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4. The Internet in China: technologies offreedom in a statist societyJack Linchuan QiuThis chapter considers the development of the Internet in the People’sRepublic of China (PRC): its diffusion, context, and institutional settings; itseconomic, political, and cultural components; its relationship with nationaland global actors; and its implications for the theorization of network societiesaround the globe. 1 For the purposes of comparison, the case of China is invaluablebecause, besides its obvious significance, Chinese business networks, aspart of the dynamic East Asian economy, “have adapted more rapidly thanother areas of the world to the new technologies and to the new forms of globalcompetition” (Castells, 1996: 173). Most importantly, the continuing power ofthe Chinese Communist Party (CCP), juxtaposed with high growth rates ineconomic and technological sectors, calls into question many existing conceptionsof the relations between technology and society formulated in theWestern context of late capitalism. Is there a network society in China, as seenthrough the prism of China’s Internet? If so, what is peculiar about this particularset of network formations – in its components, internal structure, and relationto the external environment? I will take an inductive approach to explorethese questions.THE SPIRIT OF CHINESE INFORMATIONALISMUnlike Mao’s experiments in creating a new social system, China’s “informationrevolution” since the early 1990s has been discursively less flamboyant.On September 20, 1987, Professor Qian Tianbai sent the first e-mail fromChina. 2 But the event has been ignored and its slogan-like message – “Beyondthe Great Wall, Joining the World (yueguo changcheng, zouxiang shijie)” –remained unpublicized until after 1994 when Beijing was mesmerized by AlGore’s speech on “Building the Information Superhighway.” 3 Yet China wasnot far behind in the hi-tech domain. It established the first TCP/IP-capableacademic network, the National Computing and Networking Facility of China(NCFC), in April 1994 (Qian, 1996), and opened the first public Internet99
100 Jack Linchuan Qiuservice, ChinaNet, in January 1995. 4 These were more efforts of emulationthan homegrown innovation, though: the World Bank provided partial fundingfor the NCFC; a foreign telecom firm, Sprint, operated the first internationalchannels of both the NCFC and ChinaNet. 5 Global actors were instrumental inthe genesis of the new technology in the PRC.Since 1995, China’s Internet has been developing rapidly, demonstratingthe potential for the country to become a world leader in the Internet industry.According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), 6 onaverage, the number of Internet users in China has been increasing by 262percent every year from less than 40,000 in December 1995 to 59.1 million inJune 2003. 7 By the end of 2002, there were more than 20.8 million onlinecomputers, 371,600 registered World Wide Web sites, and a total internationalconnection capacity of 9,380 megabytes directly linking up China with othercountries. Acknowledging that official statistics are flawed, 8 there is generalagreement on the extraordinary rapidity of Internet growth in the country.Although China’s huge population suggests that the scale of technology diffusionremains quite limited, the speed of development is remarkable consideringthat, when ChinaNet opened for business in 1995, the country had less thanfive telephone sets per hundred population, comparable to the US teledensitylevel of 1905. 9 China’s Internet boom appeared to be little affected by theslowdown in the information technology (IT) industry worldwide at the turnof the millennium.What accounts for this swift take-off? Although the dissemination ofWestern technologies was a key element from the beginning, the explanatorypower of a diffusion model is no longer sufficient as the Internet materializesinto the centerpiece of China’s new economy and societal transformations.More causes therefore need to be sought in the peculiar sociohistorical contextof China: from state policies to commercial rationale, from guanxi and familynetworks to the emergence of grassroots identities, to the competition ofmodernity projects, whether communist or capitalist, nationalist or globalist,and the alternative social movements arising. These factors all shape andbecome constituents of what might be called “informationalism with Chinesecharacteristics.”One thematic concern constantly accompanying the question of theInternet, which underlies most discourse on technology and globalization inthe PRC, is a strong sense of humiliation for the atrocities inflicted upon thenation since the Opium War (1839–1842). The memory of China being themost technologically advanced nation on the planet lingers (Needham, 1981),so its fall from the throne hurts. As a result, restoring China’s technicalsupremacy, and thereby reviving the Middle Kingdom, has been a constantgoal for Chinese leaders since Dr Sun Yat-sen (who gave up his presidency ofthe Republic of China to become the Minister of Railways from a belief in the
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4. The Internet in China: technologies offreedom in a statist societyJack Linchuan QiuThis chapter considers the development of the Internet in the People’sRepublic of China (PRC): its diffusion, context, and institutional settings; itseconomic, political, and cultural components; its relationship with nationaland global actors; and its implications for the theorization of network societiesaround the globe. 1 For the purposes of comparison, the case of China is invaluablebecause, besides its obvious significance, Chinese business networks, aspart of the dynamic East Asian economy, “have adapted more rapidly thanother areas of the world to the new technologies and to the new forms of globalcompetition” (Castells, 1996: 173). Most importantly, the continuing power ofthe Chinese Communist Party (CCP), juxtaposed with high growth rates ineconomic and technological sectors, calls into question many existing conceptionsof the relations between technology and society formulated in theWestern context of late capitalism. Is there a network society in China, as seenthrough the prism of China’s Internet? If so, what is peculiar about this particularset of network formations – in its components, internal structure, and relationto the external environment? I will take an inductive approach to explorethese questions.THE SPIRIT OF CHINESE INFORMATIONALISMUnlike Mao’s experiments in creating a new social system, China’s “informationrevolution” since the early 1990s has been discursively less flamboyant.On September 20, 1987, Professor Qian Tianbai sent the first e-mail fromChina. 2 But the event has been ignored and its slogan-like messa<strong>ge</strong> – “Beyondthe Great Wall, Joining the World (yueguo changcheng, zouxiang shijie)” –remained unpublicized until after 1994 when Beijing was mesmerized by AlGore’s speech on “Building the Information Superhighway.” 3 Yet China wasnot far behind in the hi-tech domain. It established the first TCP/IP-capableacademic network, the National Computing and Networking Facility of China(NCFC), in April 1994 (Qian, 1996), and opened the first public Internet99
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