A Stitch in Haste

Didn't want to let this one slip away:

Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to "purify" the Internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the country's sprawling, unruly online population.
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"Maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet and raise the level of guidance online," he said. "We must promote civilized running and use of the Internet and purify the Internet environment."

In 2006, China's Internet users grew by 26 million, or 23.4 percent, year on year, to reach 10.5 percent of the total population, the [state-run] China Internet Network Information Center said on Tuesday.

The vast majority of those users have no access to overseas Chinese Web sites offering uncensored opinion and news critical of the ruling party.

This arrogant authoritarianism is of course nothing new — China boasts about its quest to censor all the time.

What's important to remember, meanwhile, is that even censored Internet access in China is limited to politically connected elites, just as access to China's "enterprise zones" is doled out as political patronage. An ambitious Chinese youth from the countryside can't simply pack up and move to Shanghai the way an ambitious young Kansan can pack up and move to New York City. To the extent that China's "market-based communism" can even be called "capitalism," it is strictly crony capitalism — of, by and for the Communist class and not the populace at large. So too with the "Red Internet" — it is strictly for the anointed.

You cannot have free markets without free minds. Capitalism without liberty is an insolent contradiction in terms that cannot be sustained for any significant length of time.

The only question is how much misery and slaughter China's leaders will inflict in the meantime.

Meanwhile, Hu used a quite appropriate analogy:

"Ensure that one hand grasps development while one hand grasps administration," he said.

Of course, a "grasping hand" is also associated with strangulation, which is exactly what China's authoritarians seek to do to free speech and free thought. Go figure.