The Anti-Midas
Recently, a student of mine said during an TOEFL simulation that surfing the Internet was one of his hobbies. Curious, I asked what he liked to read. "News, blogs, politics, et cetera," he said, adding that he reads foreign sites in order to improve his English. The previous year, he had lived in Battle Creek, Michigan as a foreign exchange student, so intrigued I decided to ask him a fairly loaded question: what did he think about the Chinese firewall? For those of you unfamiliar with the term "firewall", it refers to the practice by the Chinese government of banning certain "sensitive" websites from public consumption. When one tries to load a firewalled page, a short message appears informing you that the page can not be loaded- no different from the message you get when your internet connection isn't working. The firewall affects many political sites in both English and Chinese, and is a perennial source of frustration for internet-savvy foreigners in China.
"Ah," he said when I asked him for this thoughts, "why do you Americans always want to know about this? It just isn't that big of a deal. You can always work around it."
His answer interested me for the simple reason that he made no qualitative judgment about the firewall at all. He simply chafed at being reminded of it by Americans. I wondered whether privately- or amongst other internet savvy Chinese people- he feels the same as I do about the firewall. Perhaps, but perhaps not. In any case, his response elicited two thoughts from me in trying to understand what he meant.
First, one explanation for his indifference toward the firewall is that as a Chinese person, he doesn't have the cultural understanding that free speech is an inalienable right. For example, if a group of Americans decided to meet and form a government, say on a desert island somewhere, you would expect almost all of them would agree on having elections, free speech, a free press, and the freedom of religion. These cultural values, or political values I should say, are accepted by broad swaths of the American polity.
Would a group of Chinese, if similarly stranded on an island, do the same? It could very well be that for the Chinese, social harmony and stability are core political values that trump freedom of expression and individuality. From this perspective, an internet firewall merely protects people from potentially harmful and disruptive material, and its abrogation of individual human rights are of secondary importance.
A second explanation might be what I call the "anti-Midas" effect. In a reference to the greedy king whose very touch transformed all objects into gold, could my students' reaction simply be a reflex against unwanted American criticism of China? The Chinese may share the same political values as Americans yet do not want foreigners meddling into their affairs, such as the recent Western focus on human rights. A Chinese might say to a countryman that he supports democratic reform, but he might not admit these beliefs to his American friend.
Both explanations are plausible, and I suspect the true answer combines elements from each. In any event, one cannot deny that Chinese and Americans have vastly different perspectives toward issues that might, on the surface, seem to be universal.
This belief- that American political values are universal- has been the foundation of President Bush's post 9/11 foreign policy. The Iraq War was a gamble that not only do Iraqis share American values, but they'd also welcome an occupation by said Americans who ostensibly would help them. Events in the past four years have thrown water on this proposition, but if anything, recent saber rattling toward Iran confirms that several influential people think invading Iran and installing a Western-style democracy there would be a successful mission for the reason that several Iranians are sick of the mullahs and would like a more modern political system.
If anything, recent history (and Chinese history over the past century or so) proves that while political values might be important, the desire to be free from foreign meddling seems to be the largest factor in shaping peoples perception on matters like free speech. I hope the next American President is aware of this not only in his (her?) dealings with China but with those throughout the world.
