High-Level Dissidence in China
There was a brief article by L. Gordon Crovitz in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, reporting on a strange but telling incident in that took place last week in China. In that country, in recent months, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has repeatedly called for political reforms, but domestic reporting of his remarks has been blocked by the censors. This elicited, Crovitz observes,
an open letter from 23 well-known Communist Party elders calling for free speech. The letter was posted last week in a blog area of sina.com, one of the country's largest websites, and widely shared before being removed.
This letter is worth attention, both for its authors and its substance. The signatories include a who's who of former Communist Party propagandists, including Li Rui, the former private secretary to Mao Zedong, and retired top editors of the People's Daily (the party's mouthpiece), Xinhua (the official news agency) and the China Daily (the state-run English-language newspaper).
The entire article is worth reading – for it points to serious divisions within the Chinese Communist Party, and it suggests that the principles articulated in the freedom manifesto sponsored not long ago by Liu Xiaobo, who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, enjoys considerable support within the party. There are those in China who would like for us to forget Tiananmen Square, but what happened on that occasion is evidently remembered there.
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Re: High-Level Dissidence in China
Couldn't agree more, Paul: This could be a very big deal. But China being China, how are we to follow the story?
May '10
Re: High-Level Dissidence in China
You have to be fluent in Mandarin and then do the right searches, but given that, there are a bunch of ways to follow it. Every Chinese kid worth his salt knows 20 proxy servers he can tap to get into any news feed he wants to read.
Probably every single liberal-minded Chinese person has read this and passed it on to several others by now. The censors try, but they simply cannot keep up with the volume.
I do know someone who can search the Chinese sources, of course.
Edited on Oct 18, 2010 at 8:15pmMay '10
Re: High-Level Dissidence in China
Could it be that the Nobel committee has contributed to something worthwhile with this year's Peace Prize? Just a year ago it seemed impossible that I'd ever witness such a thing!
With the best censors money and compulsion can buy, the Communists can only keep an increasingly tech-savvy citizenry in the dark for so long. As Steyn has mentioned time and again*, factor in a severely Y-chromosome heavy generation courtesy of the one child policy and it's a recipe for change. Here's hoping for the good kind.
* Claire said it first, and with much fancier prose
May '10
Re: High-Level Dissidence in China
I say it again:
The history of of the 21st century will be: while the USA was distracted by some silly, unimportant countries in the Mid-East, the Chinese were preparing to kick butt.
Jul '10
Re: High-Level Dissidence in China
Its really difficult for us to understand the political power struggles of a one party state but this has happened before. In the 1990's Deng Xiaoping was losing control of the Party as his health declined and a succession struggle was taking place. He was afraid that his economic reforms (greater openness and liberalization) would be overturned. So Deng launched a Southern tour of the country to highlight the achievements of his reforms and show the success of the Special Economic Zones. At first Deng's tour wasn't covered in the press. The faction that opposed the reforms had consolidated its control of the official media. As the internal politics of the Party worked themselves out coverage of Deng's tour began to emerge. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar wasn't happening here.