After years of being stifled, the Chinese-language Wikipedia is now unblocked in all of China.

This is fantastic news, but it’s probably just for the olympics. A Chinese Wikipedian says, “Yeah, they block and then they unblock, back and forth, many times. This is life.”

The Chinese Wikipedia was following the same exponential growth curve as every other Wikipedia edition until the government blocked it a couple years ago (since then it’s been built by Chinese expatriots, who number about 30 million). The site was still accessible via proxy (”climbing the wall”, in chinese), but the official seal of disapproval kind of caused the mainland-China community to evaporate.

Fig. 1: The Chinese Wikipedia is far behind

I saw a couple of Chinese Wikipedians at the 2006 Wikimania, before the site was blocked, and they were so thrilled to be there.

Here in the west, the party’s blocking of wikipedia seems ridiculous, or predictably unjust, or both — the conversation ends there. That pisses me off because the reality is so much more interesting.

The block is actually part of an intricately constructed strategy. Here’s how some of the components fit together.

1. China’s huge peasant population is disgruntled.

In the west China is thought of as totally stable. But the truth isn’t that simple.

Over the last 2 decades China has seen crazy, crazy economic growth — the fastest growth in the history of the world, probably. But the traditional gulf between the rich coast and the poor countryside has returned.

In the countryside, the communist safety net (free health care, education) has disintegrated. Industry is everywhere, but that means pollution is rampant. This combination has ruined a lot of lives, and the peasants are really pissed off.

Because china is so huge, the central government has only limited control over its local branches, which means restoring the safety net isn’t so easy. Local leaders can be corrupt.

Every day, there are protests and demonstrations all over the countryside — about 75 thousand protests in 2005 alone. These don’t get media attention because the party keeps a tight cap.

From 1960 to 1990, nuclear war was the ultimate fear lurking in the american background. You can’t understand anything about the U.S. in that period — not vietnam, not CIA coups in Guatemala and Iran, not Prince’s 1999 — without understanding that fear.

Right now, the ultimate fear of the Chinese government is peasant revolt. It probably won’t happen, but the stakes are so high. It colors everything the Party does.

2. Wikipedia represents an alternate form of social organization that threatens the party’s supreme position at the center of chinese discourse — and therefore threatens (as the party sees it) its ability to enforce stability.

I was reading Chinese Lessons (a great book), and one line jumped out at me: “For fifty years, the party had reigned supreme because it had never tolerated tightly knit networks of any kind outside its control.” The author was talking about the Falun Gong crackdown, but I immediately thought of Wikipedia. What else is it but a tightly knit network?

I sometimes wonder if you can think of the communist party like a particularly nervous neighborhood council — “I don’t like the looks of that new kid — I think he’s up to something, with all that green hair.”

But China has lately been unblocking a lot of sites. Have they switched over from Leninist to Rovian forms of social control?

China’s leaders are engineers — no, seriously.

[The government’s approach] has to do with hydrological engineering. Yes, HYDROLOGICAL ENGINEERING! Many of the current crop of central government leaders are technocrats with engineering background. As such, they must understand that public opinion is water that can carry the ship as well as turn it over. The point about hydrological engineering is not to build dams to hold the water back because there will be a catastrophic dam break one day that might bring down the entire system. Instead, the point should be about controlling and redirecting the awesome power of nature in less harmful ways down selected channels.

In the case of the Weng’an mass incident, the major portals were deleting the related posts as quickly as possible. At Tianya Forum, it was estimated that a Weng’an-related post has an average lifetime of 15 seconds before being deleted by the administrators. That was supposed to be a record speed. The same thing was happening at Sina.com, Sohu.com, Baidu, etc. So this was building massive dams all over the map which builds up a tremendous pressure. Where was the pressure release point? You may be amazed that it was over at the Xinhua Forum.

Of course, most of the peasants don’t have internet access. And they don’t speak English, which is one reason the English-language wikipedia isn’t blocked in China.

What the government is really worried about is some form of unity or collaboration between the urban intelligentsia (who are at this point totally connected and online, even more so than their counterparts in new york and tokyo) and the peasants.

The same social forces that make the peasants unhappy — the fact that they’re looked down on by rich city-dwellers, for example — also make this explosion of collaboration less likely.

For the government, it’s a catch-22. But they are nothing if not good at navigating tricky paths.

3. Wikipedia is an idealistic project, and idealism makes the communist party a little nervous

– at least when that idealism doesn’t relate back to the party itself.

Remember how I said the Chinese wikipedians were so excited? That might have been part of the problem. You can think of the Tiannamen protests as China’s 1968: an eruption of openfaced newness — generalized idealism, not idealism specific to politics.

