To China’s Censors, With Love What is it like to know the truth while trying to keep your countrymen ignorant? Bret Stephens
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323826704578354070931017596.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
I picture the Chinese hacker who spent part of last year perusing internal Wall Street Journal emails as a scrawny 23-year-old lieutenant with bad English, bad acne and a uniform that is a half-size too large for his frame. He works for a branch of the People’s Liberation Army known as Unit 61398. His office is a nondescript building near Datong Road in Shanghai.I call him Feng. I wonder what Feng does for fun.
I also have a mental picture of the censor who decides which articles or editions of The Wall Street Journal to ban in China. In my imagination she’s a matronly woman with good English named Mei. Mei works for CNPIEC—the state-owned China National Publications Import & Export Corporation—which has offices near Beijing’s Workers’ Stadium.
There’s a pond next to the stadium. I imagine Mei sometimes takes her lunch breaks on a bench by the water’s edge, quietly reading unredacted copies of Western publications.
The world knows about Unit 61398 thanks to a report last month by the Virginia-based Mandiant Corporation, which traced the source of many of the hacks into U.S. companies, including the Journal, to the Datong Road address. And the Journal knows CNPIEC’s censorship because we take note of what gets banned or torn out of our newspapers when they are distributed in China.
In 2006, a year’s worth of censorship amounted to eight articles being torn out of the paper. In 2012, the censorship was up more than 13-fold. Maps that treat Taiwan as a country: out. Articles critical of Beijing’s policies toward Tibetans or Uighurs: out. A review of two books about Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and the famine he caused: out. Articles about intrigues at the top level of the Communist Party: out.
ReutersThe building outside Shanghai that houses China’s secretive Unit 61398.
Also banned: an article about how Home DepotHD -0.07% is closing its remaining retail stores in China, after discovering that Chinese shoppers prefer “do it for me” over “do it yourself.” More mysteriously, an editorial we wrote last March about restructuring Greek debt, which didn’t even mention China, was also censored. I’m still scratching my head about that one.
What goes on in Mei’s mind when she decides what’s fit and unfit for her fellow Chinese citizens to read? And what was Feng thinking (before he was shut out of our servers) as he followed the back-and-forth of editors rewriting copy or settling on the next day’s lineup of articles?
In George Orwell’s “1984,” Winston Smith toiled away at the Ministry of Truth to make sure the narrative of the past always corresponded with the needs of the present. Feng and Mei are in a similar position: two low-level functionaries who know the truth. They know about the ill-gotten personal wealth of China’s leaders. They know about the rate at which China’s wealthy are withdrawing their money from the country. They know about the veracity of China’s official claim that it doesn’t hack into the servers of foreign corporations or steal proprietary data.
Knowing such things makes these two potential troublemakers, especially since they are in no position to benefit from what they know. A more careful regime than China’s would probably take care to kill them after a few years.
I’ve thought about Feng and Mei recently while reading “Is God Happy?” an outstanding collection of essays by the late Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. In a piece first published in 1983, “Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie,” he noted that no regime that seeks to manipulate reality to its purposes can ever hope to succeed.
“Even in the best of conditions,” Kolakowski wrote, “the massive process of forgery cannot be completed: it requires a large number of forgers who must understand the distinction between what is genuine and what is faked.”
Kolakowski pointed to another problem with the system. “The rulers of totalitarian countries wish, of course, to be truthfully informed, but time and again they fall prey, inevitably, to their own lies and suffer unexpected defeats. Entangled in a trap of their own making, they attempt awkward compromises between their own need for truthful information and the quasi-automatic operations of a system that produces lies for everyone, including the producers.”
Modern China is a far more sophisticated place than Yuri Andropov’s Russia, and in many ways a freer and more vibrant one. But that only makes the work Feng and Mei do less tenable. In a more totalitarian state, the relentless combination of terror and ideology makes it possible to sublimate reality for the sake of survival. That’s not so easily done in today’s China, where it can only produce cynicism.
Mei must have ideas of her own about what it means to keep the Chinese in greater ignorance than foreigners about what goes on in China. And Feng must also give an occasional thought to what it says about China that it should resort to so much spying and intellectual thievery to keep up in the world.
In thoughts like these there lies trouble for China’s government and redemption for its people. Enjoy your lunch break, Mei.
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