Why don’t you check your facts? No one was “run over by tanks” in Tiananmen Square. Thousands of people died and many more were injured, but there are multiple conflicting reports as to the total number of injured and how the violence proceeded. JD is right, Tiananmen Square can be considered a case of Western news report exaggerations.

I’d also like to see your sources about China employing “tens of thousands of people being paid to do nothing but make sure people aren’t saying things that the government doesn’t want them to say” .

And lastly, China’s not a “dictatorship”.

I certainly believe that China’s government was behind these attacks and that the censorship it employs must be stopped, but I think JD’s also right about Western news media exaggerations.

Really? We’re “proving their point”?

China’s government has a taskforce of tens of thousands of people being paid to do nothing but make sure people aren’t saying things that the government doesn’t want them to say. And you’re saying that their concern is “misinformation and rumors”?

Their concern is that they don’t like criticism and they don’t like open discourse.

As for the remark about Tiananmen square, do you deny that people were actually run over with tanks? Or was that just an “exaggeration”?

People are “China-bashing” because they are a heavy-handed dictatorship. Nothing horrifying about calling a spade a spade.

My point is that the blogosphere is indeed a vehicle for the type of misinformation and rumors that concern the PRC. This story itself is proving their point! We each have a responsibility, before spreading a meme, of establishing the evidence on which it is based.

The China link is plausible, but not yet proven. There are other theories which seem just as plausible. From the evidence in the public realm, you and I simply don’t yet know exactly what happened.

(Disclosure: I was horrified by Tiananmen in 1989, but have learned since how many Western news reports were exaggerations unsupported by fact. I’m now studying Chinese, have spent weeks at a time in the PRC, and am now horrified by much of the China-bashing I’m seeing in the blogosphere this week. I’ve got my own hot-buttons. Other people at Adobe have different histories.)

jd

Startlingly, your rush-to-judgment here itself lends weight to the PRC’s case that the Internet breeds confusion! With any blogosphere meme, it’s essential to establish “How do you know what you say you know?”

This is not based on ideology or a lack of respect for the durability of their hierarchical structures (whether rationalized via Confucianism’s “empire as family” or Communism’s actually very similar appeal).

The problem is the same all social organisms face when scaled beyond their origins in the Dunbar-sized organisms of our hunter-gatherer origins…

The loss of proximity (including, but not limited to physical proximity) between the hierarchically structured networks and networks-of-networks which were necessitated by the move to settled agriculture has facilitated Authoritarianism (and ultimately oligarchy) in virtually ALL civilizations…

Scale, isolation between networks and other quite natural forces promote a disconnection in world view between these networks. This is paradoxically also facilitated by a remarkable ability by humans in different social groups to either endure hardship or justify luxury as their natural state regardless of whichever of these worlds they happen to inhabit.

But these divergent rationalizations FAIL once this isolation is bridged… and it tends to fail rather spectacularly since it will generally be accompanied by a strong sense of betrayal.

ICT forms this necessary but perilous bridge. It shouldn’t and won’t go away.

So Authoritarian civilizations inevitably fail.

The only real question is the nature of the transition.

Information and Communication… I & C… are catalysts for volatile social awareness and reaction.

But CHANGE only comes with Capability.

Where none is available, ugly revolutions ensue.

SO, the miracle of ICT needs ANOTHER ICT…

ICT 2.0 = Influence Capability Technology

P.S. Re the ICT 2.0 horse I’m riding, the Individually-controlled/Commons-dedicated Account and it’s resultant network: In addition to its more obvious relationship to influence capabilities for individuals and groups, the overall structure ultimately has important potentials in relation to banking and the nature of exchange mechanisms more generally but that’s a longer discussion. I think an important one.

That position is not coherent to me. There are many nations whose governments are doing bad things that do not hold our debt. Why would you expect us to do any more about China than anyone else?

Today people seem to have a different opinion about the right of large companies (such as Google or FaceBook) to control information its users are willing to entrust them with. It seems like FaceBook is opening up, and it seems like Google and the US Government are aligned.

I cannot say much about China, because I don’t understand it (though I have many close friends who are Chinese — and I also believe that many of their philosophical viewpoints, though quite different than what is popular in the United States today, can certainly boast a longstanding legacy).

nmw