On the Soapbox

To expect people on Slashdot to understand a topic and to be able comment on it intelligently is, well, dumb, and reading some of the comments that people posted to the Slashdot article about the Chinese anti-censorship letter just reinforced that. I guess most people do not really understand what this is all about. In any case, I am reposting in this blog a (revised) comment that I posted on Slashdot about this:

1. A government for a country of that size is not monolithic. For example, it would be foolish to say that everyone in the American government is in favor of having troops in Iraq: there are a lot of senators who are not happy at all. Likewise, the Chinese government has various factions. Because there is only one political party in China, political differences are expressed in the form of intra-party factionalism (whereas in the West, it is normally expressed in the form of different parties, though there is also a lot of intra-party factionalism as well). A lot of this in-fighting also happens privately, so many are not aware of it. As such, the casual observer would think that the Chinese government was a Borgish collective of identical viewpoints when it really is not.
2. This letter was written by what NPR news describes as the "liberal wing" of the party and can be considered to be more or less a dissident voice. Such opinions are not new in China, and if you ever go there, you will notice that a lot of people will express these views (Chinese brainwashing is not 100% effective), except that they will express them privately, and you never hear about it in the media. I was personally very surprised that this letter was published. These folks are sufficiently powerful and well-connected that they are able to dissent like this.
3. I think that their target audience is the Chinese people and the rest of the government. You have to understand that the appeal of the Chinese Revolution was that the old government was corrupt and abusive, and there are many Chinese who have not forgotten that and who are well aware of the irony that China threw out an abusive government and replaced it with another abusive one.

So I would not view this as some sort of public press release (that was earlier today, when they justified censorship on grounds of "pornography", which is BS). The earlier announcement today would be like Bush telling the U.N. why we need troops in Iraq. This letter would be like the Democrats grumbling about Bush putting those troops in Iraq.