Mick Hartley

The closure of Freeezing Point, a popular Chinese newspaper, for the crime of having “badly hurt the feelings of the Chinese nation” (in reality for publishing an article which dared to suggest that history textbooks in China should be more accurate) has set off, if not exactly a storm of protest, then at least some significant criticism:

A dozen former Communist Party officials and senior scholars, including a onetime secretary to Mao, a party propaganda chief and the retired bosses of some of the country’s most powerful newspapers, have denounced the recent closing of a prominent news journal, helping to fuel a growing backlash against censorship.

A public letter issued by the prominent figures, dated Feb. 2 but circulated to journalists in Beijing on Tuesday, appeared to add momentum to a campaign by a few outspoken editors against micromanagement, personnel shuffles and an ever-expanding blacklist of banned topics imposed on China’s newspapers, magazines, television stations and Web sites by the party’s secretive Propaganda Department.

It’s another battle in an ongoing war. Rosemary Righter in the Times:

China is in the grip of a new “cultural revolution”. This revolution differs from Mao Zedong’s calculated mobilisation of Red Guards against the hierarchy in two vitally important respects. It is welling up from below as a culture of outspokenness takes hold; and, although the spread of this revolution, in chat rooms, text messages, mass e-mails and as many as 13.3 million blogs, can be slowed by thousands of cyberplods sent in hot pursuit, it cannot be stopped. After months of smouldering arguments within the Communist Party about how best to handle it, the volcano of discord at the top has begun to erupt in full view. These arguments about how much freedom to allow — or indeed, whether the floods opened by technology can be dammed — go to the heart of the debate about China’s future direction. The leadership’s dilemma is acute, and harder and harder to hide. […]

How best to guard against turbulence — by relaxing controls or telling the million-strong People’s Armed Police to put in the boot — is just what the backroom arguments are about. China’s leaders need no persuading that small sparks start big fires and, with protests and mass demonstrations officially admitted to have risen to 87,000 last year, the sparks are no longer small. Hu Jintao, China’s President, started by promising more democracy and open debate, but appears to have lost his nerve, pointedly praising North Korea’s party discipline and censorship in a 2004 speech.

Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, has argued on “efficiency” grounds that “independent” thinking must be encouraged. He has recognised that a society of “yes” men cannot develop the innovative edge that drives the knowledge economy. But neither man dares risk the party’s neck. They understand Lenin’s dictum that knowledge is power, but not that it is slipping from their grasp, as Marx and Mao and Deng Xiaoping make way for King Blog.

But despite the best efforts of Yahoo, Google, etc., it’s a war the cyberplods will lose in the end:

The thousands of censors who patrol the internet in China must feel a little like King Canute. One Chinese expert described their task as showing the futility of trying to hold back the sea.

“Everyone knows where the controls are and that makes it pretty easy to get around them,” said one anonymous internet specialist. […]

[A] recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that the internet was already becoming an important political instrument. “The internet has become a prominent forum where the public can make its opinions known to the government,” the report said. “It is undeniable that the internet is building a bridge between the governing and the governed.”

The survey concludes that as the Internet becomes more popular so its impact on politics will become stronger.

Update: the ban on Freezing Point’s been lifted, but in the good old tradition of the Cultural Revolution, the editors have been instructed to “start its first edition on March 1 with a criticism of the essay that prompted the authorities to close the weekly in the first place”.