Free The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein Page A

criticizing us no matter what we do?” Before I could answer, he continued. He was used to taking charge and being listened to.
    He told me about a concert by the Three Tenors, the name given to Spanish singers Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, and the Italian singer Luciano Pavarotti, when they sang together as a group, that was held in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Tens of thousands of people attended the concert.
    The Forbidden City is one of China’s most important historical places. Emperors lived there. Neighboring it are two of modern China’s symbolic administrative infrastructures—Zhongnanhai, where the top officials of the central government work and live; and Tiananmen Square, which is ringed by the country’s leading museums. Having the concert in the Forbidden City would be equivalent to having one with tens of thousands of attendees on the White House lawn, with the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and the Statue of Liberty all relocated there.
    A deranged man with a knife started dashing around Tiananmen Square during the concert, trying to stab people and screaming gibberish, the senior official told me. Like any competent police force, the police tackled the lunatic and took him away in a police van. The official told me a major Western newspaper ran a story covering the incident to the effect of, “Heavily armed riot police in Tiananmen Square, the site of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 where innocent people were slaughtered and massacred as hulking, brutish soldiers suppressed their drive for freedom of speech, arrested a knife-wielding man who was probably aggrieved by a power-driven government.” The last sentence of the article noted that the reason why the man was angry was not confirmed.
    The senior official asked whether it would make sense to have a lot of armed security on such an occasion. Wouldn’t it make sense to arrest a clearly mentally disturbed man trying to stab people?
    He asked what American police would have done. Probably Taser him or bludgeon him with a club before shackling him with handcuffs and throwing him in the back of a police van, I responded. Nearly a decade later I was proved right, when a New York City policeman pepper-sprayed and manhandled protesters during the Occupy Wall Street protests—yet Western media only criticized that single officer, rather than arguing that the whole political system was complicit.
    It obviously pained the senior official to see how China was portrayed in Western media. But he defended his police that day. “Free speech is great, and I want it too, but not if it threatens stability. No one wants to go back to the dark days. Besides, this man was crazy and could have hurt people with his knife.”
    At the end of the day in China, freedoms that are perceived to have the potential to bring the country back to the repression and destruction of the Cultural Revolution are not considered to be rights, but rather threats.
    Even defining freedoms and the threats against them is not quite so black and white. When Westerners discuss basic human rights, the Chinese government (and, in truth, most Chinese people) thinks about a different set of rights. Take freedom of speech, for example. Most everyday Chinese citizens do not care about measures limiting Internet access, which Americans see as a violation of freedom of access to information. Blocking Facebook or Twitter is not enough to drive mass upheaval, because homegrown versions like Sina Weibo or Renren offer equally satisfactory alternatives in Chinese society. The lack of Western alternatives might limit Chinese firms’ ability to expand abroad and employ the Internet tools their competitors use, but it won’t cause massive internal protests.
    Many Americans think there has been little progress in China on freedom of speech. This is not true. Before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Huffington Post and the BBC’s website were blocked, but they are now accessible. Around 500 million