RConversation

China and the Global Internet: my talk at Harvard

On Tuesday I was back at my old stomping grounds, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where I gave a lunch talk. Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger both blogged it.

Click on the image below to access the video posted on Berkman's website:

Here are my slides:

The Tao of the Web: China and the future of the Internet

View more presentations from rmackinnon.

Dear President Obama: in talking to China, remember its people

(Cross-posted from the Huffington Post)

Dear President Obama,

Welcome to U.S.-China relations! You didn't even mention China in your inaugural address, but the Chinese censors still took it personally. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's remarks in his confirmation hearing about currency manipulation have got everyone in a tizzy. We're off to a rollicking start!

People in China are watching closely -- and starting to debate -- whether your administration's pursuit of America's economic interests will help or hurt their own.

China is obviously not a democracy. Even so, if you really want to take U.S.-China relations to a new strategic level that rises above the day-to-day issues, you need to find new ways to engage the Chinese people themselves -- not just their government.

Normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979, combined with economic reforms and opening, transformed the Chinese people's lives. Chinese of our generation understand this. But their children take their opportunities and comforts for granted. They don't necessarily see the U.S. as a symbol of hope or a target of aspirations the way their parents did.

It is this young generation born after 1980 who were most vocal on the Chinese Internet last year, lashing out against Western critics and Western media coverage of their government's crackdown in Tibet. In response to international pressure, the Chinese government negotiated with the Dalai Lama, but it didn't feel the need to concede anything meaningful. In maintaining a hard line, the Chinese leadership could feel doubly secure in the fact that, not only did they have the strength of the People's Liberation Army and the People's Armed Police on their side; China's majority Han-Chinese public had no sympathy for the idea of Tibetan autonomy.

Chinese leaders listen selectively to public opinion, and sometimes those opinions actually give them an extra excuse to tell the U.S. where to shove it. While Americans tend to think of the Internet as the medium that will inevitably free the Chinese people of authoritarian rule, Chinese leaders have -- for many years now -- been going there for proof that the public wants them to be tougher with the U.S. Back in 2001 a U.S. spyplane made an emergency landing on Hainan island after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet which crashed into the sea. If people in the Chinese Internet chatrooms had gotten their way, the U.S. crew would be in a Chinese jail today. In a recent interview with The Atlantic's James Fallows, the President of the China Investment Corporation Gao Xiqing pointed out that his P.R. department is inundated with public comments calling for him to sell U.S. dollar assets.

The point is that while these people are not citizens of a democracy, they are by no means an undifferentiated mass of brainwashed drones. Despite often crude censorship of the Internet and state-run media, despite manipulation, intimidation of dissidents and political astro-turfing of the blogosphere by paid commentators, there is no unity of thought in China today. Civic minded citizens manage to hold wide-ranging debates on the Chinese Internet, in living rooms, dormitories, office break rooms, and classrooms about many public issues. Reading the Chinese blogs I've found all kinds of views about you and your new administration. Many are inspired by your personal story and the idea of truly equal opportunity that you represent. Others hope that you will be more forthright and principled on human rights issues than the Bush administration was. Others are very concerned that you will be protectionist in order to help the American people in the short run, and that this will hurt the Chinese people economically. Others lament cynically that no matter what happens, the rich and powerful in both countries will be the relationship's main beneficiaries.

The Chinese government will have greater incentive to work with you on creative solutions to complex problems if your diplomats can do a better job of reassuring ordinary Chinese that you do actually care whether U.S.-China policy outcomes will benefit them -- not just China's commercial and political elites. Right now, frankly, they're not convinced. One-way monologues through the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia don't have much street cred with China's Internet generation, to be honest. It's time to upgrade your public diplomacy strategy for the 21st Century.

Just as you have used new technology to engage with the American electorate, your China policy can be greatly strengthened if you conduct a real conversation with the Chinese people. Listen as much as you talk; provide a much-needed platform for open discussion. The U.S. embassy in Beijing should build a Chinese-language website modeled after change.gov, focused not just on U.S.-China relations, but on the range of concerns and interests - from environment, to food safety, to factory safety standards, to education and real estate law -- shared by ordinary Chinese and Americans. Some linguistically talented State Department employees should start blogging in Chinese. Open up the comments sections, see how the Chinese blogosphere responds, then respond to them in turn. Translate some of the Chinese conversation into English for Americans to read and react, then translate it back. Sure there will be censorship problems on the Chinese side, but if enough Chinese find the conversation important and relevant to their lives, the censors ultimately won't be able to stop it. Nor should they want to if they're wise - because the resulting conversation would help both governments build a more stable and rational relationship that would truly benefit the people of both countries.

What does Charter 08 mean? Too soon to tell...

When China's first Premier Zhou Enlai was asked in the mid-20th century for his opinion on the historical significance of the 1789 French Revolution, he is said to have replied: "It's too soon to tell." I've started to give the same answer when people ask me about Charter 08. It's way too soon. It could be completely forgotten a year from now. Or it may be viewed by future historians as one of many arguments - some theoretical, some concrete, some practical - that helped advance and shape the Chinese people's emergent debate about their future. Some hope that this "principled blueprint for change may yet inspire other Chinese to see the hollowness of the party's promises of wealth over the universal promise of freedom." We'll see. If forced to bet this week on one of those three, my money goes for scenario number two.

