Roger L. Simon: Google's Choice, China's Dilemma

I was pleased to read Google's acknowledgment of culpability for allowing China to censor the Internet giant's search engine. Maybe they were listening to Tom Lantos. The Guardian's report even hints that Google is going to do something about it and insist on no censorship, which would toss an interesting hot potato in China's lap.

How would China react? This is no small question. China, as most of us would agree, is not a communist state in any sense Karl Marx would recognize, but more like a repressive Las Vegas. It frequently behaves schizophrenically, embracing modernity and primitivism at the same time. One example of this schizophrenia are the near simultaneous reports that Harbin scientists have been able to breed a florescent pig while China itself has banned advertising of its own traditional Year of the Pig in order not to offend Muslims.

In some ways frightened, China feels it constantly has to balance between its energy source (the Islamic world) and its market - the West. Added to this are the natural totalitarian tendencies of a post-communist state. What can we do to help? Well, mighty Google can by applying pressure for freedom. As for the rest of us, we might seriously think about a Manhattan Project for alternative energy sources. It worked once.

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Be interesting if freedom actually came to China through the Internet and the microchip.

YES! A Manhatten Project for a non-oil energy source. I know that there are tons of projects out there, big and small, but they are not focussed enough, at this point.

It's a question of packaging it with patriotism. Truly, most Americans would be on board with this.

The problem with a "Manhattan Project" approach is that the technology choices would likely be driven by political factors rather than by technological and economic rationality. See Michael Munger's article Why Politicians Can't Judge Innovation, also my post Leaving a Trillion on the Table.

There seems to be a tremendous amount of innovation going on in alternative energy right now, and I worry that a massive and centralized government program would likely have the effect of shutting much of this down in favor of established players with massive lobbying resources.

Photon is right here. Government cannot be the judge of innovation because it becomes a political exercize that will shut out work on promising lines that don't conform to the needs of the lobbyists.

The Manhatten Project was NOT an innovation of government! It was an innovation of private scientists who managed to scare the gov't IN A TIME OF WAR to pony up the money before the Germans could get the bomb.

This was a special case and not applicable today. Today the downside of government running things is fully in play.

I think that an analog is the current state of physics. According to what I've read recently theoretical physics has been stuck in a quagmire for ~30 years. Ever since Hawking came up with string theory that has sucked all the energy out of the discipline. There has been no experimental movement toward proving or disproving it so that's where we sit, a lack of innovation.

If the government wanted to help they should push for and finance KNOWN solutions with a big practical upside such as nuclear for electical generation and then things like coal gassification or conversion to oil to make use of the coal that doesn't get burned for electricity.

I bet that the foreign oil "crisis" could be ameliorated in 5 years if we could shut up the enviros AND the Saudi lobbyists.

While I respect your views, Photon and Alan C., I must say they are very predictable, almost fuddy-duddy conservative-libertarian attitudes and seem formulaic to me.

One of the great mistakes of the Bush Administration in their dealings with the War on Terror has been their failure to enlist the American public from the start. We want to help. They acted and continue to act afraid - as if any sacrifice will make us run away. The truth is the opposite.

Furthermore, your fear of government and bureaucracy seems as rigid as the reverse. Remember what Chairman Deng said when he wrenched China away from Maoism: "I don't care if a cat is black or white, only if it catches mice." There are many forms a Manhattan Project could take. Think creatively. Don't quote dogma.

Way premature, I think. China still is more communist than anything else. It may not be 100%Lenin's dream, but it has a long way to go to be post-communist.

How about an alternative energy project that promotes clean, cheap energy production, as in nuclear power? Or are we still worshipping at the altar of the Three Mile Island god?

But I don't think China is anywhere near even ten percent of Marx or Lenin's dream. It is simply state-managed capitalism... a very successful version of Franco's Spain. Friends of mine who have invested in the Chinese stock market have made fortunes. The idea of such of thing even existing would have made Engels cringe. The success of the so-called Chinese Communist Party stems from the fact that it is only remotely communist in its economic activities. It is a powerful and very corrupt oligarchy filled with billionaires (yes, most of them are "party" members, but owners of companies that shouldn't even exist under communism). It's a giant charade.

Hell, after attributing all of existence to the harmonics generated by infintesimally small multi-dimensional vibrating strings, even the Big Bang theory seems rational. Boy, we proud monkeys have come a long way, huh? To think that we were once fish. Hmm...thinking of crackpot ideas...

Not sure why it's "quoting dogma" to give specific examples and analyses of cases where government direction of technology failed and the reasons thereof. The current situation with corn-based ethanol should provide an additional cautionary example.

