THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 26, 1996 TAG: 9602220013
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 50 lines
The rulers of China have decided the Internet and electronic mail are a threat to their authority. They are cracking down. Users are required to register with the police within 30 days.
No doubt Chinese officials can make life miserable for dissidents, but they are trying to halt a tide. If recent history teaches anything, it teaches that Big Brother isn't what he used to be. Governments can't control access to information or its free flow in a decentralizing world. Mass media have been supplemented by personal media, and autocrats have got less chance of keeping a lid on.
Though the state controlled printing in the Soviet Union, manuscripts circulated underground. Desktop publishing has made every man a printer. The ayatollah circumvented the shah's control over information by flooding Iran with uncounted tape cassettes. Before the Berlin Wall came down, barriers to communication had fallen or had been breached. The world learned about an earlier Chinese crackdown through portable satellite dishes, faxes, phone lines and smuggled videotapes.
Now there's the Internet and e-mail. It's reported that 4.5 million personal computers are already in use in China. Millions more are on the way. Even if a censorial state wanted to monitor and control every message sent by its citizens, it would be as impossible to stifle every speed-of-light communication as to suppress every whisper.
The messages fly where they will by the millions. Hand-held video cameras can capture images, bounce them off satellites and beam them anywhere in the world, in real time. Crack down on the tools used for subversive talk and you doom your economy because the same computers, phone lines, faxes and video technology are essential to global electronic commerce. And the freer, more interconnected, well-wired societies have a competitive advantage over those where every exchange has to be approved by a higher-up.
This doesn't mean the day of the centralized bureaucracy or autocrat is over. The oppressive use of power will remain, but it won't be secret anymore and the regimes that turn the screws the tightest will grind to a halt the fastest.
Jefferson said he had ``sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.'' He wouldn't like what the Chinese are up to, but he'd like the Internet, welcome e-mail and applaud any tool that would help keep speech free. by CNB