On December 18th, President Hu Jintao delivered the CCP's first rebuttal to Charter 08 and its call for multi-party democracy. He insisted that China will never copy Western political institutions, and echoed Deng Xiaoping's assertion that "only development makes hard sense." His point was that only the economic pragmatism and political stability brought by the Communist Party's rule would enable the Chinese people to achieve prosperity and fulfill their dreams. On Sunday the party's second rebuttal to Charter 08 (full Chinese text here) came from China's number-four leader Jia Qinglin, in the form of a long essay in the Communist Party's main ideological journal, Qiushi ["Seeking Truth"]. The essay takes Hu's speech a step further. Hu said that China' won't copy Western multiparty democracy; Jia's article seems like a call to start digging trenches for an upcoming fight. According to Reuters' translation of one passage, the Party must "build a line of defence to resist Western two-party and multi-party systems, bicameral legislature, the separation of powers and other kinds of erroneous ideological interferences," and "consciously abide by the Party's political discipline and resolutely safeguard the Party's centralised unity."

Does this imply that Party unity is a little shaky lately? Or is it just a preemptive warning in case anybody was getting any wrong ideas about the Party's tolerance levels for political reform debates? I'm not enough of an insider to know.

Meanwhile, very far outside the Party, Charter 08 supporters are derisive. Chengdu-based intellectual Ruan Yunfei pulled no punches in his Monday-morning reaction to Jia, going so far as to write: 凡是反对公正公开公平竞争者，都是民众利益之敌. "Anybody who opposes just, open, and fair competition is the enemy of the people's interests." He wonders rightly how a government that claims with such certitude to be the best thing for the Chinese people can be so afraid of competition.

It has not been possible for the Chinese people to debate China's political future fully and openly. As Uln at the Chinayouren blog points out, China's net nannies are doing their best to scrub mentions of Charter 08 from the parts of the Internet they have some control over. Still, debates are happening. In spite of censorship, many people have managed to find their way to the document and many have managed to blog about why they did or didn't sign Charter 08. Xujun Eberlein has a good summary of the wide gamut of opinions about the Charter that can be found around the Chinese-language internet. Even some people who agreed with the charter and were brave enough to sign it sometimes felt the need to qualify their support. One example is the Beijing-based blogger who goes by the pen name Doubleaf:

理想主义者，如同1949年的中国大多数知识分子一样，是相信制度的改变能给中国带来翻天覆地的变化的。结果是，中国后来真的很“翻天覆地”。于我而言，制度当然能解决很多问题，但不能解决所有问题。例如，如果我们的宪法和法律完全贯彻的话，那也可以尽善或尽美了。

我曾经悲观的认为，即使中国发生制度变革，也不会有任何改变，穷的仍穷，富的还富，甚至更糟。这样的说法当然比较过激，但教育、环境、贫困等等这些问题当然不会因为制度的变革而一夜发生质变。

In summary, he warns that the last time China's intellectuals got swept up in an idealistic belief that changing the political system would solve China's problems was in 1949, when the Communist revolution happened. He argues that changing China's political system won't on its own be enough to solve China's urgent problems of education, environment, and poverty.

Roland Soong at ESWN has a detailed analysis of why "there is no groundswell of popular support flowing from inside China." He argues that the "class of enlightened intellectuals" who form the main drafters and supporters of the Charter are only one of nine different socio-political categories of people in China today. Among the points he makes: the majority of China's population is made of peasant farmers who, while having the "lowest social status" in China are less likely to be attracted by liberal political theory and "most easily attracted by the leftists to engage in a new revolution to "re-distribute the land/wealth." If social change is to occur through the combined efforts of the laborers and peasants, China will repeat its history from the late 1940's." He also argues that Charter 08 does not sufficiently appeal to China's materialistic middle-class:

They are amendable to reforming the political systems, provided that their present situations won't be negatively affected as a result. What guarantees does Charter 08 offer them? Oh, let's get rid of the Communists, we'll have an American democratic system, we'll only elections based upon universal suffrage and then corruption will be gone and we will all be even more prosperous? Hmmm ... Instead of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, we can elect our own presidents and premiers just like they do in USA and Taiwan. Hmmm ... Do you really think that George W. Bush and Chen Shui-bian will be better for China?

In Washington, many foreign policy thought-leaders like political scientist Daniel Drezner seem to think that Charter 08 could be the rallying cry for revolution in short order, and that it has direct parallels with Czechoslovakia's Charter 77. Roland agrees with Dave at Mutant Palm (who lives and works in Quanzhou and doesn't see people there getting worked up about Charter 08) that "Charter ‘08 arguably has had a more significant impact on readers of the New York Review of Books than it has on China." Roland translated this very useful analysis published on an overseas-Chinese website comparing Charter 08 and Charter 77. The author's conclusion is worth quoting at length:

Czechoslovakia had a long tradition of freedom, democracy and human rights. This tradition was suppressed by the Communist authorities, but it continued to exist underneath the surface. Once triggered, it became a raging river. The situation in Czechoslovakia back then is somewhat similar to China when the Cultural Revolution ended and the reforms were beginning. At the time, the intellectuals thought that the western world was paradise. Thirty years later, the Chinese people no longer believe in the much self-ballyhooed western ideology. There have been too many examples of third-wave transitions to democracy that failed, of which Taiwan is one.