I would note that the Manhattan Project was conducted *in secret*. Had it been conducted openly, in anything resembling today's climate, then it would have likely been derailed by a combination of (1)"practical" people arguing that it was impossible and way too expensive, (2)ship and tank builders concerned about diversion of resources from their products, (3)"peace-oriented" individuals arguing against its inhumanity. I'm not sure ever FDR could have pulled it off.

Returning to the present situation: How about: a tariff on *imported* oil that starts at (say) $2/bbl immediately and is preset to rise at $3/bbl/year thereafter? This would mitigate one of the major concerns of those developing alternative energy programs: the fear of a drop in oil prices that would make their investments economically unsustainable, and thus accelerate the deployment of these alternatives.

I'm aware that China has been experimenting with free enterprise. And I will admit that I am not up to speed since I was pleasantly surprised to learn here that China allows foreign investment in a stock market that I did not know existed.
While I agree that economic freedom is a powerful move in the right direction, I still see China's control over its citizens, the lack of personal freedom, its political system (how leadership is decided) etc. as much more communist than not.
But if using economic freedom as the prime characteristic, you've convinced me that you are right.

A small correction AlanC. Hawkins was not the developer of string theory. His specialty is black holes. Thirty years ago he came up with the controversial theory that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it. This lead to the Black Hole information paradox. The upshot of the theory was that information would be lost. The problem is if information can be lost we could never be certain of the past or be able to predict the future precisely.

It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This "Hawking radiation" contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.

But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.

After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape.

I'm not afraid of the government except that it is incompetent when it comes to big projects. Especially as Photon pointed out, public projects in a political environment. The Defense Department in a time of war does pretty well, but, they tend to contract out construction.
See the innovation in ship building from the Liberty ship era.

If there is a single agreed on solution then government could make a Manhattan style project work. But we're not there now. There are too many people invested in marginally effective alternatives to allow the government to back innovation. It isn't even mostly the bureaucracy, it's the politics (see grain state legislators) and the lobbyists.

I fully agree that GWB has been a failure as a salesman and in getting the American public engaged. If the MSM wasn't so full of BDS maybe he would have been good enough, but, I doubt it.

It's ironic that the Deng quote was made in terms of increasing capitalist, free market type policies.

Screwed up the Hawking analogy it wasn't string theory it was the "information paradox" which he recently agreed was a mistake. So, phyicists spent 25 years in his dead end. That's what we have done and are doing with government supported alternative energy programs.

You may be interested in this recent article about the state of China by British journalist Will Hutton, who describes it as "Leninist corporatism".

Think creatively all you want. Tell us why this project will be like the Manhattan project and not like one of the later Manhattan projects, including those aimed at energy independence, such as Synfuels. You remember them - they were initially promoted as "another Manhattan project" yet turned out to be another big govt project disaster, never to be mentioned by folks promoting big govt projects.

The Manhattan project was an anomaly in that it mostly succeeded. That's why folks arguing for big govt projects to solve problems use it and not one of the many other big govt projects.

And lo and behold, all of Kerry�s inflammatory statements have been edited out of his clip. They cut out Kerry�s �international pariah� statement, and his Kyoto Protocol stuff. They also cut out the bits about viewing the world through �an American lens.�

Looks like someone�s been trying to make sure they don�t have any Eason Jordan moments slipping out to the hoi polloi.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24179_BBC_Message_Boards_Ban_Another_LGF_Thread&only

The problem with the 'Manhattan Project' analogy is that the physics of building an atomic weapon are straightforward (I didn't say easy, I said straightforward. Heisenberg got one parameter wrong and concluded it was impossible - if the parameter value he used had been correct, his conclusion would have been right.) It was a difficult and expensive engineering project that required great creativity and dedication, but had the advantage of being focused on a single, well defined end point with cost as essentially no object.

By comparison, development of new energy sources has to take place in the context of a highly complex production, distributiion and use context, with cost as a major driver and multiple externally imposed constraints (land use, environmental factors, installed base, politics) and in the face of a well established, cost effective and convenient baseline (fossil fuels).

Substantial funding has gone into alternative energy sources over the past several decades, so funding alone is not the reason for the slow progress. As fossil fuels become more expensive, and as alternatives slowly become cost effective, there will be a changeover. Given the large cost of creating an alternative distribution system (or production capability in the case of 'building-centric' technologies), the alternatives will need to either fit into the exisiting paradigm or be really cheap.

A practical issue with "non-petroleum energy sources", is that our transportation sector infrastructure will have to be replaced, that will be both expensive and time-consuming, and the transition period will be long. We use a lot of energy, and any useful alternative will have to provide a lot of energy in useful forms.

China's leadership has recognized that Marxism/Leninism has failed, but they've been steeped in it for so long that their habits of thought have been shaped by it. So they aren't exactly Communists anymore, aren't trying to be, but they can't help lapsing into Communist-thought on occasion.

January 27, 2007: Google's Choice, China's Dilemma

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