Has the internet changed China?

[irioe]

Abridged from smh.com.au:

Chinese waitress walks free after killing official
Marianne Barriaux
June 16, 2009 - 9:39PM

A Chinese waitress convicted of killing an official who demanded sex walked free from court Tuesday, after a nationwide Internet campaign hailed her as a heroine for standing up to government sleaze.

In a case that sparked widespread outrage, Deng Yujiao, 21, was put on trial for stabbing to death a local official in central China in May, in what she said was self-defence after he tried to force himself on her sexually.

Internet users fed up with government corruption, abuse of power and official impunity quickly rallied to Deng's cause, and her case became a symbol of injustice in a society tightly controlled by the ruling Communist Party.

On Tuesday, after a brief trial in Badong in Hubei province, Deng walked free despite being found guilty as charged, on the grounds of diminished responsibility, a judge at the court who asked not to be named told AFP.

The case highlights the growing might of the Internet in China, a nation where traditional media is tightly controlled and the legal system has little or no independence from the government.

© 2009 AFP

A'ight, so that shizzle came up on my World News RSS feed. I read it, formulated my own opinion on it (i.e. I paraphrased published academics' opinions on it) and distilled my thoughts into a 3000 word essay, where I contest Marianne Barriaux's assertion that the internet is a growing power in China.

Western theorists have predicted that the internet would have “democratising, civilising and modernising” effects on China as a non-western country, but contrary to this, the radical impacts that they anticipated would transform the political, social and cultural terrains of China have yet to be seen. This perception of China as a somewhat feudalistic nation in need of transformation to better comply with the western-oriented standards of the international community portrays the information age as a benign, globalising force in the promotion of a liberal-democratic society. Thus the internet, as an exemplification of both globalisation and the information revolution, can be regarded as an agent which can elicit change according to this western understanding of China.

In this essay, I shall argue against this notion, closely following Zhou Yongming’s categorisation of technology’s potential impacts upon China as democratising, civilising and modernising. Although the internet has indeed impacted upon China, it has not changed China; rather, China has changed itself to adapt to the challenges entailed by the introduction and steady climb of the internet. I shall explore the effects that western theorists have predicted that the internet would have on China as a society and as a state within the international community, and assess the degree to which they can be attributed to the transformations that China has undergone following its inception of the internet.

Firstly, the democratising effect of the internet as described by Loo involves the freedom to disseminate ideas and opinions on one hand, and to solicit and receive information on the other . However, the internet has not served as the idealised breeding ground for democratic free speech as western theorists in particular have anticipated. In fact, rather than offering the people of China greater civil liberties, the internet can be viewed as another medium through which the civil liberties of the Chinese people can be infringed.

Specifically, the state-operated Golden Shield Project and the self-censorship enacted by internet service providers are two systems internet surveillance and censorship system which moderate the availability and flow of internet content in accordance with state policies. Thus internet users must resort to alternative means to bypass the so-called “Great Firewall of China” (including data re-routers and proxy servers ), in order to access what the state deems to be illicit content (e.g. websites that propagate feudalistic beliefs through the promotion of Falun Gong ), and under China’s agreement with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, this hampers the people’s rights “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. The development of the Golden Shield Project is evidence of the Chinese government’s awareness of the internet’s potential to destabilise its policies of information regulation, and its implementation demonstrates the government’s active role in adopting measures to prevent the internet from undermining its policies pertaining to freedom of speech. Furthermore, in devolving information and communications technology (ICT) control to the private sector, the state transfers part of its censorship responsibilities to entrepreneurs and individuals, and as a result, its management of ideas and information is even more flexible and all-encompassing.

As exemplified by China’s continued application of the aforementioned Golden Shield Project, China’s accession to particular international agreements has not empowered international parties to utilise ICTs to transform China’s political landscape to better conform to the characteristics of liberal-democracies. International appeals against China’s control of ICTs based on its apparent infringement of international human rights standards are unfeasible for numerous reasons. For one, the objectives of “public interest” and “national security” under which China justifies its regulation of internet content are not clearly defined by the WTO, and thus China can legitimate what is perceived internationally as a violation of civil liberties. Moreover, rather than challenging China’s draconian internet security policies, both liberal democracies and foreign firms in the Chinese telecommunications market are inclined to overlook them for the purposes of facilitating international order and successful business relations respectively. As long as China complies with the WTO principles of equality between local and foreign industries, it can continue to assert its censorship of politically sensitive online content (e.g. online forums that damage national unification by advocating the independence of Taiwan) by classifying them in what Hughes describes as the “catch-all category” of perceived threats to social stability. Such ongoing restriction of informational flow prevents the internet from serving as a vehicle through which social dissent can spread and collective political rebellion can be organised.

