Among the most important questions I have grappled with since becoming a columnist in 1995 are whether, when and how quickly will China open up its information ecosystem to allow a much freer flow of uncensored news from Chinese and foreign sources. . I confess that I was very optimistic. And I plead guilty.
But I’m still not sure if I’m guilty of 1) just premature optimism about something that is both necessary and inevitable — if China is to develop a high-tech economy; 2) total naivety about something highly unlikely given China’s authoritarian political structure; or 3) want something for China that is necessary but impossible.
I still hope it’s a 1. I’m afraid it’s a 2. And I despair if it’s a 3.
To solve all this, let’s go to the videotape.
In my travels to China in the 1990s and early 2000s, I was struck by how much freer the business press seemed to be than the political press — an impression I took from translated articles I read and interviews I gave to business media. Chinese.
It wasn’t my imagination: back then, some of the most interesting and accurate tips about politics in China often appeared first in the Chinese business press or in newspapers in regions more open to business with the world.
For example, one of the boldest outlets in the early 2000s was Guangzhou-based Southern Weekly, which, as Foreign Policy magazine noted, “often channeled the often-overlooked perspectives of disadvantaged groups such as migrants.” , government protesters and petitioners” and “attracted a broad readership that included government officials and the general public”.
My hope was that as China became even more integrated into the global economy, the business press would be the wedge that would open the media in general, because investors and innovators needed accurate news, not propaganda, to grow and compete. globally—and because the next generation of Chinese innovators and engineers would not 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. […] Ah, China’s leaders don’t know it yet, but they are being pushed in that direction.”
The best I can say today about that observation is that I hope it was just premature!
I also wrote in my November 21, 2009, New York Times column, “Grandma’s Advice,” that if Beijing refused to allow a decent level of information flow on the Internet and in public discourse — it was for the sole reason that entrepreneurship and innovation—China would never be able to outpace the 21st century’s buoyant US economy.
As I said, “Remember what grandma used to say: never give a century to a country that censors Google.”
I also wrote about this topic in my column on December 13, 2006, in which I argued, “Sorry, but I’m not ready to hand over the 21st century to China yet.” Of course, the country “was able to launch an impressive effort to end illiteracy, greatly increasing the number of high school graduates and new universities. But I still believe that it is very difficult to produce a culture of innovation in a country that censors Google. —which for me amounts to restricting people’s ability to imagine and experience whatever they want.”
For many years China seemed to be moving in the direction of my prediction. It’s hard to believe now, but in the 1990s and early 2000s, I was able to teach freely at Chinese universities, lecture at bookstores in Beijing and Shanghai, and even travel around Jilin Province in a minibus reporting on village elections, with little oversight from the regime, let alone censorship.
In fact, China’s entire information industry is much more open today than it was 32 years ago when I first started visiting the country. The problem is that today it is also much more closed than it was ten years ago.
There has been a pronounced reversal in trajectory since Xi Jinping became head of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 and then the country’s leader in 2013. Just look at the Southern Weekly. His avant-garde voice was crushed by government censors and propaganda gatekeepers in 2013, a few months after Xi became the party’s general secretary.
I believe China will pay an increasing price for the loss of this kind of honest journalism—both in terms of being able to reveal hidden problems and in terms of the freedom to innovate and challenge operators in the marketplace with new ideas.
In a world where the pace of change is accelerating, the ability to see where the world is going, adapt quickly and correct course is vital. Xi thinks otherwise. Not only has he tightened the screws on all Chinese media, he has also cracked down on tech innovators and even business analysts.
No leader is infallible, and the fact that the Chinese press had to treat Xi as such meant it was impossible domestically to call for a more nuanced Chinese response to the Covid pandemic — rather than Xi’s strategy of relying solely on his own inferior vaccines, in mass lockdowns and quarantines, which worked until they stopped working.
If China had a freer news ecosystem — in the media and on social media — in which health experts could conduct lively public debate about alternative strategies or citizens who were locked up for weeks could vent, the country might not be where it is today. , with tens of millions of citizens being forced into quarantine and losing confidence in the government’s upbeat propaganda.
The head of research at China’s Bank of Communications International, Hong Hao, who had 3 million followers on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, had his account suspended for making “negative economic comments about the effects of the current lockdown in Shanghai, including on Twitter, ‘Shanghai: Zero Movement, Zero GDP,'” reported The Washington Post in Shenzhen.
Xi and the Chinese Communist Party are reaffirming their belief that a free press in the Western sense is not a prerequisite for effectively integrating into the global economy or mastering the most advanced industries of the 21st century.
When you look at how China has grown in just four decades from a poor country to a middle-income country with incredible infrastructure, you would have to say that Xi is not crazy to believe that. (And when you look at how social media has divided Western societies and amplified lies and liars, you would also have to ask whether China has not lost something and gained something from its tighter controls.)
But when you think about how much technology China not only invented but also had to steal from the West because it couldn’t invent it — and keeps trying to steal it — you’d be crazy to say that Xi is a sure bet.
And when you think about how the most advanced technologies of the 21st century — such as vaccines, software, microchips, robots, computers and biomedical advances, to name just a few — are often the product of global collaborations, because no country has all the talent and everyone needs reliable partners, you’d be crazy not to fear that Xi is making a big mistake.
