Hey Kaiser - I spent a few minutes looking around for the writing you allude to about some level of censorship being necessary in China, but didn't find anything that seemed quite right. Can you link to one of the pieces you have in mind? Would love to read more.
There's that piece I wrote on China's internet at 30, just a few weeks ago; and various answers on Quora that I've given over the years. Basically my argument was that while in China, civil society and the public sphere, as well as institutions of political restraint that we take very much for granted in the West, simply never developed. The reasons for this are many, of course, and countless volumes of history and political theory have been written to try and explain why. The assumption in the West, where we tend to see such things as inevitable, proper milestones along the march toward the Enlightenment and the triumph of liberal democracy, is that we're on the "normal" path. I see this path as, instead, the very fortunate outcome of historical happenstance: the more "normal" reality, alas, is the one most of the world languished in for nearly the entirety of human existence. Western European countries and their colonial offshoots were fortunate: in the U.S., in particular, we enshrined values of free expression, a free press, and other rights in the great founding document, the Constitution and its marvelous bill of rights. But this was created in a time when information moved at the speed of a horse, where printing was still slow and laborious, where literacy rates were low. The political culture developed in this context, and Americans (and other westerners, eventually) would have the luxury of acclimating as technologies advanced. And even so there were many times when these privileges were nearly lost. Contrast this with China, where there was no such political culture and not even a meaningful public sphere — not until the advent of the internet. And we're now in a time when over a billion Chinese people have in their pockets and purses a device that can send almost limitless amounts of text, or audio, or even high-def video, around the world almost instantaneously, with mere years and not centuries to acclimate, to develop a political culture accepting of the cut-and-thrust of public debate. I've argued that in such circumstances, some level of censorship is prudent and sensible.
Hey Kaiser - I spent a few minutes looking around for the writing you allude to about some level of censorship being necessary in China, but didn't find anything that seemed quite right. Can you link to one of the pieces you have in mind? Would love to read more.
There's that piece I wrote on China's internet at 30, just a few weeks ago; and various answers on Quora that I've given over the years. Basically my argument was that while in China, civil society and the public sphere, as well as institutions of political restraint that we take very much for granted in the West, simply never developed. The reasons for this are many, of course, and countless volumes of history and political theory have been written to try and explain why. The assumption in the West, where we tend to see such things as inevitable, proper milestones along the march toward the Enlightenment and the triumph of liberal democracy, is that we're on the "normal" path. I see this path as, instead, the very fortunate outcome of historical happenstance: the more "normal" reality, alas, is the one most of the world languished in for nearly the entirety of human existence. Western European countries and their colonial offshoots were fortunate: in the U.S., in particular, we enshrined values of free expression, a free press, and other rights in the great founding document, the Constitution and its marvelous bill of rights. But this was created in a time when information moved at the speed of a horse, where printing was still slow and laborious, where literacy rates were low. The political culture developed in this context, and Americans (and other westerners, eventually) would have the luxury of acclimating as technologies advanced. And even so there were many times when these privileges were nearly lost. Contrast this with China, where there was no such political culture and not even a meaningful public sphere — not until the advent of the internet. And we're now in a time when over a billion Chinese people have in their pockets and purses a device that can send almost limitless amounts of text, or audio, or even high-def video, around the world almost instantaneously, with mere years and not centuries to acclimate, to develop a political culture accepting of the cut-and-thrust of public debate. I've argued that in such circumstances, some level of censorship is prudent and sensible.