The key to this proportional response comes from the government’s ability to apply direct and indirect pressure on offenders. They use a variety of enforcement methods to ensure cooperation from the subject.

The concept in China is called ruanjian (“soft prison”), perhaps roughly corresponding to house arrest in English. However, ruanjian is far more nuanced than simple house arrest. It can be as simple as an athletic young man in a crew-cut following you wherever you go and sitting in a car outside your house at night, to full-on imprisonment in a small rural cottage, surrounded by bright floodlights and blaring speakers, with no phones or visitors.

Denying travel permits or roughing up journalists are only part of the picture.

The practice of collective responsibility (which hearkens back to the Qin dynasty) also ensures that people peripheral to the issue may feel the need to get involved in order to protect themselves. Methods used can vary from banning visits to grandchildren, or putting pressure on companies to fire friends and relatives.

If this doesn’t work, exile is often practiced as a lesser form of prison, usually termed as Re-education through Labor. The offender is packed off to the distant northwest, to spend several years doing hard labor. No one is exempt, not even septuagenarians protesting during the Olympics.

The government excels at finding the best leverage to use against the offender. They tend to target the livelihood and reputation of the offender. Additionally, in order to maintain plausible deniability, rather than using emergency laws or vague charges of sedition, they typically find some other excuse that is not overtly political.

Some of the best examples recently are of Ai Weiwei and the Xinjiang 13.  Ai Weiwei famously had his million dollar studio demolished practically overnight by the Shanghai municipal authorities (ostensibly because of permitting issues), and was later arrested on tax fraud charges. While there was clearly a political motive behind those actions, the stated reasons provide a legitimate-sounding, banal cover that permits them to claim non-political motivations.

The Xinjiang 13 are another example.  They are 13 American professors who published a report on Xinjiang in 2004.  Disliking the tone, China has quietly blacklisted them and is not granting them entry visas into the country. American universities, afraid of pissing off the Chinese, have not made much of a fuss. Instead, they almost fired one of them because they couldn’t go to China. I daresay any prospective Xinjiang scholar from here on out will think twice before publishing something overtly critical of the Chinese government’s behavior in Xinjiang.

The government’s use of indirect coercive methods tailored to the offense and the offender are some of the strongest tools in its toolbox. Rather than dismissing the offender as a miscreant and throwing them in jail, they do their best to understand the protesters. Then, armed with this understanding, they have the power to truly hit them where it hurts.

By controlling the flow of information, they possess a strong ability to control the narrative of a given story. While it is not especially difficult to get around the Great Firewall, the question that most Chinese people ask themselves is: “Why bother?” China has successfully cast the media narrative as an “us vs them” situation, where foreign sources are automatically biased against China. The average Chinese person feels little incentive to seek out foreign sources of news for a different point of view.  Similarly, despite there being almost no barriers to access, not many Americans actively seek out Al-Jazeera for a second opinon on world affairs.

Most Western media reports focus on the most basic of censorship methods—like blocked searches for sensitive keywords, deletion of blog posts, or media blackouts on certain news items. However, far more insidious than that is the censorship that editors impose upon themselves.

The genius here is that the Chinese government does not provide any general policies or guidelines on censorship. Meaning that, since you don’t know the criteria for censorship, you can never know if you will be censored. Therefore, authors will subtly alter their writings in the hopes that it will be more acceptable to their censors. As Murong Xueqin memorably puts it,

I call this “castrated writing” — I am a proactive eunuch, I have already castrated myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel.

(His entire speech is priceless, read the full text of “Absurdities of China’s Censorship System.”)

Without an explicitly proscribed list, China allows censors the freedom to keep up with the zeitgeist and memes without allowing critics to say, “But this isn’t on the list yet!” It leaves writers with the hope that their work will be published, but with enough uncertainty that they will restrain their criticism.

Many of the more ridiculous directives, like the ban on time travel stories on television, serve a different purpose: discouraging people from playing the “What If?” game and applying it to the current government.

Much has been made of subversive internet language, as documented in the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon, and how it has evolved as a way to get around China’s censorship. How many of you understand the meaning of “watered weasel ape” or “Which work unit are you from?” Even most netizens don’t. These references are an in-joke among China’s netizens—precisely the ones who have benefited the most from China’s economic policies. They are primarily urban, well-educated, and affluent. In other words, the only ones who understand the subversive language are the ones who have the most to lose by subverting the system.

