CHINA IS IN the grip of a new “cultural revolution”. This revolution differs from Mao Zedong’s calculated mobilisation of Red Guards against the hierarchy in two vitally important respects. It is welling up from below as a culture of outspokenness takes hold; and, although the spread of this revolution, in chat rooms, text messages, mass e-mails and as many as 13.3 million blogs, can be slowed by thousands of cyberplods sent in hot pursuit, it cannot be stopped. After months of smouldering arguments within the Communist Party about how best to handle it, the volcano of discord at the top has begun to erupt in full view. These arguments about how much freedom to allow — or indeed, whether the floods opened by technology can be dammed — go to the heart of the debate about China’s future direction. The leadership’s dilemma is acute, and harder and harder to hide.

Internationally, China has found itself in the dock next to Google, after the company’s loudly derided decision, in return for the privilege of official registration, to help the cybercensors who are building the Great Firewall of China to emasculate its Chinese search engine. This may not have been Google’s smartest move. Not only has the company been picketed, denounced worldwide for betraying its principles and hauled before the US Congress to explain itself, but websites all over China are spewing contempt for the internet’s “eunuch”.

It may not have been China’s cleverest idea, either. This devil’s compact has given the Communist Party’s grim drive to control all aspects of the media the widest possible publicity in China itself — awkwardly, at the very moment when official censorship has come under furious fire in an open letter circulated by a highly respected group of party elders, including retired editors of the party’s own flagship newspaper and news agency.

Their immediate target is the party’s secretive publicity (old and true name, propaganda) department, which last month made the mistake of suspending, “for rectification and self-criticism”, the prominent weekly newspaper Bingdian (Freezing Point).

The alleged crime of the paper, which is noted for its willingness to tackle taboo subjects in outspoken comment and reporting, was to have “badly hurt the feelings of the Chinese nation” by running an article by a retired university professor, Yuan Weishi, drily entitled “Modernisation and History Textbooks”. Pointing out that the Boxer Rebellion was far from being the unblemished patriotic movement portrayed in the official line, the article called on textbook writers to show respect for historical accuracy.

The censors may not have given their move much thought. Similar or worse fates have befallen dozens of other Chinese publications and journalists over the past year. But Bingdian, an offshoot of China Youth Daily, is on a different plane. It could not be more mainstream, more closely associated with the party. This was the first time since 1989, the year of Tiananmen, that censors had suspended a “central government-level newspaper”.

Its editor, Li Datong, has influence; and he has refused to go quietly. Within seconds, he put the “secret” order on the internet along with a fierce denunciation of the censors for conducting an “unconstitutional” vendetta against “healthy” debate that harked back to the Cultural Revolution.

Mr Li deliberately hit a raw nerve. Careful historical analogies are often used as political signals in China. Exactly 40 years ago, it was a newspaper article about the persecution of the long-dead “upright mandarin” Hai Rui that gave the signal for the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. Yuan’s meaning, moreover, did not require much decoding. After “the three big disasters of the struggle against Rightists, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution,” he wrote, “people have painfully discovered that one of the roots of their disasters is that ‘we were fed on wolf milk’. More than 20 years have passed, and . . . our young people are still feeding on wolf milk!” The evils of ideologically driven propaganda — the wolf milk — are not, as the Chinese know, confined to interpretations of history.

The open letter issued by Li Rui, Mao’s biographer, and fellow “senior revolutionary people inspired by freedom” also summons history to buttress an attack on censorship that explicitly takes the Bingdian case as one example among many instances of “bad management practices”. By “reviewing the lessons of seven decades”, they write, they conclude that “blinding the masses forever” is not only totalitarian: it is perilous. “At this historical turning point from a totalitarian to a constitutional system,” the letter continues, “depriving the public of the freedom to speak out will bring disaster . . . and inevitably lead to mass antagonism and turbulence.” Most are old men, but the party can hardly brush off Zhu Houze, a former head of the central propaganda department. He insists that “a free flow of opinions and information should be allowed for the sake of China’s prosperity”.

How best to guard against turbulence — by relaxing controls or telling the million-strong People’s Armed Police to put in the boot — is just what the backroom arguments are about. China’s leaders need no persuading that small sparks start big fires and, with protests and mass demonstrations officially admitted to have risen to 87,000 last year, the sparks are no longer small. Hu Jintao, China’s President, started by promising more democracy and open debate, but appears to have lost his nerve, pointedly praising North Korea’s party discipline and censorship in a 2004 speech.

Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, has argued on “efficiency” grounds that “independent” thinking must be encouraged. He has recognised that a society of “yes” men cannot develop the innovative edge that drives the knowledge economy. But neither man dares risk the party’s neck. They understand Lenin’s dictum that knowledge is power, but not that it is slipping from their grasp, as Marx and Mao and Deng Xiaoping make way for King Blog.

JOIN THE DEBATE
Send your e-mails from here

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone