Link: Web enables broader view of 'China'

When the human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng escaped extralegal house arrest and beatings and found his way to the U.S. Embassy last month, he became an instant hero on the Chinese Internet. His escape was called a "miracle." Stories of "China's blind Spiderman" went viral. Someone who had helped Chen tweeted an account: He had "climbed eight walls, jumped a dozen or so irrigation ridges, fell down a few hundred times, injured a foot, and finally crossed a stream that got him out of the village."

The Internet is the first medium in the history of Communist rule in China that the government has not been able to fully control. The authorities hire hundreds of thousands of police and spend billions of yuan annually monitoring the Web and blocking unwanted messages. Yet for hundreds of millions of Chinese, the Internet continues to grow as a source of uncensored news and platform for popular expression.

Online chatter in recent years has generated new notions of what it means to be Chinese. For decades China's rulers have insisted that "China" means not much more or less than "Chinese government leaders." To be "patriotic" has meant to support the party-state. After the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in 1989, China's government demanded, as a condition of his release, that he promise to refrain from "anti-China" activity. Fang agreed -- but refused to allow the party to own the word "China." He pledged that "my concerns for China, as a Chinese citizen, will be for its peace, its prosperity, and its modernization."

It is regrettable that American experts on U.S.-China relations continue to use "China" and "the Chinese" to refer exclusively to elite circles within the Beijing government. For these experts, "the Chinese" view of anything -- currency, technology transfer, cyberwar, Tibet, Taiwan, Syria -- is inevitably the government's view, no matter how far it departs from the views of other Chinese. They warn that if Washington supports human rights or democracy it will be "seen in China" as American sabotage. But seen this way by whom in China?

U.S. acceptance of the China="Communist Party leadership" formula dates from the Nixon-Mao breakthrough. In the early 1970s, the regime's rulers were indeed the only Chinese whom Americans could reasonably approach. But to persist with such a constricted understanding today is obtuse, even dangerous.

The Obama administration has signaled that it wants to pull free. When President Barack Obama visited Shanghai in 2009, he probably knew that his "town meeting" was packed with preselected party people. But he asked that some questions come from the Internet, and some of those queries -- including on Internet censorship -- were obviously not party-approved.

During the recent crisis over Chen, Obama said that "we want China to be strong and want it to be prosperous." Days later Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed with "we want a strong and prosperous China." Here the word "China" was adroitly ambiguous. To Americans, and to many Chinese, it could mean the United States wishes the best for "all the Chinese people." But to Communist Party leaders, given the way they have used the term for decades, the message could be: "The American president favors wealth and power for the Communist Party-state." That was the interpretation projected in China's government-run media.

Allowing "China" to mean only a small elite adumbrates nearly a fifth of the world's population. It also prevents a square consideration of how long the regime will last -- by far the most sensitive topic in the diplomatic language game. If "China" means only "the regime," what happens, some day, if it is not there?

The two dynasties in Chinese history that most resemble the Communist episode are the Qin (221-207 B.C.) and the Sui (A.D. 589-618). Both oversaw huge new construction and great increases in wealth but also ruthless tyranny, deaths from forced labor, and horrors such as burning of books and burying of scholars. China will eventually outgrow its current spasm as well, perhaps without Chen Guangcheng's help. On the other hand, maybe this artist of miracle escapes can pull off a second miracle: changing the way the U.S. government understands "China."

Perry Link was a co-editor of "The Tiananmen Papers." This is from The Washington Post.