China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom

10. God in the Machine

172 10 God in the Machine In addition to fueling a rising tide of nationalism, China’s accelerated economic growth in the 1990s also ushered in the new Information Age. At the beginning of the decade there had been fewer than 7 million private, fixed-line telephone subscribers in all of China, with an additional 200,000 mobile phone users. By decade’s end, those numbers had jumped to 145 million and 78 million, respectively. By the same token, at the time of Deng’s southern tour in 1992, China had only six electronic mail systems , each with a maximum capacity of 3,000 e-mailboxes and no online data services. By 2000 the number of Internet users in China had jumped from a few thousand to more than 10 million. The first major breakthrough in China’s information revolution came with the arrival of telephone-based facsimile machines in the early 1980s. By the time student protests broke out in Beijing in the spring of 1989, fax machines had been installed at most university campuses and research institutes and were being used by media-savvy young dissidents in China and abroad to circumvent government censorship of the conventional media. Western journalists referred to this phenomenon as “seeking truth from fax”—a mocking wordplay on the popular slogan “seek truth from facts” (shishi qiushi), originally authored by Mao Zedong and later appropriated by Deng Xiaoping. But it was not until the late 1990s that the immense power of the new electronic media to mobilize and amplify the vox populi became apparent in China. Two incidents occurring a month apart in the spring of 1999 clearly demonstrated that power. In April mobile phones and Internet god in the machine 173 bulletin boards (BBS) were used to rally upwards of ten thousand supporters of the quasi-religious organization Falun Gong for a massive sitin at Zhongnanhai, protesting the Chinese government’s labeling of the group as a “fraudulent cult.” Visibly shaken by the sudden appearance of so many dissenting citizens, the government soon launched an intensive crackdown on the Falun Gong. A short time later, in the aftermath of the May 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing, youthful Chinese netizens, using chat rooms and electronic message boards as well as cell phones, mobilized tens of thousands of anti-American demonstrators in Beijing and elsewhere . After initially encouraging the highly emotional demonstrations, the government ended up calling for restraint in order to prevent an ugly situation from getting out of hand. Since those two incidents, the Chinese government has devoted a substantial amount of money and manpower to monitoring and regulating the content of the new electronic media. The results have been mixed: On at least three occasions since 2002, technogeeks affiliated with the outlawed Falun Gong have thumbed their noses at the Chinese authorities, using radio signals to successfully hijack satelliteTV transmissions beamed into China. My initial exposure to the world of Chinese information technology came in 1978, when I escorted the first U.S. National Academy of Engineering delegation on a visit to China. At that time, China’s computer industry was in its infancy. The very first homegrown Chinese data-processing machines were bulky vacuum-tube models, copied from Soviet prototypes procured in the 1950s. They were slow and cumbersome, generating papertape output. At several research facilities I visited in 1978, these massive, clattering mainframe machines were still in service, programmed to greet visitors with an electronic rendition of “The East is Red,” China’s national anthem. It was rather amusing to be serenaded by a room-size automaton, but it wasn’t clear at that point just what other, more practical uses these superannuated behemoths were being put to. In the late ’70s the technological leap from vacuum tubes to transistors , and thence to integrated circuits, stimulated the development of smaller, faster, more powerful computers. By the early 1980s a microcomputer boom was under way in China, coinciding with the introduction of Deng’s economic reforms and open policy. By the end of 1983 there were an estimated ten thousand computers in use throughout the country, mainly for data processing and for controlling programmable precision machine 174 god in the machine tools in the defense industry. Over the next three years China’s computer inventory jumped tenfold, largely as a result of a $200 million loan from the World Bank, which financed the import of tens of thousands of...