China: A house divided against itself
It is now the fifth year of China’s repressive internet policies. The policies have not worked, so China is doubling down. WSJ:
China is imposing new regulations to control content on its news Web sites, the government said Sunday, another step in its continuing effort to police a rapidly expanding Internet population….Only “healthy and civilized news and information that is beneficial to the improvement of the quality of the nation, beneficial to its economic development and conducive to social progress” will be allowed, Xinhua said. It added: “The sites are prohibited from spreading news and information that goes against state security and public interest.” China’s population of Internet users has surpassed 100 million and is the world’s second largest after the U.S., which has 135 million.
While the communist government encourages Internet use for education and business, it also keeps an extremely tight rein over online content, usually blocking material it deems subversive or pornographic. Online dissidents who post essays questioning government actions and policies or those who express their opinions in chatrooms are regularly arrested and charged under vaguely worded state security laws. Earlier this month, a French media watchdog group said email-account information provided by Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. helped lead to the conviction and 10-year prison sentence of a Chinese journalist who had written about media restrictions in an email…..According to Xinhua, the previous set of rules governing Internet news was issued in 2000 and have become obsolete given the development of technology and China’s rapidly growing online community.
In 1858, the United States was in its fifth year of an unworkable scheme called the Kansas Nebraska Act, a stopgap that was intended to defer Civil War, but in reality was just one more cobblestone on the path to the conflict. On June 16, 1858, a still obscure Abraham Lincoln said this:
We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states….
China’s house divided against itself cannot stand. A country cannot long endure being slave in politics and free in the marketplace. The was true years ago when Taiwan and South Korea democratized, and it is exponentially truer in the age of cell phones, PDA’s, and the globalized commerce on which China is completely dependent for its prosperity and growth. What Lincoln said of the United States in 1858 is true of China today; “It will become all one thing, or all the other.” At what cost in human suffering, we wonder.