Coffee, Tea or Freedom?

By Nicholas D. Kristof
New York Times Op-Ed

December 13, 2003

BEIJING.

Impressed by the boom in Internet chat rooms in China, I conducted an experiment this week to test the limits of free speech.

On several of these chat rooms I tried to post a message, in Chinese and seemingly from an ordinary Chinese, declaring, "Why is Prime Minister Wen Jiabao off in America kowtowing to the imperialists when he should be solving more important problems at home!"

That was censored. I tried again, posting a more subdued version - and, again, it was censored. So my third version was milder yet: "Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's visit to America has been very successful, but I wonder if perhaps he is wasting too much time abroad instead of focusing on our own important problems like unemployment."

That turned out to be what Chinese journalists call a cabianqiu, after the term for a Ping-Pong ball that just nicks the corner of the table: legal by a whisker. The censors didn't intervene, and I successfully posted that comment in three chat rooms.

So that's the frontier of free speech in China in the information age, and it reflects real progress. Sure, the thought police toss Internet dissidents in prison, with 66 Chinese journalists and Web scribblers currently behind bars, some facing torture and beatings. Still, this is pretty much the first time since the 1980's that the Chinese have had public forums in which they can (very delicately) criticize top national leaders by name.

China's new emperor, President Hu Jintao, is presiding over this twilight zone and trying hard - rather successfully - to convince the population that he's a new kind of leader. Most Chinese I talk to are very impressed by Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen, who project a humility and compassion very different from the pomposity of the former emperor, Jiang Zemin. My guess is that Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen would win a free election if it was offered. Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen are relentlessly photographed feeling the pain of the poor and the underdog. Most important, they have begun to address AIDS in a serious way.

Yet as I travel around China and talk to everyone from peasants to senior officials, I'm afraid the leaders' strategy will fail and ultimately lead to upheavals in the coming years. The reason is that China has always operated to some degree on fear, and that fear is now eroding. Chinese don't protest when they are most upset, but when they think they can get away with it: that has been true of every upheaval from the 1956 Hundred Flowers outpouring of complaints all the way to the Tiananmen Square democracy movement of 1989.

Ever since the Tiananmen movement was brutally crushed, China has been fairly stable because its leaders and its citizens have each been a bit afraid of the other. But the fear has steadily ebbed, and my guess is that henceforth fewer overtaxed peasants or laid-off workers will suffer in silence.

"This Mr. Nice Guy approach won't work," a senior government official warned. "You can't govern by pretending to be nice to everybody. You've got to make hard choices. You've got to maintain control."

China is not Communist any more. It increasingly resembles the kind of complex (and corrupt) society that led to turbulence in South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970's and 1980's. One window into the country's changing values came this fall when President Hu's daughter, Hu Haiqing, married one of the country's leading Internet capitalists, Mao Daolin, in Hawaii.

The government is simply losing control of China, which now has 78 million Internet surfers and 250 million mobile phones. It's true that the middle class now has a stake in the system and may be wary of Tiananmen-style mass movements, but there are also deep grievances, especially among peasants and laborers.

The decline of fear is welcome, of course, but it's also going to mean a bumpy road ahead. In a city in Manchuria, I stopped in a small restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee. The waiter asked whether I wanted Nescafé, Maxim coffee, Swiss coffee, Brazilian coffee, Blue Mountain coffee, mountain-grown coffee, mocha coffee, iced coffee or Italian cappuccino. I can't help feeling that when people get multiple choices in ordering a cup of coffee, it's only a matter of time before they demand choices in national politics.

So I think that the long calm that followed Tiananmen is ending. Exciting times are coming to China again.