China Needs Flash Mobs

The Chinese government wants to have its silicon chips and eat them, too. It wants to harness the vast promise of lightning-fast information exchange brought by the Internet while at the same time controlling the flow of information, something it admits it can't do without the Three Stooges. (No, not Larry, Curly, and Moe. The other Three Stooges: Larry, Sergey, and Bill.)

In the meantime, the government's efforts at physical control of the Chinese populace ever more closely resemble a man trying to hold the lid of a boiling pot down with his bare hands, as I have blogged before.

First, via Matt Drudge, I encountered a news story about China's admission that there is a problem which took the form, of course, of a threat to its own citizens. And then, in TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski pointed out an even better story on the situation there, from which I quote two paragraphs.

These "sudden incidents" or "mass incidents," in official parlance, are presenting Chinese officials with a serious problem that goes beyond the negative image of China they project to the outside world. The sheer numbers are noteworthy. In August 2005, the country's public security minister, Zhou Yongkang, announced that some 74,000 such events had taken place in 2004, an increase from 58,000 the year before. According to Zhou, 17 of the 74,000 involved more than 10,000 people, 46 involved more than 5,000 people, and 120 involved more than 1,000 participants. But many believe the actual figures are higher.

...

Of even greater significance is the fact that in August 2005 the People's Liberation Army Daily warned the country's two million soldiers that they would be severely punished if they participated in demonstrations. This warning, doubtless prompted by recent demonstrations in Beijing by demobilized soldiers demanding better pensions, suggests that China's leaders are worried not only about the grievances of displaced peasants, but also about disaffection among rank-and-file members of the military. [bold added]

It's always a good sign when a dictatorship has to start worrying about its own army.

But something about the official terminology used to describe these protests that have the Chi-Comms worried jogged my memory. "Sudden incidents?" Reminds me of an old internet fad a few years back, the flash mob. And what's really ironic is that the lead paragraph in the Wired News article even evokes the Chinese peasant uprisings!

There were no peasants waving torches or pitchforks in this crowd, no procession up a winding, eerie mountain road to flush out the monster who'd been terrorizing their town.

The mob that gathered in Manhattan on Tuesday night was looking for something they referred to (without explanation) as a "Love Rug." Or at least that's what the couple of hundred people who gathered in Macy's department store told a bemused salesman, who may or may not have believed he was dealing with a commune of carpet-craving eccentrics.

The crowd of people was participating in the Mob Project, an e-mail-driven experiment in organizing groups of people who suddenly materialize in public places, interact with others according to a loose script and then dissipate just as suddenly as they appeared. [bold added].

I have been lucky enough not to have to fight for my freedom against a regime like that in Beijing, so I risk sounding both clueless and presumptuous in kibbitzing about how best to overthrow this regime. But flash mobs (or some variant thereof) sound like they'd be a good diversionary tactic in any upcoming revolution of the Chinese "proletariat". If similar methods aren't being employed already....

Here's hoping that the Chinese people show their slavemasters what "sudden" really can mean.

-- CAV