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Bone up on your Mandarin, kids, China is wise to the Web

"To us farmers, a computer is no different from an aircraft carrier, because neither has a bearing on our life."

a Chinese farmer

One of the more intriguing -- and under-reported -- developments of the week was the announcement that the British government plans to boost the teaching of Chinese in schools.

Creating the training and support infrastructure to translate this aspiration into reality will not be easy, but the idea is a very good one -- and not just because today's schoolchildren will grow up in a world dominated by Chinese economic power. They will also have to adjust to a world influenced by the "soft" (cultural) power that is the inescapable accompaniment to economic dominance.

In this context, China's approach to the Internet raises some intriguing questions. The regime has embarked on a massive social experiment: The rulers believe you can have economic liberalization without political freedom.

Conservatives of all stripes believe that this is not possible. In their view, an open society is a prerequisite for a vibrant capitalism. You can't have the latter without the former, and the Chinese Communist Party will have to accept that.

The rest of us are less sanguine. China's rulers have shown every sign of being able to have their cake and eat it -- at least as far as the Internet is concerned.

Chinese use of the network is growing like crazy, but the government has proved very adept at ensuring that the freedoms regarded by libertarians as intrinsic to cyberspace are not available to the average Chinese user. The country maintains a massive online policing operation and runs the finest firewall that money can buy. It thus provides a daily refutation of the myth that the Internet cannot be controlled by governments.

So it's not surprising that most public discussion in the West about the Internet in China has been dominated by civil liberties. But there's more to Chinese cyberspace than that, which is why the most interesting publication of the week was an essay by Deborah Fallows published by the Pew Internet and American Life project.

Entitled "China's online population explosion," it surveys what's happening behind the Great Firewall and ponders the implications both for the Chinese and for the rest of us.

First, the numbers. China has 137 million users (compared with 190 million in the US), but the online population is increasing at such a rate that in about two years there will be more Chinese than Americans on the Net.

Within China, however, there's a deep digital divide. Chinese users are overwhelmingly urban, young and male. A third are students, while a further third are business users. The deepest divide is the urban-rural one: Internet penetration among city dwellers is 20 percent, compared with only 3 percent for rural districts (the comparable US figures are 70 percent and 61 percent respectively).

Given that China's rulers see the Net as a critical enabler of development, a key policy issue for the regime is how to bridge the urban-rural gap. Fallows cites research suggesting that the two big obstacles are lack of connectivity and a huge skills deficiency. Even if rural Chinese were given Internet access, most would have no idea what to do with it. And many don't see it as having any relevance to their lives.

Fallows quotes one Shandong Province farmer: "To us farmers," he said, "a computer is no different from an aircraft carrier, because neither has a bearing on our life."

This will change. And when it does, what will happen to Chinese society? Fallows thinks that widespread Internet use will have a unifying effect on a society currently divided by many spoken languages but which has only one written one. Given that the Net deals mainly in text, she sees it having a major unifying impact in the longer term. She also sees a major impact in terms of linking the vast Chinese global diaspora with the folks back home.

What will be the impact on the rest of us? Will Chinese become the lingua franca of the Web? Hard to say, but it might be a good time to invest in online translation firms.

On a broader front, major change seems inevitable. The Internet was shaped by history and its original demographics: It came from the US and has largely been shaped by American values.

Two decades from now, its demographic profile will be radically different, which is why it makes sense to teach Chinese to our kids and Chinese culture, too.
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