Yesterday, it was reported that China is blocking YouTube to prevent their citizens from accessing anti-government content. It is merely the latest in a series of move by the Chinese government, including jailing bloggers and cracking down on Tibetan dissidents, which reflects a state of fundamental unrest across the nation.
In 1989, 100,000 students convened in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to press the government to curb its restrictions on political freedom and expression. The police responded violently and fired into the crowd, killing several thousand demonstrators. This extreme response has been widely attributed to the country's situation of interregnum and decline of the Soviet Union, but it also reflected a more significant social shift: a belief held by the younger generation that, even after fifty years of oppressive Maoist rule, they still deserved a place in the nation's political system.
Now, twenty years later, China has experienced the greatest economic explosion of any nation in history, with an almost unheard-of 12% GDP growth. Urban development exploded, with China now having over 160 cities with populations of over a million. For hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants who had spent millenia in a cycle of poverty, the manufacturing boom allowed them a glimmer of a middle class lifestyle. Cars, internet access, TVs, a living wage - these finally appeared possible to rural laborers. They migrated to cities in droves, and their numbers pushed labor prices down and allowed the boom to take place.
But with economic success comes a desire for political influence. While it was easy to keep uneducated rural laborers from organizing and demanding positions in government, matters changed entirely when that population could see the freedoms denied them being enjoyed by Westerners. The seeds of discontent have been irreversibly laid, because ultimately the Chinese proletariat will tire of the oppressive communist rule and demand the same rights as their Western counterparts. The advances in internet communication have been such that even the so-called "Great Firewall of China" cannot keep the citizens from realizing how much they are being denied by their corrupt, one-party government.
The Chinese government is catching on, and now they are using their servers to block their citizens from accessing YouTube. This will fail spectacularly. In time, they will not be able to hold back the tide of globalization. Especially as the world economy declines this year, people who saw the possibility of a middle class lifestyle will not soon forget it. As their government takes progressively more ridiculous steps to keep them in the dark, they will respond. But now that China lacks a communist bloc to back it up, the authorities will no longer be able to deny citizens the representation they feel they deserve. With the internet, organization and communication are faster and more widespread. And if China thinks it can respond to future protests like it did Tiananmen Square, it has another thing coming.