Why the Internet threatens to ruin the Chinese model
Last week brought the latest act in the theater of the absurd that has become China’s internet policy.
The Cyberspace Administration of China went after “vulgar culture” online by cracking down on account handles and avatars containing, among other things, celebrity names. So goodbye and good riddance “BarackObama44” and “KimKardashian353” — you have, according to the Chinese internet overseers, “polluted the Internet ecology, harmed the interests of the masses and seriously violated core socialist values.”
It’s tempting to laugh. But for Chinese dissenters, the consequences of this change are deadly serious. As of March 1, users of forums, messaging services, comment sections, and blogging platforms will be required to register with their real names. The CAC will monitor these registrations, meaning that the real identities behind pseudonymous avatars can now be easily accessed by the government. It represents the effective end of online anonymity in China, and it could bring about the end of dissent online, too.
With each repressive action comes the Communist Party’s ritual reaction: The CAC’s head of mobile internet, Xu Feng, claimed that this latest act of suppression “does not restrict internet users, instead it protects their legitimate rights.” What rights? We aren’t told. Instead, the public is “encouraged to take part in the drive and inform authorities of violations.” In other words, trust us and rat out your friends.
It’s easy to disregard and even dismiss the Chinese effort to repress and restrict the internet because our experience of the medium is anything but. It’s even easier to assume that the passage of time will simply loosen the vice. But if anything, China’s experience has been the opposite — its total internet users have grown hand-in-hand with its efforts to censor and disrupt its people’s access to information. The New York Times recently reported the disabling of several virtual private networks, one of the few backchannels to an unfettered internet that the Communist Party tolerated — until now. “The move to disable some of the most widely used V.P.N.s has provoked a torrent of outrage among video artists, entrepreneurs and professors,” the Times reported. And last month, added the BBC, “133 accounts on the messenger service WeChat were shut down for ‘distorting history.’ ” That’s a tendentious claim from a government that blocks web users from searching for the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Why should this matter to the rest of the world? There are, of course, the obvious commercial reasons. The tightening of internet controls in China adversely affects business, both Chinese and foreign-owned. The Times chronicles the complaints of business owners prohibited from accessing programs like Gmail and Google Docs and scientists unable to access their international colleagues’ work — barred, in other words, from the communication and collaboration tools that make business and innovation possible. More troubling are regulations that would require Western companies to provide the government open access to hardware and software, and force the storage of critical intellectual property in China. Trade groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pushed back hard on the new rules.
The Obama administration appears to have noticed. Administration officials called out China’s digital policy in an op-ed in Politico this past week. “The top-down, government-led approach advocated by China and others for managing the future of the Internet is fundamentally flawed,” they noted. “This behavior is adversely affecting the fundamentals of the U.S.-China relationship, harming the ties of our business community, tarnishing Chinese firms’ international image, and at a broader level, undermining the basic foundations of free and fair commerce.”
It represents the strongest stance taken by the U.S. government has taken on the issue to date. But our nations’ interests can’t be easily reconciled, given the Chinese leadership’s aims. What exactly are those aims? As Amy Chang of the Center for a New American Security persuasively explains, Beijing’s push for “network security” is “driven primarily by the domestic political imperative to protect the longevity of the Chinese Community Party.” As long as the Party perceives its internet crackdown as a matter of survival, gauzy appeals to bilateral harmony and international norms will go nowhere.
But for China, the crackdown represents a serious gamble. For decades, the Party’s implied deal with the Chinese people has been simple: We’ll give you economic growth in exchange for your political freedoms. But now that online connectivity is such a requirement of growth — especially growth beyond the manufacturing-and-cheap-labor model — the Chinese deal is threatening to come apart. The same internet that carries the voices of political dissidents also lets scientists share their data with overseas colleagues, lets foreign investors communicate with Chinese businesses, and helps Chinese students learn English and other foreign languages. In other words, it’s next to impossible to cut off the parts of the internet that foster political dissent without also cutting off the parts that foster economic growth.
To critics who have charged that political openness and economic openness are ultimately an all-or-nothing proposition, the Chinese Communist Party has responded: “Wanna bet?” Its repressive internet policy is the same bet, with escalating stakes. And the only certainty here is that the fate of “KimKardashian353” will, one way or another, have global repercussions.
Originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com on February 9, 2015.
