One of the main questions I’ve wrestled with since becoming a columnist in 1995 is whether, when and how quickly China will open up its information ecosystem to allow for a much freer flow of uncensored news – from both Chinese and foreign sources. . I must confess that I have been too optimistic. I plead guilty.
But I’m still not sure if I’m guilty of (1) just premature optimism about something necessary and inevitable — whether China intends to grow a high-tech economy; guilty of (2) utter naivety about something highly improbable given China’s authoritarian political structure; or guilty of (3) wanting something for China that is necessary but impossible.
I still hope it’s 1. I fear it’s 2. And I despair if it’s 3.
To sort this all out, let’s go to the videotape.
During my travels to China in the 1990s and early 2000s, I noticed how much freer the corporate press seemed to be than the political press—an impression I got from translated articles I read and interviews I gave to Chinese business media. This was not my imagination: at the time, some of the most interesting and accurate hints about politics in China often appeared first in the Chinese business press or newspapers from regions most open to business with the world.
For example, one of the boldest newspapers in the early 2000s was the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekly, which, as Foreign Policy magazine noted, “often explores the often-overlooked perspectives of disadvantaged groups, such as migrants, protesters, and petitioners.” of the government, channeled” and “attracted a wide readership, including the government and the general public.”
I hoped that as China integrated even more into the global economy, the business press would be the thin wedge that broke open the media at large, because investors and innovators needed accurate news, not propaganda, to grow and compete globally — and because the next generation of Chinese innovators and engineers could never reach their full potential without access to a relatively free flow of information.
So I boldly wrote in my 1999 book, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” that “China will have a free press. … Oh, China’s leaders don’t know yet, but they are being pushed right in that direction.”
The best thing I can say about that observation today is that I hope it was just premature!
I also wrote in my November 21, 2009 Times column, “Advice From Grandma,” that if Beijing refused to allow a decent level of free-flowing information on the Internet and in public speech, if only to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation – China would never be able to catch up with the US economy in dynamism in the 21st century.
As I put it, “Remember what grandma used to say: never give a century to a country that censors Google.”
I also wrote about that theme in my Times column on December 13, 2006, arguing, “Sorry, but I’m not ready to cede the 21st century to China.” Certainly, China “has made an impressive effort to end illiteracy, by significantly increasing the number of high school students and new universities. But I still believe that it is very difficult to create a culture of innovation in a country that censors Google – which to me is a proxy to limit people’s ability to imagine and try what they want.”
China seemed to be creeping toward my prediction for years. It’s hard to believe now, but in the 1990s and early 2000s I could freely lecture at Chinese universities, hold bookstore reviews in Beijing and Shanghai, and even travel through Jilin Province in a minibus reporting on village elections – with scant government oversight, let alone censorship.
Actually, the whole information sector of China is much more open today than it was 32 years ago when I started visiting. The problem is that it is now too so much more closed than 10 years ago.
There has been a marked turnaround in the trajectory since Xi Jinping became head of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 and then president in 2013. Just look at Southern Weekly. His crusader voice was crushed by government censorship and propaganda guards in 2013, a few months after Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party.
I believe that China will pay an increasing price for the loss of that kind of honest journalism – both in terms of being able to discover hidden problems and in terms of the freedom to innovate and challenge incumbents in the market with new ideas. . In a world where the pace of change is accelerating, it is vital to see where the world is heading and to quickly adapt and correct course. Xi thinks otherwise. He has not only terrified all Chinese media, but has also attacked technology innovators and even business analysts at the same time.
Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba, has hardly been heard from since he criticized government financial regulators in October 2020. While those regulators had legitimate concerns about Alibaba’s shadow banking system, making Ma — who resembles China’s Steve Jobs — virtually disappearing, has put a damper on the entire tech sector.
No leader is infallible, and the fact that the Chinese press has had to treat Xi that way has meant that domestically it has been impossible to call for a more nuanced Chinese response to the Covid pandemic – rather than Xi’s strategy. to rely solely on China’s own inferior vaccines and massive lockdowns and quarantines, which worked until they didn’t work.
If China had a freer news ecosystem — in the media and on social networks — where health experts could have had a lively public debate about alternative strategies or where residents locked up for weeks could blow off steam, perhaps China wouldn’t be in the predicament it is today. , with tens of millions of citizens being forced to go on and off quarantine and lose faith in their government’s official feel-good propaganda.
The head of research at China’s Bank of Communications International, Hong Hao, who had three million followers on Weibo, China’s response to Twitter, had his account suspended for making “bearish economic comments about the effects of the ongoing lockdown in China.” Shanghai, including comments on Twitter, ‘Shanghai: Zero Movement, Zero GDP’,” reported The Washington Post from Shenzhen.
Xi and the Chinese Communist Party reaffirm their belief that a free press in the Western sense is not a prerequisite for effective integration with the global economy or dominating the most advanced industries in the 21st century.
If you look at how China has grown from a poor country to a middle-income country with great infrastructure in just four decades, you’d have to say Xi isn’t crazy to believe that. (And if you look at how social media has divided Western societies and reinforced lies and liars, you should also wonder if China hasn’t both lost something and gained something through its tighter controls.)
But when you consider how much technology China not only invented, but had to steal from the West because it couldn’t invent it — and keeps trying to steal it — you’d be crazy to say Xi’s is a good bet.
And when you consider how the most advanced technologies of the 21st century, such as vaccines, software, microchips, robots, computers and biomedical breakthroughs, to name a few, are often the product of global collaborations, because no single country has all the talent and everyone needs trusted partners, you would be crazy not to worry about Xi making a big mistake.
Just a small example: the most advanced microchip foundry in the world, TSMC, is Chinese, but not Communist Chinese. It’s Taiwanese Chinese. Tiny Taiwan can still make better microchips than the giant mainland – by far. How is that possible? That’s because all the largest tech companies in the world, from Apple to Qualcomm, rely on TSMC to make their chips, not steal their technology.
Trust is a by-product of truth, and truth is a product of a free and independent press – not everywhere and all the time, but more often than not.
So, for all these reasons, while I plead guilty to premature optimism when it comes to developing a more open information ecosystem in China, I am going to ask the court to a suspended sentence. Let’s all wait and see how this develops over the next ten years.
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