New York Daily News - Stanley Crouch - Stanley Crouch: Free speech will win

New York Daily News - Stanley Crouch - Stanley Crouch: Free speech will winFree speech will win

Tech renaissance forces the East to take a far West turn

The problem that faces the Chinese at the moment is how the issue of free speech and free access will be resolved in the face of extraordinarily sophisticated technology.

It seems now that the Chinese have underestimated the power of information and the addiction to varied perspectives that it can create in the masses once they have been exposed to even the smallest amount of it.

This was not always true.

Once upon a time, it was clearly understood that information was the enemy of any regime built on repression.

Totalitarian leaders dared not be compared with the supposed decadent exploitation of the capitalist world.

When Soviet officials could no longer keep information out because those who were supposed to maintain revolutionary morale began to do international work that required travel, they started to see how far their Marxist state was falling behind the West. Then, morale began to fade, and cynicism and disregard began to build. That has not yet happened to the Chinese, but it will come down in its own way, and we can be sure that way will be the result of information.

We now see elected officials in Washington getting all bent out of shape because Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco are willing to submit to the Chinese demand for censorship in order to gain access to what is becoming perhaps the biggest single market in the world.

Such is capitalism, or the most basic and crude version of it.

Right now, it is quite easy to see that big Internet companies submitting to totalitarian demands must deepen the contempt the purist Chinese Marxists have for capitalism and the ease and the speed with which it will set aside its principles to make a buck. But what the Chinese President Hu Jintao must realize is that you threaten the order if you let even a little air in. Never lift your foot off of the people's neck; they will then become obsessed with standing up. Some already are standing up. Uh-oh.

For now, the Chinese seem to believe that they can manhandle capitalism, bending its rules of conduct whichever way they want, and duck the Western blues by making money with one hand but repressing free speech and access to information with the other. That will only work for so long. As one writer, Taylor Dinerman, said to me, "The Chinese people can get access to whatever they want through their satellite phones and have been able to do so for at least seven years."

In other words, it is all or nothing at all. Eventually, if they are lucky, the Chinese will be in the same struggle that we find ourselves in: how to keep at bay the overweening decadence of immeasurable pornography, misogyny, narcissism and all of those appetites satisfied by ever-cheaper thrills. That, as much as anything else, is what comes with our technology. It offers the same beauty and the same horror to the entire world.

Originally published on February 16, 2006