Many people underestimate the true subtlety of China’s censorship system. The genius is not in how effectively they censor what is already there. The genius is how they forestall people from putting ideas in the public space in the first place.

The maintenance of stability in the Middle East and other countries, such as Russia or Venezuela, depends heavily on one thing: petrodollars. Generous government subsidies funded by oil or gas reserves help keep the population sedated—up to a point, as we can see from the Arab Spring. Others, like Cuba, depend heavily on a cult of personality built around the leader himself. But the largest authoritarian country in the world has neither vast natural resources nor a hypnotically charismatic leader. In fact, the opposite—China is resource poor, and its leaders are famously wooden-faced and stiff.

So how, then, do they maintain social order? Is it through the justness of their social policies? Is it through strong institutions? Or is it though respect for and commitment to their citizens? Anyone at all familiar with China knows that this is not the case.

Instead, social order is maintained through the one method in which Chinese government has surpassed any country in history in their level of skill, finesse, and achievement: repression.

China’s system is a far cry from the brute force “toss them in jail and throw away the key” approach that typically characterizes other repressive regimes. Instead, it is a multi-pronged, holistic, and responsive approach to unrest. It utilizes different levels of force depending on the subject, applying both direct and indirect pressure. It selectively makes examples of people, rather than attempting to punish all transgressors. The Chinese system is also far more responsive to events, showing both flexibility and ruthlessness in dealing with public response. In short, they have created the world’s most subtle repressive system.

In the weeks to follow, I will be detailing the many working parts of this system. In the meantime, I entreat you all to comment on the following question:

What is the most impressive/overlooked/effective feature of the Chinese internal security system?

Brother High-speed Rail Safety Helmet

Niels Bohr once said, “Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.” Certainly, humor is one way in which the Chinese public have chosen to deal with the Wenzhou train collision. I recently wrote an article for ChinaGeeks about the dual catchphrases uttered by ministry of railways spokesman Wang Yongping at a press conference after the Wenzhou train collision. His two phrases—”This is a miracle,” and, “Whether or not you believe it; either way, I believe it.”—have been co-opted by the Chinese public and raised to the apotheosis of humor: the Internet meme. But these Internet memes do more than poke fun at the governement—they prolong the public memory of the incident and undermine the government’s credibility. As I write in the piece:

Aside from finding humor in an otherwise depressing situation, memes like this are important because they embed the event in the social consciousness, preserving knowledge about the event for a longer period of time. After all, two of government’s greatest allies are forgetfulness and the extremely short attention span of the average citizen.

These cultural memes show that although the government is pursuing Internet censorship more and more seriously—blocking websites, deleting posts and reposts—they cannot stop their infamies from seeping into the culture itself. Perhaps the only way citizens can remind themselves of the tragedies that are whitewashed, rewritten, or otherwise brushed aside, is to make them a part of the underground lexicon.

But recently, jokes about the Wenzhou train collision have transcended Internet forums and crossed over into reality. The first example is a clever bit of performance art I first came across on the Shanghaiist regarding a picture of a man riding the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail wearing a motorcycle helmet. The Chinese Internet has dubbed him “Brother High-speed Rail Safety Helmet.”

Yunnan Baiyao Ointment. It might just save your life.

The reporter enumerates his safety kit:

The safety equipment he prepared includes a helmet, homemade seat belt, flashlight, Swiss Army knife, fan, floral water, video camera, umbrella, Yunnan Baiyao Ointment.

Brother Helmet was going from Beijing to Wenzhou via Shanghai and was, according to the report, sweating profusely. After he arrived safely, Brother Helmet remarked, “at least the fan came in handy.”

Another joke was tweeted on Weibo and has been retweeted and quoted a fair amount:

There’s a part in Harry Potter 7 where Dumbledore says: “If you want, there is a train that will take you there.” Harry asks, “Take me where?” Dumbledore: “The next life.” A guy next to me says, “Shit, it’s the high-speed rail!” Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha then we all burst out laughing.

Though it is impossible to locate the original tweet or ascertain the story’s veracity, the joke and the retweets prove that the Wenzhou train collision remains fresh in citizens’ minds and could grow to be emblematic of the Chinese government’s poor, ahem, track record.

Irene Xiong contributed research.

"Aside from positive news received from authorized departments, do not report anything, and do not offer any comment."

