Please go read this fascinating post about the government’s digital sequestration of Xinjiang, a phenomenon that stands as a kind of case study of just how deeply the weak-kneed CCP fears any spark that might ignite the tinderbox of public opinion.

One snip about when it might end:

Here is the million-dollar question. If you ask 10 different people in Urumqi when the internet should turn back on you’re likely to get 10 different answers. The list ranges from the 1st of the year to somewhere in the middle of next year but everybody readily admits they’re not for sure.

Until a couple of weeks ago I would have been hesitant to answer this question, but a friend I trust passed along some interesting information that has given me the boldness to make my own predictions. According to some memos sent between the capital and the head office of our city’s main telecom provider, service is expected to open up during the May holiday of 2010.

There you have it. I’ve bet my money and made my prediction. This is just the halfway point…we have another 5 months to go. Of course, being wrong won’t make me sad if it’s sooner rather than later.

A sad situation, and a vivid reminder of how some things haven’t changed all that much. For all its enlightenment and reform, the party remains prickly and paranoid. Imagine any other great power blocking out the Internet in areas where there is turmoil….

And yes, I know, America has done bad things, too, and killed Indians. But I’m talking now about China. And for China, this is a sad episode, a sign of an inherent weakness and lack of confidence, despite the party’s strength and staying power, which I’ve also written about at length recently.

Just so you know, my friend Lisa is traveling through China at the moment and doing an amazing job documenting her trip in words and pictures. Go to Paper Tiger Tail and keep scrolling. Beautiful writing, beautiful trip.

There are some wildly divergent schools of thought on China’s economy, as you can see in this new post by my friend Dror (with whom I disagree on a lot of things). He blasts the rosy scenarios in some Western media claiming China will “1.) decouple” from the US and other countries it has depended on for exports and 2.) continue its growth by domestic consumption instead. His conclusion:

[I]n the real world, China’s economy is becoming increasingly dependent on investment in fixed-assets (by government, or via government-induced loans), and depends less, not more, on local consumption. China’s development trend and growth in real manufacturing income is very different from that of other “Asian Tigers” and seems to offer a very limited benefit to those working at the lowest paying jobs - which means they are not going to become the world’s new consumers any time soon.

It looks like the only decoupling we have been experiencing over the past 12 months is a decoupling from reality - a growing gap between what we read in the papers and what really happens in the global economy. There is a lot of growth in China, and while some people are making more money, there are even more people who don’t, and a few people who make more than everyone else combined. And while there is an increase in retail spending, local consumption is not likely to become China’s main growth engine any time soon.

No matter what the CIA World Fact Book or The Economist says, I’d have to agree that China is not ready to decouple from the US, just as we aren’t ready to decouple from them. I’m not as pessimistic as Dror is about China’s prospects, but the points he raises are definitely worth considering. Decoupling, I believe, is a long way off, as much as the propaganda wants you to think otherwise.

James Fallows, for years just about my favorite commentator on China (and any other topic he writes about), debunks the absurdly negative spin the US media gave to Obama’s visit here. Applying the kind of diligence that reminds us how important the paid media is, Fallows provides a series of five separate posts, each of which is required reading for those who want to see the sloppiness of the US media in action, and to fully understand all the work the Obama team did to make the trip a successful one. And it was a success.

H/t to commenter Stuart, who sums up some of the best of Fallows’ observations on his own blog. The inside scoop of the hell the Obama team went through to get the townhall televised live is particularly intense, if not all that surprising. (We know how uptight the leaders are about content that cannot be fed through the censorship funnel, edited and, if necessary, deleted altogether. Live TV is kryptonite to prickly censors.) The townhall was a triumph, and it is beyond comprehension why the media is determined to brand it - and all other aspects of the trip - a failure.

China is not about to collapse, democracy is not arriving in the forseeable future, censorship will continue, the CCP isn’t going away and it may still be in power generations from now.

Read this detailed and relatively balanced picture of why this is so. This may baffle and/or displease some of us, but it is reality so we had better get used to it and adapt to it as best we can. That doesn’t mean to kowtow before it and accept all it does with resignation and a sense of inevitability. But we do have to keep a clear head about how Chinese people view their government, and about how the circumstances that actually could lead to an overthrow of some sort simply aren’t there, at least not yet. You can point to the thousands of demonstrations, the ethnic unrest, the massive problems it faces, the environment, and those are all valid issues. But we are nowhere near a tipping point, and may never be. If you are sitting back and waiting for the coming collapse of China, it may be a very long and lonely wait.

Update: See CN Review’s post on the same article. Kai identifies the story’s weakest link, the author’s incredibly misguided suggestion that the US might consider actively helping Chinese people subvert the GFW.

Also, be sure to see this piece on China’s censorship of domestic social media sites, and the West’s misconceptions about the prevalence of Twitter here. This is a good example of Americans seeing China only through the American prism, getting outraged about the blocking of Twitter, never realizing Twitter’s role in China’s social media scene is next to zero. Excellent commentary by Kaiser Kuo.

Here’s your chance to tell him.

