China's Danger

After exactly seven days, which is the time when in Chinese tradition families usually get together and pray for the recent death, you cannot find any articles about the train crash on the front page or even anywhere of Chinese print publications or online media. Rumors say the Publicity Department is urging them to pull off all reports about the accident because it is destabilize the society. People on Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, are starting to cool down.Just two days ago, Weibo was full of mircoblogs about the accident. People retweets and comments about it. But now, only few of such exist. It is partly because life has to move on, partly because the large possibility that the government is taking some actions.

Angry is the key word. Online public are angry to the accident itself, to the way the government handled the rescue, to the attempt that the government wanted to cover the truth, and to the process of investigation. The Prime Minister Wen Jiabao held a press conference just two days ago, which is six days after the accident. Before that, no one from the central government has come out to take responsibility and say something to the angry and puzzled public. Even him, Mr. Wen has not explained everything. When reporters asked him questions like who placed the order to open the rail traffic without figuring out the cause of the problem, he did not answer it but just say that he and the President Hu Jintao placed saving lives at the first place. No one was satisfied with the press conference, but that's the best Chinese public can get.

Today, I accidently read an article from Foreign Policy about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong. The author Leon Aron anayzed many possible explanations about why the Soviet Union ended dramatically at that time. Bad economy? No. Outside pressure? No. It was because of the country is spiritual intolerable. Corruption, lack of self-empowerment, and long repressed people are the key forces that brought the Soviet Union down.

Since 1991, the international world has been pointing its target to China. If the big brother Soviet Union has left the Communist group, then China must be the next one. Even today, many scholars still believe that China's communist system will collapse, or it has been changing as China has adapted itself to a capitalistic market system, although China call it "socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics". The Party has been very cautious not to go down the same path as the Soviet Union by censoring the media and focusing on economy as many believe that porous economy was one of the main reasons that Soviet Union ended its history.

Chinese has been satisfied with the government and the country for the past two decades. The country's GDP growth is somewhere between 8% and10% almost every year since mid-1990s. As long as the economy is growing and people are satisfied with their income, there is no point to overthrow the government.

However, things are starting to change recently. One of the most striking issues is government corruption. This is not new for any country in the world. When there is power, there is corruption. The difference is that whether the political system is designed to eliminate the corruption. In China, there is no such system to effectively decrease corruption. Although there are certainly laws, rules, government departments to encounter corruption, the reality is that nothing is stopping corruption and the situation got worse to the extent that the conflict between the public and government cannot be reconciliated.

Thanks to the Internet and the power of online social networking sites, stories of conflicts between government officials and public has been leaking and spreading out. We see many of such stories coming out everyday. The government censors traditional media, but the trend of online networking seems unstoppable. However, nothing is more than commenting and retweeting. So far there has been no action taken place.

I see the same feelings among Chinese bloggers and the people from the Soviet Union. There are lacks of morality in both societies. One example Aron mentioned in his article is that a fruit seller upraised not because he was jobless, but because he was beaten by the authority after he went to talk to them about his problems. We see many similar stories in China. People have no where to go when they are in trouble. They should have been allowed seek help from the local government, but some people got threatened and even beated to death . That is why a whole family of six in Hunan province decided to suicide because their real estate license had been in detention for 15 years and they tried everything to get it back but in vain. So finally they went suicide just to get attention of the authority.

We have seen many similar stories happening every day in China. In the past, when people cannot get help from the local government, they usually go and visit the higher level. Now they do not need to travel all the way to the province capital or Beijing, not that it is effective to solve any problem; they go online to post their stories and cry for help. It is more influential to gain supports from online. And it has been proven that the public opinion online can make things different. Couple of months ago a young man Yao Jiaxin was driving a car and hit a woman. He got off the vehicle and saw the woman was memorizing the license place number. Not wanting to get in trouble, he killed the women by stabbing her several times. This story was widely spread online and people all expressed their anger toward this incident. Finally, Yao Jiaxin was executed with death penalty last month(see article from msnbc). Some lawyers stood out and say if there was no such public attention, he would have no be dead by now. The public attention brought pressure to the court and the authority, as it seems that not killing the young man would not appease the public.

From the big picture, it is actually a good sign for China. Internet, especially SNS, is acting as a platform so the public can discuss issues and take active parts. There was no such channel before because of the unique political system. Now Weibo, a lucrative business is shifting the country. Many celebrities are using it, which brings many fans and their friends. According to its website, there are more than 100 million users on Weibo now. The microblogs about the train crash alone are more than 10 millions, making it the top topic now. Media is censored, but people can talk about the real China on Weibo. Although Weibo is also censored, but the communication speed is so fast that manually deleting posts cannot make much difference.

Many people say China is getting ugly with so many unmoral things going on. It is not that China is now ugly, it has been ugly for decades but only until now people can read about them and talk about them. Truth has been always impended by censored traditional media. There are bad things about every country, and China is standing in front of a mirror and facing the reality. With this change, the Party has to adjust itself to the trend if the ruling party position has to be saved. Otherwise, there will be a moment when people cannot stand the country's corrupted system longer like the Soviet Union. An unstable China will eventually harmful to the world.