The View | How can China become a tech leader if it’s intolerant of free thought?
Liu Xiaobo’s case makes innovators wonder where’s the line between ‘subversive’ inventiveness and politically correct thought that keeps you out of the gulag
Imagine powerful images of rows of mindless, obedient subjects at a Chinese Communist Party Congress being brainwashed by an all-seeing tyrant. No one can be free of his power until a girl with a sledgehammer liberates the subjects from the tyrant’s speech.
What I’ve described is not a movie trailer, but Apple Macintosh’s arresting 1984 Superbowl commercial (directed by Ridley Scott) that paints a picture of bleak dystopia with allusions to George Orwell’s 1984.
Governments face the danger of losing authority over the social contract as social media and algorithms become their own power base. China is especially vulnerable to this phenomenon
The images from Apple’s 1984 ad are allusions to Orwell’s famous novel, in which the dystopian nation of Oceania is governed by an oppressive totalitarian government. It also lets the audience know that there is no individuality. And that the personal computer will liberate their minds.
The narration ominously chants: “Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of an information purification victory, a garden of pure ideology…we are one people with one whim, one resolve, one cause…we shall prevail.”
I’m not trying to spin larger-than-life, surrealistic film noir. But a 61-year-old, ailing Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo, is very close to death. The dissident, who has late-stage liver cancer was sentenced to 11 years in jail on charges of “inciting subversion of state power”. He will not even be exiled to a cocoon of self-banishment.
No one can imagine any Chinese tech company running that 1984 ad in China today. The metaphor and message are blasphemous. Even in the 21st century, as the new China carves out a superpower role, reactionary, Cold War, authoritarian tendencies lurk in the background.