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Tech-Powered Politics, Part 3: Iran's Youth Twitter and the World Watches

Moldova, Guatemala, Fiji, Madagascar... Iran. 

If ever there was a year that crystallized the power of technology in the hands of average people to disseminate news and force transparency in the face of political suppression, corruption and violence, this is it.

It has been one week since 40 million people in the Islamic Republic of Iran went to the polls to cast ballots in Iran's controversial 10th Presidential election.

Last week, as the early results of the Iranian elections were reported, I emailed two old and distant acquaintances, young Iranian students I had blogged about over two years ago after meeting at a rooftop party in New Delhi.  During our conversation in India, the students had suggested to me that there was continued frustration with the limits on political freedom in Iran, and, in their words, "that the current regime [would] have to open up the political process or face very serious popular unrest within the next five to ten years."

Last Friday night, one of those students, a computer scientist now back in Iran, quickly responded to my email with the following:

"Now it's 2:42 AM here in Tehran when I'm writing these lines for you. As per the state television's live broadcasting from 19 million counted votes Ahmadinejad is leading by 67% and Mousavi is second after him by 30%...Nobody knows if there is a conspiracy going on, but this result (if continued) is not going to be accepted by majority of people.

Stay in touch."

Over the last seven days I have watched from my computer and on my blackberry, videos of hundreds of thousands of young enthusiastic Iranians, marching through the streets of Tehran and risking their reputations and safety in order to demand that their voices be heard and that their votes be counted. 

As a student of middle east politics, and an uncompromising believer in the power of democracy, freedom of speech, and technology, this is one of the most inspirational things I have ever witnessed.  It may not be Tienanmen, but in the middle east, it is indeed something altogether different, and potentially more powerful. 

Just as important as the protesters' actions themselves, however, has been the ability of people around the world to witness these events despite extensive limits on the traditional media by Iranian government officials and violent attempts by government-backed forces to prevent any reporting at all.

In spite of this, or maybe, because of it, we have been privy to a rugged street view of the events in Iran via Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.  And while the past 12 months have shown us flashes of social media journalism from the globe's political hot spots, the last 7 days in Persia have provided the most poignant example.  Young Iranians armed with digital cameras and cell phones have given us unvarnished, if imperfect, images of the most important political struggle inside their country in a generation, all without editorial control, satellite hookup or commercial interruption.

This is citizen journalism, Iranian-style.  And it is my hope that this week's events not only bear political fruit for the masses of frustrated and disenfranchised Iranians, but that other reclusive and suppressive regimes around the world see this and recognize that information wants to be free, and that in the age of the smart phone, the days of centralized media control are over.

20 Years Later, Have We Forgotten Tiananmen?

Today, June 4th, marks the twentieth anniversary of the violent clearing of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators from Beijing's Tiananmen Square by the army of the Peoples' Republic of China.

So much has changed in China since those tense seven weeks between April and June, 1989, when hundreds of thousands of students, disillusioned communists, and free market reformers gathered in the World's largest urban square to plead for economic reform and democratic rights, that the importance of that experience seems hard to remember.

China's economy has become the fastest growing in the world, with GDP expanding by an average of 9% a year, every year, since 1979 and touching double-digit growth in 2006 and 2007.  This steady march has been heavily driven by a constant Western demand for cheap Chinese-manufactured goods, and more recently, significant foreign investment.  Government reform over the last decade removed much of what actually remains of the communist economic system.  Oddly, the world's largest and last big "Communist" country today boasts some some of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world, (25% for large companies, 20% for smaller enterprises).

As a result, tremendous domestic opportunities have opened up, enticing foreign and domestic firms to deploy billions of dollars of capital in China in hopes of selling products and services to the more than 1.3 billion consumers with increasing disposable income. 

The current economic crisis and subsequent Chinese unemployed unrest notwithstanding, so much has changed for the better for China's people in the last 20 years that a casual observer might assume the June 4 protesters had in fact succeeded in their mission.  Younger generations' first impressions of Beijing were likely cast while watching the Olympics Opening Ceremonies last summer.  With such an impressive show it might seem easy to forget that the 1989 protests had ever taken place.

If only it were so. 

Despite the economic miracle of the Middle Kingdom, state suppression of political and religious dissent remains rigid. 

Elements of the Catholic church, the Falun Gong, the Buddhist population in Tibet and Muslim minority groups in the Western provinces are sometimes arrested, beaten or jailed without open trial or formal charge.  And reports of Chinese political activists who have been arrested or tortured for acts of subversion against the state are a common part of the international news cycle.

The government, whose obsession with managing foreign impressions is well-known, is clearly still concerned over the wounds left 20 years ago by Tiananmen.

Beginning on Tuesday, bloggers on TechCrunch reported that major web applications including search engines, photo & information sites and social networks like Hotmail, Flicker, Live.com, Twitter, Bing, had been shut down or restricted.  Plain clothes police officers with umbrellas to block cameras are in place this morning in Tiananmen looking out for embarrassing protests that might taint China's new, post-Olympics, shining image.

However, most ironic aspect of the current state of political freedom in China is that today, 20 years after Tienanmen, the US has become much more dependent on China than ever before, ultimately weakening any diplomatic hand we might have to play in supporting continued political reform and speaking out against human rights abuses in the country.

More critical to our current precarious economic state than the U.S. trade relationship with China (our second largest partner after Canada), is the debt relationship we now have with the Chinese government.  The U.S. Treasury's ability to continue printing money to support our deficit spending on Iraq, corporate bailouts and a potential new set of health care entitlements, is limited by China's willingness to continue buying our U.S. Treasury bonds. 

Just as the U.S. has built an unhealthy dependency on the drug pushers of the middle east, OPEC, who fuel both our economy at home and our enemies' supply chains in the caves of Afghanistan and valleys of  Pakistan, 20 years of debt-financed consumption has left us with a similar dependency on the government in Beijing, now our reluctant ally against hyperinflation and further global economic destabilization.

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There are no memorials in mainland China to the estimated 2,000-3,000 people who were killed for their political beliefs and the thousands more who were wounded on June 4, 1989.  Only in Hong Kong is open public discussion of the subject tolerated by Beijing.  And as a frustrating corollary to the half-success of economic reform without political freedom, China's youth today, high on the Internet and their new found wealth, have much more to lose than their 1980's predecessors. 

As told to a CNN reporter by two young Chinese, "Our safety, our wealth are all controlled by the authority," spoke "John," a 27-year-old restaurant owner in Beijing. "The only thing that common people can do is to work hard and earn more money."

Added Holly, a young Chinese woman: "An old Chinese saying is that 'self-preservation is the first law of nature.' Politics doesn't pay. We must go to wherever that pays."

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Below is a video documenting several events in modern Chinese history following the founding of the Peoples' Republic on October 1, 1949 and culminating in the demonstrations of 1989 which began after the death of pro-democracy and anti-corruption advocate Hu Yaobang.  I believe the music in the background is a song called Elegant Bearing of the Blood Stain, a piece of popular music written in 1987, originally as a memorial of the war between China and Vietnam at the southern border in 1979, and subsequently used to commemorate those who died in the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989.