China and the U.S. Internet May Break Apart

On Feb. 15, the U.S. government announced further research in tools for breaking the Great Firewall in order to push against China and other autocratic countries. The U.S. is launching a Cold War on the Internet.

The U.S. seems to be doing the right thing. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave an agitating speech on Feb. 15 stating that the U.S. advocates “absolute freedom” of the Internet, and views opponents as anti-democratic. However, the Americans have probably forgotten that when China first applied for Internet access, the U.S. used “political barrier” as an excuse, afraid that the socialist China would acquire information from the West. The U.S. has been selfish regarding this strategy for the last 20 years.

The Internet was invented by an American and, thus, is tailored to U.S. society. On the way to the non-Western world, the Internet has been blending in with local societies. The U.S. tries to control this blending-in to make the Internet a kind of power that reforms the non-Western world, or even “overthrows” their governments.

It’s no doubt that China and other non-Western countries are not enjoying the freedom of information as much as the U.S. This can be attributed to the society’s poor capacity for free information, something that China has been changing in the past 30 years with reform. China is no longer a country of the Iron Curtain; information freedom is the wish of the whole society and also a trend pushed by inner and exterior forces.

But China is still unable to remove all the firewalls. In fact, every country cannot ensure free flowing information, which shows that they are taking the safety of society very seriously. And after 9/11, the U.S. “Patriot Act” allowed the goverment to monitor all citizens’ activities, such as Internet surfing — proof that the U.S. is very far from honesty to be flaunting its information freedom.

The U.S. is challenging China’s national security with information technology, which will make China respond with temporary measures. Consequently, the development of the Internet will most likely be pulled in different direcitons. For example, Americans use Twitter while the Chinese use Micro-blog; Americans Google and the Chinese Baidu, and the distance between the two sides will widen.

And in the beginning, Americans may feel privileged by this diversification. But this will not go unchanged. China is developing very quickly and now has far more Internet users than the U.S., making its information volume expand dramatically. English information may be dominant on the Internet, but it is not playing the major role in Chinese lives and will not necessarily be leading us in the future.

The Chinese hate splitting. But if the U.S. forces it on us, we will have to take it. In the future, when China is capable of more freedom of information and the West rethinks the marginalization of the Chinese information market, the two sides will possibly reunite. And that will be a reunion based on bilateral respect for each other’s interests.

Some scholars say that when the U.S. exports its soft power, it is because hard power is not enough. In reality, the Internet is not as powerful as Secretary of State Clinton thought it would be. It’s only the last piece of hay that brought down the regimes of Egypt and Tunisia. China can’t get politically stable by merely controlling the Internet; likewise, the U.S. is unlikely to subvert the Chinese government as in what’s happening today in the Middle East.