A better draft, improved by some thoughtful rewriting of the individual paragraphs. The central thesis is familiar to me, mostly from listening to what I say myself. Although I sometimes use the Taoist metaphor myself, I think as real political analysis it isn't very strong. Even an Internet designed to CCP specifications would still leave the people overall better informed than they were before, certainly no closer to being the uncarved block. The Party needs the Net to help it know what is going on in the China it governs, and to make its presence felt, hardly to become invisible.

That people who have little to hide and aren't very important shouldn't store their credit cards, their contacts lists, or their photographs somewhere they can easily be pillaged is hardly a sophisticated lesson we're unready to learn: no previous generation of human beings since the beginning of civilization has been inclined to store what is precious to it somewhere unguarded. This aspect of the problem is just a temporary madness caused by ignorance. But by the time we recur to the central habits of previous humanity, we may have lost the technical freedom to do what everybody before us was able to do, and which our progeny will intensely regret. What the Party wants is realtime access to actual behavior and the ability to predict future behavior of one point seven billion or so individuals. One generation from now, if we have not prevented the technical structures from forming and crippled or eliminated the Party, they will get what they want.