The fol­low­ing post is an unedited essay I pre­pared for a sub­ject on glob­al­i­sa­tion and China last semes­ter, and inves­ti­gates the role of the Inter­net par­tic­u­larly as an instru­ment of social change. Per­haps sur­pris­ingly, I argue that it is a reflec­tive, rather than dis­rup­tive, util­ity in this par­tic­u­lar social context.

The new tech­nolo­gies will bring “every indi­vid­ual … into imme­di­ate and effort­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion with every other,” “prac­ti­cally oblit­er­ate” polit­i­cal geog­ra­phy, and make free trade uni­ver­sal. Thanks to tech­no­log­i­cal advance, “there [are] no longer any for­eign­ers,” and we can look for­ward to “the grad­ual adop­tion of a com­mon language”.

—1893 arti­cle

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies have long been per­ceived as har­bin­gers of sig­nif­i­cant trans­for­ma­tion in soci­ety, from the tumult of 15th C. Europe in the wake of reli­gious and polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion enabled by Gutenberg’s inven­tion to the domes­tic tele­graphic and tele­phonic inno­va­tions of the 1800s. As bound­aries between coun­tries have, with increased access to Infor­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Tech­nol­ogy (ICT) beyond the elite, begun to blur, pro­le­tar­ian access to such tech­nolo­gies has com­men­su­rately grown apace. Despite com­mon access to such tech­nolo­gies, how­ever, their util­ity for grass­roots activism, the devo­lu­tion of state bound­aries, devel­op­ing global com­merce, and advanc­ing polit­i­cal auton­omy remains in ques­tion. Con­sid­er­ing China, par­tic­u­larly, with over one-fifth of its pop­u­la­tion hav­ing access to such tech­nolo­gies based on offi­cial esti­mates, the ques­tion of the util­ity of these tech­nolo­gies, par­tic­u­larly in the realm of their impact upon the social and polit­i­cal psy­che of China, is an impor­tant one.

Most com­monly lev­elled cri­tiques against the Chi­nese Gov­ern­ment in the field of Inter­net pol­i­tics grav­i­tate around the issue of Inter­net cen­sor­ship. In a global con­text, this has ram­i­fi­ca­tions for a vari­ety of organ­i­sa­tions, both TNC/MNCs and gov­ern­ments. The Golden Shield Project (金盾工程), it is often argued, is both facil­i­tated by the com­plic­ity of and pro­vides ben­e­fit to a vari­ety of ICT ven­dors in west­ern democ­ra­cies. In the United States par­tic­u­larly, ven­dors includ­ing Cisco Net­works, Microsoft and ser­vice providers Google and Yahoo! have all been dragged before var­i­ous inquiries into the for­eign prac­tices of the global sub­sidiaries and branches of such busi­nesses. Although var­i­ous US export restric­tions on some secu­rity prod­ucts (high grade encryp­tion being fore­most amongst these) remain, export con­straints apply prin­ci­pally to coun­tries with which the US does not have diplo­matic rela­tions or where it is presently engaged in mil­i­tary con­flict. China fits nei­ther cri­te­ria, and her inter­net prac­tices, although con­sid­ered oppres­sive by some, do not even depend par­tic­u­larly upon any advanced encryp­tion tech­nolo­gies: indeed, such tech­nolo­gies are often used for the cir­cum­ven­tion of controls.

