Imagethief enjoyed a lovely two-and-a-half weeks in the US over Christmas and New Year, during which I paid very little attention to what was happening in China. At my peril, it turned out, since I got back to find that Bullog had been harmonized, Zhang Ziyi had undergone a rigorous bikini-line inspection in the Carribean, and more than ninety websites (including essentially all the majors) had been cited by the government for excessive naughtiness. Thinking back on it, these things may all be connected somehow.

The Chinese government's periodic fits of Internet purification are generally as formulaic and ritualized as a wrestler's casting of salt into a sumo ring (pardon the Japanese analogy). That's why my reaction is usually boredom and a suggestion that we all wait a week or two before pushing the panic button and writing hysterical op-ed pieces that invoke the Cultural Revolution. It's not that these episodes are good. They're often opaque and can seem completely arbitrary. But it is important to see them in the correct context: As deviations from the overall trend line in the great curve of three decades of liberalization and progress rather than as devastating lurches back toward Maoist totalitarianism.

However, I wonder if 2009 might prove an especially fraught time for the Chinese Internet. There are two charts that are worth looking at. The first is a chart of the growth of Chinese Internet usership from Search Engine Journal (larger version of the image here):


From essentially zilch users in 1999 to something north of 250 million now.

The second is this chart of China's annual GDP growth from IndexMundi and the IMF (a larger, Flash enabled version on the IndexMundi site):

China GDP Growth

Given that what constitutes a "recession" in China has been something of a moving target over the past few years, the last serious slowdown appears to be 1998-1999, back when the Internet was just creeping into China (and the last really brutal recession by Chinese standards in 1989-1990, when the Internet hadn't crept much of anywhere). So this will be the first serious recession+Internet. Not to mention a more liberal media environment overall than ten years ago.

The conventional wisdom is that the Chinese government has spent the last three decades engaged in a social compact with the Chinese people: We'll deliver the growth. You keep your noses out of politics and let the Party do its thing. If true, one wonders how the Chinese government will start treating the Internet if it feels the compact is under threat due to economic stress. Might there be an extra frisson of existential angst?

The Chinese government has intervened directly in the Internet plenty of times in the last few years, but much of that intervention was around acute situations, such as corporate scandals, the earthquake, the Tibet riots, SARS, and so on. The recession will be chronic, possibly lasting one or two grueling years. So I wonder if we'll start to see a higher level of sensitivity on average, and more Internet crackdowns and generally reactionary behavior. 

I don't want to be too alarmist. The Chinese Internet isn't going anywhere (for one thing, it's much too valuable a tool for the government). And if I wasn't personally optimistic about China I wouldn't be staying here. But I do think there will be extra landmines scattered around this year. After all, we saw how cranky the government got during the Olympics, and the Olympics was officially a good thing.