Last year, the Chinese government declared virality a crime.
By order of the Supreme People’s Court, users who post online rumors garnering more than 5,000 visits or 500 reposts could be subject to defamation charges. Yes, that’s right: go viral, and go to jail — for up to three years.
The Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Sina Weibo, was afire with criticism. “It’s far too easy for something to be reposted 500 times or get 5,000 views. Who is going to dare say anything now?” wrote one brave user. Michael Anti, a well-known Beijing blogger, called it “the end of the online anti-corruption movement.”
Of course, fighting rumormongering was the veneer on a much more far-reaching policy. The real target was social media itself, the latest and most potent threat to authoritarians everywhere. For China — whose methods of Internet censorship have made it the envy of every repressive regime the world over — social media is the loose thread that threatens to unravel the whole fabric of state control.
This law was one step toward cutting it off, and it gave Chinese authorities broad license to detain people accused of causing social disorder. This past April, for instance, the government hauled off blogger Qin Zhihui to serve a three-year prison sentence for the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.” His final words before imprisonment sounded like those of a man whose resistance has been beaten out of him. “I don’t want to defend myself,” Zhihui said. “I just want to say that I hope my experience is a lesson to other microbloggers.”
Of course, he may never have said that. He may not have uttered a word. We don’t know, and we never will. Why? Because court officials ran the live blog of the proceedings, and the remarks were broadcast on a state-sanctioned Weibo account.
The alleged mastermind behind the rumor law was Lu Wei, head of China’s State Internet Information Office and a rising star in the world of thought policing and information control. It was in the role of “Internet czar” that Lu had occasion last week to visit the United States and tour the offices of the Silicon Valley companies he works so hard to keep underfoot in China. Among the more mystifying meetings Lu participated in was a campus tour of Facebook — a platform that has been blocked in China since 2009.
And it was in the course of this tour, led by Mark Zuckerberg himself, that the Chinese dignitary arrived at Zuckerberg’s desk. On it, he found a copy of his boss’ book, The Governance of China, a collection of speeches and commentary by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Lu is said to have laughed and asked if he could sit at Zuckerberg’s desk for a closer look at the 515-page tome of reflections by the head of the Chinese Communist Party. According to a state-run Chinese news website, Zuckerberg remarked, “I’ve also bought copies of this book for my colleagues. I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
It’s possible this was a mistake. And if that’s in fact what happened — if this was simply a piece of advance work gone awry, the classic case of an overzealous staffer who thought the book would charm the visiting dignitary — then the flap can be forgiven. Zuckerberg’s comments, too, could be excused as the appropriate response to an awkward moment (or, given the source that first reported them, written off as not entirely accurate). But if the visit, the book, and the comments are part of Zuckerberg’s efforts to ingratiate himself with an authoritarian regime — a regime that Facebook has an enormous financial incentive to placate — then that is something shameful.
It is one thing to show respect to a foreign guest. It is quite another to do so in an unprincipled way. Just a few years ago, after all, Lu wrote this in a party journal: “Without information security, there is no financial security, there’s no economic security and there’s no national security in the truest sense.” In the years since, we’ve seen what this version of “information security” means in practice, including jail for dissident social media users.
With Lu opposed to Facebook’s introduction in China, denying him an invitation to tour the office was certainly an option. But the troubling thing isn’t that he visited. It’s that Zuckerberg missed the opportunity to defend the kind of open society and free flow of information that has contributed so mightily to Facebook’s success. Had he done that, Lu Wei might have left with an impression of his host’s commitment to “democracy with American characteristics.”
Symbols matter. And they matter a great deal more in the case of direct conflict between the principles that make Facebook a forum for its users’ free speech, and the principles enumerated in Xi’s book. The activists and anti-corruption leaders locked in China’s prisons have fought for liberties that make a platform such as Facebook possible in the first place. They’re the ones who deserve Zuckerberg’s respect — not the man who put them there.