The eastern European countries also resented deeply the hegemonic Russian empire. Charter 77 seemed to be directed against the Czechoslovak Communist Party but it was actually aimed at the Soviet Russian masters behind the scene. But there are no puppet masters behind the Chinese Communists. On the contrary, the Chinese people who signed Charter 08 are getting the most encouragement and praises from the western world, and this will naturally lead to nationalistic resentment.

In summary, Chinese society is highly complex with many diverse interests being involved. This is unlike the relatively closed societies in eastern European back then, where the classes are clearly defined, the culturati and intelligentsia are prominent and draw huge public attention with their speeches.

On a recent trip to Beijing and Shanghai, I asked a lot of Chinese friends about Charter 08. While Charter 08 may have been modeled after Charter 77, none of the people I spoke with who considered themselves sympathetic or supportive of Charter 08, and who knew something about Cold War era Eastern Europe, actually believed that the conditions surrounding Charter 77 and the conditions surrounding Charter 08 are remotely similar. Despite being run by a party that dubiously calls itself "communist" and which falls in to the general category of "authoritarian" (which encompasses a wide variety of relationships between people and their non-democratically elected governments), China has few similarities to Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. What's more, thanks to the Internet, there is a great deal more political discourse and deliberation going on in China today than there was in Czechoslovakia of 1977. Democracy, it's certainly not. But China's political culture is not the same as Eastern Europe's during the cold war.

Still, I'm not ready to dismiss Charter 08 as meaningless. As daughter of a professor of modern Chinese history, I found much food for thought in a blog post by historian-blogger Jeremiah Jenne: Cai Yuanpei and Charter 08. A turn-of-the-century Chinese intellectual, Cai was a catalyst for much intellectual and political ferment in his day, though the majority of Chinese at the time never heard of him nor gave a toss. His actions in the short term had no direct relevance or appeal for the majority of Chinese at the time. Eventually however the elite intellectual activities he facilitated contributed to the May Fourth Movement and a major watershed in Chinese history. Jeremiah concludes:

But to dismiss the importance of Charter 08 because it is the product of a single class (or sub-group within that class) is to miss a lesson of history. With a nod to Margaret Mead, I might suggest that modern Chinese history has had its own share of small groups of committed individuals whose ideas did not receive their due when first published or spoken but whom we now look back upon as transformational figures: Wang Tao, Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, Li Dazhao, even Mao Zedong. This is not to say that the authors of Charter 08 are destined to enter such a hallowed pantheon, only that history warns us not to immediately dismiss their ideas because “only” 2000 intellectuals signed the document.

Of the Chinese friends I've spoken with about Charter 08, only those who fall into Roland's category of "enlightened intellectuals" had either heard of the Charter or thought about it very much. As signatory Dai Qing points out, Charter 08 is fairly moderate in that, while it calls for multi-party democracy, it's not a call for immediate revolution. (Note that the Falun Gong have decided not to support it.) That is likely also a reason why only one person involved with Charter 08, Liu Xiaobo, has been arrested despite thousands of signatories - though arresting even one person over such a non-violent and moderate document is unacceptable.

Even among people who agreed with most or all of the Charter's content, many said they felt its impact would be limited because it has no practical component. As one 20-something person who works in publishing put it: "It's performance art. There is no practical strategy for how its goals can be achieved." China is now at Point A. Charter 08 envisions Point B. But how do you get from here to there? There is no proposed plan and no consensus. Most of the people I spoke with who would like China to become a multiparty democracy with independent judiciary some day felt that a sudden overthrow of the current government would not be conducive to greater human rights protections and informed democratic discourse in the long run. (Most Chinese who admit to wanting rapid regime change don't live in China.) Right now, while the current system is corrupt and is failing many of its citizens in the rural areas especially, many pro-democracy intellectuals are concerned that no alternative groups have the governance and leadership capacity, because they've not been able to build that capacity. Plus, a critical mass of business and cultural elites have benefitted materially from their relationships with the current regime, they're proud of the fact that China's economic strength brings them respect around the world, and things would have to get one heck of a lot worse before they'd be interested in facing off against the powers that be.

"It's like we're passengers on a plane that was hijacked in 1949," said one friend. "But if we kill the hijackers, we crash the plane because we don't know how to fly it ourselves. So we have to slowly negotiate." The passengers know that the hijackers don't want to die so that gives some negotiating leverage. Now the passengers have to convince the hijackers that its in their interest to land the plane safely at their desired destination. The problem is, the hijackers won't allow the passengers to vote on the desired destination and some of the people who have emerged as passenger advocates and leaders wonder if it really makes sense to have everybody on the plane vote on their desired destination at this point.