For all its faults, con­trol of the Chi­nese inter­net is an impre­cise sci­ence, exem­pli­fied in former-US Pres­i­dent Clinton’s descrip­tion of such attempts as like “try­ing to nail Jello to a wall”. Other media, lim­ited by a raft of con­trols imposed by the State Admin­is­tra­tion of Radio, Film, and Tele­vi­sion (SARFT) and the Gen­eral Admin­is­tra­tion of Press and Pub­li­ca­tion (GAPP), are par­tic­u­larly con­trol­lable in a man­ner the Inter­net is not. While both SARFT and GAPP have attempted to assert con­trol over the Inter­net in a vari­ety of forms, GAPP’s online author­ity is lim­ited in scope com­pared to the tight con­trol it retains over peri­od­i­cals and book pub­lish­ing through ISSN/ISBN issuance, while SARFT’s March 30 notice, “广电总局关于加强互联网视听节目内容管理的通知”, is con­cerned only with ‘audio-visual pro­grams’ pub­lished through Chi­nese video shar­ing web­sites. While the SARFT notice sin­gles out videos pub­lished by 拍客 (‘vod­caster’, or video neti­zen reporter), it does not tar­get blog­gers or any non-visual report­ing. Par­tic­u­larly the per­mit sys­tem in part 4 of the notice, essen­tially an exten­sion of exist­ing SARFT reg­u­la­tions over film/TV seri­alised con­tent, raised the ire of a num­ber of video-on-demand web­sites. For the aver­age user, how­ever, this appears to have had lit­tle impact. While var­i­ous admin­is­tra­tions may attempt to chal­lenge or even change the nature of Inter­net inter­ac­tions, the Inter­net shows equal resilience and, indeed, presents an inverse chal­lenge to such estab­lished bod­ies. Despite this, how­ever, the pro­longed cen­sor­ship of the inter­net under the direc­tion of the Min­istry of Pub­lic Security’s Golden Shield Project, par­tic­u­larly in con­junc­tion with var­i­ous MIIT direc­tives to ser­vice providers, has resulted in what is effec­tively a cul­ture of self-censorship of the Chi­nese Internet.

How­ever, there are many issues, often neglected in the wake of clam­orous dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing the cen­sor­ship issue, besides that of access. Par­tic­u­larly, when con­sid­er­ing the Inter­net as an instru­ment for dis­rupt­ing the offi­cial dis­course and chal­leng­ing or trans­form­ing soci­etal con­ven­tions, it is impor­tant to con­sider usage pat­terns in online activ­i­ties. China is pre­dom­i­nantly inter­ested in very dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties to a wider sam­ple of the online com­mu­nity. While con­sid­er­ing the issue of util­ity, it is worth not­ing that the top Inter­net appli­ca­tions in China, namely Music, News and Instant Mes­sag­ing (IM) activ­i­ties, con­sti­tute enter­tain­ment related pur­suits, as opposed to more com­mer­cially moti­vated Inter­net activ­i­ties of much of the rest of the world.

This usage dis­par­ity is reflec­tive of other con­sumer atti­tudes within China. It does not shape them. The depen­dence of global online com­merce upon a consumer-credit based sys­tems, specif­i­cally, third party bro­kers with broad net­works and the capac­ity to instan­ta­neously autho­rise and/or decline trans­ac­tions based on ver­i­fi­ca­tion of avail­able credit (in Main­land PRC, the only domes­tic inter­bank net­work facil­i­tat­ing this is China Union­Pay (中国銀联), though affil­i­a­tions with global VISA and Mas­ter­Card net­works of course per­sist), is obvi­ously prob­lem­atic in a coun­try that has only begun to embrace credit sys­tems, with high sav­ing rates. Accord­ingly, ser­vices such as Ali­Pay have emerged, with agree­ments span­ning exist­ing bank­ing insti­tu­tions as well as larger exist­ing credit net­works, Union­Pay and the global VISA/MC net­works amongst these, in order to facil­i­tate trust-based inter­net transactions.

The emer­gence of such insti­tu­tions is a recent devel­op­ment in Chi­nese soci­ety. As Nie Jin observes in a 2007 paper con­cern­ing cur­rent e-payment solu­tions in China, one of the virtues of a cen­trally planned econ­omy pro­hibit­ing indi­vid­ual and pri­vate trans­ac­tions is that there is no need for any trust/credibility sys­tem to enable such trans­ac­tions. As these have emerged in the wake of eco­nomic reform, so too has demand for escrow and trust-based trans­ac­tion ser­vices devel­oped. The paper con­tin­ues to note that, out­side of China and planned econ­omy states, accrued data sug­gests as much as 90% of busi­ness trans­ac­tions are set­tled on the basis of integrity (i.e. with­out resort­ing to third party escrow ser­vices, etc., though pos­si­bly involv­ing a pay­ment net­work medi­a­tor with­out a trust layer).

