The worries by hard liners clearly telegraphs those means of control (page 145):
[The advent of the network society presents the CCP with unprecedented new challenges in governance. ... [If] the CCP fails to rein the network in, the same 'tragedy' that befell the Soviet Union in 1991 could devastate China. ... [The] same thing could happen to the PRC but offers as a solution only three time-worn policy recommendations: prevent U.S. cultural subversion, use the media to cultivate core values among the paople, and strengthen teaching and research on the connection between mass media and politics.
Pressuring Hollywood to make films conform to CCP values and the Confucius Institute's efforts to bend American views of China to be favorable clearly flow from the worries about American "cultural subversion."
And the social credit system seems a response to the CCP worries about how they can rein in their online citizens who could diverge from accepted views outside of direct party propaganda broadcasting.
China's rulers are genuinely afraid of information that springs up inside China or that comes from America that is outside of their usual means of control.
That doesn't mean that we should go along with it--we should not. Especially here where our laws and freedoms must prevail.
UPDATE: Say ... what?!
A major human rights crisis is unfolding in northwestern China, according to the United Nations, which said last week that there were credible reports that the Chinese government is holding one million or more ethnic minorities in secretive detention camps.
Yet even for those who have escaped China, surveillance and intimidation have followed. As part of a massive campaign to monitor and intimidate its ethnic minorities no matter where they are, Chinese authorities are creating a global registry of Uighurs who live outside of China, threatening to detain their relatives if they do not provide personal and identifying information to Chinese police. This campaign is now reaching even Uighurs who live in the United States.
So now China wants to control people who fled to America. To get the few who escape their repression.
Somebody needs to tell the repulsive China fanboy Tom Friedman that evidence of reasonable enlightenment in China's communist rulers is getting harder and harder to find.