Most people I've spoken with are not particularly optimistic that China will attain the goals outlined in Charter 08 any time soon, and some were skeptical that China ever will. Many felt that the first step is to build platforms that enable the Chinese people to engage in an informed discourse about their future so that concrete solutions and strategies for getting from A to B - or perhaps to some other Point C - can eventually emerge. The Internet is already facilitating a great deal of discourse, despite all the censorship, propaganda, nationalism, manipulation, and cyber-mob behavior. A more constructive discourse would be possible, many argue, if a law could be passed upholding the right of journalists to do their jobs. Thus some people are focusing on building professionalism and improving the quality of Chinese journalism, and trying to push for more media freedoms. Another step, which I heard from many people, was the need to build a stronger sense of citizenship throughout Chinese society: people need to take responsibility for the problems they see around them, and get in the habit of doing what they can to help improve whatever is in their power to improve, however small. Not to change the whole country right away, but to make small changes in their own communities. Efforts by Zhang Shihe aka "Tiger Temple" to raise money to help petitioners and vagrants in Beijing is one small example. Another better known example is the spontaneous relief effort that rose up around the Sichuan earthquake. Finally, there is the heroic work being done by China's growing group of rights-defense lawyers such as Xu Zhiyong, Teng Biao, and Liu Xiaoyuan who are doing what they can to educate the public about the rights they are already supposed to have under China's existing laws and constitution, and who are trying to advocate for the upholding of those rights. As Dai Qing told me: "Everybody needs to take responsibility as a citizen, and use their own unique strengths and professional skills to help improve the country in whatever small way we can... We can slowly build the road stone by stone."

Artist Ai Weiwei, who told me he wants to devote all his time to political activity from now on, is one of the few who was optimistic that major change is possible in the near term. (Since he didn't mind speaking completely on the record, I'll be posting longer excerpts from my conversation with him soon.) When I asked him about Charter 08's lack of practical strategy, he replied:

Society needs different people to voice opinions, to voice strategy, to have technical ideas... Its just like in a war, some people blow horns, some shoot the guns, other build the roads. People have different roles. Right? Thomas Jefferson in 1776, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence did he know how to build the road? He had no idea. He simply said that all men are created equal, we need to throw off the shackles of occupation, we need freedom of speech, and that citizens have the right to form their own government. At the time nobody had any idea how to make it happen.

I'm not ready to equate Charter 08 with the Declaration of Independence. Like Charter 77, much of its momentum and appeal had to do with resistance against a foreign colonial force or hegemon. Foreign occupation is no longer one of China's problems - a fact from which the Communist Party derives a lot of its legitimacy. The CCP claims to have played a starring role in solving that one. Few people who went through China's education system are inclined to dispute or question that claim, whatever they think about China's current problems and the reasons for them.

Which brings me back to history, and Jeremiah's blog. His last post marked the 80th anniversary of the death of another historical figure, reformer Liang Qichao. He concludes:

It’s hard to say if the PRC would have met with [Liang's] approval. The founding in 1949 at least fulfilled one of two conditions of political consciousness about which Liang was so optimistic twenty years earlier, “That all who are not Chinese lack the right to control Chinese affairs,” even as the CCP failed (and continues to fail) to fulfill the second, “All Chinese have a right to control Chinese affairs.”

Will the Chinese people accomplish this second condition in the 21st Century? It's possible. How will they do it? Will China will be governed as Charter 08 recommends? Or in some other way that might truly represent the will of the people? Hard to say.

One thing Charter 08 has going for it is that it sets out a clear set of goals. Other than getting rich and having a strong country respected by the world, the CCP has not drawn up a clear alternative narrative for what China's future should look like - beyond more of the same which equals more money at least for those who "get rich first" as Deng liked put it. The CCP has not provided a convincing rebuttal to critics who say that economic development is not sufficient to solve human rights problems, corruption, and growing social inequality, and that the current trajectory is in the long run unsustainable. The leadership effectively asks that the Chinese people continue to have faith in them because there's no alternative. That argument will likely tide things over for while, maybe quite a while still, assisted by censorship, surveillance, and the People's Armed Police. But in the longer run, will they figure out how to evolve in order to fit the Chinese people's growing needs? Or will the CCP eventually be shed like a skin that gets unbearably tight?

Deng saved the CCP from one possible skin-shedding in 1978 by making a major adjustment to the Party's whole basis of legitimacy. It's unclear whether the current crowd has what it takes to pull off the same feat. Meanwhile the skin is getting tighter. Charter 08 is perhaps one of many symptoms. But there are many other symptoms, many of which are better known to ordinary Chinese beyond the "awakened intellectual" class. They include massive groundswell of public sympathy around the case of Yang Jia, who was recently executed for killing six police, and whose mother was spirited away to a mental institution during his appeal. Other symptoms include very specific things like anger about Chinese New Year train ticket management. Another is the Sanlu melamine poisoned milk scandal, in which thousands of babies could have been spared from deadly kidney problems if investigative journalists had been allowed to do their jobs last Spring. The regime is taking bigger hits to its legitimacy from those things than from Charter 08 right now. These are the kinds of things most likely to inspire people to take specific actions... whether those actions will take China in the direction of Charter 08's goals or some other direction, who knows. It's too soon to tell.

