Forecasts for a “Chinese Spring”

The Chinese government has been exceptionally shrewd at monitoring and restricting its citizens’ Internet use, so far. But Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales insisted in a presentation last week that China’s government can’t keep the information out forever.

“The new generation of bloggers, Wikipedians, people on Twitter, people on social networks—they are there and they are becoming stronger. And they will provide leadership when leadership is needed. There is no stopping them when they make up their minds,” he said. The presentation was part of Free Thinking Festival 2011, an annual BBC Radio 3-sponsored conference of ideas that ran from Nov. 4 to Nov. 6 in the English city of Gateshead.

Wales predicted that Chinese Internet activism will eventually galvanize a mass general strike. Once mobilized, this mass uprising would shake the whole country and destroy the reigning Communist Party.

"There will be a Chinese spring exactly like the Arab spring. It isn't a question of if; it is a question of when,” he said.
Wales told his audience that the Chinese government has two choices: It can continue to spy and suppress, until this Chinese spring eventually overtakes it; or it can accept the inevitable and begin reforming now.

“I hope the government will realize that what they’ve been doing now is no longer sustainable, and that they will proceed now rather than later to open up access to information, to allow genuine democracy,” he said.

Wikipedia has clashed often with China’s censors, who banned it from the country outright for three years. It was allowed back into China in 2008, but with a tight leash: To this day, the government censors filter out any Wikipedia page that refers to the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Dalai Lama, dissident artist Ai WeiWei, and other touchy subjects.

But savvy Chinese Wikipedia users are finding ways to get around the government firewalls. And Chinese-speaking contributors outside the country add and edit pages before the Chinese government is able to censor them. Although Wales himself is not behind any of these efforts, he certainly has no intention of trying to stop them.

“We made the decision early on that we would not cooperate with government censorship. We believe that access to knowledge is a fundamental human right it’s a corollary to the freedom of expression,” Wales said.

Wales may be right. But the analogy to the Arab Spring should raise alarms. First, the Chinese government is far better financed and better armed than were the tin-pot regimes of Egypt’s Mubarak and Libya’s Qadafi. China’s would-be liberators will have to expect their fight for freedom to be much longer than those that the Libyans and Egyptians waged—and far bloodier.

Second, unlike the Egyptian and Libyan resistance, they will not get any help from the United States or Europe. Not when China literally owns tremendous stakes in the economies of both, is shoring up out-of-control public debts in both, and is a mainstay of cheap labor and food supplies for both.

If China goes up in flames, the rest of the globe will burn along with it. The world’s democratic government leaders know this. They will all mouth words of sympathy for the Chinese people, and then leave the Chinese resistance to its own devices just as they now leave activists in Syria and Yemen to theirs.

Finally, the Arab Spring’s outcome is far from certain. Egypt’s new military government looks to be anything but democratic. Tunisia’s new majority governing party is ”moderate Islamist,” and it’s too soon to tell just what that means. Libya, newly emerging from months of warfare, is likewise a huge question mark. All three countries’ revolutions may just end in new dictatorships.

And so might the future revolution that Wales expects will occur in China. Or worse, its revolution could succumb to deadly infighting that slips into unending civil war.

No matter what happens, any Chinese uprising will surely be messy, not just for China, but for the entire globe. The world had best watch China more closely than ever, press China to reform itself now, and prepare for that future uprising in the event that China refuses. With more work now, we can have less havoc later.