RConversation

Google, China, and the future of freedom on the global Internet

Maybe it's because I was schooled in political science, not computer science. But frankly I've been surprised by the extent to which some respected commentators have focused on trashing Google for lacking purity of motive. As if that were some kind of brilliant revelation. Of course Google's actions are motivated by self-interest.

Self-interest is a complicated thing, and isn't only financial. I personally know quite a number of Googlers working in various locations around the world, some at fairly high levels. I get the sense that the emotional well-being of Google's founders, and many others with decision-making power throughout the company, is quite wrapped up in their belief in Google as a force for good in the world. Whether that belief is completely or only partially delusional is an open question. (Ken Auletta's new book on Google provides some useful insight on that front.) But let's be honest with ourselves. How many people on the planet do anything for 100% selfless reasons?

If having a free, open and just society depends on purity of motive, God help us all.

If executives at companies like Google conclude that it's in their self-interest to take a public stand against censorship and unlawful surveillance, and do things that contribute to freedom of information and openness, that is a good thing, whatever their deepest and truest motivations - which probably require years of psychoanalysis for even them to understand, at any rate.

Sure, we can trash Google for not being run by a bunch of Mother Theresas. We can further trash the U.S. government because its support for global Internet freedom  involves more pragmatism - and perhaps even a certain amount of hypocrisy and cynicism - than the high-falutin rhetoric suggests. In so doing we will not be factually wrong. But if we're interested in accomplishing anything beyond clever snark that boosts web traffic and sells books, that topic gets uninteresting pretty quickly. Having noted the obvious, the question I'm more interested in is: What should concerned netizens who want a more free and open global Internet do now?

I've got a suggestion: Why don't we focus on figuring out how to maximize the incentives for a lot more CEO's and government leaders around the world to support a free and open global Internet - for selfish reasons? Reasons like brand reputation, market share, long-term profit, voter support, political legitimacy, economic competitiveness, and geopolitical influence?

If you look at many of Google's recent statements, activities, and legal disputes that are un-related to China or even to authoritarian countries for that matter, a picture emerges about how the company perceives its long-term interests. Take for example a long memo to Google employees titled "The meaning of open" posted on the Google Policy Blog on December 21st 2009 by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President for Product Management. He writes:

Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term. Fortunately, at Google we have all three of these.

He concludes:

Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

Google is betting its global business success on an open Internet. If you look at Google's latest China move through the lens of global Internet policy trends and not just through the lens of Chinese politics, or China's relationship with the West, it makes a lot more sense.  It makes sense from a business standpoint for Google not only to oppose censorship but to work actively against it, and do everything in their power to influence global policies, laws, and community practices that favor openness. In the past year they've gotten increasingly vocal about censorship - and not just in authoritarian countries like China. In this post Public Policy Director Bob Boorstin criticizes the Australian government's efforts to censor the Internet down under.  Not far below that, you'll find a post on the Google Policy Blog from December 14th about an internal anti-censorship workshop at which Ron Diebert of the Open Net Initiative gave a presentation about the spread of Internet censorship all over the world. Also present at the workshop were some of the world's most accomplished "hacktivists" like Nart Villeneuve and Greg Walton, whose mission in life is to help Internet users around the world circumvent censorship and evade surveillance. Now that Google has changed its public stance in China, my friend and Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman is hopeful that Google will get much more actively and directly involved in supporting, developing, and even hosting the tools people need to get around censorship. "A Google-backed anticensorship system," he writes, "would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today."

In the United States, Google's policy positions are frequently aligned with free speech activists and the open source/free culture community - as they go head-to-head against traditional telcos and media companies in policy fights over copyright law, Net Neutrality, the evil secretive and scary ACTA trade agreement, and other issues. In Italy, for example, Google executives are facing criminal charges because the Italian government wants to hold Internet companies like Google more directly liable for what users do on their services, which encourages a global trend that would inevitably result in companies having to massively increase the extent to which they track, police and censor users - which in turn not only has serious implications for human rights and free expression but also drastically increases Internet companies' overhead, making their business model much less sustainable. This isn't just a problem in Italy. Worried about piracy, cyber-bullying, child porn, and other ills, courts and parliaments in democracies around the world have been moving to increase intermediary liability for Internet companies. Crimes need to be punished, I'm not saying they shouldn't, but this particular solution throws the baby out with the bathwater. The chances that increased intermediary liability will be conducive to free speech, human rights, or a free and open Internet are low to nill as this excellent paper by the Center for Democracy and Technology explains. Which is why both Google and free speech activists oppose intermediary liability. Are we so naive as to think Google is acting altruistically? No. Intermediary liability hurts their business model. But it's no less helpful to have a powerful corporate ally on this issue.

On privacy, however, Google's actions, statements, and policies are not as well aligned with civil liberties and human rights activists.  Just ask the Electronic Privacy Information Center which has filed lawsuits and official complaints with government regulators over how Google fails to adequately protect user privacy in cloud computing, Google Books, etc.

Then there was CEO Eric Schmidt's infamous comment on CNBC late last year: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." What a horrible, frightening thing to hear if you're a Chinese human rights activist who depends on GMail, Google Groups, and Google Docs - as many of them have been doing. Google's damage-control people emphasized that Schmidt was talking about the Patriot Act and that he did not mean to express disregard for privacy more generally. But it sure didn't come off that way, and raised a lot of very legitimate concerns about Google's attitude to privacy. Going public about the Chinese cyber-attacks and declaring a willingness to leave China if necessary in order to protect GMail users undoubtedly helps reverse the p.r. and public trust problems caused by Schmidt's remark - whether or not this manner of handling the situation actually makes GMail users more secure given that GMail servers have never been located in China (or was the attack aided by an inside job?).

Still, if Google's stand against Chinese government-sponsored attacks on GMail's most vulnerable users leads to measures that boost the security and privacy of Google's inadequately secured cloud-based services - which ironically may have been exacerbated by U.S. government back-door surveillance requirements under the Patriot Act - that is an excellent result. However if the result ends up being a general underwear bomber-style public freakout that results in the U.S. security establishment getting even broader license to pick over Google's user data, with even less judicial/congressional oversight and public accountability than is presently the case under FISA and the Patriot Act, then that will be a very bad thing for free speech, democracy, and ultimately a free and open global Internet.  I am worried that the latter result is more likely, based on much of the rhetoric coming from American politicians and the tone of media coverage I've been seeing.

But the biggest problem with Google is not its intentions or the extent to which specific actions and policies align themselves with civil liberties lawyers, free expression groups and human rights activists.  The biggest problem is how Google says they advocate a free and open Internet, positions themselves as global leaders of this cause, then says "trust us, we're good people, we're working in your interest." Then we're just supposed to trust them. When has that been a good idea in any other human governance situation and why exactly are we supposed to expect that to work for us in this case? Is Google really run by Vulcans and not humans or something?

