Freedom of speech has little to do with the tyranny of the numbers

Liberdade de expressão e tirania dos números
No passado dia 8 de Junho, o Gabinete de Informação do Conselho de Estado divulgou o seu primeiro livro branco sobre a Internet na China: a meu ver, com um grande atraso, uma vez que o país tem o maior número de cibernautas do planeta – mais de 420 milhões, a confiar nas estatísticas oficiais anunciadas em Julho.
http://pontofinalmacau.wordpress.com/editoriais-e-opiniao/

Freedom of speech has little to do with the tyranny of the numbers
(Published in Portuguese in Ponto Final, Macao, September 2nd 2010)
By Eric Sautede

On June 8th, China’s State Council Information Office released its first ever white paper on the Internet in China: to me, a long overdue one, as China is home to the greatest number of Internet users on the planet—more than 420 millions if official statistics released in July are to be trusted.
White papers are usually short documents (this one is only 31 pages; http://china.org.cn/government/whitepaper/node_7093508.htm) released by the Chinese government to assess a particular topic of public interest that involves a significant measure of public policies, and to delineate the why and how of future developments. There are white papers on many topics: environmental protection, energy, climate change, population, etc. One on human rights was released as early as 1991, two years only after the Tiananmen repression. And the first and to this day last one on Democracy was made public in 2005—to explain that China was (again) an exception in terms of political development—some five years earlier than the one on the Internet, whereas obviously the latter seems to be far more a priority for the authorities than the former!
The present white paper on the Internet begins with a review of past development in the last 15 years—the Internet in China became commercial in 1995, describing the amazing technical prowess achieved and the mind-blowing growth in both volume and diversity of usage of these information technologies at the turn of the millennium, whether counted in bandwidth, number of bloggers, number of websites, number of government agencies with fully-integrated e-governance mechanisms, trade volume of e-commerce, etc. In this regard—total volume—and in line with the overall achievement of the Chinese economy that now stands as the world No. 2, China looks definitely part of the “first world”, and rightly so as information technologies have been very early on part of the state-sponsored development strategy, both for sound and legitimate economic reasons and far-reaching good-governance goals. With success come also difficulties, and the white paper does not shy away from showing that vast security-related impediments have followed suit, especially stressing the crippling effects of electronic viruses and hacking. Earlier on this year, a McAfee report showed that China was first in the world when it came to computer hacking, both as the actual place and origin of electronic attacks. The security company was nevertheless keen to stress that the hackers were not necessarily Chinese or even physically present on Chinese soil, and thus the white paper has got every reason to conclude with a vibrant call for active international exchanges and cooperation.
More troubling is the claim made by the white paper’s third section that the citizens’ freedom of speech is absolutely guaranteed in China. Even though there is no doubt that Chinese citizens enjoy today a much (really far much) greater degree of freedom than they used to twenty years ago and that the Internet has been playing an ever-increasing “supervision” role over the state—something heavily stressed in the white paper—especially in cases of local corruption and maladministration, heavy censorship and tight political control over the internet in the name of the fight against “endangering state security” are still two key distinctive features of information technologies as they exist in China today. Preventive methods (heavily constraining rules over online publication, charter of good-conduct for portals and search engines providing online information, etc.) as well as selective (blocking of foreign websites, limits imposed on search engines, filtering of emails, cleansing of online forums and discussions lists, “astroturfing” with Chinese characteristics sponsored by the state, etc.) and punitive ones (criminalization of the usage for “dissenting” activities) have been widely documented by NGO reports over the years (Reporters without Borders, Human Rights in China or the OpenNet Initiative). The case of Google deciding not to comply anymore with the stringent rules of filtering in February of this year acted as a startling reminder of what the situation really is—since then Google’s license has been renewed and the American company has agreed not to redirect automatically all censored content to its Hong Kong portal. Closer to us, Li Baozhu, a high-up official of the propaganda apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party, openly declared during a conference at Peking University in June that “with a wave of [his] hand, tens of millions of posts about [a sensitive] incident [had been] all deleted.” Since July, several reports have been surfacing that micro-blogging services were now being targeted for being rather too popular and unmanageable, and a Mingpao report indicated that eight websites which micro-blogging services—Sina, Sohu, Netease, Iphonixe, Hexun, SOufang, 139Mobile and Juyou9911—had to commit themselves to put in place a “self-discipline commissioner.”
Contrary to a lot of comments that have been made regarding this particular aspect of the white paper—characterizing the authors of the report as being in mere denial of reality, the exercise of the white paper as sheer propaganda or as a vision of a renewed “networked authoritarianism"—I do believe that this is the latest installation of an ever-recurring and nonetheless biased vision held by most Chinese reformers since the end of the 19th century: that progress is ever achieved thanks to technology and efficiency alone—even though it is easily arguable that means are not the same as content and access does not equate with usage. And the party-state that has been so successful in making China what it is today has no intention to challenge that vision—on the contrary—for that would entail to open the political arena to competing interests and organizations, outside of the Party. Let’s not forget that the so widely-used indictment for “endangering the state security” was thought as a replacement for the “counter-revolutionary” category in the revamped Criminal Law of 1997: in the era of reform, revolutionary ideas are not to be stressed anymore.