China’s government is hunting down signatories of the Charter 08 reform manifesto and upgrading its internet censorship software to allow the authorities to identify and suppress dissent much earlier and efficiently.
Nearly 7,000 intellectuals, farmers, students, journalists, and activists have endorsed Charter 08, modeled after the Czechoslovakian dissidents Charter 77, which warns of “the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions” in the absence of democratic reform.
The communist authorities appear hypersensitive to the risk of unrest as widespread lay-offs and declining economic growth, fearing that economic insecurity could lead the charter to become a rallying call for unemployed graduates.
Bao Tong, a former top Communist Party official jailed for seven years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, signed the charter as “a citizen”. “Would the powers-that-be please tell 1.3 billion people why freedom is a crime?” he wrote recently.
Senior government officials have expressed concern that high unemployment among migrant workers could foment further unrest and instability in 2009, a year in which the ruling Communist party celebrates 60 years in power, while dissidents and democrats will seek to highlight the 90th anniversary of the 4th May protest movement or Chinese Enlightenment and the 4th June 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
China’s internet police are using state-of-the-art internet spying technology to pre-empt criticism and manage public opinion, according to the country’s leading provider of search technology.
Officials are under huge pressure following recent events like the Sichuan earthquake, the Olympics, and the economic crisis, He Zhaohui, marketing manager at TRS, told the Financial Times. “Among those working in the news and propaganda in China the heart attack rate is highest,” he said.
The Communist regime has based its legitimacy on its performance in delivering sustained economic growth and improved living standards rather than on a discredited marxist-leninist ideology. For that reason, analysts suggest, it is acutely sensitive to the political implications of the current economic crisis and is consequently wary of any calls for reform.
“The Party apparently thinks–probably correctly–that further economic reform would threaten the country’s authoritarian system, so the Party will not sponsor much more change,” writes Gordon G. Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China.”So it should come as no surprise that this slow-or-no-reform period coincides with a time of political retrenchment.”
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