Privacy activist Katitza Rodriguez put her finger on the problem in a recent e-mail exchange about the implications of Google's China move (which I quote with her permission):  "Google's decision in China does not answer concerns in other countries about its growing domination of the Internet."

Jeff Jarvis, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and the New York Times have written in the past few days from different angles about how the Google has been playing a state-like role in this latest drama. Siva - who has a book coming out on Google called "The Googlization of Everything" - writes:

The Internet has enough diverse interests and players that it demands governance. No traditional state is in the position or willing to assume that role. So Google governs the Internet.

One could read this showdown (as I do) as a classic international power conflict between a major traditional state and a new, virtual state: the Googlenet.

Google is taking a risky stand to defend the Internet generally. This is what a weaker, threatened state would do.

Now, if I had to choose between the Chinese Communist Party as my government or Google as my government, I know in a heartbeat which one I'd choose. But that's like choosing between one king or another - you choose the one with the most benevolent behavior and cross your fingers.  I would prefer something else completely.

Societies with the highest levels of freedom, openness, and justice aren't that way because their leaders as individuals are the most morally superior specimens out there -  or because their citizens were born with higher proportions of goodness and lower proportions of evilness than people in other societies. They got that way thanks to institutions, mechanisms, and community standards designed to incentivize behavior that results in greater freedom, openness, and justice - however selfish powerful people's motives might be. This is why the most free, open and just societies are parliamentary democracies - not benevolent dictatorships, or theocracies, or dictatorships of the proletariat, or even patriarchal-bureaucratic autocracies run by wise elites schooled in the moral wisdom of ancient sages. Democracy assumes that power - even when held by the smartest and most well-intentioned people - always corrupts.  Therefore power must never be absolute. It must always be constrained by strong public supervision and accountability mechanisms.

Along with a lot of other Internet and telecommunications companies, plus everybody who creates, hosts, or enables web content and applications, Google's wide range of popular services have built a new virtual place we've come to know as "cyberspace," into which global human activity now extends. Google administers or controls increasingly large parts of this space where a growing percentage of global Internet users' activities happen. Google's power over our freedom in cyberspace is government-like - with real implications for our physical freedom in "meatspace," as the China situation clearly illustrates.

Thus Google has social responsibilities of a government-like nature toward its "users," who might be better described as "inhabitants" or "citizens" of the part of cyberspace that Google controls. These responsibilities are different and more complex than the conventional social responsibilities of companies toward customers who buy their products and services. Google (and for that matter all Internet and telecommunications companies who create, enable, and control different parts of cyberspace) needs to be held to different standards of accountability, oversight, and consent-of-the-governed than the people from whom we buy tennis shoes or canned soup. The responsibility of a soup company not to poison me, and the shoe company's responsibility not to sell me a shoddy product that makes me twist my ankle, can be dealt with largely through government regulation and national law. Regulation by national governments alone cannot address Google's trans-national moral and social obligations - as creator and protector of a place where I spend hours every day working, playing, politicking, and conducting the most intimate details of my life - to respect and protect my human rights. That's because Google competes directly with national governments for my loyalty and trust. What's more, Google recognizes that my trust and loyalty - and thus its business - depend in part on its willingness to protect me from efforts by national governments to violate my human rights. (And there is no government that won't make such efforts if presented with the opportunity to get away with it.)

In any place where governance and rule-making happens - whether through software code or written laws enforced by police - inhabitants have a choice. We can be subjects who submit to governance without consent, or we can be citizens who grant and withhold consent - and who are ultimately responsible for whether the government we've consented to fosters an open, free and just society or not. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as mere users of a service and start thinking of ourselves of inhabitants of a place called the Internet. We are Netizens. Time to get more proactive about shaping the Internet's future - and pushing its most powerful players in the direction we want them to go.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have taken a first step toward recognizing that they are fallible and require greater ethical oversight than shareholders, boards of directors, and markets alone can provide. Last year they helped launch the Global Network Initiative, a multistakeholder effort together with human rights groups, socially responsible investors, and academics, in which they've pledged to uphold basic principles on free expression and privacy, committed to independent evaluations, and agreed to public accountability mechanisms. (Disclosure: I am a founding member and on the GNI board.) It's hard to know at this point whether the GNI will succeed - it's still very much an early-stage experiment. But it's at least a recognition that new forms of public oversight, transparency and accountability are required to make sure that the companies who hold so much power over so many people's lives do not abuse this power. It's an early attempt to figure out what shape those mechanisms need to take.

In the past century many political leaders who have facilitated their countries' peaceful transition from authoritarianism to democracy have done so because they recognized that their legitimacy and power would be strengthened - not weakened - by public oversight, institutional checks-and-balances, and clear consent-of-the-governed. Similarly, Internet and telecommunications companies around the world should recognize that submitting to greater public oversight, and doing things that facilitate a free and open Internet, will ultimately be good for their own survival. They may have simply intended to provide a commercial product or service, but they have wound up collectively creating a place that they jointly own along with other companies and with everybody who creates Internet content, hosts a website, or creates and runs applications. The new social responsibilities and obligations that come along with this role may make them uncomfortable and they may try to reject them - as many have indeed been doing adamantly. But we need to figure out how to help them understand. More importantly, it's in our interest as netizens to figure out what carrots and sticks will be effective to get them to do right by us.

Finally, a note on the future of national governments in the Internet age. Over the last eight hundred years or so human society has seen sovereign leaders slowly come to recognize that sharing power with the people makes everybody stronger and more prosperous, and decreases the likelihood that the leaders themselves - or all their friends and family - will die defending themselves against violent revolution. We transitioned from countries run by kings and queens to countries run by presidents and prime ministers. It took a very long time for this recognition to happen in just a couple of countries and longer still for people to figure out how to implement the idea of "consent of the governed" in a relatively scaleable and sustainable way. Many more countries embraced this idea in the past century while others have failed to do so - or tried and failed, or claimed to be a "people's" government while actually being something else. The Internet and the penetration of cyberspace into the lives of a critical mass of people around the world has created a whole new layer of struggle over sovereignty, rights, and legitimacy.

I am not one of those people who believe that the Internet is going to eliminate the human need for geographically-based government. But I do believe that we're starting to enter a time when enlightened governments will slowly come to recognize that their legitimacy along with the well-being of the societies they govern will be improved if they figure out ways not just to peacefully coexist - but to share power with the global cyber-nation. Each has a duty to help us - citizens of both physical and cyber space - to keep the other's power in check. Both must submit to appropriate public oversight. Both must commit to high standards of transparency if they want our trust - which they require in order to be successful and powerful for the long haul. We're very far from figuring out how to make it all work. But it is in our own self-interest as netizens to be proactive in doing what we can to help companies and governments come to grips with what is, unavoidably, in their own long-term interest.

