Assessing the effects: A curse disguised as a blessing? ONE OF THE world's most widely read bloggers, Han Han, who is based in Shanghai, once explained to your correspondent why he did not think much of the shorter forms of microblogs, which he uses only sparingly. It was not long after the high-speed train crash in July 2011 that had been a big moment for social media. Outrage at the accident and at the government's slow and bumbling response spread rapidly on Sina Weibo, overwhelming the censors. It seemed a rare case of the public shouting down the authorities. Urban intellectuals, including some hardened sceptics, saw this as a turning-point in the history of the internet, perhaps of China generally. But Mr Han was not impressed. "You feel everyone's really angry, you feel like you could go open the window and you would see protesters on the street," Mr Han said. But once you open the window, you realise that there's nothing there at all. Microblogging, he said, encouraged people to tune into a big story briefly, almost as entertainment, until the next big story comes along. It did not bring about "any real change or progress." And yet microblogging has already transformed Chinese society and the way it is ruled. It has fundamentally altered the relationship between the people and the state, allowing the public to demand more accountability from officials, even if it is often disappointed. In another era the authorities would surely have kept the details of that train crash secret, lied about its cause and understated the death toll. As it was, official orders kept it off the front pages the following day. Even so, microblogs quickly spread the news, along with lots of photographs, before officials could control them. When a spokesman failed to provide convincing answers, he was pummelled online and lost his job. Anger continued to rise at his employer, the powerful railway ministry, which is now being reorganised. This special report has argued that by building a better cage, the Communist Party has reaped the economic benefits of the internet while absorbing and controlling its political impact, and that other countries have adapted China's blueprint to their needs. The high-speed crash posed a challenge to this state of affairs, a demonstration of the power of weibo to rattle the cage. So is that cage built to last or will it fall apart, shown up as an increasingly desperate and ultimately doomed effort to control the uncontrollable? Recently it has become fashionable to suggest that the cage is being rattled so much it will eventually break, heralding a Beijing spring. This special report, in contrast, has argued that if such a spring were to be on its way, the internet may well be delaying its arrival, not hastening it. China's problems in the real world are mounting. Admittedly the economy remains one of the world's best-performing, with GDP expected to grow by 7.5% this year. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people have become middle-class or even rich, whereas the number of those in abject poverty continues to decline. But corruption, income inequality, pollution and food-safety scares are far worse now than they were before the internet arrived. Incidents of mass unrest have risen dramatically in the past two decades. Even among some of the most prosperous Chinese, who have little reason to protest, a more subtle but palpable unease has taken hold. Some of them, including entrepreneurs and government officials, have hedged their bets by obtaining foreign passports and residence permits, buying properties overseas, sending their children to study abroad and sometimes getting their spouses to go with them (the term used for such officials is "naked," meaning there is nothing to hold them in China). Such moves have been spurred by concerns about things like smog, tainted milk and the quality of education, but also by a vaguer sense that the current gilded age cannot last. For some people the train crash was a metaphor for years of unrestrained high-speed GDP growth propelling the country towards a social, environmental and political reckoning. Of mice and Chinamen So far the party's heavy investment in the internet has paid off, allowing the government to acknowledge the problems but keeping things under control. Outsiders often describe China's internet as an ever-evolving game of cat and mouse in which both parties keep getting cleverer. The metaphor is useful up to a point, but ultimately misleading. The Chinese government has a strong interest in catching and silencing the troublemakers among the mice, and this special report has shown how much effort and ingenuity it is putting into achieving this. But it has just as much interest in providing a roomier and more attractive cage for all the mice so that they might make less trouble. To this end it has allowed a distinctly Chinese internet to flourish, with more people getting online - and more of them shopping, watching videos, gaming and chatting with each other, all on trusted Chinese platforms - than in any other country. This customisation of the internet is an important part of building a better cage. This special report has also shown that the internet is not just a forum where citizens can vent their concerns, it is also a place where the party can listen to them and take part in the discussion. The authorities have come up with serious responses to events such as the train crash and the recent air pollution. One reason that the train crash has had no further repercussions is that the authorities have heeded people's concerns about safety, reducing the number of trains and their maximum speed so that they are now running smoothly and on time. If the internet makes the government more responsive to people's everyday concerns, does it matter if the party quickly crushes attempts to organise protests, as it did during the Arab spring? China's top security official urged at the time that any such efforts be snuffed out "in the embryonic stage," and so they were. Does it matter that the party continues to stamp on dissidents online, just as it does offline? Some will say that a few human-rights concerns hardly detract from the massive success story of the Chinese internet. But this misses the point. Microblogging has already transformed Chinese society and the way it is ruled The government has indeed provided a roomy and attractive cage, with helpful officials tending to it. But meanwhile the systemic issues that have contributed to the problems in the real world - such as corruption, unaccountability and a total lack of transparency - continue to fester, destabilising the foundations of authoritarianism. It is not inconceivable that the entire authoritarian edifice may eventually founder, hastened perhaps by some huge domestic crisis. If the economy were to go into a deep slump, causing massive unemployment, or if some catastrophe were to befall the country that seriously undermined the party's legitimacy, the internet could play a dramatic and unpredictable role. Flipping the kill switch to turn it off could have equally unpredictable results (see article). Until such a moment the authorities will try to fill in cracks in the edifice of power as the internet exposes them. By doing so they may be able to buy themselves more time, possibly a lot more. The old way of doing things will not be viable indefinitely; but for now the party is still very much in charge, deciding on the new way of doing things. In that sense Mr Han was right to be sceptical about social media. When, many years from now, history books about this period come to be written, the internet may well turn out to have been an agent not of political upheaval in China but of authoritarian adaptation before the upheaval, building up expectations for better government while delaying the kind of political transformation needed to deliver it. That may seem paradoxical, but it makes sense for a party intent on staying in power for as long as it can.