Nobody Does It Better (Than China)

Anyone who would be foolish enough to draw parallels between the "pro-democracy" rebellions in Egypt and China is making the mistake of thinking that the repressive regimes running those two benighted countries are equally vulnerable to a successful revolution. Most repressive regimes, Egypt among them, are generally old-school and unprepared for modern dissent.

Hosni Mubarak seems to have been caught flat-footed, unaware of the growing anti-government movement in his country. Like dictators of old, he didn't know whom he could trust, he didn't prepare for the onslaught, and his intelligence agencies dropped the ball by missing the great organizational tool of this "spontaneous" revolt--the Internet. There was a great deal of reaction but very little planning by the Egyptian government in advance of the big demonstrations.

The Chinese government is much more media savvy, and watches the Internet like a hawk. Where it has not succeeded in suppressing anti-government net traffic, it has been fully aware of it, and made plans months in advance for any possible attempt at revolution. What the people attempting to dislodge the dictators knew, the government knew. And when it was time for the protesters to act, the troops were ready to quell. The dictators didn't want a repeat of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Bad for the public image, bad for business as usual. So the dictators made sure they knew everything they needed to know about the plans of the protesters before the protesters could assemble in large numbers in very public places.

Naifs were touting the "Jasmine Revolution" that would take down the Chinese Government and bring true democracy to the Great Oppressor. Fat chance. American Internet users assumed that the Chinese mandarins were as unaware of the web chatter as Mubarak's regime was in Egypt. Fatal error. Encouraged by the seeming success of the Middle East Internet-fueled revolts, Chinese dissidents began a huge web campaign to stage massive protests in Beijing and other major Chinese cities. The protests were supposed to burst on the scene this past weekend.

Chinese dictators learn from their mistakes. Having read every Internet transmission, deciphered every plan, singled-out all the potential leaders, and knowing the proposed locations of the protests, the Red Guard sprang into action. Why wait for an embarrassing slaughter of civilians in large numbers and in highly public places when you can knock off the opposition early and in much less visible ways? There would be no repeat of Tiananmen Square. Why bother?

Suddenly, there were mass arrests of dozens of anti-government human rights activists. Those few activists who did manage to gather enough numbers to stage any kind of protest were quickly rounded up amidst the occasional beatings. The problem is that in the Internet Age, spontaneous demonstrations actually have to be spontaneous, as well as successfully clandestine. Organizing via the Internet may have worked in Egypt, but it ain't gonna work in China.

It didn't help that the calls for protests largely originated on Chinese language sites in America. The government knew in advance the thirteen cities which would be targeted, where the protesters would gather and even the slogans that would be used by the anti-government crowds. Police and army troops showed up at the sites before any meaningful protests could even begin. The Jasmine Revolution quickly became the Jasmine Fiasco.

Still, even the attempt shows that there is a large and growing population fed up with government repression and corruption. Despite its public face of new wealth and strides forward, the simple fact is that China is rushing into the 21st Century on the backs of its masses. Modernization is everywhere, and if a few hundred thousand Chinese who got in the way of progress have to die, well, that's life. China has millions of truly homeless people, many displaced by those immense government building projects. At the same time, the government has built "show cities" of the future in which nobody lives and probably never will. Potemkin villages on steroids.

And even though the Chinese dictators skillfully monitored the Internet to shut down the potential revolution, that won't be the end of it. It is extremely difficult to entirely shut down news from the West, pro-democracy Internet posts and the transmission of the message of freedom in the ether and the cloud. As fast as China shuts down a dissident voice, two more spring up in its place. So the tech-savvy dictators may be able to fend off an organized protest poorly-disguised on the Internet, but it cannot entirely shut down the information that could lead to a truly spontaneous revolt throughout the evil empire.

As I've quoted before, "no army is as powerful as an idea whose time has come." That idea is freedom, and though the government may continue to have the ability to shut down Internet-organized protests, it can't entirely shut down the ideas transmitted on the Internet that fuel protests. And if those protests take place on a large scale in very visible places, the government may lose control of its ability to fend off a revolution by using Internet plans against themselves.

Still, for the time being, let's be cautious about the true motivation behind the revolts in the Middle East and wary of optimism about the same thing happening in China any time soon.