In this, the Inter­net func­tions not as an instru­ment act­ing upon China to change it, but merely another man­i­fes­ta­tion of an already-changing eco­nomic real­ity. As pri­vate enter­prise grows, it is log­i­cal to pur­sue the Inter­net as yet another sales and/or mar­ket­ing chan­nel, and, in doing so, the same issues already iden­ti­fied will be faced regard­ing trust online as in per­son. There are of course par­tic­u­lar chal­lenges to online busi­ness (fraud/verification of iden­tity, logistics/delivery, etc.), but at the level of chang­ing social land­scapes it is clear the most press­ing issue, that of integrity, is derived not from the emer­gence of a dis­trib­uted, glob­ally inter-connected net­work of prospec­tive clients and ven­dors, but rather as a result of eco­nomic reforms imple­mented over the course of thirty years.

What, then, of trans­ac­tions that tran­scend national bor­ders and geo­graphic bound­aries? Tra­di­tion­ally China’s largest trad­ing part­ners have con­sisted of Asian neigh­bours whose socio-cultural and per­sonal ties com­mend them as such. In an era of global trade facil­i­tated by buyer/seller pro­tect­ing trust net­works, is there any rea­son for this priv­i­leged trad­ing sta­tus to con­tinue? Of course there is. Guanxi can only account for so much: there are log­i­cal, prac­ti­cal rea­sons beyond this for bar­ri­ers the Inter­net can­not (yet) alle­vi­ate. The so-called ‘dig­i­tal divide’ is often spo­ken of in terms of access to tech­nol­ogy. It is clear, how­ever, that phys­i­cal access to tech­nol­ogy is not suf­fi­cient. Edu­ca­tion is often addressed as an issue affect­ing access, but it is gen­er­ally raised only at the level of com­puter lit­er­acy. With China rapidly embrac­ing the Inter­net through both PC and mobile tech­nolo­gies, and par­tic­u­larly with the recent approval of licenses for TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE net­works (3G/4G net­work tech­nolo­gies that will dra­mat­i­cally improve net­work access speeds), the issue of phys­i­cal access is decreas­ingly rel­e­vant. Addi­tion­ally, as mobile access improves and touch-capable hand­sets increase in preva­lence, bar­ri­ers to usabil­ity also decrease.

What, then, is the prob­lem? The net­works are in place, users can access them, and yet trade bar­ri­ers per­sist. There are sev­eral issues at play here. Firstly, the dom­i­nance of the Anglo­phone Inter­net com­pared to Eng­lish lit­er­acy in China. While China is one of the largest English-speaking coun­tries, as a pro­por­tion of its own pop­u­la­tion this is not a dom­i­nant lan­guage, and access to much Inter­net media and tech­nol­ogy requires Eng­lish lit­er­acy in order to com­pre­hend or use ser­vices. This is a con­tribut­ing fac­tor behind the adop­tion of social net­work­ing ser­vices such as Kaixin and Xiaonei over their antecedent equiv­a­lents in the wider Inter­net: Face­book par­tic­u­larly has offered for some time now an Chi­nese lan­guage ver­sion, but its fail­ure to suf­fi­ciently localise con­tent from the begin­ning (it is, by default, served in Eng­lish) granted Chi­nese clones advan­tage required to cap­ture the main­land mar­ket first.

Sec­ondly, there are cul­tural bar­ri­ers. China has an envi­able adop­tion of blog­ging and ‘inde­pen­dent’ pub­lish­ing tech­nol­ogy. On CNNIC sta­tis­tics, there are over 162 mil­lion blogs in China: rep­re­sent­ing half of China’s Inter­net pop­u­la­tion, on the assump­tion of only one blog per user. Yet, despite such dra­matic adop­tion of this medium, expres­sion is tem­pered by var­i­ous reg­u­la­tions imposed upon pub­lish­ers by ser­vice providers. Ser­vice providers who fail to con­form to such reg­u­la­tions face unpre­dictable ser­vice denials facil­i­tated by Golden Shield Project prox­ies and fire­walls: Blog­ger and WordPress.com rep­re­sent two promi­nent exam­ples of such providers. Tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions aside, the effect of this con­for­mity is a homogeni­sa­tion of blog con­tent that is pro­hib­ited from fea­tur­ing con­tro­ver­sial mate­r­ial. The video neti­zen reporters tar­geted under the March 30 SARFT direc­tive are par­tic­u­larly addressed on account of the dif­fi­culty of auto­mat­i­cally pro­tect­ing against video con­tent: scan­ning blog posts for banned key­words is much more achiev­able. Thus, this (imposed) self-censorship stymies the devel­op­ment of an inde­pen­dent Chi­nese blog­ging com­mu­nity within eth­nic media: iron­i­cally, the depen­dence of dis­si­dent blog­gers upon non-conformist ser­vice providers reduces the effects of their dis­si­dence and, com­men­su­rately, their rel­e­vance and impact upon the wider Inter­net. The entertainment-oriented activ­i­ties of Chi­nese Inter­net users are pri­mar­ily con­sump­tive in nature, and the gen­er­a­tive activ­ity of con­tent cre­ation is accord­ingly mar­gin­alised while so much atten­tion con­tin­ues to be paid to offi­cially reg­u­lated media. One hun­dred and sixty two mil­lion blog­gers can’t be silenced, but they can be (mostly) irrelevant.

