January 14th, 2010

Ya gotta love totalitarian governments. They are so childish and paranoid, and they take themselves so seriously that they are comical right up until the moment they are perforating your body with bullets.

Take this little fact:

A sophisticated attack originating in China and apparently involving the Chinese government was made on Google's Internet infrastructure late last year. In fact, it was part of an attack that also saw 20 other large companies' data centres poked, prodded, and, in many cases, infiltrated. In defense, Google has just recently stopped censoring results for its Google.cn search engine, and is considering closing its Chinese offices. And Google isn't the only one with a beef about this; Hillary Clinton, currently the US Secretary of State, has asked the Chinese government to explain itself. But I doubt it will.

I have very mixed feelings about this. My initial response is that China better bloody well get with the times and abandon its dictator-like political absolutism and adopt some 21st-century attitudes about freedom of information. It's already adopted the technology, but it should also accept the implications of that technology. (The Internet may be the Wild Wild West, but ... welll, actually, that's the whole central-government-threatening point, isn't it?)

Then I think about how China would expand and grow without its totalitarianism, and wonder if maybe they've got it right after all: For them (not for the West, but maybe for them) their attempts at iron-fisted control over information is what prevents them from stretching themselves too thin to be an effective nation. Their control is an act of self-preservation and their peoples' protection.

More than any other nation in the world, China ought to be wary of unsustainable growth. (With India running a close second ... but India doesn't have the right resources and geography to even attempt it just yet.)

An empire can't grow in on itself; it needs (for want of a better word) lebensraum. It needs expansion of its borders. Until it can establish habitable bases of appreciable size on the moon (I am not kidding) it may have to hold itself in tight check ... hence, it needs to maintain an ideological blackout until then.

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