A really interesting column today from Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times (reg. req’d). He’s trying to get himself shut down by the Chinese authorities, but he can’t quite manage it.
To test the limits of the Internet in China, I started a couple of Chinese blogs â in which I huff and puff as outrageously as I can.
For a country that employs some 30,000 Internet censors, that turned out to be stunningly easy….
I wrote the most inflammatory comment I could think of, describing how on June 4, 1989, I saw the Chinese Army fire on Tiananmen Square protesters. The two characters for June 4 were replaced by asterisks, but the description of the massacre remained intact.
These various counterrevolutionary comments, all in Chinese, are still sitting there in Chinese cyberspace at http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1238333873 and http://jisidao.blog.sohu.com. (When State Security reads this, it may finally order my blogs closed.)
All this underscores, I think, that China is not the police state that its leaders sometimes would like it to be; the Communist Party’s monopoly on information is crumbling, and its monopoly on power will follow. The Internet is chipping away relentlessly at the Party, for even 30,000 censors can’t keep up with 120 million Chinese Netizens. With the Internet, China is developing for the first time in 4,000 years of history a powerful independent institution that offers checks and balances on the emperors.
It’s not that President Hu Jintao grants these freedoms, for he has arrested dozens of cyberdissidents as well as journalists. But the Internet is just too big and complex for State Security to control, and so the Web is beginning to assume the watchdog role filled by the news media in freer countries….
China’s leaders decided years ago to accept technologies even if they are capable of subversive uses: photocopiers and fax machines at first, and now laptops and text messaging. The upshot is that China is much freer than its rulers would like.
To me, this trend looks unstoppable. I don’t see how the Communist Party dictatorship can long survive the Internet, at a time when a single blog can start a prairie fire.
Interesting stuff. Ironic, though, that Chinese citizens can read Kristof’s subversive postings for free, but Americans can’t read Kristof’s column about them unless they subscribe to the New York Times!
The imposition of the “Times Select” subscription to access NYT columists, among them Kristoff, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, has severely limited the reach and inluence of these writers and so has been the source of much complaining by them.
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I just read (somewhere) that the Herald will be dropping its subscription requirements and reverting to free access to its columnists after a year or two trying to get on-line readers to pay for it. Free Howie Carr!
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The only subscription that seems to have met with some success is the Wall Street Journal which costs $29.95 as opposed to $175 annually for the print edition. But that’s for the full edition, plus archives.
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Goes to show what influence on-line content is having on opinion.
is already free!
Perhaps China’s police state is so efficient they KNEW it was Kristoff up to his old publicity tricks and deliberately did not shut him down. Now all those “100 Flowers” of emboldened NY Times Select-subscribing Chinese dissenters will walk right into the trap.
It reminds me a bit of a civil disobedienc campaign in which the police refuse to make arrests, because they know that that will give the protesters great press. The Chinese authorities may simply know that shutting down Kristof will get them bad press, while letting him blog will, as Kristof shows, get him to write that they’re not so tyrranical.