Got suggestions for what we might put into a Constitution for the Global Cyber-Nation?  Please hit the comments section under this post and share them.

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Happy Internet Human Rights Day!

Today is the 98th anniversary of the 1911 Wuchang Uprising which led to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and founding of the Republic of China in 1912. (I wonder how the 100th anniversary will be celebrated in the People's Republic two years from now?)  To mark the occasion, 15 Chinese intellectuals have issued a Declaration of Internet Human Rights, suggesting that netizens of China and the world celebrate October 10th to be Internet Human Rights Day.

C.A. Yeung at the blog Under the Jacaranda Tree has done a great public service and posted a translation. I've made a few small changes which I think clarify the meaning of the original Chinese version. Here it is:

Internet Human Rights Declaration
Issued by 15 Chinese Intellectuals

Those of us who are standing on the riverbank overlooking the torrent of history have witnessed the potential of this new technology: the Internet. We understand how this new technological revolution has brought about progress and social change. It has great potential to advance basic human rights and freedom for the Chinese people. Its contribution to civilisation will be on a par with the discovery of iron and fire, or the invention of plough and wheel in ancient times.

We acknowledge the arrival of netizen activism and regard it as an irreversible trend. Citizen reporting, which involves the use of mobile phones and digital cameras for live information dissemination, has already become a popular trend. The Internet has also provided netizens with unlimited space for creativity, and for voicing opinions through weblogs, podcasts, BBS and online comments.

We believe it is a citizen’s responsibility to be concerned about public affairs, and a netizen’s responsibility to care about freedom of speech on the Internet. Netizens are exercising their civil rights when they legally express their opinions or when they report the truth of what has actually happened. The best way to rejuvenate an ancient civilisation is to inject it with new core values based on the advancement of happiness and of basic human rights for individuals. It is also the best way to improve well-being for everyone in China. For these reasons, freedom of speech on the Internet should be encouraged, nurtured and tolerated.

We therefore pledge for the following principles to be endorsed:

1. Freedom of speech on the Internet is a part of citizens’ rights to freedom of speech. It is the most basic human rights and the most fundamental value that should be pursued, treasured and protected.

2. Netizens who express their opinions on the Internet using words, sounds, pictures or videos, should be protected and encouraged, as long as such conduct is in accord with the constitution and local statutes.

3. The right to publish opinion is the most basic rights for netizens. This includes the right to publish through weblogs and podcasts, as well as online discussion forums. Netizens’ rights to publish should not be subjected to unlawful investigation and interference. They should be allowed freedom to hold and to express their views without feeling intimidated.

4. Netizens’ editorial rights should be respected. When they are exercising those rights, they should not be subjected to harassment by authorities who act outside of law.

5. It is the right of Netizens to conduct interviews and to report their findings. This right is protected as a part of their constitutional rights to freedom of speech. Netizens who excercise this right should endeavour to report the truth, and to avoid distortions, fabrications and malicious slander.

6. It is the right of netizens to make comments and to exchange opinion. This includes the right to ask questions, to monitor, to criticise and to boycott.

7. Netizens’ freedom of speech encompasses a right to express themselves anonymously. Anonymity enables some authors to express their opinions in ways that best suit their needs. This legal right should be respected as long as an anonymous author is expressing his views in accordance with legal and constitutional requirements.

8. The right to search for information on the Internet is an integral part of netizens’ rights to expression, to be informed, and to act as watchdogs. It is our opinion that law-abiding websites should not be filtered, and that netizens’ rights to conduct searches on public information for personal use should be respected and protected.

9. Online privacy should be respected and protected. Netizens’ real identities and personal information should not be disclosed unless the information is required for a transparent legal proceeding, or else if the disclosure is necessary under the rule of law.

10. The free flow of information should be respected and protected as long as it is conducted in line with legal and constitutional requirements. Website monitoring, filtering and blockades that go against the principle of freedom of speech should be condemned by public opinion. Netizens are entitled to seek freedom of expression and justice through judicial proceedings.

We call for the establishing of an Internet Human Rights Day, to remind everyone of the need to safeguard freedom of speech on the Internet. This is the only effective way to make sure all people in China enjoy human rights and happiness.

10 October 1911 was the day when a group of patriots staged an uprising to end the rule of a cruel and racist dynasty. They also put an end to a long imperialist history. As a way of commemorating their bravery and their spirit of freedom, we suggest to make every October 10th China’s Internet Human Rights Day.

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Obama administration disappoints on civil liberties

On Thursday the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to renew all of the powers granted to the U.S. government by the USA PATRIOT act - passed hastily in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks - that were set to expire by the end of this year.

The committee rejected changes that would have strengthened the protection of Americans' civil liberties and privacy while still retaining expanded power to conduct anti-terrorism investigations. They also voted to approve Republican-sponsored amendments - most of them recommended by the Obama administration - that removed remaining civil liberties protections left in the bill.

Firedoglake blogger Marcy Wheeler has the most comprehensive coverage and analysis of everything having to do with the PATRIOT Act, including an annotated live blog of yesterday's proceedings. Highly recommended.

Here is a sampling of what disappointed civil liberties defenders had to say:

Leslie Harris, Center for Democracy and Technology (as quoted by PC World): "The administration deliberately took a wrong turn on civil liberties here... The administration even opposed civil liberties protections that President Obama sought as a senator."

Kevin Blankston, EFF: to everybody who voted "yes" on Thursday "and especially the Obama Administration: you let down the American people today, undermining our constitutional rights and endorsing a bill that doesn't do nearly enough to protect our privacy."

ACLU's Michael Macleod-Ball in a press release: "We are disappointed that further changes were not made to ensure Americans’ civil liberties would be adequately protected by this Patriot Act legislation. This truly was a missed opportunity for the Senate Judiciary Committee to right the wrongs of the Patriot Act and stand up for Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights. The meager improvements made during this markup will certainly be overshadowed by allowing so many horrible amendments to be added to an already weak bill. Congress cannot continue to make this mistake with the Patriot Act again and again. We urge the Senate to adopt amendments on the floor that will bring this bill in line with the Constitution."

CATO's Julian Sanchez on Twitter during the proceedings: "Soul slowly dying."

Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, who voted against Thursday's reauthorization bill, wrote a lengthy post on Daily Kos explaining why. A lengthy excerpt:

Before I get into the specific provisions that concern me, I want to say how disappointed I was in the debate in the committee. Today particularly, I started to feel as if too many members of the committee from both parties are willing to accept uncritically whatever the executive branch says about even the most reasonable proposed changes in the law. Of course we should consider the perspective of the FBI and the Justice Department.  Keeping Americans safe is everyone’s priority.  But we also need to consider a full range of perspectives and come to our own conclusions about how best to protect the American people and preserve their freedoms.  Protecting the rights of innocent people should be a part of that equation.  It's not the Prosecutors’ Committee; it's the Judiciary Committee. And whether the executive branch powers are overbroad is something we have to decide. The only people we should be deferring to are the American people, as we try to protect them from terrorism without infringing on their freedoms.

