From The Nation, via Yahoo News (link):
Back in the late 90’s when I was working as a journalist in China, I happened to read Timothy Garton Ash’s The File. It’s a personal account about what happened in East Germany soon after the Berlin Wall fell when East Germans were suddenly able to access their Stasi police files. As it turned out, secret police informants included neighbors, lovers, spouses, and in some cases even people’s own children. One evening over dinner with some Chinese friends, I described the book and asked how they thought things might play out in a post-Communist China. One friend replied: “That day will come in China too. Then I’ll know who my real friends are.” The table fell silent.
Today China’s leaders are fighting hard not to follow their East German and Soviet counterparts into the dustbin of history. Newspaper and magazine editors who have dared publish stories exposing government lies and abuses of power have recently been sacked. Behind-the-scenes accounts of the sackings, defiant statements by the sacked editors, and reproductions of the offending articles have spread like viruses all over the Chinese Internet. Chinese censors, enlisting the help of private Internet companies–both domestic and foreign–have been working overtime to remove the offending content. But they simply can’t keep up with the viral spread of information in cyberspace.