Thirdly, the eco­nomic bar­ri­ers to global par­tic­i­pa­tion are sig­nif­i­cant. In a pos­i­tive reflec­tion upon China’s inter­net pen­e­tra­tion, for the past sev­eral years CNNIC’s annual reports have iden­ti­fied approx­i­mately one quar­ter of inter­net users as hav­ing monthly income of less than 500 RMB.

This has an obvi­ous impact upon the will­ing­ness of neti­zens to engage in financially-related online activ­i­ties, as dis­pos­able income is neg­li­gi­ble for many of them. This is borne out in another CNNIC report par­tic­u­larly con­cerned with adop­tion of secu­rity soft­ware (安全软件) in per­sonal com­put­ing, par­tic­u­larly a sec­tion iden­ti­fy­ing indi­vid­u­als’ great­est con­cerns where com­puter secu­rity prob­lems are encoun­tered. The great­est con­cern is loss of com­puter files and any virus that will affect the oper­a­tion of the com­puter: these two com­prise over 50% of respon­dents’ great­est con­cern. Nei­ther sit­u­a­tion involves the theft of files, only the dis­abling of the user’s com­puter.  This reflects rel­a­tively lethar­gic adop­tion of e-commerce and inter­net bank­ing in China, and is not a cause of it. Gen­eral con­sumer atti­tudes beyond Internet-specific secu­rity con­cerns rep­re­sent the great­est threat to Internet-based finan­cial ser­vices growth.

The Inter­net has not, here, changed China. Indeed the ques­tion of income equal­ity is in need of res­o­lu­tion before the Inter­net can be used to any great eco­nomic effect: it cer­tainly does not presently ful­fil that role for many users. Despite these qual­i­fi­ca­tions, it is unde­ni­able that China is of advanced global stand­ing in pur­chase of cer­tain dig­i­tal goods con­nected to dig­i­tal social con­texts. QQ/Tencent is one promi­nent exam­ple of an effec­tive dig­i­tal goods busi­ness model not really repli­cated with great suc­cess in the west. Sim­i­lar to this in a game envi­ron­ment are mas­sively mul­ti­player games that allow con­ver­sion of cash to in-game cur­rency. This form of dig­i­tal econ­omy is unessen­tial and recre­ational in nature. Inter­net devel­op­ment prac­tice here is unique and at the fore­front of global indus­try, yet it con­tin­ues to reflect real-world par­a­digms: Nike shoes, Gucci bags, and other lux­ury brand items func­tion as signs of sta­tus in the same way web­page dec­o­ra­tions or vir­tual dec­o­ra­tive armour does. Thus here, too, the Inter­net ful­fils an emu­la­tive, rather than trans­for­ma­tive, social role.

The Inter­net has been lauded and demonised as a chal­lenger to the estab­lish­ment. This is evi­dently the party view of the mat­ter: its Golden Shield Project report­edly accrued 6.4BN RMB in costs in its pre­lim­i­nary phases, and count­less more since. How­ever, as a result of reg­u­la­tion and con­trol, the Inter­net in China rep­re­sents not a threat, but a mech­a­nism for the effec­tive con­sol­i­da­tion of party power. Far from func­tion­ing as a broadly trans­for­ma­tive social mech­a­nism, the Inter­net chiefly embod­ies the atti­tudes and val­ues of the com­mu­nity in which it is set. Addi­tion­ally, the bound­aries imposed by lin­guis­tic, cul­tural, hyper­tex­tual, polit­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms func­tion in effect to pro­duce a ‘localised’ form of the Inter­net. As Gold­smith and Wu note in their book Who Con­trols the Inter­net, one of the virtues of a ‘bor­dered Inter­net’ is that domes­ti­cally held val­ues and stan­dards can be pre­served in a form that per­mits peace­ful co-existence in online con­texts —cer­tainly there must be many within the Chi­nese admin­is­tra­tion who have wished this to be true as issues of inter­na­tional diplo­macy have spilt over in nation­al­is­tic fer­vour on BBS and forums across the Chi­nese Internet.

