China, Say Hi To The Eye In The Sky

Counterbias | November 23 2004

We're all familiar with the irony of China, a totalitarian, one-party Communist state that also happens to be at the forefront of world capitalism: the devouring of natural resources, the buy-out of huge Canadian corporations, and the friendly second home of Wal-Mart.

The economy is flourishing, freshly minted millionaires are moving in on every Beijing block, and every toy you'll ever buy your child (or future or inner child) will have a 'Made in China' stamp on it. A recent Globe and Mail Saturday edition dedicated entirely to the country as a rising power enforced the idea that China will lead the world in the upcoming century.

Even Rebuilding America's Defenses, a 2000 document by the influential Project For A New American Century think-tank, stated that "Raising US military strength in East Asia is the key to coping with the rise of China to great power status... The prospect is that East Asia will become an increasingly important region, marked by the rise of Chinese power".

Economically, the Chinese are almost as free as Westerners. Yet that's where the 'freedom' stops. This fact was brought home with news that the Chinese government plans to launch one hundred satellites - "eyes in the sky" as Reuters put it, a "large surveying network" as a Chinese government official put it - snooping on the world's second most populous nation.

What is it all for? "To monitor water reserves, forests, farmland, city construction and 'various activities of society'", a state official proclaimed on China Central Television. It's nice to keep track of water reserves, forests and development of cities, and even a paranoid democracy wouldn't find much problem with that. Yet the Orwellian monitoring of "various activities of society" goes above and beyond any reasonable purpose, and completely detracts from China's credibility of a nation undergoing extensive change and personal liberation.

The CIA World Factbook mentions that for many centuries, "China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences." Although vast national problems in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the dastardly dictatorship of Mao Zedong, took China downward, it has climbed back up, once again outpacing the fight to lead civilization. How silly all this eye-in-the-sky stuff seems - no, make that scary, since the nation is on pace to be the dominant world power of the late twenty-first century.

All of this should not come as much of a surprise. If China's goal is to be the next American Empire, there is but one nation to follow: the United States. In this case of geopolitical observational learning, the U.S. is teaching China all the wrong lessons. Rather than to serve as a beacon for personal and political freedom, America has launched the controversial PATRIOT Act, as well as the TIPS program (which called for Americans to report any suspicious activity of any sort to the government, a project which has been shut down due to intense citizen outrage) and the Information Awareness Office (a Pentagon-based secretive intelligence system to gather and centralize info on every American, like credit card purchases, travel and medical history; it, too, was stopped before it actually began). The US government is currently funding study of a system to monitor online chatrooms. A former head of the Justice Department's computer crimes unit told MSNBC that such a system would bring America a step closer to the Information Awareness Office.

If you can't spew random nonsense anonymously online, where can you?

In a few of the aforementioned freedom-fighting cases (the government fighting against citizen's freedom, I mean), America's citizens, watchdog groups and organizations fought back. The Chinese don't have such an option.

If America's political and military leaders truly are committed to freedom for the world's people, they would shoot those egregious satellites down whenever the 'Star Wars' missile defense program is implemented, activated and fully operational.

But then again, the US government doesn't seem so interested in shooting down Big Brother in it's own country, so why would it aim its sights at what a one-party dictatorship in capitalist-friendly China does?

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