Additionally, the people of China themselves appear less interested in such civil liberties supposedly offered by the internet than they are in its potential as a source of entertainment. On one hand, a survey conducted by the China Academy of Social Sciences reveals that 10% of internet users resort to proxy servers amongst other covert means to overcome censorship; on the other hand, according to a survey of internet usage in twelve Chinese cities conducted in 2003, 48% of internet users utilise the internet primarily for its entertainment content, with 79% and 48% of internet café users preferring online news relating to entertainment and sport respectively, as opposed to topics including politics. The results of the latter support Zhou’s contention that contrary to the perceptions of western Internet utopians, the Chinese primarily do not harness the internet as a source for “free” information; rather, they view it as a new domain for leisure and entertainment.

As emphasised by Loo, the democratising effect of the Internet is only as effective as China’s telecommunication and legal structures allow them to be and can only be enforced by the people’s willingness to actively employ the Internet as a medium for democratic engagement . Thus the internet has been ineffectual as an agent for political change in China and, on the contrary, the globalisation of ICTs has inspired Chinese policy-makers to assume greater control over aspects of politics related to the internet, amongst other political and communication structures.

Secondly, in spite of the civilising effect that the internet can engender, whatever advancements the internet has inspired in promoting a civil society in China have been overshadowed by the government’s omnipresent domination of the internet architecture. Yang describes civil society as “the intermediate public realm between the state and the private sphere” where citizens can “participate in organized or unorganized discursive or non-discursive activities”, yet the state compromises the development and autonomy of such a public space in by permeating major discursive aspects of the internet, including the news media and public opinion communities.

Yang’s discourse analysis of Qiangguo Luntan, an online bulletin board affiliated with the People's Daily (the leading official newspaper in China) conducted between 1999 and 2000, found that internet users in general were satisfied with the “opportunity of expression for grassroots voices that have always been repressed and blocked” that the internet offers. Yet, as if to contest the openness of this domain for communal public discussion, Yang also concedes that the Qingguo Luntan exercises a greater degree of censorship than other virtual message boards . This supports Banerjee’s assertion that the government sponsored expansion of the internet media channels ensures that the news and information presented online accords with the accounts promoted by the state. Additionally, Yang’s investigation into Huaxia Zhiqing, a network of websites managed by former educated youth originating in 1998, exposed a similarly contrasting juxtaposition of civil and state pursuits. In this instance, the internet was most conducive to the establishment of an active community based on a commonality of interests that did not limit its interactions to the virtual sphere . But despite being independent of the state, Huaxia Zhiqing could not evade state intervention in 2000 when political discussions on its bulletin boards intensified to the extent that the website was forced to shut down. Upon the reactivation of the virtual community, discussions were conducted under the monitoring of board moderators who essentially acted as negotiators of the interests of the people and the state.

Yet regardless of state arbitration, whatever influence the internet does exert, its impact is limited to members of society with internet access (i.e. the well-educated and affluent social strata ), and according to the 16th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China released by the China Internet Network Information Center in 2005, this accounts for only 7.8% of the total population of China. Although the number of internet users in China is expected to increase, the internet has yet to become a ubiquitous tool in the average citizen’s life, especially in comparison to other nations (e.g. the US, which has reached a 70% internet penetration rate), and this demonstrates the limited capacity of the internet to act as an all-inclusive civil space for the majority of the members of Chinese society.

Therefore, although the internet has offered an albeit small percentage of the people of China an innovative means of voicing their political concerns and connecting on an extended social plane, the extent to which they can exercise social activism and civil action remains constricted by state interference. Paradoxically, the government’s insistent attempts to control its ICT structures’ technological, social and political scope of influence offsets its concurrent measures to build upon its sophistication, and this in turn raises questions as to the validity of the internet as a genuinely civilising medium in the case of China. This is yet another example of China’s active role in governing the internet through state and private sectors and definitely not a demonstration of passivity in the face of the challenges to national interests that the internet poses China.

