Because it could topple the wall and end the party
Google’s decision to stop helping the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censor the Chinese Internet is just the kind of peaceful act that made the Berlin Wall come down.
Google, the world’s top Internet search engine, announced Jan. 11 it will no longer censor results on its Chinese-language search engine and may shut its offices in China, because of “highly sophisticated” cyber-attacks on its website and the Gmail accounts of Chinese rights activists. California-based Google said the attacks included theft of intellectual property and also targeted at least 20 other companies in technology, finance and chemicals.
The Google “incident” could be an omen of the Chinese “Wall” and regime coming down.
In ancient China people believed in cosmic timing: when conditions are right, events occur naturally. This was certainly true when communism fell in Eastern Europe and Russia. Although U.S. President Ronald Reagan spoke the words (to then Soviet leader Gorbachev), “Mr. President, tear down that wall!” in reality it was the timing that was right--or ripe--including people’s consciousness, that made the Berlin Wall come down--without a single shot fired. To most it seemed unexpected, effortless, and magical.
It shall be seen whether Google’s motto: “Don’t be Evil,” will prove to be a similarly “magical” mantra to bring down China’s Fire Wall and China’s communist regime. Chinese “netizens” placing bouquets of flowers and candles outside Google’s Beijing office is reminiscent of the peace prayers in Dresden and Berlin.
Chinese Internet users were also excited by the sudden, unexpected unblocking of some Web filters. In a Jan. 16 opinion article in the Financial Times, James Kynge said that with Google allowing uncensored searches in Chinese for the first time, China’s citizens have been indulging their curiosity ahead of a widely expected crackdown.
Besides the consequences the CCP may have to face from a thoroughly informed public in China, there is also the reality that the Internet attack on Google may cause an exodus of foreign companies from China and other repercussions by trade partners around the world which would be a blow to the CCP financially and to its reputation.
Kynge in his article states, “...Google’s defiance of China’s censorship regime is indicative of much more than a single company’s decision to reassert its open society principles over the pragmatism by which it originally entered the Chinese market, agreeing then to self-censor in return for business licenses. Google’s move may suggest that the accommodations made by western companies in China can extend only so far before contorted values snap back into place.”
Reuters recently reported that many large foreign companies have in the past years withdrawn from or sold down their investments in China because of either fierce competition or restrictions that required foreigners to give control to Chinese partners. Among them are: Time Warner Cinemas, eBay, Fosters (Australia’s biggest brewer), Yahoo! Inc., Dutch grocer Royal Ahold, Fashion retailer Giordano International.
The German magazine “Handelsblatt” commented in a January 15 article titled: “Fear of Data Theft Threatens Commerce with China,” saying, “The Internet attack on Google in China has scared German companies. Espionage and the growing pressure by Beijing to give up sensitive information impedes business with the rising super power. German economic circles react with alarm--and are even warning about an exodus of companies.”
Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said this: “There are likely some functionaries in China who were surprised by Google’s announcement--the country has become used to the idea that they could simply ignore criticism from abroad. But the Chinese government looks to have made the same mistake made by so many other dictatorships: Democracies can, for a time, be easy partners as they don’t tend to overreact. But one shouldn’t push them too far. When their core values are threatened ... they will defend themselves.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, U.S. State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said Friday the US will be issuing a formal diplomatic protest in Beijing, likely early this week, to express U.S. unease about the cyber hacking incident.
Faced with such criticism and pressure, how did the CCP respond? Financial Times’ James Kynge notes, “...the ease with which China’s propaganda authorities are able to channel western criticisms of China into outpourings of anti-western cyber-rage or patriotic fealty. In the case of Google, just hours after the news broke of its change of mind on censorship, party-affiliated newspapers began to play on the widespread sensitivity to a history of humiliations by the west to construct a great wall of patriotic fervor....”
In addition, state run media allegedly conducted a survey, asking thousands of its readers if they thought the Chinese government should submit to Google’s conditions, and that the survey “generated an overwhelming response to the effect that Beijing should stand up to Google.”
Such a “survey” must of course be treated with extreme skepticism as an independent press is nonexistent in China. The regime can and will make up anything they want and need. It has happened before.
Doing all sorts of crazy searches, from Tiananmen Square, the love affairs of national leaders, the corruption of leaders’ children, and everything else, is of course precisely not what the CCP wants the Chinese people to do. But there can be no doubt that the majority of Chinese “netizens” would do exactly that. They would also rather have free flow of information than Internet blocking and media censorship. This goes without saying.
The CCP has a violent track record against it’s own people and maintains power entirely through oppression, corruption and media control. The Internet blockade, the cyber attacks, the sentencing of democracy and rights defenders, and the thousands of “mass incidents” the regime has to deal with every year attest to this and are an indication of the many holes in its sinking ship the CCP is having to plug up. In this writer’s opinion they are signs that the end of China’s communist regime is near.
When communism fell in Europe, the Chinese regime brought in tanks and machine guns to deal with unarmed student protesters in Tiananmen Square, who were calling for government reforms because of rampant corruption. Although the whole world watched the scenes on television, the CCP still claims that nothing happened.
The CCP’s violence has never diminished. Persecution of various groups of Chinese citizens has been continuous to this day, with a large-scale persecution being launched roughly every decade so as to scare the rest of the population into subservience. The latest one is the persecution against the Falun Gong meditation group while at the same time Tibetans, Uighurs, Christians, AIDS activists and anyone investigating civil injustice are targets of government oppression.
