Chris hedges AND george Monbiot ON THE IGNORANcE - ColdType

other voices
After the beijing
games, Chinese
bloggers fiercely
debated the
economic direction
the country should
take over the
coming years. it
was a far more
robust debate
than one would
expect from
coverage of China
in the west, where
the emphasis is
always on rampant
nationalism
44 thereader | November 2008
or Google’s willingness to modify their
behaviour to please paranoid officials? I
discovered that the western executives
of these companies have been more than
comfortable with allowing their Chinese
counterparts to self-censor thousands of
sensitive keywords; far more than just “democracy”
and “Falun Gong”. Moreover,
they are ignoring disturbing developments
such as Yahoo China’s decision earlier this
year to post images of wanted Tibetans on
its home page after the Lhasa uprising.
democratic force
An important question the book poses is
whether the web is an automatic democratiser,
as is widely assumed in western media
circles. The general consensus, across
the globe, was that political and military
meddling by Washington and London was
making the job of real democrats much
more difficult.
As one blogger told me in Tehran: “Most
of the people I know are in favour of reform,
not revolution, because people are too tired
to experience another revolution.” I found
the same message echoed throughout the
countries I visited: the desire to experience
incremental change without foreign
involvement.
Take China. It has 250 million internet
users – now the largest online community
in the world, far surpassing America
– based in both the cities and rural areas.
Politics is often the furthest thing from
their minds, but connecting with friends
has become an essential part of life. I met
very few bloggers who wanted to discuss
anything political and most expressed general
satisfaction with the regime’s economic
policies. No great desire for “democratisation”
there.
Mica Yushu, a blogger in Shanghai, told
me that most of her middle-class friends
didn’t crave political change. “We use the
internet mostly for entertainment, sharing
information, earning money or other fun,”
she said. The sight of darkened internet
cafes across the country was something to
behold, with thousands of users gaming,
watching soft-core pornography, blogging
and instant messaging.
A recent study by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project found that the vast
majority of China’s web users expressed
support for Beijing managing or controlling
the internet, including the banning of “pornographic”
sites. This is not to say that the
Chinese desire authoritarian rule; but while
they want change, curbing corruption and
ensuring essential services are their top priorities,
not the advances in human rights
the west puts at the top of the agenda.
After the Beijing Games, Chinese bloggers
fiercely debated the economic direction
the country should take over the coming
years. It was a far more robust debate
than one would expect from coverage of
China in the west, where the emphasis is
always on rampant nationalism. One anonymous
blogger noted – after sarcastically
praising the country’s free-market reforms
as the “best system seen not just in Chinese
history, but also in humankind’s” – that
greater political development could only
come with a “basic welfare system.” Such
discussions on a massive scale were impossible
in China before the internet. Equally
important debates are occurring in every
country I visited.
Allowing people to speak and write for
themselves without a western filter is one
of the triumphs of blogging. The online
culture, disorganised and disjointed in its
aims, is unlike that of any previous social
movement. While some want the right to
criticise their leaders, others simply want
the ability to flirt and listen to subversive
tunes. That is revolutionary for much of
the world. CT
Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney, Australia,
based journalist, blogger and author of The
Blogging Revolution