Stable as Mount Tai

So here's some food for thought: China has decided to start blocking blogspot today. I was totally unable to read or post to blogspot blogs, and had Pocket of Bolts verify it on Great Firewall of China. That means I can't access anything with a blogspot domain name, including this blog. I am only able to post this because I have a intermittently usable virtual private network through my school, but it is slow and doesn't seem to work from anywhere but my apartment.

I'm not sure how long they will keep blocking blogspot. Maybe it will be unblocked tomorrow and the episode of "China rage" I am currently experiencing will seem like a tempest in a tea-cup. But let me roll with it for a moment.

In my Chinese lesson a few weeks ago, I was learning the idiom "as stable as Mount Tai" (安如泰山). As an example for the use of this phrase, my teacher said used the expression, "The Chinese government is as stable as Mount Tai." And she kept on using it, despite my repeated objections. Mount Tai is a famous mountain, a paradigm of continuity and stability. To compare it to the Chinese government, given its upheavals in the twentieth century alone, let alone the future of the CCP and the very structure of the political and legal systems here... well, frankly I find it absurd. In fact, the first time she used it as an example, I laughed out loud. "You mean this idiom is supposed to be used ironically?" I suggested.

Any government that cares this much about suppressing its citizens' freedom of expression cannot possibly be as stable as Mount Tai. And it's not that freedom of expression is universally suppressed, not at all. It is spottily and arbitrarily suppressed, which is almost worse. We reserve the right to control you. But because they don't exercise that right very much, people shrug it off and don't consider it a very big deal. The government just cares about us and wants us to have a stable society. Who cares about a few bad elements here or there, a few bad websites. So maybe some good people and websites get blocked too. But better execute a hundred innocents than let one guilty one slip through.

Lots of Chinese people have blogs, on sites that don't get blocked. There are pseudonyms, sure. But ultimately, these blogs are traceable to the person's actual identity. Since you are accountable to the government for what you write, you can make artfully crafted entries about the coolest Western classics or your own sentimental experiences... but nothing like "I saw the police beat someone up yesterday." Nothing like, "My friend got arrested for something he didn't do."

I have often thought that the blogosphere gives an amazing sense of a society, just because of the diversity of what's out there, and the fact that it's practically impossible--in the long term--to blog in anything other than your own authentic voice. From what I've seen, the Chinese blogosphere is no exception--and what it reveals a self-centered head-in-the-sand society. Who can blame them really. The consequences of making trouble just aren't worth it. I can empathize. But what really gets under my skin is the sense of self-congratulation. "The Chinese government is as stable as Mount Tai." I don't wish for upheaval and lives lost, of course I don't. But how I do wish that some way could be found to give people here a sense of just how precarious and problematic their system is.

Sorry for the long rant. I really need to go back to the land of the at least for now free. Meanwhile, I am considering my blogging options. I know Repressed Librarian (for example) has made the switch to Wordpress, and I can in fact still see her blog from China. But that's because she hasn't used Wordpress's free hosting (as far as I can tell, the wordpress domain is also blocked here), but instead has her own domain. Am I going to have to start paying for web hosting? Should I just limp along with blogspot and the VPN? Should I give up blogging and just send out e-mail updates to my friends? Or sanitize my blog and put it under my real name on my school account (at least until I graduate)? I have questions. Do you have answers?