The storm began with a screenshot of a message that a journalist received on his cell phone, which seemingly forbade all media from mentioning or writing about the Wenzhou tragedy or paying respects on touqi. (Pictured right.) That heavy-handed, some might say absurd, attempt to stop the truth from spilling out across the newspapers and televisions provoked strong responses on Weibo.

One of the first comments last night came from the editor of Southern Daily’s investigative reports department:

Tonight, hundreds of newspapers are recalling tomorrow’s issue, thousands of reporters are killing their articles; China, tens of thousands of souls are wandering restlessly, millions of truths are being torn to pieces. This country, countless evil hands are humiliating you.

Information about 7.23 (as the Wenzhou tragedy is called here) disappeared off of the main pages of Sina, Tencent, Sohu, 163.com, People’s Daily, Xinhua and iFeng.com. Every single newspaper and every television station across the country shelved their memorial reports and turned instead to Party-approved news.

Weibo stood alone.

A Defining Event

Journalists and editors came out of the woodwork and posted their “harmonized” front pages onto Weibo, pages that were forwarded thousands of times as professors, intellectuals and just plain outraged netizens called for justice, each posting the picture or video that best summed up the crisis for them.

Harmonized pages from Nandu Daily.

Wang Qinglei, the producer of CCTV’s 24 Hours program, was sent home from work after publicly protesting the way the government was handling the Wenzhou tragedy. He posted this after learning of the nationwide ban on touqi news:

A society will always have a few what I think are “basic professions”: teachers, doctors and journalists. If a nation still has at least one teacher willing to stay and teach children, then that nation still has hope; if a nation still has at least one doctor willing to heal the sick, that nation still has life; if a nation still has at least one journalist willing to defy authority and fix society’s ills, that nation still has soul. China has many!

Harmonized cover story from Xinjing News.

Calls to wake up and rise up went across Weibo and others spoke of being part of a nationwide revolution against the barbaric destruction of civilization, against the ignorant evil oppressors of truth and against the traitors to the Chinese nation, the corrupt officials and the police that do their bidding.

Left: Covers with the headline, "The Ministry of Railways must answer whether rescuing people is their first priority." Right: harmonized obituary page from Xinjing News.

A Silent Revolution

Graph showing spread of news via Weibo and traditional media.

But Shen Yang, a professor of information technology at Wuhan’s Information Technology Institute, used the spread of news about the train collision to compare the power of micro-blogging with that of traditional media. His relevant conclusions:

1) Weibo is fast and explosive.

2) [News on] Weibo lingers at the top for two days, then slowly begins to descend.

3) Weibo reaches its peak a day before traditional media, but their reports are similar.

4) The amount of reports in traditional media is extremely high, reaching 13,600 at its peak.

And based on the graph Professor Shen supplied, traditional media also has a much longer trail. What this means is that the government (authorities, police, security apparatus, what have you) is content to let the middle-class intellectuals rail away online, just as long as the workers, laborers and peasants are kept ignorant and distracted. No one knows better than the Communist Party what can happen if the lower classes rise up, so their decision to keep the clamp down on public protests, threaten or pay off angry citizens and control the traditional media will prevail over the power of Weibo. For now.

In summary, let’s take a look at joke going around the Interwebs today that helps clarify the true difference between the power of newspapers and television and the power of microblogging:

A journalist asked a street sweeper, “What do you think about the 7.23 railway tragedy?”

The street sweeper righteously replied, “At least they didn’t make the common people pay for the trains!”

"Cops came to the memorial service and threw away the candles. There was a survivor from 7.23 there and her parents angrily rebuked the police. All these days and not a word of sympathy from the government. She crawled out of a pile of corpses. Does the government even know she's alive?"

Sascha Matuszak is a writer based in Shanghai who blogs for Chengdu Living. Visit him at www.saschamatuszak.com.

When we consider that China has an estimated 1.3 billion people (not including unregistered births), 0.02% of the population choosing to end their own lives annually may not seem so bad. For one, far more will die on China’s roads, or because they lack access to or funds to pay for adequate health care. The suicide rate in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan is far higher than in China, which ranks 66th in the world, although the reliability of the source data is, as with all statistics emerging from state organs, subject to doubt.