I am also very troubled that administration officials have been taking positions behind closed doors that they are not taking publicly.  I am pleased that we have not heard the type of public fear-mongering from this administration that was such a regular part of the discourse in the past.  But if the administration wanted to further water down the already limited reforms in the bill that was on the table, they should have said so openly.  Instead, at our only public hearing we were told that the Justice Department did not have positions on the crucial issues about to be discussed.  Then, over the past week, in classified settings, the Department has weighed in against even some of the limited reforms that Sen. Leahy originally proposed.  That led to the unusual spectacle today where many members of the committee based their decision to further weaken the bill on a classified briefing held yesterday, but could not fully discuss or debate their reasons.  As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I am privy to every bit of the classified information that was referred to today.  And nothing presented in the classified briefings justifies the failure to address the real problems with the expiring Patriot Act provisions and other intrusive powers.

Furthermore, much of this debate is not about classified matters.  Continuing to hide behind a veil of secrecy is not fair to Congress or to the American people.

He concludes:

Democrats have to decide if they are going to stand up for the rights of the American people or allow the FBI to write our laws.  For me, that’s not a difficult choice.

Next stop: the Senate Floor. For those readers who are American citizens, please contact your Senator and tell him or her to stand up for your rights.

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Is America getting more like China?

Since Obama became President - and yes, I voted for him - there has been a great deal of optimism and energy around the idea that the Internet can be used to improve  or "reboot" our democracy. The Administration has hired some great people to work on making government more open and transparent.

This is all great. But how much good will all of this nifty e-government do for American democracy if citizens' rights to privacy and free expression are not also fiercely defended?

On that score, the Obama Administration has been dangerously disappointing. This month's news makes me feel like the U.S. is getting more like China in some ways.

A man who was using Twitter to help coordinate G20 protests in Pittsburgh was arrested and had his home searched because he posted information about police movements on Twitter. For more on that story see the New York Times, Democracy Now (with a video interview of Elliot Madison and his lawyer), the Huffington Post, the CDT's Policy Beta blog, and the Digitaldumonde blog.

The FTC has released new commercial endorsement guidelines for anybody who ever posts anything online, be it on a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon reviews, or wherever (except professional journalists who are exempt thanks to the First Amendment which seems only to apply to some Americans these days).  While the guidelines are well intentioned and aim to promote honesty in product promotion and protect consumers on the Internet, they are so broad and vaguely worded that they could only be enforced selectively and unfairly. As Salon's Jack Shafer describes them: "They are written so broadly that if you blog about a good and service in such a way that the FTC construes as an endorsement, the commission has a predicate to investigate." What's more: "As I read the guidelines, the FTC could investigate you if you did disclose but it was not satisfied with the disclosure." See more critques from Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis, the LA Times, and Jeff Bercovici at Daily Finance. As free speech activists living in authoritarian countries like China - or even pseudo-authoritarian pseudo-democracies like Singapore - will readily tell you, over-broad and vague regulations of speech are dangerous because there's no way to enforce them uniformly or fairly. So authorities enforce them selectively based on often arbitrary and generally un-transparent criteria.  Such regulations become a great umbrella excuse to stifle speech that powerful people don't like for whatever reason. Over-broad regulations also have a chilling effect on speech because people tend to over-compensate in order to avoid trouble.

Then there's the matter of the media shield bill currently before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The idea is to pass a law that would protect journalists who refuse to divulge their confidential sources in federal court. It was bad enough that the definition of "journalist" has now excluded citizen media, bloggers, and student journalists completely. Even worse, the White House has now proposed changes to the bill that would substantially weaken professional reporters' protections. As the New York Times editorial page points out, so much for Obama's promise of transparency:

At the heart of the disagreement is the balance between national security and the public’s right to know. The best approach is to protect legitimate security claims while rejecting those that are made in the name of national security but are really aimed at avoiding embarrassment. That was the constant cry from the Bush administration as the public learned — through the unauthorized disclosure of confidential information — of prisoner abuse, secret C.I.A. prisons for terrorist suspects and warrantless wiretapping.

The Senate bill and a measure passed earlier in the House aim at a reasonable balance by relying on a federal judge to decide when security is not truly at risk and sources must be protected. The White House proposals would instruct judges to defer to the administration’s view of when and if a news leak presents a “significant” security leak. The executive branch would arrogate power to decide the public’s right to know by crimping the news media’s ability to make a case for disclosure.

As Michael Masnick at TechDirt puts it:

If you want to create a chilling effect against any sort of whistleblowing on gov't corruption, that's what this proposal does. It basically lets the gov't say that the shield law only applies to whistleblowing that doesn't make the administration look bad. But, in any case where the administration isn't happy, it gets to wipe out the shield. Apparently, freedom of the press only applies to situations in which the administration is not embarrassed.

Dan Thomasson at Scripps Howard puts it this way: "Now it seems the president also has decided the people's right to know might not be all that beneficial to him or them."

Last but not least, there's the USA PATRIOT Act (full text here), which in 2001 expanded the government's powers to spy on American citizens in the course of anti-terror and criminal investigations. Three of its key provisions are up for reauthorization this year, and the Senate Judiciary Committee will be considering them today (Thursday U.S. time). The Economist's Democracy in America blog has an excellent summary of the current state of play, which I take the liberty to quote at great length:

While some Democratic senators had initially shown interest in using the occasion to review the broad edifice of post–9/11 surveillance powers granted the executive branch, legislators now seem poised to move ahead with reauthorisation absent even the mildest additional civil-liberties safeguards.

The Obama administration had requested reauthorisationof all three "sunsetting" Patriot-Act powers: roving wiretap authority; license to spy on so-called "lone wolf" terror suspects under the broad aegis of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance act; and "section 215" orders, which allow investigators to compel the production of business records or any other "tangible thing". Yet the Justice Department had also signaled its openness to "modifications" designed to protect the privacy of Americans and check potential abuses.

Russ Feingold took them up on the offer with an ambitious proposal that would have substantially overhauled the new foreign-intelligence-surveillance architecture. More modest was a proposal by Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee's chairman, that would have somewhat constrained the scope of both 215 orders and the controversial "national security letters", which internal probes found to be subject to endemic misuse.

Yet even the more moderate reforms proved a bridge too far for Dianne Feinstein, who swooped in at the last minute before last week's legislative mark-up session with her own substitute bill, stripping away even the feeble restraints Mr Leahy had supported. The reason was the purported fear of FBI officials that these constraints might interfere with a number of "ongoing investigations", intimated to have sprung from the arrest of suspected bomb plotter Najibullah Zazi. Over Mr Feingold's objections, Ms Feinstein's language was made the template for renewal legislation, and the committee is expected to report a final draft out to the full Senate on Thursday.

