If you want to launch a lynch mob against the "Chinese Communists," I'll probably be there with a pitchfork. I'm an American who believes in ordered liberty, after all.

Of course, when Congress tried to get the leaders of the search engine business to launch such a party today there were no takers.

All the major search engines are now in China, and all censor the results they deliver from their Chinese servers. (Outside China they all operate differently.) Thus China's "great firewall" seems, from the outside, to be effective in keeping citizens there from knowing anything about political issues other than what the government chooses to let them know.

All true. But something else is happening.

China is rationing liberty for its own survival.

China has nearly 1.5 billion people. China has been destroyed, literally destroyed, in ways only Southerners and American Indians can imagine, by politics several times over the last century. First came the democratic revolution against the Emperor, then came the Japanese invasion, then came the Communist Revolution, and finally several renewals of that revolution which left literal starvation in their wake.

Before that, for 2,400 years, China's system of rationed liberty, run by Mandarins, kept the nation fairly stable, at peace, and whole. Since the death of Mao Zedong China has returned to this pre-democratic order. It is run by Mandarins. Except for the facade of Communism it's run a lot like Japan (which retains a facade of democracy).

By that I mean there's an educated elite at the top, and a long series of steps which can lead a Chinese child into that elite:

1. Rural peasants have almost no freedom, and little contact with the outside world. Government can take their land (and does), natural disasters can wipe them out (and do). A peasant who is fortunate will have relatives in the city, and their knowledge, their freedom, will be limited by what those relatives choose to share.
2. Urban workers have a little more freedom. They live in cities, where there are many people, and many ideas. But their ambition is channeled totally into earning more money, because with each raise comes a little more liberty. A TV, a refrigerator, eventually (maybe) a computer.
3. Urban professionals have a little more freedom, but it's limited. They may have phones with data capacity, and they may have broadband Internet service, but what they can do with both is limited. They learn what not to ask, what not to say, and in finding these boundaries begin to test them. Their ambition is for education, which leads to promotion, and for trust, which leads them to become
4. Chinese travelers have the full Internet. Once a Chinese goes overseas they see it all, the decadence, the rhetoric, the full panoply of what freedom can be, and what freedom can do. By this time, however, they have background, and enter the fire of liberty with eyes wide-open to its dangers. Which may lead them to become
5. Mandarins. People who have high positions in the government are truly free. Those who are part of the system must know the world, all of it, or they can't function. Their liberty is full, but it is tempered by responsibility, for the ranks below them, and for the nation.

This is the way China was run for 2,400 years. The poster at the top of this item, from Jet Li's feature film "Hero," tells the story of how it all started.

As more Chinese rise within this system of "rationed liberty" they push the boundaries. A little more, day by day. Text messages that include double entendres. Works on fiction and history that give hints of the wider world. Films from Hong Kong and beyond that keep the hunger for more freedom burning.

If China is to become a truly middle-class society, which fully draws the strength of all its people, the Great Firewall must come down. But look at what its system of rationed liberty has accomplished in just 30 years. The nation has been rebuilt. It has become a great power again. People are no longer starving. They're actually exporting food. Don't sniff at it.

I'm glad I'm not Chinese. I'm glad I live in a nation which, despite its faults, generally believes in the greatest freedom for the greatest number. I'm glad the Internet was invented here, and not in China.

But it's not as black-and-white as Congress makes it.