Far more alarming, in my opinion, are the mental health statistics. 100 million Chinese living with some form of debilitating mental illness. The CDCP doesn’t go into specifics, so it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which mental illnesses are the more common, but whichever way you look at it, with almost 8 percent of the population classified as mentally ill, you wonder how it’s taken the central government so long to come up with some kind of response. This June, the first official white paper on mental health has pledged more resources to assist Chinese people living with mental illness. Observers could be forgiven for thinking that this action redefines shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

At the last count, China had a mere 600 purpose-built psychiatric hospitals, and just 16,000 qualified psychiatrists. There’s little hope that even one percent of the 100 million in need of psychiatric care will receive it – few Chinese can afford the luxury of non-essential medical treatment, and even if money isn’t an object, time and traditional perceptions of mental health certainly are. Seeing a shrink may be a rite of passage for the white-collar New Yorker, but in China, actively acknowledging anything less than complete mental invulnerability is a massive loss of face, and, if you did deign to see a psychiatrist or therapist, you’d likely keep it a secret even from your immediate family.

With words like “retarded,” “sicko,” and “crazy” bandied around fairly liberally in China, it’s safe to say the general population has a less than enlightened perception of mental illness. Most families with a member who suffers from learning difficulties or even full-blown psychosis are likely to simply lock them indoors if their condition is too severe. If they are judged sufficiently capable to go out and work, the family is likely to micromanage their lives, carefully orchestrating those social necessities like marriage and job postings in an intricate dance of damage limitation. Many rural wives only discover their husbands’ psychiatric problems after the fact thanks to a carefully-planned courtship and a shotgun wedding. In mainstream society, mental illness is also synonymous with criminality – cold-blooded murderers like Yao Jiaxin are dismissed as having some form of 神经病 (mental disorder), and, without their right to a psych evaluation before they have a bullet put in the back of their heads, who’s to argue?

While the provision for China’s mentally ill is woefully inadequate, the West hardly has an enlightened track record when it comes to helping those in need of psychiatric care. Indeed, we in America continue to deny Gulf War syndrome even exists, and until recently incarceration in a lunatic asylum in Europe or the U.S. was seen as the best solution to severe mental illness. Unwed mothers were among the most numerous inmates of London’s notorious Bethlehem Lunatic Asylum (Bedlam), and it was common practice until the 1950s to lobotomize young people suffering from “diseases” ranging from autism to homosexuality. There is also little evidence to suggest that certain people are at greater risk to clinical mental illness than others. Real psychosis exists in all societies. There’s no definitive solution to the fact that human society inevitably creates a certain proportion of mentally ill people. The human brain is barely understood, and all kinds of experiences and chemical changes can unleash forces so powerful that a person’s consciousness collapses before anyone can react. Just old age alone is one of the leading causes of psychiatric illness, and while Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and common dementia are more heavily documented and arguably better understood in the West, there’s evidence that they’ve existed in some form in all human societies since the beginning of time, and China, like other developing countries, is a major contributor to research into possible treatments.

However, there is another form of mental illness – one which governments, rather than chemical or physiological changes, are instrumental in inducing, directly or indirectly, in the general population. A condition common in places like Congo, Sudan, and Palestine but far less so in Manchester, Amiens, and San Francisco: post-traumatic stress. I can’t help wondering how many Chinese sufferers there are.

I recall a cycling holiday with my parents in Guangxi Province, taking in the karst limestone peaks that resembled sugarloaves from the backs of bicycles. Passing through a small rural village, we noticed a long-haired and wiry man, of about 40 to 50 years of age, walking down the main street, singing tuneless Cultural Revolution marching songs. We noticed him instantly, as there wasn’t a stitch of clothing on his sinewy frame – he simply strode through the village while all those who passed him averted their eyes, disappearing into the distance at remarkable speed. During my time in Beijing, I can recall at least two specific instances of elderly women berating random passersby with admonitions including words such as “landlord,” “class enemy” and “counterrevolutionary,” one particular woman in Houhai screaming her criticisms so loudly I could still hear her every word from the other side of the lake. I also remember passing an elderly man near my workplace, who insisted in no uncertain terms that the Nationalists had surrounded the city, but “we’d fight to the last man.” In fact, my only contact with mental illness, or at least, what I perceived as mental illness, in China has been this unusually regional affliction, something my mother, a therapist for 40 years, has informed me she has only encountered in the inmates of high-security prisons, and in her own father, a World War II veteran.

