About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

As a pseudo-geek, my RSS Reader includes a subscription to the almighty TechCrunch, an influential blog that covers the internet and tech industry. I woke up today to an entry about Jason Calacanis retiring from blogging and now choosing to only write to a mailing list of about 1000 of his followers. In his first e-mail, he elaborates on this decision and criticizes a potential problem of blogging when it results in “trolls and haters” taking over the discussion:

Why should we all build our homes and give residence to the trolls under them? Comments on blogs inevitably implode, and we all accept it under the belief that “open is better!” Open is not better….We’ve put the wisdom of the deranged on the same level as the wisdom of the wise.

She too has felt the harsh mob mentality, also known as “the wisdom of the crowds.” For the record, crowds are really frackin’ stupid and to put your stock in crowds is about as bright as putting your faith in a dictator-they’ll love you for as long as they feel like it, then they’ll ripe[sic] you apart without mercy.

For some reason, reading this reminded me of what Kaiser Kuo¹ at Ogilvy Digital Watch wrote about China’s Facebook-clone Xiaonei² and their new open platform policies. Reflecting upon the legion of developers angry that Xiaonei’s “open” policies actually ended up NOT being so open and thus negatively affecting their plans for making money through Xiaonei, Kuo wrote:

Tangos³ suggests that there really isn’t a culture of openness, but rather one of control, with Chinese Internet companies, and I agree that’s the case. In this case this tendency is reinfoced by something even more basic to Chinese culture, Internet company or whatever: ruthless pragmatism.

Of course, Calacanis and Kuo are talking about two very different things. Calacanis supports his decision to exit the blogosphere by citing the degradation of dialogue in the face of capricious crowds. Kuo (and Tangos) attributes Xiaonei’s tight-fisted policies to a basic tendency in Chinese culture to regard control controlling your options and controlling how others should coexist with you whenever possible as being pragmatic.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Calacanis’ rationalization has a certain technocratic air about it, which is ironically reminiscent of the Chinese central government. Like Calacanis, the CCP government too doesn’t put much stock in crowds, especially crowds with “frackin’ stupid” ideas that aren’t government approved. Like Calacanis, the CCP government fears the crowds, regarding them suspiciously being one step away from becoming an uncontrollable mob ready to end their rule disrupt “social harmony” and tear apart the country.

Therein lies the complex rationalizations for the necessity of the Chinese central government to control the Chinese people, whether it means increased patriotic education for splittist TIbetans, suppressing grieving parents who lost their children in the Sichuan earthquake, or employing grassroots public relations specialists to shape public opinion with propagandic posts and comments throughout the internet. The Chinese government doesn’t need to show Tibetan young men cutting out chunks of ass-meat or show how the Weng’an mass riot was ultimately a 30,000-strong mob mobilized by rumors and lies. All they need is a video of Cantonese teenagers raping and beating up a single, naked girl and the ensuing public commotion to show that, yes, people are inherently evil, can’t be trusted, and will do really “frackin’ stupid” things when in groups, much less crowds and mobs. So, society needs government to control and control, itself, is a pragmatic necessity for the welfare and continued development of the Chinese nation.

China, like Calacanis, isn’t too keen on letting dissidents and westerners “trolls and haters” take over the discussion. After all, the last time it happened, China became a whore to Western imperialist powers. As a social, poltiical, and economic entity, a CCP-governed China will only be as open as it chooses to be. Just as Xiaonei not wanting to be OpenSocial, China doesn’t want to be a Western democracy. China’s unapologetic embrace of control, like Xiaonei, is about ruthless pragmatism, for good or for ill.

For most Chinese, society is ultimately inefficient, injustices happen, and there is no Holy God in the afterlife to give you your due. “Westerners,” ever confident and optimistic in their socio-political ideologies, often miss that. The concession that governmental control of society is necessary is certainly a defining characteristic of Chinese culture, a culture that has, for thousands of years, hoped for benevolent governance from enlightened individuals to guarantee the most basic right hope of being able to eat, sleep, and make babies in peace.

Of course, the other defining characteristic of Chinese culture is that it is always everyone else–and not oneself–that makes government control and other necessary evils, well, necessary.

Notes
¹ About the only other person in the world I know of that shares my name. Sucker.
² For those who don’t know, “Xiaonei” literally means “inside campus,” reminding us of Facebook originally being open only to university students, you know, before they made it big.
³ Now, “Tangos” is a cool name, far cooler than “Kaiser.” It has more “Spanish street brawler” and less “German world domination.”