Weekly Standard contributor and German Marshall Fund fellow Daniel Twining on the incompatibility of restricting free speech in a globalized information age:
Freedom of the press is under attack in much of Asia — in countries that should know better, like Thailand and Singapore, and perhaps most importantly in China. China’s leaders apparently believe their country can continue to flourish in a globalized world economy increasingly dependent on free flows of information, even as they restrict free speech at home. But as Victor Mallet points out in this Financial Times piece (sub. req’d), “Asian authoritarians are repeating their mistake of a decade ago, seeing the free flow of information as a preventable evil promoted by misguided western liberals. In fact, it is an inevitable adjunct of global modernisation.” Democratic South Korea and Taiwan, once dictatorships themselves, demonstrate that economies dependent on information and services — rather than manufacturing, which sometimes rewards organization and hierarchy — require freedom of speech. That’s a lesson other Asian leaders should heed, if not for the sake of their people’s rights than for the continued growth of their economies, in an age when businesses everywhere profit from free flows of information and lack of government interference. Mallet is right: “Repression and censorship will put awkward people in jail and keep awkward news off the state television channels, but they will not stop the sharing of information…. Authoritarians typically accept the need for free speech on economic matters, but not in their own sphere of politics. Yet business and politics are intertwined. Freedom of information is indivisible.” The Asian economic miracle may increasingly depend on a new level of openness in controlled societies.
