I read an article last week that discussed how the Chinese Communist Party believes it has a responsibility to oversee and control education at the university level (a moral imperative). It is another step in the wrong direction for a country who citizens are clearly looking for a more democratic government and greater protections of their free speech. It's controls like this and others that will continue to make it very difficult for Chinese citizens to live up to their innovative potential, as they faced continued resistance from their government, including:
- Making it more difficult to access Gmail
- Tighter control of University education
- Banning the use of puns in the media
- The list of more than 2,700 banned websites
- The Hong Kong protests
- Continuing to jail dissidents
The story of Chinese growth over the past twenty years is one of the most astonishing economic triumphs in human history. In a very short period of time, China has established itself as one of the world's greatest economies, creating hundreds of billions of dollars in new economic value and introducing nearly 700 million of its citizens to the internet. Those citizens are now spending billion of dollars every year on goods and services and have the leverage to move China to a modern consumption based economy.
As China continues to integrate itself into the global economy and as the explosion of the Chinese consumer continues it is going to be increasingly difficult for the Communist Party to reconcile these trends with their ideologies of ever-tightening government control. Furthermore, as technology makes it way deeper into China and millions of new users gain access to the internet I suspect the government will find itself between a rock and a hard place. Every step taken to further integrate itself globally will make it harder for the Chinese government to hide their policies restricting the rights of the citizens of a "free country". Furthermore, as their role in the world grows they will simultaneously be inviting more criticism of those same policies. The growth that they are so eager to sustain comes with expectations from other developed nations that their citizens have access to similar basic rights of any other free nation.
-With all that said I still expect to see China produce some of the most innovative companies of the 21st century, just don't expect them to gain control of the title "Most innovative country in the world" anytime soon.
-I'm also excited to see how technology is leveraged by the Chinese to force change on their government.