Near as I can tell, the government of Beijing does not really - and never has - understand the words "subtlety," "moderation," or "forethought." Perhaps it's simply an unavoidable side-effect of locking yourself in an echo chamber of opinion, surrounded only by sycophants and like-minds. Regardless, their policy toward the economy has been a heavy-handed yo-yo over the 62 years of the CPC's reign. Through the era of Mao, it had several attempts at full regulation... with disastrous effects; tens of millions of people starving to death, purge after purge, brain drain... the works.
"You're welcome!"
Then quasi-midget Deng Xiaoping stepped up and said, maybe an open market isn't such a bad idea after all. And it wasn't... in thirty years, China went from a third world cesspool, to a bustling, booming global powerhouse. Since then, however, it's been a dance along the knife's edge for the CPC. They, like any authoritarian ruling body, want control... or industry, of commerce, and of information and opinion. That's completely at odds with the natural processes of a thriving market economy. Their legitimacy and claim to power rests on continued economic growth, and their assertion that one shouldn't rock the boat, since (almost) everyone's lives are getting better.
It's been an either/or proposition... either the Chinese govt. chokes the life out of their own economy and people in a quixotic quest of isolation and control, or they risk instability and possibly their own loss of power by remaining open and allowing access to services, opinions, and viewpoints that might not be entirely favorable to their regime. Shocking, I know.
And here's the thing: Every time. Every. Single. Time. the government lets up its economic and social choke-hold... the Chinese economy has bloomed and prospered. It's magical... sort of like when you stop throttling a person they start breathing again.
Though now that I'm looking at it,
it might not be so bad...
So, that being said, I'll get to my main focus here. I've noticed a rather disturbing trend in the 4 years I've been here. I arrive in China immediately following the 2008 Olympics... deemed "China's Coming-Out Party" to the world. Heck they even promised they'd tolerate and allow protesters and dissenters to air their gripes about "human rights" and "forced disappearances" and "brutal information suppression." Y'know... in an appropriate space...
"Right this way please, protesters...
your platform is just ahead."
And largely, they did... sort of... follow through on a lot of those pre-Olympic double pinky-shake promises. Foreign media access was allowed, western websites had fairly free reign, dissent and protester did have some (extremely limited) access to the limelight.
That lasted until, oh, April of 2009 or so... when the CPC realized that the June 4th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre was fast approaching... and not just any old anniversary, either, but the 20th. Add to that a moderate upsurge in ethnic tensions and a hate crime or two in Muslim majority Xinjiang Provence (aka Uygheristan), and the ongoing colonization of Tibet, and the technocrats manning the towers along the Great Firewall had all the terror-fueled delusions of mass-uprising they needed to essentially shut down the entire internet for a few days.
Obviously, that couldn't last... and so they opened many websites back up to public use, minus a few pivotal ones including Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, and a host of others deemed "Dangerous." But what to do to fill that void? Why, clone them, of course! Make PRC-friendly versions of each of those sites, and then have the ability to monitor, delete, redact, and otherwise "harmonize" this sanitized Pod-People Internet to the benefit of the powers that be. Ingenious.
We foreigners cried, screamed, shouted, stomped on the floor, and threatened to hold our breaths until we passed out... and finally got around to buying custom-built VPN services to tunnel through the information blockade.
"$5 a month?! Are you f**king kidding me!?"
- Foreigners, ca. 2009
Finally, we got used to it... there were ways out, workarounds... as Google put it during the (ultimately futile) struggle to remain operational in China while keeping their dignity, "Better to have a library with a few books missing, than no library at all." Except for us it was more, "better to pay money for a service and get the full library, than be a cheapskate and render the internet largely useless."
But then it got worse. It creeped in around the peripherals, often not even noticeable until it was nibbling on you pant leg and refusing to clean up after itself around the house. Little by little, China is rebuilding its Great Firewall... and they're not only after the internet, this time. It seems that slowly but surely, they're slipping back into another isolationist, Mao-era. Foreign films are being forced through a narrower and narrower channel if they want to get to the Chinese screens. There have been at least two occasions in my tenure here that the Chinese Cinema's governing body ruled that all foreign films were being temporarily suspended... until a certain (and usually hyper-patriotic) domestic film reached a target revenue. They literally held Harry Potter hostage until people payed the ransom for the Boy Who Lived via tickets for The Founding of a Republic, a two-hour long propaganda piece on Mao and the CPC's glorious and harmonious victory for the soul of China.
"Again, you're welcome."
Recently, my own job's parent company - Pearson - which owned a 70% share of the Shanghai school it bought out in 2008... was forced out of the city by a policy change in the Ministry of Education which made such joint ventures, apparently, no longer acceptable.
And just today I read an article stating:
The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television said late Monday that under the new rules, no foreign TV series may be shown during the prime-time hours of 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. and that overseas-produced shows can take up no more than 25 percent of the total broadcast time each day.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2106770,00.html
For what I can see, China's taking everything it can use from the West, Sinofying, and has the padlock in hand and is attempting to push that gate shut again.
Like this, but possibly with fewer cave trolls.
How far will this closure go? How much insularity, seclusion, and isolation are the increasingly interneted Chinese people willing to tolerate? Probably a lot. They're used to it, largely... many have all but forgotten that something called YouTube or Facebook even exists. Let's face it, if China does one thing well, it's ripping off someone else's idea and copying it wholesale for its domestic market... the internet is no exception. But in the mean time, might I offer you this genuine Larry Viuton bag? I give you best price! You buy now!
(CS) TAW Out.
No dark sarcasm
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