Big Brother China

If you've grown up in the US, then at some point in your educational career you've been made to read George Orwell's 1984 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Both of these fictions lay out a nightmarish dystopia from which its citizens are powerless to escape--and indeed--even unwilling to acknowledge. If you've ever thought such fantasies were the product of an overactive imagination, then you've never been to China.

Not to hate on The Middle Kingdom or anything (I may seem bias after the camera incident), but one will invariably see extreme censorship by the government in any developing country. It's simply a lot more obvious in a place with over 1.3 billion people. Throughout my one-and-a-half week stay in Shanghai, not once did I see or hear news about the outside world. Media censorship is outrageously apparent, and one is more likely to hear about a Chinese cow getting assaulted by a moped than 4,000 people dying after a cyclone in Myanmar.

Case in point: there was a blurb in Fortune magazine recently about the Beijing Weather Modification Office preparing rocket launchers full of silver iodide to fire into incoming clouds to flush out excess moisture so it won't rain on the main Olympic stadium. Now, I'm no meteorologist, but preliminary research indicates that the kind of cloud-seeding that China is intending to engage in is sketchy at best. Silver iodide can freeze the cloud's moisture, but the particles are so far apart that it's hard to guarantee precipitation unless a secondary event occurs (aka., the vertical motion of air).


Not to bore you with too much nerdiness, but this is just another example of China's attempts at control. Unsatisfied with censoring your television, radio, newspaper, and internet, Chinese officials have to go and screw with weather patterns too! What's next? Gravity? Maybe they can help really fat people lose weight (the solution is actually going to Shanghai. If you can gain weight after walking around and taking public transportation, then you are truly a hopeless case).

In fact, when I met up with my good friend Jason (who is on scholarship in Beijing), he told me that the local government already proposed ridiculous measures such as even- and odd-numbered license plate driving days and a completely new taxi service to take over only during the Olympics. Basically, the city is being overhauled and all non-Olympic foreigners are being kicked out of the country.

None of this is surprising, especially having been there once. What worries me is that the population at large doesn't much care. Of course there are the academics and the college students who may raise a small cry, but most people are so involved in day-to-day shopping and survival that they could care less about unfettered access to information. Nevertheless, it's the dangers that we aren't aware of which can prove the most insidious. Orwell was right: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."