If you find yourself, like me, glued to the 24hr news channels in this tumultuous year of the bunny, then you’ll probably have sifted through gaggles of pundits all expressing their unique angle on regime after regime that is experiencing problems. Admittedly, I know little about the Middle East, but I have been to China a few times and the most absurd opinion I’ve heard recently is that, “Chinese people don’t need or want Facebook or Twitter.”
Basically the premise is, China’s own ‘in-house’ generic copies fulfill all the needs of the Chinese population when it comes to social media. In fact, China’s social network sites are better, with more features than Facebook and Twitter, therefore, making them obsolete in a market that is now well established. The internal Chinese market just isn’t the same as the global market and the Chinese consumer prefers a locally, controlled Chinese-style social media rather than a free, unfettered social media.
Well, no…
Firstly, if Facebook or Twitter were allowed in China it would race through the system like wildfire, there’s no doubt about it.
After all, Facebook was allowed in China for many years. When I was first running by business in Tibet, Facebook was the best place to advertise because the 'Tibet' word was just too sensitive on Chinese search engines, so often my website would be blocked, and I was only running a guesthouse, which had absolutely nothing to do with Free Tibet movement.
If we think back as to why Facebook got banned it all started after the riots in Tibet in 2008 and the approaching Olympics. Facebook was awash with groups arguing their point of views. If I recall correctly the Free Tibet site went from about 30,000 members to about 200,000 in just a few weeks. On the Chinese nationalist side, no site was more prominent than the, Tibet was, is, and always will be part of China group. This group was the front lines of the Tibet/China Facebook battle. It was hardcore Free-Tibeters going head to head with China nationalists in a no holds barred slanging match. Interestingly though, many of the most ardent Chinese nationalists were Chinese students studying abroad, especially in US universities. It seems that as the Olympics approached, they felt compelled to defend their country against what they saw as a blatant attack by the Free Tibet movement on China’s achievements. Which of cause it blatantly was. With China having so many skeletons in the cupboard, the Free Tibet movement wasn’t going to allow China to have a 'world party' without a bit of mud slinging.
So, one would have thought that the CCP would have loved this show of national pride by its overseas flock of die-hard nationalists? But no. The CCP saw both sides with equal fear. For here on Facebook there was unfettered, uncontrolled emotion on two very polarized sides and the CCP had no control over any of it. The Free Tibeters were systematically dismantling the Chinese propaganda on Tibet for all to see. Conversely, the nationalists were getting more and more irate and vocal. It was a true melting pot, with temperatures of 1000 degrees and up.
The CCP knew that it had to do something; both the Free Tibeters and nationalists were equally as volatile and needed to be controlled.
However, it wasn’t until the Uighur riots in Urumqi in 2009 did the great firewall come down and end the Facebook free-for-all-punch-up. The men at the top weren’t going to allow such free reign of ideas clash again, so openly. Absolute control was needed, not only to prevent people from organizing but simply just talking or arguing about it was too much. Social media went into lock down and that is where it remains today.
And this is the ace in the CCP’s hand, I’ve heard TV and internet pundits say that the reason why China is not going to be rocked by social revolution is because it is too quick to crack down on grass roots organizations or that it can control people’s emotions through making Japan the convenient enemy. To my mind these are just contributory factors, the principle reason why China will be able to keep itself out of the fray, for now, is because it controls social media and the internet.
However this is changing. Even now, forces in the ‘Free World’ have been awoken to the power of the Internet like never before. Everyone had their suspicions that it was an authoritarian regimes Achilles heel, but the regimes did such a good job of controlling it.
But not now.
A whole new dimension of the internet has been let out of the genie bottle. In the future you’ll be seeing a lot more investment into technologies that can allow unfettered Internet access despite main servers or firewalls attempting to block it.
I’m no tech-geek, but look out, the future will see massive investment by democratic countries in peer to peer networks, via un-jamable satellites, or other modes of communication that will allow people in closed countries easy access to the internet, despite their governments attempts to block it.
The Internet as a soft weapon has been born in 2011 and coming to an authoritarian regime near you – SOON!
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