For updates on Thursday's developments, a liveblog of the proceedings, and information about how to take action, visit the Patriot Act Action Hub. For very detailed background read the last eight posts or so on Marcy Wheeler's Empty Wheel blog. She will also be live-blogging on Thursday. Also see Glenn Greenwald's The joint Post/Obama defense of the Patriot Act and FISA for a critique of some of the lap-doggish mainstream media coverage on the issue, and a rebuttal of Fox news coverage by Cato's Julian Sanchez. 

I'm worried that most liberals and progressives have stopped paying attention and are just assuming everything will work out ok now that "our guy" is in office. I was tremendously excited about Obama's candidacy. I was jubilant when he got elected. I don't see myself turning Republican any time in this lifetime, but if the Obama Administration doesn't start showing a bit more concern for American civil liberties - putting aside for the moment the question of whether he cares about anybody else's - I'm going to start wishing for a viable third party with a meaningful civil liberties and human rights platform.

China's censorship blowback

I'm not sure what the Chinese government is thinking, or whether certain parts of certain ministries and party apparatus have gotten completely out of control.  

Until recently, it had seemed to me that the Chinese government was managing its censorship system with surprising success: censoring enough (combined with strategic arrests) to keep people from using the Internet to organize a successful nation-wide political opposition movement; but at the same time allowing enough space for online discourse and citizen-muckraking that people have felt freer and more empowered than ever before, which actually seemed to work in favor of the central government's legitimacy - despite being very bad news for corrupt local officials. But this month, something shifted. It's unclear whether the shift is long-lasting or just temporary madness until the PRC's 60th anniversary on October 1st.

Most of China's educated, largely apolitical, internet-connected urbanites have until now been generally willing to accept the political status quo - and with it a certain amount of censorship, thuggishness and injustice, political paranoia and occasional bizarreness - in exchange for overall social stability (compared to any other time in living Chinese memory), economic growth, plus an impressive increase in China's global power and status. But whoever is driving the latest Internet crackdown and the accompanying moralistic propaganda drive may have done substantial damage to the government's credibility.

June began with the expected tightening of Internet censorship around the 20th anniversary of the June 4th crackdown, including the temporary blocking of Twitter and various other websites. That in itself was not a huge surprise. It followed the usual logic of Chinese Internet censorship: tighten up the bottleneck between the Chinese Internet and the outside Internet during politically sensitive periods. Chinese Internet users who tend to be concerned with politics know to expect this kind of thing. However a simultaneous suspension in service for "technical maintenance" on many domestic websites impacted a much larger number of Chinese Internet users who don't visit overseas-hosted news or social networking sites very much. It would likely not have occurred to many million Internet users that June 4th was a politically sensitive date if China's "net nanny" hadn't made it so blatantly obvious, prompting many teenagers who weren't even born in 1989 to ask each other and their parents what happened on June 4th. But that was June 4th. People expect a certain amount of government paranoia around that time.

Little did we know, that was just the beginning of The Month The Censors Stopped Taking Their Medication.

The next week the government's Green Dam censorware mandate became publicly known. Authorities insist on implementing the mandate despite the fact that it doesn't work as intended or advertised, is a security risk and has been subject to widespread domestic criticism (by bloggers as well as state-controlled media and respected public figures like Caijing editor Hu Shuli). Now the U.S. government warns it could be a violation of the WTO. It seems the government is having trouble finding a face-saving way to climb down. Rather than admit they made a mistake and work out a sensible solution with domestic and foreign industry, they have chosen instead to escalate in an increasingly irrational manner that serves only to increase Chinese Internet users' scorn and irritation.

Last week the propaganda department turned it sights on Google China, and continues to blame Google for smut on the Internet. Horror of horrors, when you type smutty words and phrases into the Google search box, you get smutty content coming back in your search results! Many people including this blogger (via Roland Soong) and this blogger have pointed out that plenty of smut remains available via Google's Chinese competitor Baidu. How commercially convenient for Baidu... though some bloggers point out that the whole fracas - aided by outrage and ridicule over a staged anti-Google interview on CCTV - is actually making Google more popular among netizens, who were already annoyed with the government for dispensing commercial favoritism on the makers of Green Dam.

So far this week we've seen the temporary blocking of Google.com and related services hosted outside of China including GMail. As if that wasn't bad enough for one week, we're now told that sexual health websites are a no-go for ordinary Internet users.

Meanwhile, the increased discussion of censorship all over the Chinese Internet is prompting China's netizens to educate themselves about the various technical methods to "jump over" the "great firewall." There are no hard and fast statistics on how many people in China are now using proxy servers, Tor, Psiphon, Freegate/Dynaweb, or OpenDNS as compared to a month ago. But based on the frequent mentions of these tools I've been seeing every day on blogs, in Twitter, and on other social networking sites, it seems that the latest Net Nanny follies have helped raise awareness of circumvention tools to a whole new level. If you plug the term 翻墙 (which means "scale the wall" - the most common Chinese euphemism for censorship circumvention) into Google's search insights and restrict it to searches coming from China, you see a big spike in early June and a bigger spkie in the past few days (click to enlarge):

Searches for Tor (a nonprofit tool for anonymizing and circumvention) are also substantially up this month, and Chinese-language searches originating in China for Freegate (a tool developed and operated by a FLG-affiliated organization) spiked dramatically over the weekend.

Aggravation is certainly mounting. After finding Google.com and GMail blocked on Wednesday night Beijing time, Jeremy Goldkorn, who runs Danwei.org wrote a letter to China's "net nanny," in which he pointed out: "You are making Chinese people look like children on the world stage. You are bringing shame to the People's Republic of China, and the Chinese Communist Party."

To protest the mounting ridiculousness, Ai Weiwei is calling for an Internet boycott on July 1st. Others like lawyer-blogger Liu Xiaoyuan believe a boycott is not the best way to protest Internet restrictions. He writes (translated by Roland): "We have nothing against the Internet. We should not boycott the Internet. We should be using the Internet to promote democracy, rule of law, people's livelihood and progressiveness." Roland suggests some other kind of protest that is more measurable, as the success or failure of an Internet boycott is very hard to measure. Meanwhile a group of anonymous Chinese Netizens have issued an open letter, vowing to take collective action on July 1st. It's not clear exactly what they will do, other than to say: "we are going to acquaint your censorship machine with systematic sabotage and show you just how weak the claws of your censorship really are. We are going to mark you as the First Enemy of the Internet."

