Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

When the Austro-Hungarian Empire tried to erase the name Italy from the official maps of Europe, in order to legitimise its own rule there, the English essayist William Hazlitt wrote this:

"Go on, obliging creatures! Blot the light out of heaven, tarnish the blue sky with the blight and fog of despotism, deface and trample on the green earth; for while one trace of what is fair or lovely is left in the earth under our feet, or the sky over our heads, or in the mind of man that is within us, it will remain to mock your impotence and deformity"
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In other words, if you want to suppress the truth you have to do it ruthlessly and totally. Leave a shred of it and you look idiotic, and the masses of the people "mock your impotence". Tonight, on thousands of bulletin boards inside and outside the Chinese firewall, impotence is being .

The astonishing thing about Google's about-turn on self-censorship in China is not the move itself. Still less the fact that gmail accounts were hacked. It is that the crowd that gathered outside Google's Beijing HQ was sympathetic to Google and have actually been laying flowers. The last time a corporation got caught up in global criticism of China's human rights record it was Carrefour, which saw its supermarkets invaded by nationalist Chinese youth simply because the Olympic Torch procession was disrupted in France.

By contrast here is just one example of the reaction of Chinese netizens:

"Shut it down. TG [The government] already does whatever it wants.
Entering email boxes, deleting the account owners' emails...is tantamount to
entering someone else's company and kicking out the old customers. They [the company] can no longer do business, so of course they will want to leave. I ding you Google. Your name will go down in history."

The rising generation of Chinese youth is deeply attached to the rule of law and market principles and will see the cyber-attack on Google as just the latest in a string of government measures on the internet which flout these principles, which are incidentally also enshrined in the Chinese constitution.

But do not expect the goodwill to last. Even among some bloggers in China there is mistrust of Google for trying to, as one netizen says, "foist its ideology on China".

The background is a massive rise in low-level defiance of authority by Chinese netizens. You can get a great translated selection on the . Chinese youth have adopted a whole Rabelasian code to discuss sex on the internet; meanwhile mobile telephony has enabled two other gaps in the Great Firewall to open up - to porn and to surreptitious twittering about politics. In Orwell's 1984, you will remember, the heroine, Julia actually works in a Party-run porn factory. But today - in the west as well as the east - governments have lost control of this particular form of online discourse. Chinese young adults regularly mix risque discussions of sex with discussions of freedom. It's no big conspiracy - young people tend to be heavily interested in both phenomena.

In recent days China has launched a crackdown on porn, widely interpreted as a cypher for a wider crackdown on low-level anti-establishment conversations on the web. To give one example of how mild but at the same time canny Chinese netizens' discourse has become, last December netizens nominated the Chinese character for "blocked" as the key word of the year. Young people began to express that the internet phenomenon of content being blocked was also a metaphor for their own lives, which felt perpetually "blocked" - though few people then went on to say what by.

Before we condemn China for cracking down on web porn, anybody whose children use the Internet will be aware of how untrammeled and accessible porn is on the internet, and how readily Google serves it up to you from the most innocuous search terms. Google points out that it has upped the power of its safe search technology, but accepts its an area of concern.

But China's porn crackdown does seem to be a pretext: it has allowed them to introduce in swift succession a ban on individuals registering URLs; plus a warning to Chinese mobile phone users that their SMS services will be cut off if they upload porn. There is also the persistent monitoring of web cafes, and the reported 40,000 members of the Internet police who pro-actively take down content and post bogus content critical of the west and human rights campaigners. Since June, when Chinese state TV attacked Google for carrying porn results, Chinese netizens have been accusing the state-run TV news of siding with rival Chinese-owned search engine Baidu, which they point out has spent tens of billions in ad revenue with CCTV.

Is Google's response proportional? The attack on Google seems to have been what spooks call "humint" - that is it wasn't a hack of Google's own systems but malware allowing intelligence agents (or, yes of course a totally voluntary group of private individuals who suddenly decide to collect intel on the Chinese state's opponents) into Google's systems. It did, Google alleges, involve the theft of the company's own IP.

Google has felt harassed by the and initiatives but I read Google's immediate decision to start listing search results about Tiananmen, and threat to pull out of China, as a measure of how frustrated western businesses are becoming about operating in this state, which to call it what Hazlitt would have called it, is a one-party despotism where the rule of law barely exists.

As I write, for example, Chinese prosecutors are of Rio Tinto employees, one an Australian citizen, arrested on espionage charges coincidentally just after a Chinese attempt to buy a stake in Rio Tinto fell through. And read , for a micro-level account of what happens to entrepreneurs in a country where people in power are simply allowed to make things up, unchallenged by a free media, and unqueried by any kind of online democracy.

Whatever the outcome, and whatever the motivation, as Chinese netizens log on to do their nightly rants against the west, France, CNN, the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ, Amnesty Internatioanal, and - surreptitiously - the government, the CCP, police brutality, and nouveau rich airheads, one astonishing thing is becoming clear:

It is impossible for repressive regimes to close down information without closing down the functioning of modern society. This was the nightmare Orwell depicted in 1984, and of course remains the dream of the people currently running Iran and Burma.

But the Chinese state has just found out it is not possible. And in a popularity contest between the CCP and Google among urban Chinese youth, I would not like to bet on the winner.