Except that it happened in a country that had only ten years of stability (following the disaster that was mao), and the government totally freaked out and shot a bunch of people. And they really, really don’t want something like that to happen again, because…

4. China has no formalized process for political change

In other words, communist party officials don’t worry about losing their jobs if the political tide turns. They worry about losing their lives. That’s why they’re so paranoid about managing public opinion.

I realize the United States doesn’t look so great right now, what with Capt. Retardo and all. But Bush is never going to the guillotine, and that’s a good thing.

The most important day in the history of the U.S. was March 4, 1801, when Thomas Jefferson was sworn in and power was transferred peacefully from Adams — from the federalists to the democratic republicans.

It’s important to remember that at the time, nobody knew what was going to happen. The founders never even thought there would be competing political factions in the U.S. — they thought that was an unhealthy product of monarchism. The federalists thought Jefferson would tear the republic to the ground. (Remember, Jefferson was prone to saying things like “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.)

But the system continued, even though all the officeholders changed. This was an unprecedented political event, and it’s the foundation for the U.S.’s stability.

China desperately needs something similar. Yes: I’m talking about elections. You can’t put that thought to paper if you’re Chinese.

Fig. 2: Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. The Chinese Wikipedia should be huge.

5. The communist party has a very friendly relationship with chinese industry — including the internet industry.

When Wikipedia was first blocked, most people overlooked the fact that there was one very big beneficiary: Baidu Encyclopedia (”Baudu Baike”), the Wikipedia clone run by the Chinese search engine Baidu. Baidu Baike launched after access to Wikipedia was cut off, and enjoyed explosive growth.

Baidu Baike has one big difference from Wikipedia: there are no live edits. Each edit has to be approved by an administrator before the public sees it.

On Wikipedia, the admins are community members who rose through the ranks. On Baike, the admins are … well, they’re unknowable (and uncontactable).

This is actually a good illustration of the way influence flows in China: centrally, from the party outward. This is fantastic if you’re running Baidu, but not so great if the government paved over your home to build las vegas.

Interlude

I’m going to quote a passage from Chinese Lessons. You can skip to the end (though you’ll miss the chandelier shaped like golden nipples).

The author talks about his old classmate “Big Bluffer” Ye, who always won at cards back in school, and who was now rising fast through the ranks of the communist party in Nanjing (a city about the size of New York). This story starts in 1995.

Everyday, Ye walked along a street called Hunan Road on his way to work. [emphasis mine -ben] The street was a hodgepodge: bustling food stands serving noodles, steamed buns filled with pork and cabbage, and the pot stickers that Nanjing was famed for. There was a line of cramped mom-and-pop stores selling fruit, vegetables, and odd assortments of hardware and household items, including the ubiquitous party-issue washbasins. Traffic was always heavy on Hunan Road; accidents, thefts, and fisticuffs were commonplace.

Big Bluffer hated the disorderliness of Hunan Road. He hated the farmers who flooded the area to sell goods and in the process blocked traffic. He hated the government’s inability to control and manage the street. Most of all, he hated the fact that people were spending money there, but his office didn’t get a cent of it because all transactions were done in cash receipts. …

One night, Ye had a dream of a classy pedestrian walkway on which lovers and families would stroll, stopping to eat well and spend lavishly. He woke up with an idea. Why not use commerce as a way to transform Hunan Road? His colleagues did not believe he could pull it off. No Chinese city since the revolution had created a new commercial district… Ye believed that Hunan Road was the party’s chance to show that it, too, could create a consumer’s paradise.

… Ye’s first directive to local businesses was simple: shopkeepers were welcome, manufacturers were not. The city’s People’s Congress, which on paper controls the government purse strings, balked at approving money for widening the road and moving the factories. Big Bluffer ignored their concerns. In the first year, he invested four hundred thousand dollars of government money in the area. He also blanketed the streets with tax collectors. Revenues that year hit six hundred thousand dollars.

…

The Chinese are great people watches. Kan renau (or “watching a commotion” ) is a favored pastime. For years there had not been much to do in Nanjing, but people still liked to go out in the evening. When Ye switched on his pyramid of light in September 1996, tens of thousands of people crammed the intersection. The police called Ye and told him to turn off the lights, but he refused. This was Ye’s field of dreams. He built it, and they had come.

… As the pedestrian traffic increased, the very vendors Ye was trying to put out of business — hudnreds of small-time traders, many of whom had been fired from bankrupt state-owned firms — flooded the area. Ye called them vagrants.

