Do authoritarian states have to stop jailing bloggers to survive?

I’ve been working on a long essay about the role that the Internet plays in promoting "authoritarian deliberation" and this example fits right there.

Two Chinese bloggers separately detained for writing online about government corruption have had their charges dropped by police in recent weeks.

The cases reflect a possible move by Beijing to allow more free speech, though within clear limits. Corruption has long plagued China’s government, especially in rural areas, and allowing victims to express grievances online and elsewhere could help curb the problem.

Police in northern Henan province have dropped defamation charges against a man they detained earlier this year for posting online about a corrupt village election, state media said Wednesday.

The man claimed that the number of votes for his rival in the election exceeded the size of the village, the China Daily said.

The police who detained the man were disciplined after he gained public support by posting again about the poll, the report said.

Last month, a police official from the province apologized for the detainment of another man who blogged about illegal government land seizures, according to the paper.

…Beijing may believe a higher level of free speech will serve its interests, said Joshua Rosenzweig, a senior researcher at the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights advocacy group.

In recent weeks a number of people detained for criticizing local governments have seen their situations improve after news of their cases spread through the press or online, said Rosenzweig.

This is mildly controversial: free speech serving the interests of the Chinese state? Currently, the very idea that tolerating online dissent could be a very effective survival strategy for an authoritarian state still does not sit well with most people (after all, it’s a bit hard to square with the media narrative of "bloggers-get-to-prison-for-challenging-authorities" that we read on a daily basis).

Yet, I think we’ll be inevitably be seeing more examples like this, where the state apparatus understands the relative usefullness of new media – both as a means of producing useful information that is not otherwise present in the ineffective dictatorships and as a means of adding a veneer legitimacy to otherwise very undemocractic regimes. From this perspective, putting bloggers in jail brings a lot of unnecessary international attention and significantly impairs the ability to gather much-needed information about local officials, etc – simply because other bloggers are likely to be discouraged…Will try to expand on this paradox in a longer essay soon.