Rising Voices: toward a more inclusive global conversation

(Photo courtesy Patrick Philippe Meier)

The public part of the Global Voices Summit is over, and the blog posts about it are piling up around the web. But the meeting continues for GV project participants, website contributors, editors, and others who are actively involved with our growing citizen media community. We're nearing Day 1 of two days of internal planning and brainstorming meetings in which we try to figure out where to take the project in the future. Ethan has a great post about the techniques David Sasaki, Georgia Popplewell and Solana Larsen have devised to unearth ideas and foster discussion amongst this multi-cultural, multi-lingual group.

I was almost brought to tears yesterday during the first panel, devoted to work by members of the Rising Voices project. Led by David Sasaki, Rising Voices is funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. It gives micro-grants to promote blogging among groups of people who are - for various reasons, cultural, economic, linguistic, gender - not taking advantage of the opportunity to express themselves online. After Global Voices was created, there has always been concern by many people in our community that blogospheres in most countries are dominated by wired elites - and that unless we conduct more active outreach, Global Voices is really "Global Elite Voices."  Rising voices it our first stab at addressing that problem. Ethan writes that he is "blown away" by the work being done by Rising Voices grantees. Click here for summaries of all the projects and here to watch videos of all the projects. Also see the RV Introduction to Global Citizen Media. But before you click on any of those links, watch this video:

 

"Authoritarian Deliberation" on the Chinese Internet

Earlier today in Beijing, Chinese President Hu Jintao did a webcast with staff of "Strong China Forum," an online forum run by the People's Daily Online. See the English transcript here and the Chinese here.

More than 300 questions for President Hu were posted in advance by forum members. He only answered two softballs.  One thread on Tianya reflects some people's dismay that the whole thing was "over as soon as it started."  There has been some web chatter saying that not many people were able to get into that chatroom. The questions at Strong China Forum are supposed to be here, but so far I've been unable to access the page from my internet connection in London, even when I use a Chinese proxy.  Fortunately the folks at China Digital Times got on, and provided this summary:

"Some complained, “Old Hu, lots of government money has been wasted by officials on feasts. Why don’t you stop it?” ” Why haven’t our salaries been increased while the prices of everything else are skyrocketing? “; “The stock market and housing market are collapsing. It is hard to find a job…”"

Some asked about policy and political issues, including some tricky ones: “What do you think of Taiwan’s democratization?” ; “How would you deal with wrong but well-intentioned opinions on the Internet?”

Despite the whole thing being gimmicky and generally content-free, I found the final part of Hu's webcast interesting:

Hu Jintao: We pay great attention to suggestions and advice from our netizens. We stress the idea of "putting people first" and "governing for the people." With this in mind, we need to listen to people's voices extensively and pool the people's wisdom when we take actions and make decisions. The web is an important channel for us to understand the concerns of the public and assemble the wisdom of the public.

Forum: Thanks you, Mr. General-Secretary. Dear friends, General-Secretary Hu Jintao's communication must conclude now as he has other things to do.

Hu Jintao: It is a pity that I cannot communicate more with the netizens today due to the time constraint. However, I will read and think carefully the comments and questions posted for me by our netizens.

As the BBC put it: "Mr Hu's appearance on a chat forum suggests that the party at least knows the importance of listening to the public." (UPDATE: More from Danwei.org here.)

As it happens, I just finished reading a book by Zheng Yongnian of Nottingham University titled Technological Empowerment: The Internet, State, and Society in China. It's an academic book which means that it costs an outrageous US$50 and is also dry and not written in a particularly entertaining style. But for anybody trying to make sense of how the Internet is changing Chinese politics and society, it's well worth a read if you can afford it or get somebody else (your institution's library or your company) to pay for it. 

Zheng argues that while China is making no meaningful progress toward democratization, the Internet is nonetheless causing "political liberalization." The Internet in China, he believes, is enabling greater public deliberation about policy (within limits to be sure) as well as forcing the leadership to be more responsive to public opinion - or at least that segment of public opinion that is able to appear on the part of the Internet that you can access in China, which despite its limitations still gives Chinese citizens a conduit of expression that was not available before. Zheng points to several cases where public reaction to and discussion of information posted online led to policy changes: outrage over Sun Zhigang's death in detention led to abolition of the "Custody and Repatriation" system; outrage over the detention of outspoken rural business tycoon Sun Dawu created pressure on provincial governments and the central government  to change policy practices that discriminate against the private sector. During the SARS outbreak, information, concerns (and wild rumors) posted on the Internet and sent through mobile SMS eventually broke down government attempts at tight information control. He also points to wildly unsuccessful cases: use of the Internet by the outlawed FLG and the opposition China Democracy Party to criticize the regime and call for an end to one-party rule by the CCP. What's the difference?

Zheng says that the difference between success and failure comes down to an online movement's strategy and objectives. The most spectacularly unsuccessful online movements (and the ones leading to the most brutal crackdowns both online and off) tend to advocate what he calls the "exit" option - i.e. that the Chinese people should exit one-party CCP rule, or that a particular group or territory might have the right to do so. The Chinese bureaucracy and leadership contains reformists and conservatives. However "when the regime is threatened by challengers, the soft-liners and hard-liners are likely to stand on the same side and fight the challengers."  Successful online movements in China tend to use what he calls the "voice" option, or what other political scientists call the "cooperation option." The key to a successful effort to change government policy in China is to find a way to give reformist leaders and bureaucrats at all levels of government the ammunition they need to win out in arguments and power-struggles with their hard-line conservative colleagues. Reformists can point to what's being said in the chatrooms and blogs and in the edgier newspapers and argue that without change, there will be more unrest and public unhappiness - thus change is required to save the regime. Zheng writes: "the voice does not aim to undermine or overthrow the state. Instead, through a voice mechanism, the state can receive feedback from social groups to respond to state decline and improve its legitimacy." 

