Chinese puzzle

To: Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao

From: Me

Re: Your plans to control the Internet in China.

It ain’t gonna work.

Despite your best intentions to, as you put it in such Orwellian terms, "strengthen administration and development of our country’s Internet culture," you will fail.

The toothpaste is out of the tube, and a hundred dictators can’t put it back in. The ’net is all about freedom, not limits and boundaries. You can run from its impact, but you can’t hide.

That’s especially true in a country like China — increasingly modern and wealthy, beyond the control of petty commissars.

Maybe in a backwater like North Korea, which actually has a handful of Internet users among the privileged elite, you could keep the clamps on.

But in a huge nation like China, with millions of computers, fugedaboudit. One report said that in two years, China will have more Internet users than the current No. 1, the U.S. of A, which has 210 million webheads.

So my advice to you and your cronies on the Politburo is, enjoy while you can. People who have access to search engines and chat rooms and e-mail cannot be made to believe lies forever.

As the years go by, it will become harder to pretend that Karl Marx was some kind of genius.

It will become harder to explain why China’s people can’t choose China’s leaders.

It will become harder to justify shutting down a Web site that dares to dissent.

It will become really harder to put up with party bosses like you who spout nonsense like, "(We must) maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet and raise the level of guidance online. We must promote civilized running and use of the Internet and purify the Internet environment."

You and your cohorts will hang on for a while; dictators are good at that. Eventually, though, the game will be up. You will be done in by a lot of things, and your inability to stifle liberty because of the Internet will be one of them.

Who’s Hu? A dinosaur who doesn’t know he’s about to become extinct.