FT full-page "analysis" and Economist story.
FT is about rise of microblog sites in China and how the government throws ever more censors at the problem. As always, it's a strange mix of shaping and monitoring public opinion on the government's part, but what always impresses me is the sheer amount of expression going on.
Naturally, the piece leads with the latest example of a netizen mob gone wild over some official's nastiness -- or more specifically, some high official's son's nastiness (the infamous son of Li Gang, who, after hitting a student with his car while drunk, drove off shouting from his car window, "Make a report if you dare, my dad is Li Gang!"). Well, the report was made and Li Gang paid the price. "My dad is Li Gang" became the Chinese web equivalent of "I'm Spactacus!" symbolizing everything that the public finds wrong about official abuse.
But as the piece makes clear, the evolution of China's web defies traditional Western expectations. More and more Chinese log on, and more and more government effort is launched to keep track of it all. Instead of some glorious montage scene where everybody expresses their clear desire for free elections and then we cut to the movie's uplifting climax, we see a lot of virulent nationalism being expressed. And instead of hapless government censors throwing up their hands at the insane flow of words, the Party is getting fairly sophisticated at managing the whole mess, even publishing its annual list of Li-Gang-like events. So, for now, the web just seems like another place where the Party is subtly polling the public, cracking down only in the those rare instances where somebody truly steps out of line.
We in the West are disappointed with this, but I don't think we should be. Expecting China to morph into the U.S. overnight is wrong, but so is assuming that the line between Party control and public expression isn't moving, because it is. It's just that the public is happy enough, for now, exploring a lot of personal and mundane, simply entertaining stuff, not being all that different from anybody else in the West.
And when the political is expressed, it's often frighteningly out of control and over the top -- immature. That too is not all that different from the West, if you go back to an equivalent time in our political evolution.
And that's the trick. Rapid modernization can speed up all sorts of evolutions, but a rapid modernization of the political system is something entirely different. Those sorts of rules, when they change abruptly, can be very destabilizing, and the more you let the connectivity revolutionize everything else in the economy and society, the more you, the leadership and even the public, should fear commensurate possibilities of change in the political sphere.
We can assume that everything would work out to our liking if the Party just let it all hang out at once, but we'd likely be wrong. People need time to get used to all that change, and we consistently underestimate the amount of time traveling that the average 50-something Chinese has undergone over the past three decades. We took a couple centuries to travel similar political ground, and we forget the journey, so we say, "All right already, you've had the web now for a while, so why doesn't everything resemble our way of life?"
I say, be patient and give them time to get used to the all the economic and social change before moving on to the political. And then expect that journey to likewise be entirely Chinese, understanding that how they kept things together over time has never been our way, because our way was to escape all that back home, run here, and build something entirely different.
Over time, the Party commands less and less of the public's attention, and for this thing to evolve in a more free direction, that's all we need.
The Economist story makes this point. Not only is the government's main channel, CCTV, losing viewers to less controlled provincial stations, it's really losing the young to Internet video, most of which is pirated immediately from the West. Interesting example of a show I know and love: "Prison Break" is huge in China and its star, Wentworth Miller is not only mobbed everywhere he goes in China, he's the frickin' face of GM on TV commercials!
The show has never been aired on any Chinese TV network.
Now, the temptation is to read meaning into Wentworth's original TV subject matter, but go easy on that. Point is, the young get used to choosing on their own and, over time, that changes things.
So, go easy on the pessimism, I say. We expect too much out of the original, time-traveling generations here. Xi Jinping (China's next president and in his late 50s), for example, still remembers vividly being thrown in jail as a kid as a political prisoner on his dad's behalf during the Cultural Revolution. He's China's leader for the next decade, and his "Sixties' were a bit different from the Boomers.
Conservatives in the West keep saying, Nixon went to China 40 years ago and look how the Party still rules! They say that because that's all they want to see. But we need to go back and read our history here. The Cultural Revolution was a "long national nightmare" that trumps our Vietnam and Watergate by . . . more than just a bit. It was a national insanity and the bite it took out of the national psyche was closer to our Civil War than anything we've experienced since
So rather than expecting that much more time traveling by the 50-something crowd, think of this more in terms of post-Cultural Revolution generations. The first truly post-CR leadership generation comes online in 2022 and China hits the half-century-mark post Deng's reforms another decade after that. Realistically, this is always where I've been positing this sort of political change -- when the bulk of China's population has had all its formative experiences post the Cultural Revolution, or when their definition of normal truly normalizes, and their willingness to start some of the political time-traveling builds to the point of acting on those impulses.
For now and for a while, China's population will remain mostly filled up by people for whom all the change to date is more than enough for them. We can be disappointed in that most human of realities, or we can just be happy for them and all the changes they've been able to enjoy in their collective lives to date.