The following paragraph is particularly interesting. They claim they're not interested in overthrowing the government; but the government is bringing on its own punishment for behaving in such a stupid manner:

NOBODY wants to topple your regime. We take no interest whatsoever in your archaic view of state power and your stale ideological teachings. You do not understand how your grand narrative dissipated in the face of Internetization. You do not understand why appealing to statism and nationalism no longer works. You cannot break free from your own ignorance of the Internet. Your regime is not our enemy. We are not affiliated in any way with any country or organization, and we are not waging this war on any country or organization, not even on you. YOU are waging this war on yourself. YOU are digging your own grave through corruption and antagonization. We are not interested in you, destined for the sewage of history. You cannot stop the Internetization of the human race. In fact, we won't bat an eyelid even if you decide to sever the transpacific information cables in order to obtain the total control you wanted. The harder you try to roll back history, the more you strain the already taut strings, and the more destructive their final release. You are accelerating your own fall. The sun of tomorrow does not shine on those who are fearing tomorrow itself.

June has been pretty wild. I wonder what July has in store...

Green Damned

Chinese netizens are certainly having fun mocking the government's mandate for PC manufacurers to install the Green Dam-Youth Escort software. Danwei posted some great pictures of cartoon "green dam girls," greated in the style of Japanese porno manga. This one on the left (click to enlarge) is removing the underwear of "Windows XP Girl". Hecaitou has a lot more.

The Guardian, Associated Press, and even the China Daily are now quoting an unnamed Chinese official at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology who says that the installation of Green Dam-Youth Escort is "not compulsory." The China Daily reports:

"The PC makers only need to save the setup files of the program on the hard drives of the computers, or provide CD-ROMs containing the program with their PC packages," said an official of the department of software service under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, who did not want to be named.

PC users have the "final say" over installing the filter and recent reports of the government compelling them to use the software was "a misunderstanding", the official said.

"The government only provides the Green Dam-Youth Escort software for free."

It seems like there must have been some kind of policy tug-of-war going on these past few days. Late last week the Communist Party's Propaganda Department sent round an edict to the media instructing them to say nice things about Green Dam and stop being so critical. But Caijing and other media continued running critical articles, and then the People's daily website, Renminwang, launched a whole feature section on Saturday with full coverage of the Green Dam story - pro and con. Plus a reader opinion poll. Here's the screenshot I took Monday morning of the results, soon before the whole thing got taken down (click to enlarge):

At the time the screenshot was taken, more than 5 million readers had voted. 16 percent (nearly 880 thousand) supported Green Dam, while 74 percent (more than 4 million) voted against it.

On the left is a screenshot of the front page of the feature section, provocatively titled: "Have you been 'Green Dam-Youth Escort-ed' today?" (Click to enlarge.) Interestingly, the accompanying discussion forum has not been deleted - and it's full of comments criticizing or mocking Green Dam. Even though the main section has been taken offline, Chinese media insiders say the fact that the critical analysis and online poll managed to appear at all on the People’s Daily website is proof of strong internal government disagreement over how to respond to this public relations fiasco.

Despite today's reports about an apparent climbdown, however, I got an email from one person in the industry who said his company has yet to hear anything different from the original directive in his company's discussions with the government. So the game may not be completely over, and some in the industry are concerned about the implications of even providing an accompanying disc, knowing the security and IP issues in addition to the free speech implications.

Meanwhile the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has ordered Green Dam's maker, Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co. to urgently patch their now well-documented security flaws. That could take a while if it’s to be done right: the University of Michigan computer scientists who analyzed Green Dam last week warned that the problems are so serious that they can only be resolved with “extensive changes to the software and careful retesting.” Whether the government requires installation or just an accompanying disc, it’s unclear whether it will still hold PC makers and importers to the original July 1^st implementation deadline. It also remains unclear whether the mandate will ultimately end up being enforced. If Jinhui fails to patch Green Dam’s leaks to government satisfaction in a timely manner, that could give the authorities solid reason to scrap the plan. Meanwhile, never a dull moment on the Chinese Internet. I look forward to the continued Chinese online humor... including this doozy that some reader managed to post for a short period of time also on the People's Daily site:

China blocks Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Hotmail, Windows Live, etc. ahead of Tiananmen 20th anniversary

This cartoon was created today by Chinese Twitter user "junde" to protest China's censorship of Twitter: The bird bound and gagged represents Twitter. The crab catching the bird is a well-established symbol for censorship used by Chinese netizens. (For the full history of how the "river crab" 河蟹 came to represent censorship click here.)

On Herdict, the global crowd-sourcing censorship-tracking website, people are reporting censorship of Twitter on networks all over China... with some people adding frustrated commentary, often including the f-word. You can also see blockage reports for Hotmail, Windows Live, Bing, Flickr, YouTube, Blogspot, etc.

Twitter users are expressing their anger by using the #fuckgfw hashtag on Twitter (gfw = "great firewall"), though the good folks at Twitter appear to be keeping this hashtag off their "trending" page - I assume due to the use of of obscenity. Perhaps people will switch to plain old #gfw, or something. (Update, people are now using both #caogfw - the Chinese translation of the f-word - and #gfw)

Isaac Mao has issued an appeal to Twitter management, asking them to fully enable "https" so that people in China can access it in encrypted form. Google enables https encryption on many of its services.

Many Twitter users also hope that the company will speak out publicly against the blockage.

Active Beijing-based Twitter user David Feng sent the following email to me and some other friends. I reproduce it here with his permission:

I am not one to use Twitter for what I call "obvious political means", as in most of the content I post is tech, mass transit or city-related and concerns the events of Tian'anmen much less. However, my Twitterstream has been picking up with tweets such as "Twitter is more than a website". This in itself is "the truth", so to speak. Quite a number of us don't even text message each other. We DM or tweet each other instead. It's for real even in "far far away" China, so to speak.

So here you have the typical apolitical twitter-er who is far less interested in reactionary propaganda so-called and far more interested in conveying stuff that is "much closer to life". This GFW thing is a major inconvenience and I am sure it is by no means your fault. It lies with the censors far closer to home (thankfully not "your" home States-side!) and I think that while this recent blocking is not unexpected, it was a real pain in the back when it finally struck.

I'm hoping that this most recent block goes away quickly after a few days, when the whole anniversary is done with. I cannot exclude, however, the possibility of a block extending through right after National Day, which is October 1 in China. The public security authorities have already launched a never-before-seen scale campaign to clean just about every last thing in Beijing up -- we're not just talking about "officially published acts", such as the taking away of illegal weapons and stuff like that.

In the meantime, let me echo the latest hashtag of the Chinese Twitter community floating around: #F***GFW. This is pretty much a good sentiment of how people feel about this most recent of dumb acts done by no-one else than the censors themselves.

A selection of blog posts and news reports about the blockage:

Danwei: Twitter and other sites blocked in China as of today

Toronto Star: China shuts Twitter ahead of anniversary

Shanghaiist: Blocked in China list now includes...

