> China and Russia are both (quite unique) examples of countries with an unfathomable degree of control over their citizens. It can be hard to grasp occasionally, coming from a western mindset but for the vast majority within said countries, the entire reality they see and what they believe to be true is heavily distorted--in that, it is defined by the vision of the oligarchy and information is carefully controlled to produce a desired set of beliefs. North Korea is an extreme caricature of this pattern.
Perhaps you ought to read the retracted preface from Animal Farm [1].
> [China] an unfathomable degree of control over their citizens
You obviously haven't been there. I think Chinese gov have the same level of control over its citizens as France: very erratic, sometime works well, some people try to play with fire, but overall the Chinese are all but lobotomized robots in the hands of a few puppet masters. There's over 500 strikes a year in China, not counting all the ones not big enough to be counted. I have seen streets of pedestrians walking against policemen, who were sweating of fear. Right now the prez is quite appreciated and trusted by the people, so he probably has some level of control, but this is earned by its fight against corruption, and not by some matrix-like brainwashing system.
You're misinterpreting the nature of control. Yes, there are protests, mostly because the government lets them happen. It helps people let off steam, it gives the government an indication of how people feel, and quite often there are conflicting interests which the Party can rise above (remember, government and the Party are not the same thing). So, often it's a bunch of workers protesting against a company, or a corrupt local official in one department - the Party can let that happen, and choose sides later when they've decided which way the wind is blowing. Policemen are shitting themselves because the Party mostly sides with the security apparatus but today they might let the protest get a bit wild if they want to allow the protesters a bit of leeway, and then those untrained, poorly equipped policemen will be screwed.
When stuff he Party doesn't like happens, they shut it down using methods you (on the whole) cannot do in France, the UK, and the U.S. Try introducing political censorship of material critical to Hollande. Try censoring books and courses in university. Try locking up journalists and writers (on tax evasion charges of course) when they say stuff you disagree with. Try rolling out the tanks when a protest gets out of hand. Etc.
So don't be fooled by the seemingly light hand of the gov - they've intentionally backed off from the Cultural Recolution level of control because they know that most people don't give a damn, and if left alone they will do nothing. How about an experiment - I'll hold up an anti government sign in front of the French parliament, and you do the same in Tiananmen Square and we'll see how much control the Chinese gov has ;)
"How about an experiment - I'll hold up an anti government sign in front of the French parliament, and you do the same in Tiananmen Square and we'll see how much control the Chinese gov has ;)"
Actually, i did just that 10 years ago, in front of the elysee ( white house french equivalent), alone, american style with my street sign ( although i didn't shout any sligan, i remained silent), and one policeman asked me my ID, went somewhere with it, gave it back to me, and told me to leave, saying "this is is not the US here".
But, yeah, nothing else happened. I wasn't beaten up or followed or spyed upon after that.
I don't think so. I am just taking the other angle, from the people's perspective, and want to debunk the cliche that Chinese people are easy to control. They've had much more revolutions than any other country in their long history. They're all but easy to control. In French we say "like boiling milk", which means they can easily and suddenly get out of control and wash out anything on their way. Just blocking a few topics on social network is certainly not enough. As for things that are allowed or forbidden, it seems more cultural than anything else: In China direct verbal confrontation is very rare, while it is very common in the West, and this holds in families, in companies and also at the country's level. Not very surprisingly, in France insulting the head of state is not forbidden, and even something like a national entertainment. However, in France we have laws telling people if they are allowed to work on Sundays, which seems extremely weird and borderline "totalitarian" to the Chinese, which believe people should be allowed to work whenever they need to or want to.
Also, when talking about China, it needs to be reminded that in fact the core Western values (i.e. Enlightment values) and the core Chinese values (i.e. Confucean values) are very similar, and quite compatible. (See how fast Chinese immigrants adapt to and adopt Western values.) For instance, secularism and religious tolerance, equality of rights and before the law, meritocracy, etc.
I think the world is going very badly these days, and a big chunk of it is in the hands of people whose values are really opposed to the core of modern humanist values, and this chunk is not China. We'd better team up and fight (with ideas, not with guns) what really threatens humanity as a whole. Just my thoughts.
I know what you mean in terms of "boiling milk" - in that respect I agree. I keep thinking these days of that old saying of China as a sleeping elephant; instead I think the people are the sleeping elephant. I think the government's strategy relies a lot on ignorance and apathy, but if even half of these stories we read as standard on NYTimes etc made it into the public consciousness, there would be huge issues.
About the laws - I guess it's not the actual content of the laws or relatively different values that illustrates control. Eg in your example about working on Sunday's - if you decided to fight one of those laws, you could do it openly and publicly and in principle it would be a fair fight. You might even embarrass the government or a political leader, but here there's so little chance of that - that's the different nature of the Communist Party control. The government/party has taken away avenues to legitimately discuss/debate/fight, so the options are either total apathy or explosive revolution. That's scary!