In a similar vein, at the Chinese Internet Research Conference last week Jiang Min, an Assistant Professor at UNC-Charlotte, presented a paper titled Authoritarian Deliberation: Public Deliberation in China. Her argument centers around the idea - oft overlooked by Western punditry - that it's possible to have substantial amount of public deliberation about policy within an authoritarian state. Different authoritarian states have different levels of deliberation, and it's no substitute for the "democratic deliberation" in democratic countries when it comes to the ability of the governed to influence their government. Thus political deliberation needs to be divided into two categories: democratic and authoritarian.  Within the "authoritarian" category, China is seeing growing amounts of deliberation taking place thanks to the Internet. Click here for a live-blogged summary of that session.

Immediately following her presentation came talks by Xiao Qiang of China Digital Times and Ashley Esreay of Harvard's Fairbank Center and Middlebury. (Click here for the blog summary.) Xiao (whose paper will be made available on the circ.asia website in the coming week) described numerous examples of how the Internet is enabling the powerless to challenge the powerful. Esreay, in his paper titled Political Discourse on Chinese Blogs presented the findings of his empirical research. (See the WSJ writeup of his presentation here.) He compared content on blogs and newspapers discussing news events in 2006 and found that 61% percent of blog posts analyzed contained "some form of criticism", compared to 19% of all newspaper articles analyzed. 36% percent of blog posts contained "pluralism" or discussion of more than one point of view, while only 5% of newspaper articles did. Thus he was able to empirically confirm the unscientific impression of most people who follow the Chinese Internet: "Compared to the content of mainstream, traditional media, blogs are much more likely to contain opposing perspectives and criticism of the state."  I found his findings about blogs as economic watchdogs particularly interesting: "Another important finding was that bloggers criticize corporations five times more frequently than journalists, whose role in democratic societies has been to protect the interests of the public from transgression."

Here's a breakdown of the kinds of criticism found in the Chinese blog posts (click to enlarge):

...Which brings me to Roland Soong's presentation on Day 1, A Psychographic Segment of Chinese Bloggers. Using survey data about Chinese Internet users collected by the media research company he works for, Roland "created a 3-segment solution based upon 32 psychographic statements about personality, motivation, society, culture, technology and so on by the K-means algorithm" Here is how Roland describes three different kinds of people now coexisting in the Chinese blogosphere:

Segment 1: Not interested in latest technology; not interested in latest fashion; not interested in other people's opinions; don't want to told what to do ... Who do they sound like?  Fenqing (angry young people)?

Segment 2: Easily swayed by other people; want to be told what to do; first to buy latest technology; follow western lifestyle; lesser respect for tradition ... Who do they sound like?  These are groupies who follow whatever is au courant as reported on the Internet.

Segment 3: Interested in a lifestyle filled with challenges, novelties and changes; more interested in spending time meaningfully than just making money; ready to pay extra for environment-friendly products; appreciate companies which support public causes; willing to volunteer personal time for good causes ...

The data was collected before the Sichuan Earthquake, but in his talk, Roland suggests that it is this third group who came into their own and made their presence felt in the aftermath of the earthquake. Deborah Fallows suggested that the earthquake may have been a "break through" moment for the way in which people use the Internet, as 9/11 was for people in the U.S.

In his Sunday afternoon talk, Isaac Mao repeated his core view that the Chinese people need free-thinking before they can have free speech.  He also believes that the Internet is facilitating the evolution of an increasingly sophisticated "social brain", which he believes "will be the key in the future of this country." 

USC graduate student Peter Marolt, in his PhD dissertation, is attempting to create a new conceptual framework to help us understand what is going on in China. He is working to map how "spaces of dissent" come into being, and what is the linkage between deliberation and action.

...Which brings me back to  the beginning of my last post and Lokman Tsui's argument: that cold-war paradigms, based on the information environment and state-society relations in the countries that once comprised the Soviet Block, are not only hindering the outside world's understanding of China but are contributing to misguided policies.  This is not to say one shouldn't support efforts by many people in China to obtain greater freedom of speech and the right to choose their leaders. Of course we should.  The point is, strategies and approaches should be grounded in actual facts rather than over-simplified, romantic cold-war notions, or these efforts will not only fail but will also be rejected and denounced by the people you're ostensibly trying to help.

Next week at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest, we'll be spending the first day talking about how free speech advocacy can be improved and upgraded for the Internet age. I hope we'll be addressing some tough questions about what works - and what no longer works so well - when it comes to the strategies and tactics of today's human rights organizations and movements. What can the Chinese people do to convince Hu Jintao to pay attention to their concerns? Is there anything that well-meaning outsiders who care about China can constructively do to facilitate that process (or at least not hinder it) and if so what is it?

