The Internet and China's Rule-of-Law Games

[Commentary] Every day Beijing grows more uncomfortable with the degree of free communications it has accidentally allowed in China.

Witness a growing list of commentaries appearing in official media outlets directed especially at Sina's Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. The site sparked authoritarian concern in the weeks after late July's deadly high-speed train crash in Wenzhou. Weibo became a conduit for inconvenient truths and cynical speculations about the accident. The Communist Party sees a huge threat. This is as much a business story as it is a free-speech issue. In short, over the years Beijing has made certain decisions about how it would interact with the business world, especially concerning the rule of law. Those decisions are coming back to haunt the Communist Party. The Party won't or can't shut down Weibo. The real reason for all the worried official commentary about microblogging is that Beijing has reached a disturbing realization: While the authorities obsessed over controlling the supply of Internet services, they lost sight of the demand. That demand for the service Weibo provides has made it so popular that Beijing must fear a backlash if ever the service were cut off. Hence all the talk about "regulating" Weibo but no talk about the simplest and most clearly legal means of ending the nuisance. The problem is that in this instance, the rule of the party's law discouraging Internet investment would undermine the growth on which the party relies for legitimacy. Beijing needs businesses like Sina, whether it wants them or not. Having admitted this to itself more than a decade ago, Beijing finds it's too late to change its mind now.