The Chip May Prove Mightier Than the Sword
Former Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal, who spent part of his youth in China, was asked on ABC’s David Brinkley television show Sunday what he thought was going on in China today. “The same thing that is happening throughout the Communist world,” said Blumenthal, who is now chairman of Unisys Corp., “and that is really the computer revolution. Over the last 40 years, because of the tremendous power of that little chip, everything that we do and that the Communist countries have had to learn to do is governed by this new technology.”
People are dying and this guy’s talking about semiconductors. Is he kidding?
No. Blumenthal is making a profoundly serious point--the same one made by former President Reagan on Tuesday when he declared in London that “the Goliath of totalitarian control will rapidly be brought down by the David of the microchip.”
The point is that the fax machines and computer networks made possible by advances in microelectronics--which began with the transistor in 1947--undermine Communist systems, because they defeat its central planning and control of people’s lives.
‘Impossible to Control’
They do so by putting information in people’s hands. On one level, microelectronics keeps students in China in touch with each other and with the 70,000 Chinese students who are currently in the United States. Through fax machines and computer networks, they communicate information on missing individuals and news of families. Information may not save lives, unfortunately, but it does undermine the Big Lie.
And beyond that, says Blumenthal, elaborating on the thought he expressed on television, “the enormous pools of information created by microelectronics are impossible to control from the top.”
It seems evident that there are a lot of fax machines in China. One or two fax machines can be controlled by secret police. Hundreds are more difficult to control. And if China is to progress into the modern world, there will be thousands of fax machines and control becomes nearly impossible.
It is not immediately evident that the driving forces of the modern economy undermine political control, but they do.
With computerized money markets, businesses gather capital everywhere, and local control diminishes. With computerized desktop publishing, a government can’t so easily stop the presses.
Two decades ago, the Soviet Union seized a Xerox machine from a U.S. correspondent because he was allowing dissidents to run off their underground newspaper. But today, copying machines are portable, computers can be held in the palm of a hand and are harder to seize.
International Networks
Even the means of production can be disseminated widely instead of being controlled by a central source. Thanks to microchips capable of storing information equal to 125,000 of the letters and numerals you are now reading, production changes profoundly. The knowledge is in the machine, not the instruction manual. The precise specifications of an automobile, the dimensions of windows and fenders, can be put onto microcircuits that control the cutting of the metal and molding of the shapes. And goods can be produced anywhere because those specifications and instructions can be transmitted instantly over international networks.
All of that is possible if you’re in the network--as China’s students in the United States are, but China’s politicians are not. “The students have been communicating on Bitnet,” says Richard Judy, director of Soviet and Eastern European Studies at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis. What is Bitnet? It is an international computer network, powered by 1,306 mainframe computers that link scientists and scholars in the United States, Canada and Mexico with Earn, the West European network, and with AsiaNet in Japan.
“Communication and trading of ideas goes on all the time on Bitnet,” says Judy. And it is that network that Chinese students at places such as Harvard, Berkeley and Columbia have been able to use--at least in the United States.
Such networks are the nerve system of the modern industrial world. But China itself is outside such networks, as is the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Thus their scientists are limited, their technology several steps behind. Control from the center is possible, but it is control of a technologically backward and materially poorer society.
It was to escape that condition that Communist societies have been trying to liberate their economies. But liberation isn’t easy. “In order to manage a modern economy, you need people who are clued in,” says Blumenthal. “You must allow students to have information.”
For over a decade, China has been sending 20,000 students a year to the United States. The government’s problem was that it couldn’t restrict what they--or its own young people at home--were learning.
Now China wants to reverse course. But it’s going to find that it cannot shut access to political ideas even while going forward economically. In the age of the microchip, you can’t stop the flow of information. “Power comes out of the barrel of a gun,” said Mao Tse Tung. But that was a long time ago, and now there’s another kind of power coming out of fax machines and computer screens.