The latest viral video iteration: No You Can't

(Hat tip Micah Sifry)

In case you were considering McCain...

Are you American? VOTE!

Perhaps this video will help inspire you! If you're an American citizen living abroad don't forget to vote in the Global Democratic Primary starting on Tuesday. If you didn't register to vote online, you can still vote in person at voting centers in 33 countries. Click here for the full list. 22 delegates representing Democrats living overseas are at stake, and in this primary, every single delegate counts.

I hope you'll vote for Obama. He can make us proud to be an American once again in ways that I don't think Clinton will be able to do - though I'll take her over McCain any day. Obama's election would prove that despite my country's considerable hypocrisy, the American dream and the values we claim to espouse actually can mean something real.

As many people have pointed out, last week's debate in L.A. showed that Clinton and Obama are extremely close on policy substance. But what they represent as people ends up being quite important in terms of where the United States is headed in the future. Obama represents a generational shift and a new direction for the country, and I really do think he will inspire a new generation to feel that they can make a difference in public affairs to a much greater extent than Clinton can; Clinton represents dynastic politics, back-to-the-90s-with-Bill-back-in-the-white-house, and a much more familiar form of democrat vs. republican partisanship. But don't just take it from me. Andrew Sullivan has an excellent essay on today's Times of London arguing why Obama is the best candidate. On the Huffington Post, Sherman Yellen explains how his family is split down the middle, and why he's voting for Obama despite his strong admiration for Clinton. Dave Winer wrote a couple of great posts last month about how the Clintons have thoroughly turned him off. My former Berkman colleague David Weinberger recently wrote this eloquent endorsement after Edwards dropped out:

I have to look back to being a high school kid handing out leaflets for Bobby Kennedy to find the same sense of hope that Obama inspires in me. In part, I think, it’s the pure youth of the candidate. My generation had its chance and produced Bill Clinton and He Who Needs Forgetting. Time for us to pass on the baton, as quickly as possibly. And, in part it’s the sense of common cause, common enthusiasm, and common hope across this country’s class and race lines. It’s awe-inspiring and oh so best-of-America to be out in streets dappled with so many colors.

Then there’s this: With McCain the likely Republican candidate, it’ll be character vs. character. And in that matchup, Obama is by far the Democrats’ best choice.

Here are the final three paragraphs of the Los Angeles Times' endorsement of Obama, which I hope will convince you if you're still on the fence:

Clinton's return to the White House that she occupied for eight years as first lady would resurrect some of the triumph and argument of that era. Yes, Bill Clinton's presidency was a period of growth and opportunity, and Democrats are justly nostalgic for it. But it also was a time of withering political fire, as the former president's recent comments on the campaign trail reminded the nation. Hillary Clinton's election also would drag into a third decade the post-Reagan political duel between two families, the Bushes and the Clintons. Obama is correct: It is time to turn the page.

An Obama presidency would present, as a distinctly American face, a man of African descent, born in the nation's youngest state, with a childhood spent partly in Asia, among Muslims. No public relations campaign could do more than Obama's mere presence in the White House to defuse anti-American passion around the world, nor could any political experience surpass Obama's life story in preparing a president to understand the American character. His candidacy offers Democrats the best hope of leading America into the future, and gives Californians the opportunity to cast their most exciting and consequential ballot in a generation.

In the language of metaphor, Clinton is an essay, solid and reasoned; Obama is a poem, lyric and filled with possibility. Clinton would be a valuable and competent executive, but Obama matches her in substance and adds something that the nation has been missing far too long -- a sense of aspiration.

If you're in Hong Kong, come vote at Dublin Jack's in Central on Tuesday night from 6-9pm A group of Obama supporters (myself included) will be there. There will be two more opportunities to vote in person: the Flying Pan on Sunday Feb.10 from 4-6pm, and again at Dublin Jack's on Tuesday Feb. 12 from 6-9. More info here.

Vote the Bastards Out!

You can download the HTML code for this countdown clock here.

I have started a new tag in Delicious. votethebastardsout!

My first two items tagged in this way are:

Wired News - AP News - Cheney Wants Surveillance Law Expanded

Rummy Resurfaces, Calls for U.S. Propaganda Agency | Danger Room from Wired.com

If you use Delicious (or any other social bookmarking service for that matter), please feel free to contribute to the pile.

The power of Cyber-Grannies: Gender equality and the Internet

The woman in this photo is a 77-year old Ugandan grandmother named Anastasia. She is illiterate, but managed to get "hooked" on computers thanks to an interactive CD full of pictures and sound explaining how women in Uganda can use technology to make money. According to Nancy Hafkin, a leading scholar on technology, development, and gender, Anastasia "used the information on the CD to raise her income from raising chickens and now travels through her district to promote awareness among women, especially those without formal education, on how new information technologies can improve their well-being."

