Better information might have helped Marie

I’ve come to realize in recently having had my China visa renewed just how much more strict authorities have become in their dealings with foreign residents than in the past. Westerners that live here believe Chinese leniency for the sloppiness and/or laziness of Westerners ended as the 2008 Olympics approached. Now, with the leadership having steered the economy from the Scylla of global financial meltdown, it’s been bolder about the place of foreign investment in China. It sees no Charybdis.

Tom Friedman wrote recently in the New York Times that China’s government elite has a choice in whether it will permit its society to participate in the global Flow of information that will be the competitive fount for the 21-century’s innovative companies, or whether – by shutting Google down in the country – it will choose to close in on itself, so starving its home-grown companies from the vitality of ideas and perspectives circulating through the world wide web. Will the leadership be in-grown or grown-up?

I have very seldom seen leadership cliques surrender up power and wealth to forces they could not control, without first ensuring they would not lose the wealth they had accumulated and without making sure their power would dissipate into historic obsolescence. Usually, power-cliques that run companies and societies will sacrifice evolution  of the organization in favor of maintaining and consolidating power, if evolution means the new condition dissolves some of their power. Of course, we all say from the outside, “that’s suicidal.” “No organization wants to suicide.” The management of American corporations is based on this precept; hence, we allow listed companies to choose and pay for their own auditors; we imagine that the masters of the universe on Wall Street would never do anything to endanger the markets; and we believe societies would never attack other countries.And yet we have Enrons, Arthur Andersons, Wall Street, a couple of world wars and regional conflagrations that seem unending. The dissolution of apartheid in South Africa is one of the rare instances in the world in which the elite chose to devolve its power.

Consistently, when events come down to the power-clique deciding whether it should survive or its ward should evolve beyond it, the clique has chosen self-preservation. So, though I do believe the CCP and Google will actually come to a rapprochement during this round, I expect the powers that be to continue on the path its set itself to accrete wealth and power, and to consolidate it for the forseeable future, albeit more softly-softly than before.

Though China is nowhere close to melting itself down, the leadership’s entrenchment and refusal to diffuse power – even to its technology vanguard – can only lead to a China increasingly detached from the world.

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