Guardian: China blocks Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail ahead of Tiananmen anniversary

Reuters: China blocks Twitter service ahead of anniversary

WSJ Blog: Twitter Goes Down in China

Lost Laowai: Twitter & Flickr blocked ahead of Tiananmen’s 20th

Cyber-tarianism, #cfp09, Twitter

The Future of Freedom and Control in the Internet Age

For 2009 I am on leave from the University of Hong Kong. The Open Society Institute has generously granted me a fellowship to spend the year working on a book. The tentative title is "Internet Freedom and Control: Lessons from China for the World." (I'm likely to change that title once I come up with a better one.)

On February 10th in New York, I will be speaking at an OSI Forum event, alongside another Open Society Fellow, Evgeny Morozov, an expert on Internet controls in the former Soviet states, among many other things. Below is the announcement. Go here to RSVP - space is limited so be sure to sign up. The event will also be webcast, so if you can't make it in person it should be possible to participate remotely.

OSI Forum: The Future of Freedom and Control in the Internet Age

Location: OSI-New York

Event Date(s): February 10, 2009

Event Time: 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.

Speaker(s): Isabel Hilton, Rebecca MacKinnon, Evgeny Morozov

The Open Society Institute and Asia Society will host an event with Open Society Fellows Rebecca MacKinnon and Evgeny Morozov that explores the changing landscape of Internet censorship. Special attention will be given to the techniques employed by governments to co-opt and steer online discussions in ideologically convenient directions. Focusing on the specific cases of Russia and China, the panelists will discuss how the strategies and tools of control, manipulation, and censorship have evolved in both countries.

Isabel Hilton, editor of China Dialogue and an Open Society Fellowship selection committee member, will moderate the discussion.

Light refreshments will be provided at a reception from 5:30 - 6:00 p.m. The discussion will begin at 6:00 p.m.

This event is presented in cooperation with the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations.

Ai Weiwei: On taking individual responsibility

 

On Tuesday January 13th I visited Ai Weiwei at his home on the outskirts of Beijing. We talked for a bit over an hour while he ate breakfast.

Despite having designed the Birds' Nest Olympic Stadium, Ai became a vocal critic of China's handling of the Olympics. He has written actively about the Yang Jia cop murder case and other social issues. Recently he held an online auction of a bag of Sanlu Milk Powder, both to make a political statement and to raise money for the helpless and destitute. (Sanlu is the company at the heart of China's recent public health disaster in which melamine-tainted milk became widespread throughout China thanks to official corruption, collusion between industry and party officials, censorship and press cover-ups. As a result the public being uninformed about health risks that officials knew about months before the information went public - only after the Olympics were safely over. Six children died, 300,000 were sickened, and who knows many people were exposed with unknown impact to their kidneys.)

Ai says he wants to stop doing art will focus on politics - or at very least, do political art. He has been blogging actively on Sina for the past couple of years. He also started blogging last year on Bullog.cn, but now that's shut down. Here is an interview with the Index on Censorship last summer. I asked him about his blogging, his political perspectives, and the issues he's been writing about recently. I recorded the whole conversation, though I had originally brought along my recorder for reference and accuracy, and I didn't have a professional microphone with me, so the sound quality isn't very good. Nonetheless, he was quite enthusiastic about the idea that I post the full audio interview. So here it is, unvarnished, bad quality audio and completely unedited, conducted while Ai Weiwei ate breakfast (with the accompanying breakfast-eating sounds):

Below are extended English excerpts. Note that it is not a complete transcript and the translation is by me, which means there are most certainly errors. I welcome corrections. Also note that the excerpts below are not in the original order of the conversation. It was a somewhat rambling conversation so I've re-organized his remarks according to subject groupings and put them in a sequence that I think will make most sense and be of greatest interest to my English-speaking non-Chinese audience - given that this blog is blocked in China anyway. Since the original conversation is in Chinese, people with better Chinese transcription skills than mine are welcome to make a Chinese-language transcript. I can post that here too and welcome others to post it anywhere they want.

On his evolution from artist to political activist:

I want to spend all my time on politics now. However if they stop me it will be difficult, so I need to come up with some ideas, or do art in a different way. Exhibiting art in museums isn't very interesting... Art is connected to our lives. Our lives are political so it becomes political. If our life wasn't political we wouldn't need political art. We are living under massive government controls, we can't say that politics doesnt exist. We can't just say, art for the sake of art. Art is for life. Our life is political. So we have no choice. We've been sucked into politics. [English] We got involved.
...I used to take a traditional approach to my online work, writing articles, posting photos, showing what I was doing every day and who I was meeting with, being very transparent about everything. Then one day I happened to go to this event... and they asked me to contribute an object for them to sell from their shop. So I thought well why don't they do an online auction, then a lot of people will see it, and it will have a big impact. So I set this up with the Vitamin Art Gallery and did it together with them. After posting it online, the response wasn't bad. A 120 yuan bag of Sanlu milk powder [signed by Ai Weiwei] was bid up to 1600 yuan, and the bidding got really fierce... So we decided to take the money earned and buy a bunch of things like coats which we decided to donate over Chinese New Year to the people who come to Beijing to appeal their grievances to the central authorities ["shang fang" 上访], who have no home to return to. That way we were able to turn a small matter into a relief aid fund for rights defending ["wei quan" 维权]. ...  A fund for protecting people's rights. Then we took one of these coats put that online to auction it. Because I'm an artist and some people like to collect the things that I have signed. That way we'll raise more money, and make the whole thing bigger, then we'll buy more things and in this way create a relief fund.

RM: Will you create a foundation?

AWW: That's difficult because in China they don't allow NGO's. But in China because of the earthquake and relief effort, there are a lot of disaster relief activities that have led to a lot of people's support and non-governmental organization. Most of these NGO's are spontaneous, they have no money, the government is not so happy about them. So I think this is part of the beginnings or a more democratic society. There are too few levels in our society. Either you have government or you have the masses without ability. Now that we have blogs, we can have a lot more levels. You can have NGO's, you can have discussion, and society is undergoing a big change.

RM:  So the Internet has created a very big platform?

AWW: I don't know about in other countries, but in China the Internet's impact is beyond anybody's imagination. The Internet can do more to accelerate China's reforms than any other thing. If it doesn't get shut down it will become the only platform in China where you can have free and democratic discussion.

On the Olympics:

Real Chinese democracy will come from education. In the beginning who didn't support the Olympics? I supported the Olympics. I thought it would bring China to the same level as the rest of the world, would bring about interaction and reform. But the year before the Olympics when I looked at the development I realized that wouldn't be the case. This system wasn't willing to realize that dream, they just wanted to put on a big party for the foreigners. During the Olympics you could see all the foreign companies like [English] NBC, Coca Cola, you know all those, Nike, all those companies. They're the same as the Chinese government. They're even worse. They just want to sell their product. They have nothing but just want to make a, you know, all those companies there, they're all the same shit. They have no belief, they have no, you know any kind of integrity, they just want to make a sale. So to us it's a big learning process.

