Fearing Symbolisms of Revolt: China Bans Jasmines

Politicians sell us symbolisms to get elected and to maintain and preserve power, yet politicians are afraid of the very imagery which they use when used against them.

The series of revolts in MENA seem to have incited a political paranoia: China’s government has banned sales of Jasmines.

This from the New York Times, (bold emphasis mine)

Since Tunisian revolutionaries this year anointed their successful revolt against the country’s dictatorial president the “Jasmine Revolution,” this flowering cousin of the olive tree has been branded a nefarious change-agent by the skittish men who keep the Chinese Communist Party in power.

Beginning in February, when anonymous calls for a Chinese “jasmine revolution” began circulating on the Internet, the Chinese characters for jasmine have been intermittently blocked in cellphone text messages while videos of President Hu Jintao singing “Mo Li Hua,” a Qing dynasty paean to the flower, have been plucked from the Web. Local officials, fearful of the flower’s destabilizing potency, canceled this summer’s China International Jasmine Cultural Festival in south China, said Wu Guangyan, manager of the Guangxi Jasmine Development and Investment Company.

Even if Chinese cities have been free from any whiff of revolutionary turmoil, the war on jasmine has not been without casualties, most notably the ever-expanding list of democracy advocates, bloggers and other would-be troublemakers who have been preemptively detained by public security agents, among them the artist provocateur Ai Weiwei, who remains in police custody after being seized at Beijing’s international airport last month.

Less well known are the tribulations endured by the tawny-skinned men and women who grow ornamental jasmine here in Daxing, a district on the rural fringe of the capital. They say prices have collapsed since March, when the police issued an open-ended jasmine ban at a number of retail and wholesale flower markets around Beijing...

Much like the initial calls on the Internet for protesters to “stroll silently holding a jasmine flower,” the floral ban is shrouded in some mystery. The Beijing Public Security Bureau, reached by phone, declined to answer questions about jasmine. But a number of cut flower and live plant business owners said they had been either visited by the police in early March or given directives indicating that it had become contraband.

This only goes to show how politicians seem to be afraid of their own shadows.

Knowledge Revolution: Internet and Freedom

I’ve been writing about how the internet/web has functioned (and will continue to function) as a critical instrument for the widespread dissemination of the principles of freedom based on what I call the Hayekian Knowledge revolution platform—characterized by a decentralized-horizontal flow of information.

You can read my earlier explanations here or here.

And in realizing that the web has been undermining the current political order, governments around the world has, intuitively, resorted to counterbalancing these evolving spontaneous order by attempting to regulate the internet or by imposing censorship. A good example are reports from wikileaks (such as this and this) that has exposed many covert government activities.

Well my observations seem to be getting substantial validations.

Here is the Economist, (bold emphasis mine)

THE number of people with access to the internet has more than doubled in the past five years to over two billion. Many governments have responded with regulation and repression, according to a report published on April 18th by Freedom House, which assigns countries an internet freedom score. Nine of the 15 countries that the Washington-based think-tank assessed in 2009 fared worse this year, among them Iran, Tunisia and China. On the plus side, citizens are growing increasingly adept at sidestepping these threats to their internet freedoms, and the use of social media did much to galvanise political opposition across the Arab world in recent months. Indeed web-users in some countries, such as Georgia and Estonia, have more freedom now than they did two years ago.

Some great charts

The massive growth of Internet Users (Freedom House)

Social media as a widely used application (Internet world stats)

Index of Internet freedom: 37 country score of internet freedom (0 Best, 100 Worst)

A green-colored bar represents a status of “Free,” a yellow-colored one, the status of “Partly Free,” and a purple-colored one, the status of “Not Free” on the Freedom of the Net Index. (Freedom House)

More internet freedom versus less internet freedom (Freedom House)

How Asia has fared.(Freedom House)

Freedom House identifies the typical government’s countermeasures:

(From Freedom House, bold emphasis original)

Key Trends

* Explosion in social-media use met with censorship: In response to the growing popularity of internet-based applications like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, many governments have started targeting the new platforms as part of their censorship strategies. In 12 of the 37 countries examined, the authorities consistently or temporarily imposed total bans on these services or their equivalents.

* Bloggers and ordinary users face arrest: Bloggers, online journalists, and human rights activists, as well as ordinary people, increasingly face arrest and imprisonment for their online writings. In 23 of the 37 countries, including several democratic states, at least one blogger or internet user was detained because of online communications.

* Cyberattacks against regime critics intensifying: Governments and their sympathizers are increasingly using technical attacks to disrupt activists’ online networks, eavesdrop on their communications, and cripple their websites. Such attacks were reported in at least 12 of the 37 countries covered.

* Politically motivated censorship and content manipulation growing: A total of 15 of the 37 countries examined were found to engage in substantial online blocking of politically relevant content. In these countries, website blocks are not sporadic, but rather the result of an apparent national policy to restrict users’ access to information, including the websites of independent news outlets and human rights groups.

* Governments exploit centralized internet infrastructure to limit access: Centralized government control over a country’s connection to international internet traffic poses a significant threat to free online expression, particularly at times of political turmoil. In 12 of the 37 countries examined, the authorities used their control over infrastructure to limit widespread access to politically and socially controversial content, and in extreme cases, cut off access to the internet entirely.

The battle rages.

Egyptian Revolt: Web Censorship Fails

Learning from the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, the Egyptian government swiftly severed web connections.

But this hasn’t prevented Egyptian malcontents from going around recently imposed government controls.

From the computerworld.com, (bold highlights mine)

"When countries block, we evolve," an activist with the group We Rebuild wrote in a Twitter message Friday.

That's just what many Egyptians have been doing this week, as groups like We Rebuild scramble to keep the country connected to the outside world, turning to landline telephones, fax machines and even ham radio to keep information flowing in and out of the country.

Although one Internet service provider -- Noor Group -- remains in operation, Egypt's government abruptly ordered the rest of the country's ISPs to shut down their services just after midnight local time Thursday. Mobile networks have also been turned off in some areas. The blackout appears designed to disrupt organization of the country's growing protest movement, which is calling for the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

"[B]asically, there are three ways of getting information out right now -- get access to the Noor ISP (which has about 8 percent of the market), use a land line to call someone, or use dial-up," Jillian York, a researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said via e-mail.

Egyptians with dial-up modems get no Internet connection when they call into their local ISP, but calling an international number to reach a modem in another country gives them a connection to the outside world.

Centralization under fire.