Considering what every Chinese person over the age of 40 has lived through, it might come as no surprise that some are haunted by the demons of the last sixty years. For the first half of the communist era, the country was run as if it was at war, and the people suffered accordingly. I won’t attempt to conjecture how many of China’s 100 million mentally ill are the way they are as a result of their experiences during the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, or the atrocities in the summer of ’89. What I do believe, however, is their suffering can be reduced. Unlike autism, Down’s syndrome, or dementia, the effects of post-traumatic stress can be alleviated in all but the most extreme cases with the so-called “talking cure.” But those who have had their mental faculties eroded by abuse at the hands of cadres, soldiers or neighbors are denied any respite by government policies which either falsify the past or attempt to conceal it altogether. Whereas the citizens of Germany have an open forum to discuss the excesses of Nazism, two World Wars, partition, and all the other horrors embedded in their national psyche, the Chinese have no such luxury, as the subjects that aren’t off-limits are so heavily restricted that the real scars, the genuine horrors, can never be truly acknowledged and, consequently, those whose minds have been destroyed in the name of politics and progress are abandoned to psychosis.

The saddest thing for me to see, however, is that this trend of concealing how damaging catastrophic loss can be shows no signs of abating. The tear-jerking coverage of the horrendous earthquakes that have ravaged Sichuan and Qinghai since 2008 does not focus on the victims – it relegates them neatly to casualty statistics. CCTV coverage revolves around the heroism of rescuers, exploiting the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and condensing it into Party PR sound bites, with no consideration of the need for people to heal through acknowledging and engaging with grief. Who wants to hoist a red flag and shake hands with Hu Jintao when their house has been flattened with their entire family inside of it? Like the Three Gorges Dam, the government bulldozes peoples’ memories in order to keep emotion off the table – emotion being the enemy of development. “Bring new ideas, leave old furniture,” went the slogan when millions were evicted from their homes to make way for dams, factories and highways in the 1980s. Nobody gave a thought to how the evictees might actually feel – because those carrying out the evictions had not experienced loss. To this day, journalists continue to posture, talking about their “sympathy” with those who have lost loved ones, failing spectacularly to see the utterly patronizing tone they adopt – how could anyone who hasn’t had a child crushed beneath fallen masonry ever understand how that feels? And when someone tries to help people grieve – for example, when Buddhist monks offer open-house counselling to those bereaved in Qinghai, or Ai Weiwei uses the schoolbags of dead children to create a poignant illustration of the immense losses in Sichuan, the government sweeps them aside, as if grieving solves nothing. It does. It offsets even greater psychological suffering down the road.

It is precisely this failure to engage – induced by a government attempting to manipulate the emotions they can’t eradicate – which provides a fertile breeding ground for mental illness. Only by engaging with the stresses of life – and death – can one hope to develop a healthy mental outlook. This may mean more short-term pain for everyone concerned, but the latent agony concealed within which inevitably bubbles over into full-blown psychosis, could be reduced, even eradicated, if China as a whole were allowed to face its past horrors, the horrors of the present, and the horrors yet to come. That the Chinese people are heroically resilient needs no further proof after the last six decades – but only a psychotic would think that they don’t have a natural need to grieve.

It seems that the seeds of the Jasmine Flower, the symbol of the Tunisian Revolution, have spread beyond the borders of the Middle East, wafting through the air and touching down in the Far East.

In Beijing on Sunday anonymous calls for protest sent across social media and micro-blogging sites resulted in a demonstration outside a McDonalds in the busy downtown shopping district of Wangfujing. By 2PM hundreds of police were on scene. 25-year-old Liu Xiaobai was apprehended for placing a jasmine flower in a planter in front of the McDonalds but was released after the commotion drew attention from photographers and journalists.

The call for protests originated from Boxun on Saturday (Feb. 19), a U.S. based Chinese community website, and listed thirteen major cities for demonstrations. Participants were urged to shout, “We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness.” On Saturday Boxun was attacked by hackers and subsequently formed a temporary site during this time period.

Word of the “Jasmine Revolution” induced authorities to block any mention of mass protests on internet portals as well as stop mass text messaging on cell phones. Heavy police presence was reported throughout major cities in China.

Online, reports stream in of increased police presence in Shenzhen subways. A skirmish outside a Starbucks in Shanghai lead to the detainment of three people. In Peking University students claimed that officials had urged them to avoid attending any protests. According to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, more than 100 activists in cities across China were taken away by police, confined to their homes or were missing.