The persecution against Falun Gong which began in 1999 is huge. It has targeted 100 million people who took up a peaceful meditation and exercise practice. The brutal crackdown by the CCP was accompanied by a venomous slander campaign which enlisted the entire Chinese population to take part in the persecution.
The CCP has done untold harm and damage to the Chinese people through its relentless persecution of the people, destruction of culture and environment. It has also caused huge mental health issues along with problems of corruption in society. All of communism has these in common. Eastern Europe was economically and ecologically depressed and depleted which was also a cause of communisms collapse there.
During this last year of global economic crisis, countries have ignorantly been idolizing China as the “savior of the world economy.” We have to be careful of appearances that could prove deceptive. Things are not going that well for the CCP, and the CCP’s economic data cannot be trusted, nor any of its words, promises or assurances. We must assume that it makes up the numbers and is deceiving the world. Many analysts are also warning about a huge real estate bubble in China.
China’s population is more than 1.3 billion. As a result of the opening up, a portion of the population has been able to increase their living standards, although China does not have a middle class to speak of. The CCP’s claim that it has lifted people out of poverty is not entirely true. There is a privileged upper class consisting of mostly the CCP cadres and their families. But one billion Chinese people are still living in poverty.
It is the hard labor of the Chinese people, in spite of the CCP claiming all the credit, that accomplished this. And it is not a secret that Chinese products are so cheap because hundreds of thousands of Chinese are forced to do slave labor without pay in Forced Labor camps. Any Chinese citizen who doesn’t have influence or money to sue or bribe officials can be picked up off the street or taken away from her home and sentenced to a Forced Labor Camp without trial. This essentially is the meaning of the term “with Chinese characteristics” that Chinese officials often tag on when explaining their special brand of “democracy” and “human rights.” The re-education-through-labor system also includes torture and political brainwashing sessions to ensure that Chinese citizens who are dissatisfied with the system will give up their ideas.
However, China’s population of Internet users has increased nearly 30 percent last year to 384 million. This is really troublesome to the CCP as the Internet means information that is potentially very damaging to the CCP (not to the people) as information is power.
The other 1 billion Chinese who are living in poverty, with millions of them out of work, are also becoming more difficult to control. Chinese people are becoming increasingly more aware that they are suffering from extreme lack of human dignity and basic civil rights. Arbitrary detention, forced demolitions and relocations, children killed in the earth quake because of substandard school building, the HIV spread through tainted blood, forced abortions, state controlled religion, media censorship, internet control, toxic baby formula, toxic food, toxic environment, muzzling of rights lawyers, oppression of Christians, Uighurs and Tibetans, forced life organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners are a daily reality.
Why does the CCP censor the Internet and support cyber terrorism? This is why. The Chinese regime has done so many bad things that have involved so many hundreds of millions of people, and the information is all out there, on the Internet. But the Chinese people are for the most part ignorant about the extent. If after every disaster or persecution event people knew about the total number of fatalities, they would rise up, and that would be the end of the CCP.
Blocking the Internet, and silencing dissidents and human rights activists is vital to the CCP’s survival. Corruption, injustice, and violence by the government against the people are something the government doesn’t want them to know, think, or talk about.
Bloomberg reported on Jan. 15 that “Chinese authorities shut more than 100,000 Web sites in December in an “escalation” of its Internet censorship efforts...”
AP said in a report of the same day, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi defended the controls during a meeting Friday with his visiting German counterpart, saying, “China’s Internet regulations are implemented in order to maintain a stable Internet environment and to prevent harm to people’s physical and mental health.”
The CCP is shutting down all human rights defenders’ Web sites that threaten its grip on power. The CCP does not care in the least about the spread of pornography. If it did, it would have instructed hackers to break into porn sites in the West, not try to get information on human rights activists. Nor does the CCP care about the people’s physical and mental health as is evident from its treatment of people. For example, the Falun Dafa Information Center has confirmed the identities of over 3,000 people that have been brutally tortured to death while in detention. The exposing of the persecution of millions of Falun Gong practitioners in China during the past 10 years, and the vicious slander campaign the CCP has spread about the group, has become one of the most “sensitive” issues and the biggest worry for the CCP.
In fact, on December 17, 2009 Argentinean Judge Octavio Araoz de Lamadrid ordered the arrest of two former Chinese Communist Party leaders, Jiang Zemin (the former President of China) and Luo Gan, for their part in the genocide and torture carried out against practitioners of Falun Gong in China. (Case No. 17.885/2005, Luo Gan Tortures and Genocide, Secretary No. 17, National Criminal Court No. 9, Ruling of Judge Octavio Araoz de Lamadrid, dated Dec. 17, 2009).
Lamadrid’s decision says, “The genocidal strategy … comprised a broad range of actions arranged in total contempt for life and human dignity. The designated purpose--the eradication of Falun Gong--was used to justify any means used. Therefore, torment, torture, disappearances, deaths, brainwashing, psychological torture were everyday occurrences in the persecution of its practitioners.”
The judge concludes the decision by issuing a national and international order to capture the pair to be carried out by the Interpol Department of the Federal Police of Argentina. As such, should the accused former officials travel to other countries that have extradition treaties with Argentina, they will ostensibly face being detained and transferred to Argentina to be brought before a court.
A media release of this landmark case was posted on the Falun Dafa Information Center web site and the news spread around the world by news wire services.
No doubt, the Chinese leaders have been very nervous and concerned about this case and are trying everything to block the Chinese people from learning this news.
Friends Read Free