A Week in Beijing

Sun, 16 Sep 2018 09:59:36 GMT

Introduction

Our visit to China was limited to a short and sweet 144 hour transit permit which we spent in the Beijing area. We found the people to be friendly and were impressed with the rate and magnitude of development.

Attractions

We visited many of the most popular tourist attractions - mainly on foot. Not only were there miles between locations, but often the sites themselves were gargantuan. Tiananmen Square is over 1000’ by 2000’. From there, the plaza that leads to the Forbidden City is 2500’ long. The City itself is 3500’ wide and 4000’ long. It has so many enormous palaces and halls you simply lose count. These distances do not include milling around or checking out the side buildings. Over 50,000 people passed through the Forbidden City on the day we visited. Due to the scale, there was always enough room to amble along the main promenade. Some days we may have walked 20 miles.

Development

China’s major cities have experienced an explosion of new office building and towering apartments. Old neighborhoods were razed and nearby farmlands were paved over to accommodate the influx of rural peasants. Many of the buildings express a bold and daring optimism about what is possible. China is teaming with industry and leaves no doubt about its superpower status.

The Future

There is a frenetic and intoxicating vibe to modern China. On the positive side it has lited many of its people from the 18th or 19th century into the 21st within a few decades. It has also reestablished itself as a world power, soon to eclipse the USA in Gross National Product. But what about Gross National Happiness? Like many other developed countries there is a growing loss of community and at the end of the day some may wonder if it is all worthwhile.

China is currently over half way through a 5 year program to relocate 100 million semi self sufficient farmers off their land and to the cities by 2020. It plans to relocate another 150 million by 2026. The goal is a) to amalgamate their small plots for more efficient industrial agribusiness and b) to create more domestic consumers to keep China’s manufacturing industries stoked as foreign export demand cools off.

Brave New China

As the citizens’ identity with ancestral land and family diminishes, broader and carefully crafted meta narratives, or culturally accepted myths, are taking their place. The propaganda machine is still hard at work exhorting industry and national pride. Ethnic chauvinism is strong and China has a very stringent immigration policy. To some degree, the spectacular 2008 Beijing Olympics were an expensive marketing campaign for both foreign and domestic consumption.

Facilitating the delivery of these myths are billions of smartphones. Everywhere we looked, people were absorbed in their screens. At least three quarters of metro riders were looking at the phones, often with earphones. Only seldom did people speak with each other. On the streets, pedestrians were glued in and sometimes stumbling. It was quite common to see the drivers of cars, motorcycles and bikes preoccupied and even texting, sometimes while smoking as well. We saw countless near misses and a few fender benders. Our guide to the great wall told us that many youth can no longer properly form some of the Chinese characters because they no longer need to write them, only recognize them from electronic drop down menus.

As part of their myth cultivation, Chinese authorities are ‘managing’ the internet through was is being termed ‘networked authoritarianism’. This is a three pronged approach - fear, friction and flooding. Fear is traditional monitoring of user access to forbidden content and punishing infractions. Friction monitors and blocks forbidden content sources, VPNs and other workarounds to make access as difficult as possible. Both of these forms of control are expensive. Flooding deluges the citizen with a torrent of both plausible but biased and fake news - it is cheap and effective.

Hive Mind

What does the future hold for humanity? Is China a harbinger for things to come?

Corporations and governments, east and west, are researching how to target and manipulate individual human emotions and compiling extensive personality profiles of anyone who uses the internet. Soon they will have the knowledge and processing power to ‘hack’ our feelings and emotions, without our full awareness, to their end - be it consumer or political. While the net result of voter sentiment manipulation for the Brexit of Trump vote can be debated, it has been established that a sizeable number of individual sentiments were effectively hacked with a relatively small amount of resources.

Will democracies allow networked authoritarianism to become even more embedded with our information infrastructure? What about those that resist, like the one million Uighur Muslims in western China that are being held in re-education prisons? Will the ascendant tools of general AI allow for more ubiquitous and insidious manipulation of our values and opinions? Who will determine what those will be? When the day comes that AI is our master, will it be as self serving as its creator? Or will it transcend baser motives, embrace the greater good and provide some ‘adult supervision’? What then will it do with us - the chief troublemakers?

Sources

How China censors the net: by making sure there’s too much information
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/16/how-china-censors-internet-information

China's genius plan to move 250 million people from farms to cities
https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-chinas-big-plan-to-move-a-population-the-size-of-the-phillippines-from-farms-to-cities-2015-7/

China claims Muslim detention camps are education centres
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/14/china-claims-muslim-internment-camps-provide-professional-training

Yuval Noah Harari: the myth of freedom
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy

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