An article in Foreign Policy magazine tellingly ranked 10 major global events that have taken place in the decade since 9/11, and America’s response to 9/11 was last on the list. No. 1 was “the rise of China and other BRICs,” and one position ahead of 9/11 was the Arab Spring.

It’s clear most analysts regard the 10 years after 9/11 as America’s “lost decade,” and their anxieties over the country’s decline are palpable.

The Americans have reason to worry. But these analyses did not go far enough to separate cause and effect. Instead, they generally gave an impression that post-9/11 events were somehow a consequence of the attacks and the response to them. In fact, major events such as the rise of the BRICs and the Arab Spring had little to do with 9/11, but instead resulted from the collapse of the Cold War order.

During America’s lost decade, the BRIC economies enjoyed 10 golden years. Descriptions of their power gained currency over the years, and cooperation among them took root. The four BRIC countries began to grow closer in terms of strategy and stance, so much so that they have now become a political group of considerable weight. All four countries have in fact seized the strategic opportunities for development that emerged after the end of the Cold War, when globalization and market development accelerated, and a multi-polar world was taking shape.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Arab Spring, Berlin Wall, BRIC, Cold War, history, terrorism, United States
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Chinese netizens are marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a little anarchy of their own.

They are flying over the Great Firewall of China (GFW) in exuberant numbers to send messages to an anniversary website in Berlin that was set up to allow people to share memories of the night the wall came down, or, recommend “which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place.”

The opportunity to use the forum to chip away at Beijing’s heavy Internet censorship was obviously too good a chance for many Chinese netizens to ignore and they deluged the site with calls for web freedom. Until the Chinese government caught wind, that is.

On the evening of Nov. 2, 13 days after its launch, the Berlin Twitter Wall became inaccessible in China. At that point, according to organizers, 1,500 of the 3,300 tweets posted had been written in Chinese.

See also from MSNBC’s blog, “In China, battles over a new wall.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Berlin Wall, GFW, Internet censorship
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Written by a high-profile political scientist and published in hard cover in 2008 and then in a paperback edition this year, Shambaugh’s book is a very fitting one to turn to just now, as the media is filled with retrospective looks at the last days of the Berlin Wall. Why? Because the destruction of that great Cold War symbol, more than any of the other wondrous events of 1989, inspired the erroneous belief that the days of all Communist Party regimes were about to end (they live on not just in China but also Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea). And because Shambaugh provides one of the best accounts yet of the post-1989 reinvention of the Chinese Communist Party that has kept China a Leninist country during what many assumed would be a post-Leninist era — not just for Europe, but for the world. He sheds important light, in other words, on why, when speaking of China, we need to think not of a Leninist Extinction but rather a Leninist Mutation.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, Berlin Wall, political reform
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Chinese authorities appear to be blocking access to a state-funded website which recalls the evil of the Berlin Wall, organizers of the culture project in the German capital said Thursday.

The website invites Twitter users to ‘share your thoughts on the Fall of the Berlin Wall now or let us know which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place.’

The operating company, Berlin GmbH, said the website had been unreachable for Chinese users since Monday, after Chinese Twitter users had posted messages protesting about web censorship in China. It said the cut-off had been confirmed by several sources.

And from AFP: China blocks ‘Berlin Wall’ Twitter page: organisers

China has blocked a website inviting users of microblogging site Twitter to comment on the fall of the Berlin Wall amid a deluge of protests at Beijing’s Internet censorship, organisers said Thursday.

The site was meant to be a place for people to share memories of the night the Berlin Wall was yanked down 20 years ago, but quickly morphed into a forum for protest against what users described as “The Great Firewall of China.”

Of the roughly 3,300 comments left on the virtual wall, around 1,500 have been in Chinese, said Carsten Hein, coordinator of the “berlintwitterwall.com” project.

The site “has not been freely accessible since Monday evening Beijing time,” he added, citing “several current sources.”

According to the China Digital Times, one user wrote: “Mr Hu Jintao, please tear down this Great Firewall,” in a twist on the famous 1987 Berlin speech by then US President Ronald Reagan who implored his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall.”

Read also on CDT: “Mr. Hu Jintao, Tear Down the Great Firewall!” (Updated with Video).

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Berlin Wall, fotw, Internet blocking, Twitter
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© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Berlin Wall, Fag Binxing, Fang Binxing, fotw, GFW, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, tweets
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China, unlike the Eastern European states, had early warning that its regime was about to fall; the entire world seemed to know it. That sense of urgency made Chinese leaders avid students of the Soviet Union’s downfall. The CCP charged official think tanks with discovering the keys to maintaining a monopoly on power, while avoiding the fate of erstwhile counterparts in Budapest, Bucharest, Prague, and Moscow.

What did the Chinese researchers learn? First, that Europe’s 1989 unrest was fueled by patriotism — a desire to rid their countries of regimes imposed from outside. Protesters in Europe also had a potent mix of economic and political grievances. Those in charge had claimed that Marxist regimes could compete with capitalist ones in material terms, but the night-and-day contrast between the creature comforts available on the two sides of the wall revealed the hollowness of this boast. Finally, Eastern Europe’s movements spread quickly because nearly everyone — regardless of their class — felt they were in the same boat. The only meaningful social divide was between a small privileged coterie of corrupt officials and the rest. And the rest was pretty much everyone.

Wasserstrom continues this line of thinking in an article in Dissent, in which he compares protest movements of 1919 and 1989 with social unrest today:

But what does set 2009 apart from both 1919 and 1989 are two things. The first is the relative quiescence of university students. They are not nearly as apathetic as they are sometimes portrayed in the West, but they are not agitating loudly for change and trying to get members of other classes to follow them onto the streets as their counterparts did during the May 4 and Tiananmen protests.

The second difference is probably an even more important one to keep in mind. In 2009, there is no unifying thread that connects the actions of different disgruntled groups. People from various walks of life don’t feel—as many did in 1919 and in 1989—that they’re all in the same boat. Censorship and crackdowns, especially on the most organized forms of protest, help keep the landscape of dissent fragmented. But this is also a product of the economic boom, which has made and continues to make Chinese society ever more socially, culturally, and geographically differentiated.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Berlin Wall, PRC history, protests, social unrest
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