Project for a New Chinese Century

By Aussiegirl

Max Boot tells you everything you ever needed to know about the future and China -- and more. Readers of UT will already be familiar with many of the points that he makes, nevertheless he pulls the entire picture together with marvelous insight. Here's just a smidge of the whole article -- but a vital one that I think is being overlooked -- the role of internet giants like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft in cooperating in the suppression of human rights in the interests of securing business deals in countries like China. This will be an emerging problem which will need to be dealt with seriously -- and possibly with legislation as the author recommends.

On this same subject, a blogger has been motivated by these events to start an internet boycott of Yahoo for revealing the name of a Chinese journalist who was then sentenced to a 10 year jail term for what he posted on his blog. If you are interested in the campaign and in learning more about this effort you can visit the site called BooYahoo. If you wish you can sign a petition or learn how to use alternate technologies if you presently use Yahoo and wish to make your disapproval known to them by boycotting their service.

Project for a New Chinese Century

Project for a New Chinese Century
Beijing plans for national greatness.
by Max Boot

[...]BEYOND CONTAINMENT, deterrence, and economic integration lies a strategy that the British never employed against either Germany or Japan--internal subversion. Sorry, the polite euphemisms are "democracy promotion" and "human rights protection," but these amount to the same thing: The freer China becomes, the less power the Communist oligarchy will enjoy.

The United States should aim to "Taiwanize" the mainland--to spread democracy through such steps as increased radio broadcasts and Internet postings. At the moment, Beijing does an effective job of censoring free speech with the unfortunate connivance of giant American companies, which in various ways agree not to expose Chinese consumers to such "subversive" concepts as democracy and human rights. American companies even help the security services nab people who dissent from the party line. Yahoo!, for instance, recently assisted the Chinese authorities in tracking down a journalist who dared to email information about censorship to a New York-based website. He got 10 years in prison. The U.S. Commerce Department and, if necessary, Congress should pass rules that forbid U.S. firms from facilitating human rights abuses in China.[emphasis added]

American technology should be used to crack open, not cement, the authority of the Communist party. The United States needs to step up spending for the Chinese service of the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other organizations that aim to penetrate the Bamboo Curtain. China does an effective job at the moment of jamming U.S. transmissions, so we need to develop technology to get around their censors. In 2004 Congress allocated $1 million for a trial grant to the Broadcasting Board of Governors for a project to circumvent Beijing's Internet controls. That work needs to be greatly expanded. As suggested by the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, we need to create an Office of Global Internet Freedom within the executive branch that would work on undermining government controls on the web not only in China but also in dictatorships from Cuba to Syria.

In general, the U.S. government should elevate the issue of human rights in our dealings with China. The State Department wrote in its most recent human rights report that the Chinese government's "human rights record remained poor, and the Government continued to commit numerous and serious abuses." The U.S. government should do much more to publicize and denounce such abuses. We need to champion Chinese dissidents, intellectuals, and political prisoners, and help make them as famous as Andrei Sakharov, Václav Havel, and Lech Walesa. There is no point in continuing to mute our criticisms in the vain hope that, in return, China will do something tangible to help stop the North Korean nuclear program; notwithstanding the much-ballyhooed six-party deal announced in early September in Beijing, there is still no sign of Beijing's cracking down on Pyongyang.