the dam is leaking all over the place

This follows on from Alex’s post here, in a way. Roland Soong’s undelivered lecture at Chinese bloggercon. Extensive citation warning:

So what are the most important changes over the past five years? Firstly, the Internet has grown so big that it is beyond normal control. How do you monitor what 253 million netizens are doing (statistics from Wikipedia)? How do you monitor the contents on 11 million Chinese websites? The mythical 30,000 Internet police are helpless against those numbers. If there are banned subjects, they must run to thousands each week. How is any website supposed to implement the bans? It is humanly impossible. There is no well-defined, active system in place. Instead, there are only opportunistic, reactive systems that operate slowly and imperfectly. The dam is leaking all over the place.

Secondly, there is the emergence of an extremist right and an extremist left on the Internet in terms of public opinion. The characteristics of these two extremist wings are by no means clear. Generally speaking the extremist right might be the ones who claim to automatically embrace the universal values of freedom, liberty and human rights, and assumes that China is nothing until those values are implemented. Conversely, the extremist left automatically embrace patriotism, nationalism and sovereignty, and assumes that China must defend itself from foreign intrusion at all cost. But that is very much an over-simplification of matters. It suffices that on any seemingly simple issue (such as Chang Ping's essay about how to find out the truth about the Lhasa incident), there exists two diametrically opposite viewpoints that are automated gainsays. They are vigorous, even vicious, but also uninformative and unpersuasive. Each viewpoint is likely to be held by a small number of netizens, but when the majority chooses to keep silent, this becomes much ado about nothing to read about these Internet comments.

“Extreme left” opinion does get represented in English language media by people like Martin Jacques and the merry band of opportunists at Spiked, setting up a sort of parallel dialogue of the demented with the “why aren’t they more like us” crowd. Oddly eough, Anglospheric discussion of China has come to echo some of the dumbest Chinese internal political discussions.

Thirdly, a more interesting development has been the artful insertion of rumors into public debates. On the seemingly straightforward case of The Police Beat A Harbin University Student To Death, there was a wave of misinformation about the deceased (that is, he had family ties to important government figures; he was a drug abuser; etc) that undermines public sympathy. This gets to the point where one has to tread extremely carefully in every case to tell information from misinformation. That may be frustrating, but it is actually very useful training. You might as well as learn about the art of lie detection in cases with lower social costs than in more important cases with huge consequences (such as elections).

Fourthly, and most importantly, you will note the role of western media has been eliminated from the process model. This means a lot to me, because I am a bridge blogger from China to the English-only readership. My base has just been driven into insignificance. If once upon a time western media coverage, which affects the opinion of western politicians and citizens, mattered to the Chinese people, this is no longer the case.

In the political realm, the Chinese people no longer have to believe in the rhetoric of freedom, liberty, democracy, sovereignty and human rights. The war in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison, the Guantanamo camp, hurricane Katrina and other misconduct took care of all that. Why would the Chinese people be interested in what American president George W. Bush have to preach to them about freedom, liberty, democracy, sovereignty and human rights? When the western media invoke those terms, the reaction from the Chinese people is: "Look within yourselves and fix your own problems first!"

In the economic realm, the financial tsunami of 2008 took care of any credibility in the Washington consensus. In its place was an as-yet-undefined Beijing consensus which has less specifics than the general idea of self-determination. Why would the Chinese people be interested in what Alan Greenspan and Henry Paulson have to tell them about how to run their economy when they have failure on their hands?

In the media realm, the western media have taken a pounding in the eyes of the Chinese public this year. First, there was the western media coverage of the Tibet disturbances (see Chinese Netizens versus Western Media), followed by The Olympic Torch Tour As Public Relations Disaster. The list goes on and on. Why would the Chinese people be interested in western media coverage along the same lines?

So here is how I perceive my role to have changed in these last five years.

Five years ago, I had the missionary complex that I was going to help change China by getting the western media interested in certain matters and hence create international pressure. Maybe good things will occur as a result.

Today, I no longer have any sense of mission. Instead, I am a passive observer who is recording how the Chinese people are forging their own destinies by their own actions.

Here’s an example of this process in action. Here’s another. The wider point is that opinion has moved on from a notion of freedom and democracy as imported goods from a central source into a more generally distributed sceptical and critical attitude to the claims of power, whoever makes them and wherever they're made: actual universalism, in short.

Comments

[Madam Miaow]

It was inevitable that the Chinese people would reach this point but it's fascinating to be witnessing it actually happen. Given all the hypocrisy and the assorted agendas of the West, this is most welcome.

I expect there to be lots of mistakes as this baby learns to walk but also positive new developments as it outgrows the decrepit old former masters of the universe.