China Airborne (27 page)

Google was evicted from China in early 2010, and within a
year doing business over the Internet anywhere in the country became significantly harder. VPNs suddenly stopped working. The leading ones sent out messages to users in China suggesting new IP addresses to use, with new settings; almost immediately many of those were blocked as well. If you have used the Internet while in South Korea, Japan, or Singapore and then tried it from America, you know that the load time for Web pages in the United States seems shockingly slow. In countries with ubiquitous high-speed broadband, pages load practically as soon as they are selected. By comparison, the half second or so it might take for a complex page to load over a slow U.S. connection can seem an obstacle. In China, during the crackdown, you could wait five, ten, thirty seconds for a page to appear—if it appeared at all.

Google, with its range of services, was a special target, for obvious reasons. One study found that it took forty-four times longer for a Gmail screen to come up than the domestic Chinese system QQ, and eight times longer than Yahoo.
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The government’s Google-specific filtering and interference techniques became sophisticated enough that sometimes users would see a list of messages in their inbox or documents they had stored as “Google Apps,” but if they clicked to open a document or send a message they had been composing, the screen would freeze. Eventually it would display the message that in the rest of the world meant an actual connection failure but that in China usually meant that the firewall was at work: “The connection has been reset.” When I was grumbling during this period to a foreign tech expert who was on long-term assignment in China, he said that he had been wrestling with the same problem. “If I hadn’t spent years in this field, I’d never be able to reconfigure my home network in Beijing simply to connect to Gmail,” he told me.

And Google was in a better situation than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many other services, which much of the time were blocked altogether. “I have to say, Twitter, Facebook, Google Earth, and the rest didn’t do themselves any favors by telling the world they were responsible for Egypt and Tunisia,” a Western businessperson who had worked in China for decades told me during the Arab Spring. “What do you expect China’s response to be? You have given a gun to the hard-liners—not that there is any ‘soft-liner’ in the government, but you’re playing to the deepest fear of everyone in the government by saying there is a force outside China that they can’t control, and that will fundamentally change politics here. That, they will stop.”

Just after the disastrous 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I corresponded with a Western journalist who had returned to his home in Shanghai from the devastated areas of northern Japan, where he was reporting on the villages that had been obliterated and the families whose loved ones were still lost. The Japanese government was being criticized for not saying more, faster, about its problems, he pointed out—but then he drew the contrast with China. “One of the more helpful sites to those of us trying to get a sense of what might be happening at the stricken Daiichi Fukushima plant has been the Union of Concerned Scientists’ [site],” he wrote in a note. “The folks there have been almost unerringly—and depressingly—accurate in their postings. Yet upon returning home to Shanghai last night for a few days, I find that the site appears to be blocked here in China (though accessible through my usual proxy).” Then the real reflection on China: “Anyone care to speculate as to why
THIS
site would be blocked? What are they”—the Chinese government—“afraid of? Or is the answer simply that these days, they’re afraid of
EVERYTHING
 …”

For many puzzling events in China, like the variation in what laws are enforced in different parts of the country, or the varying messages about foreign policy coming from different branches of the government, I assume an “accident rather than conspiracy” explanation. Coordination is so difficult, divergences are so great; internal friction among rival or disconnected entities is often more significant than any concerted effort to deal with the outside world. But in this case, I came to believe the hypothesis that the Internet controls were a purposeful trial run, an experiment to learn exactly what it would take to close down the VPNs altogether if it came to an emergency. Indeed, I interviewed enough tech officials, from enough companies from enough different parts of the world, to be confident in a conclusion I generally resisted about China: that there was a deliberate plan to cut off all access, that it was being tested, and that it would certainly be used if conditions became tense enough.

“There is a widespread sense of anger and malaise among the foreign community here—myself included,” one long-time resident wrote me in an e-mail message. “I suspect it’s because this is a reminder that whatever rights we thought we enjoyed here were merely privileges, granted and rescinded by the government.” A prominent blogger in China sent out this tweet (using a VPN to escape firewall controls) in the summer of 2011: “Anyone bullish about China should come and try to use the Internet here.” Or to put it as the head of an American Internet company did in an e-mail to me during the crackdown, “Ultimately, if they want to take the country’s Internet connections ‘Third Word,’ none of us can prevent that.”

One of China’s main nationalist papers,
Global Times
, has argued that China needed special consideration and understanding in circumstances like these. It was still too early to unleash the full power of free communications on the society. “The Internet has broken China’s previous social calm, and forced society to proceed hurriedly in respect of issues like democracy,” the official English version of the editorial said. A few weeks later, the same paper argued that since the Pentagon was shifting the international battlefield onto the Internet, the Chinese government had no sane alternative but to exercise its own controls to defend China’s national security.
⁸
The
People’s Daily
chimed in around the same time, “Chinese people fear turbulence and worry about being led into troubles and so they ardently hope for stability, harmony and peace.”
⁹

This was putting a proudly nationalistic gloss on the idea that there was a time and place for each stage of development, and that the proper time had not yet come for Chinese people to choose and filter information on their own. Opinion polls in China, for what they are worth, suggest that many people were indeed comforted by the government’s role in shielding them from dangerous views. But I know there are people who feel infantilized and diminished by this reminder that they’re not quite part of the modern world. I know because I’ve met many of them. Students at universities seemed dutiful rather than sincere in explaining that they didn’t really miss much by using the Baidu search engine instead of Google. “They are kind of embarrassed,” one tech expert said at a program in Bejing in
2011. “It suggests a kind of second-rateism for the country, even now.”

