside China, thanks to the web.

Beijing’s censorship of language is a serious obstacle to democratization, but it would be a mistake to overemphasize this point. In China, the Internet has already set into motion a core component of democratic consciousness. I know who my comrades are--those words can easily be deleted. The realization behind them can not.

Great piece of analysis by an assistant features editor at WSJ.