“They were all previously inmates of work camps or people from the countryside,” Ye told me in 2004, although it was obvious to me that he was exaggerating. “Once they had set up shop, it was hard to get them to leave. We offered them a deal. We set up another night market for them at few blocks away. They could work there as long as they stayed away from Hunan Road. But they didn’t accept the offer, so we had to get tough.”

On a cool evening in April 1997, Ye ordered a hundred policemen and government workers to Hunan Road in an effort to force out the street vendors. They all fled, but were back the next day, so Ye directed his troops to begin confiscating their goods. Within a few days, they had expropriated hundreds of pounds of fruit, which were then distributed among government employees and kindergartens in the area.

“There were no regulations allowing us to do what we did, but we did it anyway,” Ye said with a smirk. “They were in the way of progress.”

The battle between Ye and the street sellers went on like this for weeks. One evening, a trader threw hot water on a government worker trying to take his goods; it was the first time a vendor had sought to defend himself against the property seizures. Security personnel took the man into custody. “Should we keep him in jail for a few days?” an underling asked Ye.

“Two years,” Ye barked, slapping his hand on the desk. With that one vendor’s act of defiance, Ye had been handed the excuse he was waiting for. Within days, the trader, along with several others, were sentenced to two years in a labor camp. Chinese regulators give local government authorities the right to send anyone to a labor camp for three years or less without a trial. Just as important, Ye ensured that cash payments were made quietly to several other traders in exchange for their agreement to leave Hunan Road.

“We were not making any headway, so we decided to get rid of the troublemakers and help out the rest,” Ye recalled.

The party was reshaping China, bulldozing or buying off anyone in its way. Ye’s technique was typical for an official confronting opposition. Go after the ringleader, jail him, and co-opt his followers. The Chinese call it killing the chicken to scare the monkeys. And the monkeys were scared.

Ye and I were dining together at Hunan Road’s swankiest restaurant, a cavernous three-story place where waiters in top hats and tails greeted diners at the door and women in purple hot pants escorted them to their seats. The dining room’s central feature was a concrete hill covered in artificial turf, through which flowed a whitewater stream. A pianist in a wedding gown was playing Peter Frampton’s “Baby I Love Your Way” on a heart-shaped island in the middle of the raging current.

We were eating in a private room on the third floor. It was opulently furnished in black, gold, and red and had a private bathroom with italian fixtures. From the ceiling hung a massive chandelier of cut glass set into a black base fashioned in the shape of six breasts with golden nipples; the decor suggested a playroom for a Mandarin Marquis de Sade. Our meal, featuring shark’s fin and abalone, was easily worth five hundred dollars, though Ye never paid a bill. As we ate, Ye boasted about his will to succeed — for himself and the party. Then the turtle dish came. “Here, I’ll help you,” he said, yanking the body out of the shell by the head.

Hunan Road is still a thriving part of Nanjing’s nightlife. It’s even in the english Wikipedia article.

Fig. 3: Measured by Wikipedia articles per capita, China is particularly far behind.

The End:

I’ve had the occasional run-in with nationalist Chinese bloggers. You probably know the type (and if you don’t, you will). They tend to construe any criticism of China as a personal insult, and they’re very pissed off about western media coverage, which tends to focus on pollution, corruption, the government accidentally injecting people with AIDS, etc.

Here’s what they don’t understand.

When western reporters visit china, they immediately bump up against all the cultural and political walls — the things you can’t talk about, or don’t. But western journalists have spent their whole lives trying to dig to the center of stories and they have an acute sensitivity to misdirection. All their detectors are screaming at 11 and you can’t expect them not to go apeshit. It’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Of course they’re going to focus on the things the government doesn’t want them to focus on; that’s what makes them feel like they’re a useful part of society. In the U.S., when the press does not adequately constrain the government, the government does things like invading iraq.

This new nationalism is worrying. I think it’s a product of a people with not enough to believe in — all the old beliefs were destroyed by Mao, and then communist thought was replaced with consumerism. And now people are discovering that consumerism is a very thin gruel indeed.

(The nationalism also happens because Chinese discourse can never swing in an anti-government direction, so it keeps swinging the other way.)

But apart from that, I’m really excited about China. It’s a whole other world, unexpectedly emerging from typical post-colonialist chaos.

Kind of the New World of this era, except that it’s being built by the people who live there: you think you know everything and then poof, there’s a new continent, with more people and places than the U.S. and the EU put together.

The New York Times, as usual, puts it pretty well:

China sought these Games as a major step in its coming-out party, and now China will be tested in front of the world — no retreating behind walls, no slogans, no long marches. China is here to stay.

[…]

We all have to live with one another awhile longer. Wouldn’t it be good for everybody if the world came out of the Olympics knowing and liking China a little more than before?

Posted Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:21:17 and filed under china, business, sociology. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.