Back in Wangfujing, the mix of police (as well as plainclothes officers) and protesters heightened tensions amid the bustling tourist spot. Many bystanders stopped to see what the commotion was about, believing a celebrity had stepped in for a bite. Others quietly acknowledged when asked if they were there to attend the protest.

On Saturday, Hu Jintao met with top leaders for a special “study session” in order to address lingering social problems which threaten harmony and stability in the Middle Kingdom. Of particular note were rising food and housing prices which continue to create public unrest. Hu also told senior officials to improve social services and improve management of information in order “to guide public opinion.”

All this continues in spite of increased crackdowns on human rights supporters recently, which to date has resulted in the arrest or detainment of 15 well-known lawyers and activists. According to the New York Times:

Several of them reached by phone, including Pu Zhiqiang and Xu Zhiyong, said they were in the company of security agents and unable to talk, while many others were unreachable on Sunday evening. Two of the men, Tang Jitian and Jiang Tianyong, remain missing.

Whether these calls for democratic reform will take root or fall on deaf ears in a country of 1.3 billion is yet to be seen. The sporadic incidents of Sunday are drops in the pond for a country so vast and diverse. Nevertheless, the comparisons to the Middle East are unavoidable. In a region where snipers are being dispatched to squelch dissent, let’s hope that the CCP can bear these atrocities in mind when dealing with their own citizens.

One person sitting in the McDonald’s after the brief protest in Beijing said he saw Sunday’s gathering as a dry run.

“Lots of people in here are Twitter users and came to watch like me,” said 42-year-old Hu Di. “Actually this didn’t have much organization, but it’s a chance to meet each other. It’s like preparing for the future.”

More photos of the protest.

But don’t worry, the Chinese government won’t let something like reality subvert their grand narrative. If netizens sow disbelief and discontent on the Internet, then the next logical step is to carefully police the Internet. And so we turn to the government’s treatment of the unrest in Egypt. Though news of the events are not blocked per se, the government has a clear idea of how they would like the events to be interpreted. According to the Christian Science Monitor:

“All media nationwide must use Xinhua’s reporting on the Egyptian riots,” read a directive issued last Friday, referring to the state run Xinhua news agency. “It is strictly forbidden to translate foreign media coverage,” the order said, warning that websites that did not censor comments about Egypt would be “shut down by force.”

Official media is instead focusing on the evacuation of Chinese nationals and hinting at the chaos that attempts at political reform can bring. As a result of this directive, microblogging sites like Sina and Sohu have banned searches with the word “Egypt.”  Any such search returns an ominous, “According to the laws in force, the results of your search cannot be given.”

One assumes that the Chinese government feels uneasy about the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt because they see more than just a little of themselves in the events there. Mass demonstrations against a corrupt, autocratic government led by popular uprisings sparked by unemployment and inflation. Tens of thousands of reform-minded demonstrators gathered in a square in the capital city surrounded by tanks. Sound familiar? Perhaps the Chinese government understands that these events are more than just echoes of their past, but could be scenes from their future if they are not careful.  (To be fair, one difference is that Egypt’s military has vowed not to fire on protesters.)

Though many similarities can be drawn between the governments of China and Egypt, the countries themselves remain vastly different. Even if all the news about Egypt were broadcast to Chinese citizens, I doubt there would be cause for immediate concern. The fact remains that many Chinese trust their government, or at least support it. Despite the increasingly severe social problems plaguing China, life has gotten better for the majority of citizens and very few would argue that regime change would benefit them at present. But if unadulterated news about Tunisia and Egypt, and more generally about political reform and human rights, were available to Chinese people, they might get ideas. Ideas about how a government should be responsible to its people and about how, even today, grassroots anger can incite change or even topple a government. The Communist Party, which turned an ideology into a revolution and a revolution into a country, knows exactly how dangerous ideas like that can be.

The CCP’s response to the events in Egypt brings their age-old political strategy—manufacture a narrative, prevent conflicting reports, and curtail discussion—into the 21st century. We are witnessing a government that is getting better and better at controlling the Internet, which is one of the few things that can threaten its power. As the protests began in Cairo, the Egyptian government blocked Twitter, which inflamed protesters and drew attention to the unrest. The Chinese government doesn’t have to worry about that—Twitter is already blocked and its Chinese clones are obediently practicing self-censorship. One thing’s for sure: the Chinese government will never allow a website to precipitate regime change (though I’d like to see Wikileaks try). On this last day in the year of the tiger, let’s pause for a second to reflect on how a single website promoting human interaction and the facilitating the transmission of information has become the greatest fear of oppressive governments. What a beautiful world we live in.

