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Xiaoqiang: China's First Web-Organized Protests

Andrew forwared me Xiao Qiang's article on AWSJ( THE ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL), "China's First Web-Organized Protests". Of course, it's about the anti-japan protests over China in last several weeks:

> From an organizational point of view, the Shanghai
> demonstration was a decentralized, bottom-up event, organized by
> taking advantage of the opportunities presented by digital
> communication technologies. Chinese authorities may have initially
> given the demonstrators some political space because it wanted to let
> out some of the virulent nationalistic steam. They may also have used
> this demonstration of Chinese "public opinion" as a lever to support
> Beijing's diplomatic goal of opposing Japan's bid for a seat on United
> Nations Security Council.
> But whatever political space the anti-Japan activists were
> initially given, the success of their technology-enabled protests now
> poses a serious challenge to the Chinese authorities' traditional
> mechanisms of social control. That was demonstrated by the failure of
> Shanghai authorities efforts to use such technology to dissuade
> students from attending the march. According to information posted on
> Chinese online bulletin boards and Web blogs, Shanghai authorities
> broadcast text and email messages in the run-up to the April 16
> protest reminding people that, "demonstrations must be approved ahead
> of time through proper application procedures." Numerous personal
> accounts of the April 16 march mentioned having received such messages
> or seeing them online.

Just in these two days, China gov tighten the control of internet to prevent from any callings on new protest. Yesterday, the spokesman of Minisry of Public Security warned that any online organizing or gossip on gathering are illegal. The official voices in these two days are mainly one point: all the people should keep stable as the first priority thing. It means that gov is worrying about the protest could evolve into anti-gov movement.

That's the myth in today's China. Gov wants to use civilian's protest to presssure on JP gov. They will also control the information to expose those only supportive to their policy and censor other opinions. Definitely, all the official media has been tamed to one tune already. They are trying a lot to do the same thing in cyberspace even with many so shortsight tricks. Anyway, it's obvious a mission impossible today, there rasied more reactions already in blogosphere(BBSs are totally controlled in these days), can be summaried into four types:

1. We common people can do nothing now, but only rely on gov
2. The gov is usefulless in solving the problem, they will eventually comprise and sacrifice people's benefit to keep their regime
3. The gov can do only limited things to reach real mutual understanding, the gap between people in the two countried will widen unavoidably
4. We won't trust the gov anymore, not just for this issue, many issues in this country are connected