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XiyunYangFirstPaper 3 - 23 May 2013 - Main.XiyunYang
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Act V: The Decay of Privacy and the Sprouts of Chinese Democracy | | | The corpse of privacy has fertilized transparency. In a country where princelings rule and corruption is so atomized that no one has clean hands, the boundary between the public, the private, and the political is permeable and opaque. Why shouldn't the Chinese public dig into the private lives of princelings to expose the lavish lifestyle provided for by their corrupt parents? Why shouldn't villagers dig to expose the webs of personal relationships feeding a culture of bribery and fraud? How can the line between the private and the public be drawn at all?
Act V Scene iii: Viscera | |
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< | The human flesh search engine has been used to expose corruption, but it has also claimed its victims. Vigilantism is judge, jury and executioner in one. Mob rule is the tyranny of the majority, vibrating with hysteria, teetering on a knife's edge above chaos. But for a culture that has never been governed by its people, there is value in a shared sense of visceral, righteous anger, pouring forth as waves of collective action, even if those actions are nothing more at first than creative Googling (or Baidu-ing). If the difference between the United States and China is the freedom to speak and assemble, that freedom is only exercised when emotions swell to a breaking point and burst forth in political action. | >
> | The human flesh search engine has been used to expose corruption, but it has also claimed its victims. Vigilantism is judge, jury and executioner in one. Mob rule is the tyranny of the majority, vibrating with hysteria, teetering on a knife's edge above chaos. Yes, anger and power can be co-opted, redirected. Oh, the CCP does try, aided by big data, but neither side has a iron grip on victory. For a culture that has never been governed by its people, there is value in a shared sense of visceral, righteous anger, pouring forth as waves of collective action, even if those actions are nothing more at first than creative Googling (or Baidu-ing). If the difference between the United States and China is the freedom to speak and assemble, that freedom is only exercised when emotions first swell to a breaking point and burst forth in political action. | | | For this reason, the human flesh search engine is aptly named. It is the ugly, stinking entrails of democracy. Yes, the line between the private and the public must be drawn. In the United States it is drawn by the judges and the legislatures. The representatives of the people. In China, increasingly, aided by the Internet, and for the first time, it is also drawn by the people. |
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