From 30-second “made in China” advertisements, to the spread of “national image” advertising, our country has already stepped into the “national public relations” age.  This means that China has become more confident and more willing to demonstrate its own “soft power.”

The photo attached to this blurb was a photoshopped array of athletes, intellectuals, and actors.  Ai Weiwei was not among them.

I’ve mentioned before that since the Cultural Revolution, China has perhaps undergone the most drastic and careful rebranding campaign in history but actions like the demolition of Ai Weiwei’s studio show the limits of China’s rebranding campaign.  The Chinese government can squelch unflattering or embarrassing news domestically, but internationally these gaffes and scandals are not only broadcast, they are relished.  International media would like to portray China as a nascent superpower with no consideration for human rights, which makes it dangerous, and China seems more than happy to play the part.  So you have to wonder, who is the public relations campaign for?  It seems that the government can only get native Chinese to believe its bullshit.  And even then, many in big cities harbor a healthy distrust of the government after years and years of scandals.

Ai Weiwei could have been a vehicle of soft power like those celebrities in my mobile paper.  He is perhaps the best-known Chinese artist outside China.  But his relentless activism got him put on the government’s naughty list.  Two years ago was he asked to build the studio in Shanghai, effectively an order from up-top, and last year he was told it was to be torn down, another order from up top.  The whole Kafkaesque situation belies not only the arbitrariness and capriciousness of the Chinese government, but the powerlessness of the people whose lives they treat as toys.

This, just two days after Beijing began the final phase of Olympic preparation: the even-odd car ban which reduced traffic above ground at the expense of creating chaos below; the use of Olympic car lanes which plunged regular lanes into traffic while leaving the Olympic ones completely empty; the stationing of two scent hounds and a metal detector at every entrance to terminal 3 at Beijing International Airport; the addition of three new subway lines—Line 10, Line 8, and the Airport Line; and the posting of Olympic volunteers in subway stations to assist confused tourists and laobaixing alike.

Do you feel safer?

The government’s campaign against anything remotely unsafe began early this year and has proven to be all-encompassing, touching on food safety, highway safety, the safety of venues outside Beijing, terrorism, and social and political dissidence.

Do you feel safer?

In June we saw the addition of X-ray machines in subway stops, but to this day the scans have been inconsistent.  Just the other day I was asked to scan my bag while entering Line 10 but when I boarded Line 2 in the afternoon with the same bag no one batted an eyelash.  As the Olympics near the scans could become more routine but right now the whole process seems haphazard, as if the guards were waiting for something to happen before they get serious.

After the attacks in Kunming, police reacted by setting up checkpoints on highways and tightening security at the airport and train terminal but somehow I doubt they will find the bomber, who was identified as “a short man in a black shirt and gray pants.”  Well, that narrows it down.

There are already checkpoints on roads entering Beijing, and airport and train security are as strict as they can be without being obtrusive, but is it enough?  There are too many people (not to mention men wearing gray pants) in China to search every single one, and even if you do, it will only create other logistical problems.  Imagine the lines at the subway if the estimated five million daily passengers during the Olympics all had to go through an X-ray and metal detector.  And yet, if you don’t do that, it would be trivial to smuggle in dangerous materials.  Somehow I’m not deterred by the signs depicting dynamite and guns behind a Ghostbusters circle-and-slash.

Sadly, people will do bad things if they have decided to; it’s just a question of timing and magnitude.  And the Chinese government, though I praise them for their effort, will ultimately be powerless to stop those who have it in their mind to destroy things, especially in small, anonymous attacks—unless they place X-rays and metal detectors at every bus stop around the city.

During the Olympics, the Chinese government has to keep people safe (if not for the people then for their own image), which almost always means tightening security, not taking chances, and limiting freedoms.  But after the Olympics, I hope that they will work on solving the problems that led to this anxiety.  You know what they are.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”  This implies that one can exchange liberty for safety, and so far, I’ve given up more than enough freedoms for the Olympics.  How come I don’t feel any safer?