I arrived in one piece. Was hoping maybe winter would be late this year. But no. It’s brutal out there.

I’ll be boarding my flight to Beijing in just a few hours. The trip will be part business, part meeting old friends and going back to the places I love the most.

Apologies in advance if comments are held for moderation, especially first-time commenters. Please be patient, they’ll appear eventually. If any of you in Beijing, Shanghai or Hangzhou want to get together please let me know. I’ll probably get to Yunnan, too, especially if Beijing is really as cold as I hear. I can’t wait to arrive. But then, I never really left.

Foreign Policy offers an interesting if somewhat debatable book excerpt on the role the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations played in influencing soon-to-follow demonstrations in Europe, where less than six months after the crackdown in Beijing the Berlin Wall would crack as well, realigning the world’s long-entrenched geo-political structures in ways that we still can’t completley comprehend even today. The dust of the ripped-down wall, like that of the World Trade Center, has yet to fully settle.

In the eyes of the author, Chen Jian, the Michael J. Zak Chair of history for U.S.-China relations at Cornell University, the fact that the world’s foreign correspondents had congregated at the Square in May 1989 for Gorbachev’s visit helped ensure the students’ story would spread to all corners of Europe.

The events of Tiananmen Square shocked the whole world. Ironically, it was the rapprochement between Beijing and Moscow that exposed the crackdown to a global audience, as hundreds of journalists and cameramen who reported on Gorbachev’s visit stayed to cover the students’ demonstrations….

The effects of the Tiananmen tragedy ricocheted throughout the entire communist bloc, especially in the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe. In Moscow, Gorbachev, in spite of his disapproval of the CCP leadership’s behavior, tried to avoid criticizing Beijing directly (though the impact of the Tiananmen crackdown indirectly restricted his ability to influence and control developments in the Soviet Union, and he was even less willing and likely to resort to force in dealing with activities related to the disintegration of the Soviet Union).

In almost every East European country, the pro-democracy movements grew rapidly in the following summer and fall of 1989. These opposition movements took the opportunity of international Communism’s deepened legitimacy crisis to wage new offensives against the Communist authorities in their own countries. The Communist leaderships were all facing difficult dilemmas — they could neither afford to take a totally defensive attitude toward the pro-democracy movements nor dare resort to violent means.

During the following summer and fall, Eastern Europe experienced great unrest, eroding the political foundation and undermining legitimacy of every Communist regime there, culminating on Nov. 9 and 10, 1989. In Germany, the uprising masses brought down the Berlin Wall and with it the symbolic divide between the East and the West. By December — with the execution of Romania’s Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu — the communist bloc in East Europe had virtually collapsed.

Somehow, the Chinese Communist regime survived the shock waves of 1989. After a three-year period of stagnation, Deng used a dramatic tour of southern China in the spring of 1992 to regenerate the “reform and opening-up” project, initiated by Deng and the CCP leadership in the late 1970s. What has followed, as is well known today, is China’s rapid economic growth — despite continuous stagnation in the country’s political democratization — in the last decade of the 20th century and entering the 21st century.

The argument - that the TSM exacerbated the fissures that ultimately pushed the Soviet Bloc past the breaking point - isn’t easy to prove. Those fissures had been building for decades, and I believe that had their been no demonstrations in China in 1989, the Wall would still have fallen and the USSR would still have disintegrated. China’s political-economic fissures were worlds apart from Russia’s, and I’m afraid any effort to compare them has to be somewhat contrived.

Nothing could have stopped the fall of the USSR — except perhaps if there’d been a madman running the show and not Gorbachev, one of my personal heroes and the man who made the extraordinary decision - unbelievable, really - not to order the shooting of the demonstrators who stormed Checkpoint Charlie in 1989. Would that Deng had shown similar restraint (like, say, using tear gas and rubber bullets), maybe he, too, would enjoy Gorbachev-like status. His legacy is great; a pity about that one bright shining stain.

My recent interview, over here.

Last night I spent more than an hour listening to a speech Kaiser Kuo gave at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln on what the Internet has meant for China, and for US-Chinese relations. I was thinking about breaking the speech down, but then saw that a friend of mine had already done so, with greater patience and diligence than I would have mustered. I can’t recommend strongly enough that you listen to the speech and read my friend’s response and partial transcript.

Kaiser and I don’t always see eye to eye on China. But I thought this speech was practically perfect, elucidating how Chinese “netizens” perceive their American counterparts and visa versa, and giving the students in the audience more insight into today’s Chinese youth than they’d get from reading a hundred articles (or even blog posts). His love of China is always evident, but so is his clear-headedness and lack of prejudice, insisting that we see the situation from both Chinese and American eyes, and showing compassion for both sides. We need to remember, there is no black and white, that there are always two sides to the equation. What sometimes seems so obvious to us - raging nationalism, defense of a ruthless one-party system - cannot be understood without context and an understanding of the kind of world in which these people grew up and the extraordinary evolution of their country. And we need to understand how they see us, too, and why.

A beautiful job, and the best single discussion I’ve ever heard of the Internet in China.