China’s Mounting Censorship: How Much Should We Care?

Uncensored fount of creativity - inventiveness - unorthodoxy

 Hacking into Google email account servers. Intimidating blogsters. Erecting filter walls to block website access and remove words from search engines.  Interfering with text-messaging, “You-Tubing,” “Twittering” and “Facebooking” transmissions. All this and much more testify to China’s authoritarian government’s increasing determination to censor its citizens’ access to information and ideas.

How much should we care? It should bother us, of course. But certainly not enough to influence our policy on China. That  must remain focused sharply and narrowly on issues that protect and advance America’s interests.  Rather, we should view China’s censorship offensive as a strong reminder, at a time when it’s increasingly common to hear dire warnings that this will be “China’s Century,” how far China yet has to go to sustain its stunning economic growth.  Censorship, while possibly ensuring China’s rulers’ a bit longer control over their people, will impose huge penalties on China’s development, retarding China’s emergence as a true economic (and thus, political) superpower.  

Beyond a reflexive response.

Chinese censorship is a self-inflicted wound.  Nothing we say or do can increase the severe damage China is doing to itself.  In some ways, the Obama Administration realizes this.  Speaking on January 21 to a media group in Washington about internet freedom, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to measure her words carefully, only obliquely slapping Beijing for internet censorship and not at all singling out China, instead lumping it together with Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.  Still, when she made her strong and sound case for internet freedom, she won headlines (catching Beijing’s angry attention) by sharply invoking Cold War images, asserting that the emerging “virtual [internet] walls” differed scantly from the Berlin Wall.

Clinton’s rhetoric certainly captures the reflexive dismay and disgust of Americans at even a whiff of censorship.  Free speech and free access to speech, after all, not only are at the heart of but were and remain a major reason for America’s unique historical experience.  But beyond a reflexive response, beyond declaring our disdain for any regime or group (external and, we should remind ourselves, internal) advocating censorship, we should not allow our feelings about China’s censoring its own people to affect our policy with China. 

What, anyway, is to be gained by harshly attacking Beijing?  Surely, our centuries in dealing with China teach us that the more China (whether ruled by Emperors or Kuomintang or Communists) is criticized from abroad, the more stubbornly China refuses to bend.  Clinton’s Cold War allusions may make her (and us) feel good, but certainly will not soften China’s censors.  And tougher rhetoric (the kind demanded by many U.S. critics of China, on the left and right) foolishly would spend some of our finite political capital with China on a matter far from central to U.S. interests.  We would be squandering that capital if it makes it more difficult for us to pressure Beijing on the two issues counting most for us: (1) gaining China’s (so far distressingly reluctant) cooperation in restraining Iran, North Korea and similar rogue nations and (2) opening China’s market to American goods and services and, at the same time, encouraging China to boost its domestic living standards so that market grows. [See: The 21^st Century Takes Shape.] 

Undermining creativity and inventiveness.

As for opposing China’s censorship, we need do no more than warn China of how deeply it is wounding itself.  We should explain that China’s great economic strides so far rest solely on imitating and doing cheaper what the West and Japan already have done. To be sure, China’s has been a fantastic feat. No doubt about that.  And faster than any of us expected.  In recent months, China has overtaken Germany as the world’s #1 exporter (the U.S. is #3), and is about to overtake Japan as the #2 economy, second only to us. 

But little of what China has been doing is enough to sustain its growth.  For that, it must move beyond imitating our goods and processes.  If it remains simply a supplier of cheaper copies of American and western products, it stagnates.  Just look at Japan.  Going beyond copying, however, requires creativity – and inventiveness – and unorthodoxy.  None of that sprouts from a China-like command economy.  They come only from one thing: Freewheeling competition of ideas and actions. It is this, recognized and admired by the world, that has kept America for decades at the peak of the globe’s economy and will keep us there deep into the future as we unleash one pioneering idea after another, with the rest of the world perpetually playing catch-up.  And by the time others do catch-up, we’re on to the next pioneering breakthrough.  

Enemy #1 of such inventiveness is censorship.  It suffocates ideas and aborts creativity.  This is the danger rooted in China’s new wave of censorship; it threatens China itself and its prospects for continued economic growth.  What should frighten China’s insecure rulers is that by slowing growth, censorship will unleash that which these rulers most fear – popular discontent.

So, how much should we care about China’s censorship?  We should care enough to craft a sensible response.  Let’s not beat up on China with futile rhetorical fusillades.  Let’s not squander political capital on telling China what it’s internal policies ought to be. But let’s warn China of the enormous damage it does to itself by censoring creativity and censoring inventiveness.  Without that, China’s growth will slow and then stagnate, preventing China from becoming the “great” power its leaders seek.

Further discussion of U.S. China Relations see:

The 21^st Century Takes Shape.

Obama in China

China & Conservatives

 Obama is No Jimmy Carter

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