Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

WORLD NEWS: "China's Internet Culture Goes Unchecked, for Now," by Sky Canaves and Juliet Ye, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2008, p. A10.

Opening sentence says it all:

While the Chinese government keeps a tight grip on Internet news and political discussion here, it has done little to prevent online defamation and invasions of personal privacy.

So the Chinese Communist Party is doing everything it needs, in a 20th-century, Gap-sort of way, to cover itself on political expression on the web, but ignoring the 21st-century, Core-sort of responsibilities that empowered individuals tend to demand from their government ("Hey, you need to police this collective good for our benefit and not just yours!"). They worry about "dangerous" speech in a collective sense, but it's the dangerous speech and actions in an individual sense that's actually skyrocketing.

The old assumption here, by the CCP, is that the early onliners are the ones to be watched (good reasoning), but as the percentage of Chinese population regularly going online rises dramatically (from about 8 percent to almost 29% in last three years), the mismatch of goals and policing will only grow, meaning the CCP's incompetence will be increasingly revealed and that alone will eventually become the larger source of regime illegitimacy (as opposed to "dangerous" speech).

In short, the more connectivity, the greater the demands of citizens for good governance--not just firm governance. Single parties do firm governance well, but good governance poorly, because the lack of shifting between in-power-types and out-of-power-types means that corruption goes systematically unaddressed.