All these bound­aries are, of course, fluid. This is one of the great virtues of the Inter­net, and one of the enabling forces that will per­haps one day enable sig­nif­i­cant change, offer­ing more than a reflec­tion of soci­ety. For now, how­ever, China is cap­tive to broader soci­etal forces that impact upon its Inter­net usage. The decline of cen­sor­ship does not appear immi­nent: media reforms in recent years have been dri­ven largely by eco­nom­ics rather than social dis­con­tent. If the ben­e­fits of open infor­ma­tion exchange even­tu­ally out­weigh the CCP’s desire for con­trol, it is likely that the frame­work of con­trol estab­lished over the Inter­net over the past 13 years since pub­lic BBS access was first offered will per­sist: if ensur­ing a sta­ble and ‘har­mo­nious soci­ety’ is the goal, what­ever crit­ics may say of oppres­sive Inter­net regimes, the pro­mo­tion of a cul­ture of con­sump­tion and self‑censorship promises, at least in the short term, to reduce imme­di­ate chal­lenges to the admin­is­tra­tion. The Chi­nese Inter­net has changed China’s atti­tude to the Inter­net, cer­tainly, but the spec­u­la­tions made over 100 years ago con­cern­ing uni­ver­sal free trade and com­mon lan­guage are as close to ful­fil­ment by the Inter­net as by the tele­graph. A glob­alised cul­ture, enabled more by force of adver­tis­ing and mass media than by the Inter­net, is dri­ving these fac­tors. Tech­nol­ogy, whilst pro­vid­ing a chan­nel for the expres­sion of such cul­ture, remains sto­ically neu­tral in impart­ing val­ues and attitudes.

Foot­notes

Bib­li­og­ra­phy

Angelova, K., “Chart of the Day”, Busi­ness Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-the-chinese-get-more-entertainment-online-the-americans-shop-2009 – 5 Pub­lished 22 May 2009. Accessed 5 June 2009.

CCTV News, 3 Sep­tem­ber 2002, recorded at http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/3/10/22/n397830p.htm Pub­lished 22 Octo­ber 2003. Accessed 7 June 2009.

ChinaInternetWatch.com, “China Inter­net Sta­tis­tics 2009 Whitepa­per”, ChinaInternetWatch.com, 13 April 2009. Accessed 4 June 2009.

CNNIC, “2008年中国网民信息网络安全状况研究报告”, http://www.cnnic.cn/uploadfiles/pdf/2009/3/27/142455.pdf Pub­lished 27 March 2009. Accessed 4 June 2009.

CNNIC, “Inter­net Time­line of China (2008)”, http://www.cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2009/05/18/5600.htm Pub­lished 18 May 2009. Accessed 4 June 2009.

Drake, W.J., “Dic­ta­tor­ships in the Dig­i­tal Age”, iMP, Octo­ber 2000, in Hughes, C.R., “Con­trol­ling the Inter­net Archi­tec­ture”, April 2002, in ASNS3619 reader, Dr David Bray, 2009.

Gold­smith, J. & Wu, T., Who Con­trols the Inter­net?, 2006, Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press

Lü Yao-Huai, “Glob­al­iza­tion and Infor­ma­tion Ethics”, Local­iz­ing the Inter­net: Eth­i­cal Aspects in inter­cul­tural per­spec­tive, 2007, Paderborn.

Nie Jin, “Analy­sis of Cur­rent E-Payment Solu­tion in China-Third Party Pay­ment Plat­form”, First Inter­na­tional Sym­po­sium on Data, Pri­vacy and E‐Commerce, 1 – 3 Novem­ber 2007. IEEE Xplore 10.1109/ISDPE.2007.22

国家广播电影电视总局, 《广电总局关于加强互联网视听节目内容管理的通知》, http://www.sarft.gov.cn/articles/2009/03/30/20090330171107690049.html Pub­lished 30 March 2009. Accessed 5 June 2009.