China Gives Net Users an Error Message
President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji have done wonders for China’s international image, but they now face a kind of mini-technological Tiananmen that threatens to tarnish it anew. The issue comes down to whether China’s security apparatus will be allowed to treat the Internet as if it were always and inevitably an enemy within.
The current brouhaha, which is becoming an international cause celebre, arises over the arrest and trial of a 30-year-old computer whiz who allegedly assisted in the distribution of anti-state material via e-mail. The West does not know the full story; Lin Hai’s criminal trial was held behind closed doors. All the details have not been disclosed. Even so, the case poses a fundamental dilemma for China: As this massively developing nation, held back for so long by outside exploitation and internal mismanagement, acquires the ambition to become the 21st century’s Asian superpower, mustn’t it accept globalization’s information technology? Even with all its messy ability to challenge central state control over what people say, write and transmit?
The big puzzle in the Lin Hai case is that China’s new leaders are said not only to share a sophisticated view of the new information technology, but also to have recently downsized their sense of how much they will be able to control its evolution and reach. How could Beijing, apparently so committed to national economic development, try to squeeze ever-expanding worldwide information technology into the confinement of a metaphorical Mao straitjacket?
The effort would not only be fruitless for Beijing but would also set back an evolving domestic media warming. While Chinese news media freedom remains a faint shadow of what Americans enjoy (and sometimes have to endure), China today is far from the closed-minded culture it was 10 or just five years ago. According to prominent journalists from the People’s Republic of China whom I recently interviewed, China’s government and Communist Party will accept a measure of aggressiveness as long as it’s limited to exposing the nation’s considerable corruption problem without undermining China’s power elite. And China’s cyberpresence is more and more visible online: Internet experts from China recently visited America to discuss promising partnerships with U.S. counterparts, a prospect all but unthinkable until recently.
Not coincidentally, this new attitude mirrors the progressively activist directions of Chinese foreign policy. Beijing, this past year alone, has been more diplomatically engaged than at any time since the Communists came to power in 1949. Last week, Jiang concluded a difficult but historic six-day state trip to Japan--the first by a Chinese head of state in China’s long history as a state. Earlier this year, China received the U.S. president for a state visit. In the fall, seven European leaders jetted in and out of the country for visits. And throughout 1998, a turbulent year of Asian economic scares, China triumphantly protected its currency from any official devaluation, a steadfast policy that earned it widespread praise as “an island of stability,” as the Clinton administration put it. In October, China signed the U.N. Covenant on civil and political rights. That’s a lot for any country in one year, much less for China.
China’s national interest is reflected in all these changes. Reaching out to become a big-time player on the world diplomatic scene simply complements the domestic economic development that’s necessary to keep this sprawling and problem-plagued nation from unraveling and disintegrating into a kind of supernova Asian Yugoslavia. More than a billion mouths must be continuously and adequately fed--not to mention competently educated and fully employed--if China is to hang together.
Alleged cybersubversive Lin Hai may not realize it, but he encapsulates in his tiny frame the huge, historic question of whether China can accept a less controlling but brighter, wealthier future. If China doesn’t answer this millennial question correctly, it runs the risk of both forfeiting a good measure of the international face and stature that it has gained under the Zemin-Zhu leadership and slamming its economic gears into reverse. That would emphatically not be in China’s national interest, or the world’s.