Anastasia's new career as cyber-granny didn't just happen because somebody donated money for a bunch of computer centers and cyber cafes in Uganda. Her new-found role is thanks to an organization called WOUGNET (Women of Uganda Network), an organization that has put a lot of effort into figuring out how to make computers accessible to women who are badly educated or illiterate, how to make technology relevant to solving problems in women's daily lives, and how to create female-friendly environments in which women have the opportunity and time to learn. Here is a video shot by WOUGNET, documenting the challenges that women in one community in Uganda face in trying to use the local computer center:

These stories were part of a luncheon talk on gender and technology at the Berkman Center by Nancy Hafkin editor of a new book called Cinderella or Cyberella? Empowering Women in Knowledge Society. She posed several challenges to common assumptions that technology is "gender neutral."  Many people assume that the introduction of computers and the Internet into a society will transform everybody's lives positively, and that the technology naturally "trickles down" to benefit both women and men.

Colleagues Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger have both blogged the talk in detail, but here are my major take-aways:

• Just because you introduce the Internet into a society doesn't mean that it will be used equally by men and women. Interestingly, the percentage of women vs. men using the Internet vary widely from country to country  - where there are statistics on this at all. In some countries with widespread Internet penetration (the U.S., Canada, and Hong Kong for example)  Internet useage is split fairly evenly between men and women. While in other countries with high levels of Internet penetration there is significant disparity (France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK). Same in developing countries with low Internet penetration: in some developing countries with low Internet penetration, there are nonetheless relatively equal numbers of men and women using the Internet, while in other countries with similarly low Internet penetration levels, the relative proportion of men and women using the Internet is badly skewed. What this shows is that there are lots of social and cultural factors that dictate the extent to which women will take advantage of the Internet's existence in their country. It also means that choices made by people with power and money - education policy choices, business model choices, and development project funding choices - can all make a difference. Unfortunately Hafkin believes that policymakers, NGO's, and businesses tend to lack awareness about the gender implications of their decisions about how technology will be implemented, taught, or marketed.  Hopefully, her ongoing research will help make them more aware.

• You can't assume that technology - just by virtue of existing in a society - will bring immediate positive benefits to women's lives. In fact there may be ways in which the technology might worsen women's lives in the short term. Hafkin brought up the fact that the Internet has fed the growth of the porn industry and the child porn industry, which in some parts of the world increases the victimization of girls and women. She also pointed to studies in some parts of Africa that indicate increased domestic violence arising after women attempt to use the Internet or mobile phones, because their husbands and fathers tended to interpret this as an effort to communicate with other men. She did not raise this as an argument against the spread of technology, but rather to point out that women in some communities may first come into contact with technology via negative experiences such as these, which may in turn cause women and their parents to view technology as a male realm that they had best avoid in order to be safe. This context needs to be understood and kept in mind when we are thinking about questions of gender equality in the use of technology. How do you create opportunities for use of technology that will not feel threatening to women or to family members who may control what they can or can't do?

• In communities where Internet and computer resources are scarce, women and girls will be left behind if they don't feel safe or if circumstances to use the technology are stacked against them.  It appears that in developing countries where there is relative gender parity of Internet use, one major reason is that a lot of women are working in the formal economy - i.e., in offices that have computers. Many "ICT4D" (internet and communication technology for development) projects created in rural communities by well meaning non-governmental organizations often fail to create environments that are conducive to women and girls being able to use that technology as easily as men and boys. Parents and husbands tend to be leery of a woman's reasons for wanting to go and spend a few hours a week in a computer center. Cyber-cafes are often full of men watching porn and playing violent games, creating an environment in which women don't feel comfortable and or which parents forbid their daughters from entering.

Hafkin argues that women can basically have a "Cinderella" relationship with technology or a "Cyberella" relationship with technology, hence the title of her book.  According to two of her slides which she generously shared:

Cinderella:

• Works in the basement of knowledge society (if she works at all)
• Has little opportunity to reap its benefits
• Waits for "her prince" to decide the benefits she will receive

Most women around the world today are Cinderella. Hafkin believes the goal is for Cinderella to become Cyberella, who is:

• Fluent in the uses of technology
• Comfortable using and designing computer, technology and communication equipment, software, and in working in virtual spaces
• Devises innovative uses for technologies across problems and subjects
• Finds information and knowledge to improve her life and expand choices
• Active knowledge creator and disseminator 
• More than a user, designs information and knowledge systems to improve all aspects of her life.

Will Cinderellas magically transform into Cyberellas over time? Initial research indicates that the answer is not necessarily.

This is where cyber-granny comes back into the picture. Hafkin mentioned the Grameen phone project, in which village women in Bangladesh and elsewhere are given micro-loans to create businesses in which they rent out uses of mobile phones. What if women like Anastasia could get capital and support, systematically, to run computer and Internet kiosks in their villages? Would that create environments that would feel more friendly to women, and less threatening to their parents and husbands? Hafkin said that in India and elsewhere there are village Internet kiosk projects, some of which are run by women. She pointed out that it would be interesting to see some statistics comparing the number of female customers at women-run cyber-centers versus the numbers of women using other cyber-cafes and computer centers in similar areas.

Why am I writing about all this at such length? Because I've been thinking a great deal lately (in between packing and winding up various projects before I move to Hong Kong) about the question of how policy and business choices affect the extent to which the Internet is or is not transformative for different kinds of people.  Hafkin's work is important because it highlights how - if we really want technology to make the world a better place for everybody - spreading computers and Internet access around as widely as possible is certainly a start, but it's probably not going to be enough.