In an interview with a Chinese Web site in 2011,
¹⁰
Richard Parris, an Australian Internet-technologist living in Beijing, pointed out that the number of Chinese people directly affected by Internet censorship was relatively small. But he argued that the restrictions had a disproportionately large effect on the country and its potential. The small group directly inconvenienced constituted a large share of those Chinese with ambitions to operate at the highest level of scholarship, scientific research, technical innovation, and other elements of truly first-rate international activity. Among others, they would likely include those with the greatest ambitions to learn from and compete with the world’s best in aerospace or other advanced high-tech fields. “This is a younger, more Internet-literate group, more likely to have a friend overseas with a Facebook account,” Parris said. “Or a new colleague who can’t
believe
that they can’t get on their Facebook account in China.”

Hip and worldly young Chinese might be embarrassed in front of their foreign friends by these remnants of backwardness, Parris said. But the real damage to the country was that in any line of work that depended on international communication, “there was a sense that this could make China second-rate. If you’re an Internet professional,
this is not the place you’ll want to work
if you want to be competing with the best. This will still be a place where people can make money. But they will go to Silicon Valley—or India” (or other countries he could have mentioned) “to be part of real innovation” in modern fields like infotech, biotech, and aerospace.

“I feel so sorry for China’s scientists, engineers, and artists in all of this,” a foreign friend of mine who has worked for years as a musician in Beijing told me during the Jasmine crackdowns.
“Just at the moment that should be their ‘coming out,’ which happens by sheer luck to coincide with the blossoming of the Internet as the very fabric and medium of the scientific and artistic worlds at large, they have these additional handcuffs slapped on them by their own government. They have plenty enough access to the Internet to know how important it is, but just enough obstacles to prevent them from joining and taking advantage of it all.”

Or, as another correspondent suggested in an e-mail exchange, “What country ever rode to preeminence by fighting the reigning technology of the time? Did the Brits ban steam?”

China’s universities are at the heart of this transformation. If they can flourish and mature, almost anything will be possible, including eventual world leadership in aerospace. If they cannot, it will be a sign of larger obstacles to the country’s emergence. The outsized share of the world’s top research universities is one of the three American advantages hardest for any other country to match. (The others: openness to large-scale flow of immigrant talent, and an even more outsized share of world military power. Of course, the first two build greater strength in the long run; the third threatens to sap it.)

The news that the outside world receives about China’s output of cars, computers, buildings, and high-speed trains applies to China’s approach to higher education as well. Huge amounts of money are being spent; classrooms and laboratories are being equipped at record speeds; larger and larger cohorts of graduates are being tested, trained, and prepared for their own success and their nation’s. “In twenty-five years, only a generation’s time,
these universities could rival the Ivy League,” Richard Levin, the president of Yale, said in a speech at the Royal Society in London in 2010, referring to India’s ambitions as well as China’s. “This is an audacious agenda, but China, in particular, has the will and resources that make it feasible.”
¹¹
Soon thereafter, the Royal Society issued its own report on national trends in scientific research, which had a similarly cautionary and awestruck tone. A BBC summary of the report said that “China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013—far earlier than expected.”
¹²
Also that fall, a report in
The Telegraph
in England was headlined, “China: The Ultimate Brain Drain?”
¹³
During his time as leader of one of the world’s great universities, Levin has placed special emphasis on developing ties with students and institutions within China and has visited the country often. When I asked him in Beijing just before the 2008 Olympics whether it would be possible to create a first-rate academic system within a political and media environment as closed as China’s, his response was immediate and positive. “Sure,” he said. “The Soviet Union did it.” He went on to argue that a surprisingly large share of the curriculum of a leading international university could fit and flourish even within the confines of modern Chinese controls. Certainly in math and sciences, engineering, music, and some other liberal-arts fields, the universities of the Soviet era were strong; and today’s China is far less sweepingly totalitarian than the Soviet system was even in its reform era.

Yet by the time the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc nations were as short on the broader cultural and intellectual achievements that great universities both promote and symbolize as they were on high-tech consumer goods. Universities become great by attracting the best scholars and the
best students from around the world. Few of the world’s most sought-after candidates were competing for places at universities in Leningrad or Warsaw. Few ambitious graduate students or aspiring inventors who had a choice of where to live chose to live in or move to the Soviet bloc to realize their dreams.

China’s situation is obviously more promising than the Soviet Union’s, and it is already more attractive to students and teachers who want to be part of the excitement that is modern Chinese life. But the culture of China’s educational and research establishment symbolizes some of the country’s problems now, and a change in that culture would be significant.