Look Who's Talking.(government methods of gauging Chinese public opinion)

The war of words that has raged between Beijing and Washington over the past few weeks hasn't always been a matter of diplomatic nuance. "The United States would be foolish to send GIs to China just to die," warned one irate Chinese Netizen after U.S. President George W. Bush pledged to do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan in the event of a mainland attack. "I strongly protest that the government can't do anything but strongly protest," complained another. A third blasted the American president as "Bu-sh-t." By now, similar rants in Chinese Internet chat rooms have become de rigueur in every foreign-policy crisis involving the People's Republic. As much as fire-breathing American legislators and stern Chinese generals, they have become a critical voice in Sino-U.S. relations.

The question is, who are we--or, more important, Chinese leaders-- listening to? Despite all the talk of "Chinese public opinion," the voices that are actually heard do not speak for all 1.2 billion Chinese. China still lacks the kind of sophisticated polling and democratic forums through which a truly representative sampling of the public can be measured. Instead, leaders hear primarily from a thin slice of society--determined by the limited ways in which they are able to monitor their citizens and by who it is that authorities want to hear. The fact that they're listening at all, though, makes it ever more critical to understand whose voices are coming through.

Barely a decade ago some of China's mandarins thought they could safely ignore the opinion of their people. When Zhao Ziyang, who was then party chief, argued against using force on student protesters massing in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he claimed, "I have 1 billion Chinese people behind me." China's "paramount leader", Deng Xiaoping, shot back, "You have nothing," sent in the tanks and put Zhao under house arrest, which continues to this day. Current leaders maintain a far shakier hold on power--one that depends crucially on convincing the public that Beijing is boosting living standards and defending the nation's interests against outsiders. "Since 1989 the Chinese leadership has had to rely on nationalism and xenophobia for its legitimacy," says Sinologist Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism At Berkeley. And officials well know that the same people demonstrating against outsiders like the United States could very quickly turn on the regime as well. The Tiananmen protests, says Schell, were "a great wake-up call that public opinion has an autonomy and a danger that cannot be ignored."

Fortunately for Beijing, the spread of the Internet has provided a fast and ostensibly high-tech way to sample that opinion, particularly during crises. More than 21 million Chinese have access to chat rooms, where they can be far more outspoken than ever before. "Now we see what people are really thinking, because they say what they feel on the Internet," says a senior official on the State Council, China's cabinet. "It's not like in the past when China didn't have freedom of speech." Some top officials assign aides to write daily reports about what Chinese are discussing on the Web. After a U.S. Navy spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter and made an emergency landing on Hainan Island, Webmasters deleted the most vitriolic anti-U.S. and antigovernment screeds as public-security personnel simultaneously wrote crisis reports on the tone of the chat.

The picture that emerges from the Web, however, is severely limited. Seven out of 10 Chinese live in the countryside, and the vast majority are not wired. Chinese Netizens are predominantly male, under 30, well educated and living in metropolises. They share certain concerns with their rural brethren--corruption in particular--but they focus much more on foreign affairs and China's international image than on grass- roots headaches, such as punishing local taxes. Catering to the intelligentsia is not unusual for the regime: its power base is urban in nature, and it draws its ruling elite from educated city dwellers. "China's Net users may not be representative of all Chinese, but they will determine the future of China," says Guo Liang, a Beijing social scientist who recently published a survey of China's online community.

What these young urbanites also represent is possibly the greatest threat to the regime: they are precisely the types who filled Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the grounds in front of the U.S. Embassy in 1999, after the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Because of their ...