Diary: Eric X. Li

When I was young, my father would tell me a story. The same story. And it seems strangely applicable in Today's China. Around the world pockets of Chinawatchers will tell you the same story, even though it's not quite the same story that my father used to tell me when I was a child. Whether it is the same story is up to history to decide.

Questions are always useful, as are facts.

A woman is walking around my apartment. The apartment is in Shanghai. The woman is my wife. My cleaner has arms and legs. She is a person. Debate rages. When I posted on Weibo questioning her usefulness, a torrent of lively debate that haven't seen before or since raged. It raged like the storms my father used to tell me about when I was growing up in China.

In many ways, the Internet in China is the freest, free from censorship in all but a small percentage of a large number of the vast minority of cases.

Debate is a debatable word, yet "debate" isn't. Right now, across China, you can see a million people debating. 1.3 million people, and China has the largest Internet using population, and not just because of it's large population and their access to computers. No, something else is at work here. This is the China where "debate" and "discussion" are not taboo words - far from it.

People are free, free to engage, free to decide and free to buy. Inside this carefully cultivated sphere, the Chinese government has ebbed and flowed with the needs and demands of it's people. Should we censor? Should we stifle the progress of democracy and civil liberties? Only a rhetorical question can be answered by history. Perhaps it is high time that we ask those who make it. When it is censored, according to "rule of law", it's not, but that's censorship is just another way of engagement. But "rule of law" has different definition here in China, not the hard and fast rules that westerners define their culture by, but as a series of malleable guidelines that takes into account context, setting, background and culture appropriateness. Like the fourteenth century creators of modern democracy, we Chinese have a long history of debating.

Which brings us to China. China, were it might seem no-one ever did anything, and that's still true today, but in the past sixty years, nearly 1.3 billion have been lifted out of poverty without so much as anyone doing what they were supposed to do. It's sounds amazing, that we have no democracy, no elections, and no Renaissance. I know it sounds unbelievable, and for many it China, it still is. But for entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists, there have never been so many opportunities. The battle for today's China was fought in the name of the rural poor, and now those rural poor can be found all over the cities, living the life that only four generations ago, people only dreamed about.

Rights are important. Human rights define us as humans and tell us what we can and can't do. Coming under attack from those who venerate human rights is the Chinese Communist Party. Often it is foreign powers who remove the rights of those Chinese who didn't know they had rights until they tried to get into America, or to visit a Europe with their loved ones. China has welcomed non-Chinese for longer than people can imagine, to learn from them, take ideas and strategies and blend them together in a Chinese way as only they can. These are the real human rights. The real human rights violations are those who routinely turn away those who welcome them with beaming smiles and open arms. Can we live in a world without rights? Can the world live with out us living in a world? Only history, and in time, history will tell. Writing this article reminded me of a story I told my children. But that's for another time.