> if you decided to fight one of those laws, you could do it openly and publicly and in principle it would be a fair fight.
Yes, but here you may have assumed that "openly and publicly" is a precondition for fairness. I do not think openness and publicity of fights is the only way to get fairness. Or at least this can be discussed and we should allow that, on one side openness is often faked, on the other that private and closed tractations may to some extent result in a decision or in a law that is efficient and corresponds to the long term better good of the concerned people (i.e. what they would really choose if given all the elements, and not disturbed by red herrings)
For instance, if the governing elite is composed of ("extracted from") people from all parts of society, attracting the best of them with some good rewards (e.g. not money, but something like "good fame") and they collegially discuss important issues using the powers of associations, it could very well be a sane way to distillate the will of the people. Maybe even a saner way than ours (where representatives are elected from their good-looking face, this has been proven).
I don't know, I'm kind of skeptical of the ability of closed elites from anywhere doing things that are fair. We've seen the last few years how tightly linked elites in European/US societies have been evading tax responsibilities, trampling on constitutions or laws to spy on citizens, protecting those responsible for the 2008 crisis, fabricating evidence for various invasions etc. I just mean to say that temptation is too great - openness is too often a toothless tool, but it helps check those elites when their interests veer wildy away from the common good.
China is weird because it's so closed, and it's often tempting to say that the elites here are doing a pretty good job of doing what's best for the people. Until you read about how much money they are making personally from abusing their positions.
> but today they might let the protest get a bit wild if they want to allow the protesters a bit of leeway, and then those untrained, poorly equipped policemen will be screwed.
I'd say most often than not, when a government lets a protest get wild it's because they want to justify the harsh repression that's coming or at least that when the time comes for decision, they won't side with the protestors.
Or they're just in over their head but in that case, they don't let it get wild, they just loose control.
The HK protests were interesting recently for that reason - the protestors had the momentum, and the governments first reaction if it was mainland China would probably be to crush it. They let it boil over, and eventually the momentum was lost and anti-protestor sentiment took over. Whether that was by design or 'helped along' is another issue, but it showed how popular protests can sometimes just sour if left to their own devices.
Occupy Wall Street comes to mind as another example. NYC sentiment turned rather quickly against that movement once the public delectation, rape allegations and the inconvienient even caused by protestors started to boil over.
At university my friend was studying police tactics dealing with football hooligans and riots in the UK - they were slowly changing their tactics from full-on horse charges and batons waving to a very tai chi style light touch. Generally speaking the moderates would get bored and go home and then leave only the hardcore, who were then easier to identify and target. The light touch is a fantastic PR tool too because it shows any gov as tolerant and open.
I live in China, and I disagree with your statement, but I can understand why you think like that.
Usually when you reside in a country for a long time, you don't think the government as a whole, big, flat thing. The size of the it is gigantic, so that anything you do, you might be interacting with government at some level. I'm not judging this but giving you an image of what it's like living in China, salt, gas, newspaper, movies, all the crazy stuff, are controlled by different departments of government.
But here we are talking about the internet, the thing that Chinese government cannot control, they tried, they tried hard to stop people from accessing free, open internet, from playing foreign games, from using foreign softwares, but much of them were failed. There were years that Chinese Expansions of the World of Warcraft were years late than the rest of the world, and yet, Diablo III is still not public, the stated reasons were, erotic and violence content, on the other hand, there are more bizarre webgames on Chinese market, trolling millions of millions of money from players pocket, and of course they are poorly designed, some of them even has copyright infringement.
With this event (DDoSed Github),the message is quite clear, China wants to fork their own internet, for their own people. This is certainly a very high "degree of control over their citizens."
China is a huge place, and I would agree with your definition of "erratic control" in the context of various non-industrial provinces...
That said, the reality is that most of what you are referring to is representative of "controlled dissent." It's not "martial law" or some kind of truly orwellian mind-control scheme... it's just the product of very tightly controlling the country's written/perceived history, with a significant focus on nationalizing "information" (ie, parse everything that comes in and out of the country via digital channels).
Once you see the way they handle the lesser-publicized issues (ie, Uighur/Han unification, Tiananmen, and Taiwan), you begin to realize that they do have the power to whitewash history on a generational scale, and considering that (as you mentioned) they take a fairly lax enforcement approach toward the "general populous," I'm curious to know what perceived ideological threats their best and brightest are working to mitigate. And how many people have simply "disappeared."
Perhaps you ought to read the retracted preface from Animal Farm [1].
[1]: http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html