Pockets of Chinese culture and society, like many other places in the world, have evolved rapidly in the Age of Information. The onset of ubiquitous, if not universal cell phone and Internet connections from anywhere to anywhere, at all times, and under all circumstances hasn't been reached yet, but systems are getting better by the day.

The global standards for digital human rights have not been firmly established; what kind of example is China presenting the world-futile policy to avoid, or a paradigm of our collective fate?

The PRC is a signatory state on five of the seven major accords promulgated by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights. The two that remain remind everyone to keep an eye on the mainland, whether they are investors of time, money or other resources.

What China plans to enshrine in law demonstrates how small the nation is in the human rights sphere compared with its nascent prominence as a colossus in the world economy. No country is perfect. America's lofty perch occupying the high ground in these areas has certainly dropped several notches overall since the start of the century.

Even in a time of relative decline nobody in their right mind is burning a U.S. passport seeking asylum in Beijing. Freedoms of thought, expression and assembly protected in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and recommendations of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights were squashed in both the real and virtual worlds on Sept. 25 by the Chinese government.

The worst-case scenario of this plan paints China attempting to be a totalitarian rather than authoritarian state.

China has no explicit plan for genocidal global domination. It is not a techno-fascist state.

There were socialist totalitarian states in the erstwhile Soviet Union under Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong's China. Stalin died in 1953 followed by Mao 23 years later, yet their brutal bids to remold the human spirit controlling thought and action persist as a policy paradigm, especially in mainland China. Mao haunts the racks of stacked network servers while Stalinist software of toeing the Party line hunts messages for threats of independent thinking.

Parts of the world interested in (and dependent upon) China are watching for the full text of the country's new law on information content concerning online news, bulletin boards, mobile phone short messages and email.

China's new law will be an arbitrary sanction for government's role in controlling expression and assembly. Phrases such as "let's meet" or "my opinion is ..." scare the wits out of the Chinese government. In a country with more than 100 million Internet users and 350 million-plus cell subscribers techno-Maoist practitioners fear "a single click could start a prairie fire".

Chances are that explicit definitions of what constitutes "state security" and "inciting social disruption" will not be spelled out in the pending regulations. Criminality of content and intent of ideas expressed will remain arbitrary, reliant upon case-by-case judgments of which few will be made public. Analysts will have to sift bits and pieces to learn what falls through the cracks as acceptable information and guess what hits the wall as a punishable offense.

Murky law and inconsistent enforcement are hallmarks of authoritarian regimes ranging from petty tyrant backwater countries all the way to the world's most populous nation. According to international human rights groups, there are approximately 60 people incarcerated in China as documented prisoners of conscience for sending emails with ideas Westerners do not find criminal.

This problem looks negligible against the numbing numbers of China's 1.3 billion population, of which more than 1 of 13 are on line, and nearly 1 in 4 have a mobile phone. So why does China feel the need to promulgate such a draconian law?

The timing of the announcement is the one of the shockwaves of power from the fourth generation of Chinese leadership under president and Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao. The Eleventh five-year plan, a legacy of socialist development charting the country's short-term direction is going to be released on Oct. 8. It is the first statecraft developed by the new Standing Committee with Hu at the helm.

What sends shivers down the spines of the apparatchik in Zhongnanhai is that the masses now have the ability to communicate with one another sharing news and information, contact details, agendas and complaints outside the control of the authoritarian state. If the Party's plan is no good, people might develop ones of their own. Beijing keeps trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

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