Mr. Xi, Tear Down This Firewall!

This week’s meeting in Beijing of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which will inaugurate a new slate of leaders, has not exactly brought a golden dawn of free expression. In addition to cracking down on all forms of media, China’s creatively paranoid security forces are on the for threats such as taxi passengers carrying pingpong balls that they might slip through windows to deliver subversive messages.

Such off-the-wall measures, however, usefully highlight one of the central challenges that will confront Xi Jinping, the princeling pegged to be China’s next president, and his new colleagues on the elite Politburo Standing Committee: how to maintain the flow of information vital to economic growth and public wellbeing in China without undermining the party’s legitimacy and primacy.