24 { China’s Quest
Islamic dictators rose in 2009 for democracy. Uprisings across the Arab world
beginning in 2011—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—shook a region long
immune to democratic politics. The point is not that liberal democracy will
work in any, let alone all, of these countries. The point, rather, is that liberal
ideals are extremely attractive in today’s world.
Underpinning this global contagion of liberal ideas was modern technol-
ogy: jet airplanes, leading to mass tourism and foreign study; fax, photocopy-
ing machines, and digital printers; satellite communication, cell phones, and
text messaging; video cameras and then digital photography; and contain-
erization and the deepening of global economic flows. The most powerful of
these new technologies was the internet and the world wide web. This revolu-
tionary technology came of age just as the CCP was buckling down after June
1989 to counter “peaceful evolution” from “the West.” It was in the late 1980s
that the first commercial internet service providers appeared in the United
States and Britain. The US military internet system, which had hosted and
nurtured the internet since the 1960s, was decommissioned in 1990, and rapid
proliferation of private, commercial internet service providers followed. By
the mid-1990s, the internet revolution was well under way. Web-based blogs,
chat groups, social networking, online shopping, and distribution of all sorts
of hypertext documents expanded rapidly. Powerful new forms of organiza-
tion and distribution of information that circumvented many forms of state
control became available.
These technologies undermined the monopoly on information that had
historically bolstered Leninist dictatorships. Pursuit of wealth and power, the
old Chinese nationalist quest, made disengagement from this new technology
impossible, but continued engagement with it carried great dangers for the
legitimacy and stability of the CCP’s Leninist system of rule.
Another factor feeding CCP fear in the post-1989 period was America’s
increasing propensity to concern itself with China’s internal governance, or—
even more dangerous for the CCP—the inclination of the US government to
go beyond words and act on the basis of its opinions. During the Cold War,
the awesome geopolitical imperative of countering the USSR had limited the
US inclination to criticize China’s grievous human rights shortcomings. After
the end of the Cold War, that restraint was gone, freeing Americans and their
elected representatives to concern themselves with China’s domestic failings.
The stark contrast between the nonviolent transitions from communist rule
in Eastern Europe and the violent communist repression of demands for
freedom in China further encouraged US concern with China’s continuing
repressive political arrangements—about dissidents and political prisoners,
conditions in Tibet and Xinjiang and in prison camps, workers’ rights, reli-
gious groups, and environmental issues.
The liberal-minded United States also occupied a position of immense,
indeed unparalleled, global power. The major global rival of the United