Thirdly, I argue that rather than embracing the potential for change that the internet inspires as Tai contests , China is adamant in retaining its distinctive national characteristics and regulations in the midst of dissenting global propositions, and thus its engagement with the information revolution reflects a deliberate strategy of technological development as a component of the Four Modernisations. Zhou’s claim that westerners highlight the positive impacts of technology on non-western nations implies that the process of modernisation for China necessitates a greater conformity to the global standards pioneered by the western sphere, e.g. in the fields of technology and politics.

Considering this definition, the internet has not been directly responsible for China’s modernisation; rather, China has implemented and reshaped its ICT infrastructure to compete with the predominantly western, technologically advanced players on the international stage. The rising prominence and rapid proliferation of the internet has impelled China’s participation in the processes of global standardisation and product development and research within the ICT sector through bilateral engagement with foreign firms. However, rather than focusing on interdependence with foreign enterprises, China’s priorities lie in developing its indigenous industries and subsequently affirming its own sense of nationalism. This indicates that despite an outward, globally oriented approach to ICT infrastructure expansion, China’s motivations remain inward and directed towards instituting economical and technological gains for the nation.

On another note, facets in China’s development of physical internet infrastructure have not facilitated any west-oriented transitions from a cultural standpoint, as illustrated by the emergence of internet cafés. Conversely, they have led to the maintenance of the distinctly Chinese cultural concepts; in the case of internet cafés, this refers expressly to guanxi and bribery as continually viable methods by which private entrepreneurs can achieve economic success . The state enforces its strict control over ICTs through its establishment of multitudinous internet café regulations spanning across four different government bureaus, yet ironically these regulations do not promote the rationality of the western business ethics that they represent, but compel aspiring entrepreneurs to adopt underhand means to circumvent the government’s stringent conditions for obtaining a permit of operation. This is an indirect counterpoint to the assumption that the globalising impetus of the internet will lead to a modernisation of cultural mores and standards.

Thus the internet has acted as a catalyst for China to update its technological information infrastructure, yet overall it has proven ineffective as a catalyst to compel the globalisation of other aspects of China, e.g. it has had limited success in inspiring China’s thorough assimilation of international protocols and culturally western motivations. This reflects China’s determination to simultaneously extract foreign support in its development of ICT infrastructure through international partnerships and preserve its national interests.

In conclusion, the effects that the internet has had upon the political, cultural and technological dimensions of China are simply that - effects. As a metonymic representation of the information revolution, the internet has dictated neither the course of democratisation, civilisation nor modernisation. It is thus more logical to infer that the transformations that China has undergone following the proliferation of the internet have not been direct results of the technology itself, but rather China’s active approach to meeting the challenges posed by the globalising force that is the internet.

The Chinese government’s motivations for developing the nation’s internet structures have always been driven by economic development, as is exemplified by its official policy of “developing [the internet] actively, strengthening its management, seeking advantages and avoiding harmfulness, making it serve our purpose”. As is perhaps attested by the fact that the term “democracy” itself is monitored and filtered in Chinese cyberspace, China did not develop its technological structure with the primary intention of offering its citizens a civil, social or political overhaul. With state support absent in such developments and inversely present in more economic and telecommunication inclined areas, China has transformed itself in more divergent and diverse ways than western theorists have predicted that the internet would.

And the references:


1. Hughes, Christopher R. (2004) ‘Controlling China Internet Architecture Within Greater China’, in Francoise Mengin (ed.), Cyber China: Reshaping National Identities in the Age of Information. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
   
2. Hughes, Christopher R. and Wacker, G. (eds.) (2003) China and the Internet: Politics of the Digital Leap Forward. London: Routledge.
   
3. Loo, Eric (2007) ‘The Internet: Simulacrum of Democracy?’ in Banerjee, Indrajit (ed.), The Internet and Governance in Asia: A Critical Reader. Singapore: Asian Media Information and Communication Centre.
   
4. Tai, Zixue (2006) The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society, New York: CRC Press.
   
5. Walton, Greg (2001) China’s Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People’s Republic of China. International Centre for Human Rights and Development.
   
6. Yang, Guobin (2003) ‘The Co-Evolution of the Internet and Civil Society in China’ in Asian Survey, Vol. 43 no. 3.
   
7. Zhou, Yongming (2008) ‘Privatising Control: Internet Cafes in China’, in Zhang, L. and Ong, A. (eds.) Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithica: Cornell University Press.

Well, kidding actually. That essay's old shizzle I wrote last week. As if any news article could compel me to research and write an academic rebuttal for leisure. No need to read beyond the LJ-cut. I just thought it interesting that the stuff I've learnt has some critical application outside of the sandstone walls.