Slouching Toward Transparency

     Back in February I wrote a short piece (about 1000 words) about how the PRC government is losing its battle against the free flow of information.  I sent it to the LA Times, where I have published a bunch of articles over the past few years, but they did not take it.  I did not update it because, when Aidan died, my attention was turned to other matters.

     I post it here, below the jump because, even if the examples are a bit dated, I believe the argument may still hold up.  There is no ancient Chinese philosophy in it, just contemporary political analysis.  What do you think: is the PRC government actually becoming more informationally transparent, even as it tries to maintain its censorship regime?

Slouching Toward Transparency
By Sam Crane
Williams College
[email protected]

     As recent cases of internet censorship and press closures remind us, the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) works hard to control the flow of information into and out of the country. It is failing, however. More messages, ideas and images are crossing the borders in both directions than ever before. Harried Chinese censors cannot keep up with the volume and speed of communications, which are gradually forcing the government to reveal more about itself than it has in the past.
     Although it tries to obscure media of various sorts, the Chinese government is gradually becoming more transparent.
     Take the latest controversies surrounding Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, web giants that have been criticized for playing along with Chinese censorship. Although each company, in order to do business in China, has given up certain internet freedoms generally enjoyed in the US, it is also true that their continued presence in the PRC, even in compromised form, facilitates interconnectivity.
     Last December Microsoft, upon request of the PRC government, shut down a blog by a Chinese journalist, “Michael Anti,” when he criticized the firing of an editor of a Beijing newspaper. Microsoft said it was just adhering to Chinese law; critics complained that Microsoft was complicit in censorship. Yet even though the blog was sacrificed, it turns out that the same Microsoft service in China provided several other bloggers the opportunity to publish the exact post that had brought the law down on Anti. One blog was closed, but the message was transmitted, and is still available, in Chinese, for PRC readers to consider.
    Of course, Chinese censorship of the web continues. It is a daily battle. When a blog post with the words “Tibet independence” goes up on a site hosted in China, whether it is an American or Chinese company, it will almost certainly be taken down in a few days.  But the accumulation of thousands and thousands of web sites, new ones popping up each day while others are closed by the Chinese government, has created an impossible situation for the censors. They simply cannot keep up with the explosion of openings in their Great Firewall.
    When local farmers in the small Guangdong village of Dongzhou protested last December against the construction of a power plant and about sixteen of them were shot and killed by riot police, the Chinese government restricted stories of the tragedy in the national press. On a web site hosted outside of China by a group called Citizen’s Rights Protection Network, an extensive description and analysis of the tragedy was posted in Chinese. It was an excellent means for Chinese citizens to inform themselves about the conditions of their country and the actions of their government. But would it reach a PRC audience?
     It did.  Although the original site was blocked by the Chinese government, the entire report was copied and published, in Chinese, on a blog hosted by Microsoft. That blog has recently been closed down, for other reasons, but the example is instructive: the internet is so large and so fast that it is virtually impossible to block all sources of unwanted information.
    This puts the PRC government in an impossible situation. It can struggle against the swirl of information all around it and never really win the war against stories deemed undesirable. Or, it can respond with its own stories and its own spin but, in the process, reveal information that otherwise might be kept secret or downplayed.
    Beijing does both, simultaneously expending enormous resources on its sieve-like firewall and disclosing news that confirms just how dire the domestic political situation is.
    Last month the Public Security Bureau reported that “public order disturbances” increased by 6.6% in 2005, growing from about 74,000 in 2004 to approximately 87,000 nationwide. This announcement confirmed what analysts outside and inside of China had suspected: the Dongzhou killings were part of a much larger crisis of economic inequality, corruption and violence.
     The Communist Party does not want to discuss publicly the failings of the political system it dominates; the Central Propaganda Department would much rather talk about China’s booming economic expansion and its growing influence in the world. But with pictures and analysis of the Dongzhou killings, and many other censored stories, flowing into and out of the country, Chinese political authorities have no choice but to release information in an effort to become relevant in the global conversation about social and political conditions in China.
     Why didn’t they lie and say that the number of “public order disturbances” had decreased in 2005? Not telling the truth is more difficult when so many sources of information can quickly reveal distortions and evasions.
    In January, a demonstration by farmers in Zhongshan township, Guangdong province was suppressed by police. A 13-year old girl was reportedly clubbed to death. The Chinese government said she had had a heart attack. But it later came out, in a mainstream newspaper story, that the girl’s family had been paid to back off their story. A week later, as reported in the South China Morning Post: “Two party officials in Zhongshan, Guangdong, face dismissal and another is likely to be jailed over the death of a schoolgirl last week during a crackdown on protests over land seizures.” Although the full truth will always be unclear – the girl’s body was cremated shortly after the incident – what is certain is that the government’s capacity to control the news has been fundamentally weakened by the increased access to information by Chinese citizens and foreigners alike.
     In the end, then, the Communist Party cannot shield itself as easily as it once did from the searching glare of public scrutiny. Little by little more light seeps into the inner recesses of Beijing’s political elite, and more information spills out into the open.
   The Party might covet opacity, but proliferating sources of news and data are forcing its transparency.