[Back to Chinese] I was one of the first people who came out and said "stay away from this Olympics." Since I designed the stadium, when I said this it was big news. Then I thought maybe I was wrong, it's still a year away. But in the end it was even worse than I expected. [English] It's a police state. They kick away all the immigrant, shut off most small shops, half of the hotel empty, restaurants nobody there, tickets not well sold. And they just set up this fake fake celebration, even the singer is fake. The sound is fake, and the image of the fireworks is pre-recorded but they don't tell you it's pre-recorded... and many others come out about this, so then you realize: what the government has in mind is just to lie to the world, that's all they want to do.

Thoughts for Obama:

I would very much like to give some advice to Obama. He represents the promise of a new era. He brings the promise of a new era in which we don't treat human beings as a commodity to be traded... On this I think Obama can do a better job than Bush. I think Bush didn't do a good job even though Bush was considered a friend of China. But mainly what he cared about was business. Of course what I'm saying now may be useless since the whole world these days is focused on business. .. But otherwise the loss could be even greater and China could move towards collapse, it's a very unstable society. That's not in America's long term interest. He should be clear on that. ...Don't listen to the subtle arguments of China experts. These issues are not subtle.

...As the leader of a country, he naturally needs to make America's interests the priority, but what are America's interests, and what are America's priorities? ...I remember when Clinton came to China it was great, one of the first things he did was to hug an AIDS patient. It was on the cover of the Beijing News. That was very important. I remember that a Chinese leader didn't shake hands with a Chinese AIDS patient until a couple years later. It was very important. In showing your values you don't have to insult the Chinese government, you just say where you want to go and who you want to meet. Then things will be very clear and all Chinese people will appreciate it. The most important thing is to show your values as a leader: that you wont put aside principle for the sake of cooperation. Otherwise everybody will be disappointed. Take the French president and the German chancellor. They made decisions about meeting with the Dalai Lama. Some people criticized them saying they're naive and stupid. But I have great respect for their decisions. They demonstrated a society's concern for a weak minority group... to simply say you won't have dialogue is wrong... The dialogue [that China is having with Tibet] is thanks to international pressure. If it wasn't for this pressure, China wouldn't have had a dialogue. Every change China makes, if China has moved forward 100 steps it's all because of international pressure. Not a single step is due to its own determination. China's reform and opening has no ideals - what kind of idea is "feeling the stones as you cross the river"? "Letting some people get rich first" what kind of statement is that? They have no ideals. They're pragmatically saying well we don't want to end up like North Korea with people starving so we'd better let some people get rich first. Go out and do whatever you want, be a prostitute, a security guard, whatever, as long as you bring home money. That's the government policy. So we've been cheap labor for a few decades. [English] Unbelievable. But we've ruined everything, education, health. Terrible.

On foreign human rights groups:

Let's put it this way. It's hard to know how much use they've been, but they certainly have been of some use. I think they have been useful in two main ways: First, they have told the Chinese government that human rights is a global issue. It's about the fundamental value of human beings. It's not an individual matter. Second, they've told everybody working for human rights everywhere, we know you exist, we know where you are. This is very important. Imagine if a person is captured and nobody knows about it, how horrible that is. Then the government can arrest anybody, put anybody they want in mental hospital, sentence anybody to death. Now the government realizes they need to think before giving the death penalty. They haven't been useful enough, but they've had some use...I have a lot of respect for people who do this work. Because they truly understand that human rights is everybody's business.

On U.S. human rights policy:

I think they don't interact enough with ordinary people. For instance. They need to pay more attention to the Internet, to NGO's. This kind of expression [of attention] is very important. It's very important to show support. .... For instance yesterday I was talking to Liu Xiaoyuan [the rights defending blogger-lawyer]. He asked me if I can help him go to the U.S. I asked him how many lawyers do you want to take over there? He said we want to take some lawyers over there to see and learn more about the U.S.. I said why not? This should be a long-term plan, we should send 10 lawyers to the U.S. every year. This kind of thing is very important. The most important thing that the U.S. ever did for China was to accept so many students. In the past 30 years there have been millions of people who have returned from studying there. They brought new values back. The U.S. may not be clear that its most successful policy has been to accept so many students from so many countries. ..

...If you as an American criticize us directly we find it impolite. Even if I know what you said is true, I still lose face. ..It's my own home so I don't like outsiders criticizing. What they should do is support us when we speak. They should encourage people to speak about what's happening in their own home.

...But the main thing is moral support on some things. [English] Moral support i think is most important.

RM: You think they're not doing it enough?

AWW: It's not nearly enough. You cant just do diplomacy and business. You have to support the power of ordinary citizens. Because that is the real base for promoting democracy.

Why everybody needs to take responsibility:

I don't think there's such thing as the "outside world" anymore. ...If you are using the products that people have made somewhere else in the world, if you don't concern yourself with their lives, you're committing a crime. I think everybody should be clear on this. They have responsibility. Either you're part of the crime, or you're compassionate. Domestically it's the same thing. If a child is killed by a crumbling building in an earthquake and it's not your child, maybe you don't care. Yang Jia was sentenced to death, maybe you don't care. Poisoned milk has affected 300 thousand children, but it may have nothing to do with you. But this does have to do with you.

...We will never have a real civil society, a democratic society, unless people take responsibility. Why Chinese citizens don't take responsibility and speak their views is partially for cultural reasons, and partially due to circumstances created by government policy. They don't let people take responsibility, don't let them vote, don't let them say ah, I made the wrong choices and I take responsibility for them. Like Americans said, we made the wrong choice with Bush and now we choose Obama. Maybe they'll decide that Obama was the wrong choice too. But they take responsibility for choices made according to their conscience and their duty. They say next time we'll do a better job. Chinese citizens aren't that way. They say well I didn't choose this party and this government, how you build each road is none of my business. How you spend your funds you won't tell me anyway. Why do I want to take any responsibility? Democracy is not a political ideal. Democracy is a means of handling problems. This method is effective, why? Because everybody in society takes responsibility. If nobody is taking responsibility, it shouldn't be called "society." Or its a slave society anyway.

...Even people in the police, even people who make policy, they are all able to make choices. Otherwise my blog wouldn't survive. There are always people who insist. One person says, "this post has to be deleted," but another says "it's best not to delete it." I believe somebody must have worked to make it happen. So I believe the desire for justice and equality is something that people must have in their own hearts. This isn't something that one person can give to another. This is a right that must be exercised. If you don't exercise your right society will be in a difficult state.

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.