Thursday 10 February 2011

CHINA AND EGYPT

The Daily Maverick

THE CHINESE SPHINX: HOW CHINA REPORTS ON EGYPT

The Daily Maverick, February 10, 2011

Unsurprisingly, the People’s Republic of China has been extraordinarily uncomfortable with the popular uprising in Egypt. Hosni Mubarak’s 30 years of authoritarianism, suddenly under existential threat, has many a corollary with the Chinese Communist Party. The question is not so much whether this could happen in China—it has, and might well again—but how the Chinese have reacted to it.

Tahrir Square in late January 2011, must have looked to the Chinese upper echelons like hell on earth. Memories of Tiananmen Square—the defining event of post-revolutionary China—were unwelcome, but inevitable. Squint at the TV, and the two uprisings looked incredibly similar.

Thing is, most Chinese were not squinting at the Egyptian revolt on their television screens. The CCP was determined to manage the outflow of information, even as it crackled across the Internet, trending high on Chinese Twitter and Facebook sites. Too much has been made of the Egyptian uprising being a result of online social networking - Frank Rich handily debunks this nonsense in a recent New York Times op-ed piece - but no one is arguing that news of the events in Cairo and beyond were disseminated over the web.

(...) [artículo aquí]

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