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To mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a German arts organization launched a website called the "Berlin Twitter Wall." Anyone anywhere on the Internet could use Twitter to post a comment into one of the speech bubbles. Within a few days of its launch, the website was overrun by messages in Chinese. Instead of talking about the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism in Europe, Chinese Twitter users accessed the site to protest their own government's Internet censorship. One wrote: "My apologies to German people a million times [for taking over this site]. But I think if Germans learn about our situation, they would feel sorry for us a million times." Twitter is blocked in China. Still, a growing community is so determined to gain access to the widely used social-networking service and hold uncensored conversations with people around the world that these Chinese Internet users have acquired the technical skills to circumvent this censorship system-widely known as the "Great Firewall of China," a filtering system that blocks websites on domestic Internet connections.
In late January 2010, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton-who two months earlier had stood at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate with other world leaders to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall-gave a 45-minute speech on "Internet Freedom." She spelled out how one single, free, and open global Internet is an essential prerequisite for freedom and democracy in the twenty-first century. "A new information curtain is descending across much of the world," she warned. "And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day."1
But can we assume that Chinese authoritarianism will crumble just as the Iron Curtain crumbled two decades ago? It is unwise to make the assumption that the Internet will lead to rapid democratization in China or in other repressive regimes. There are difficult issues of government policy and corporate responsibility that must be resolved in order to ensure that the Internet and mobile technologies can fulfill their potential to support liberation and empowerment.
When an authoritarian regime embraces and adjusts to the inevitable changes brought by digital communications, the result is what I call "networked authoritarianism." In the networked authoritarian state,...