Cyberdualism in China
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Cyberdualism in China

The Political Implications of Internet Exposure of Educated Youth

Shiru Wang

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Cyberdualism in China

The Political Implications of Internet Exposure of Educated Youth

Shiru Wang

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About This Book

Internet usage in China has recently grown exponentially, rising from 59 million users in 2002 to 710 million by mid-2016. One in every two Chinese has currently been exposed to the Internet. This upsurge has made political communication among citizens and between the government and citizens less costly and almost instantaneous in China. Despite these advances, scholars are only beginning to understand and systematically explain the ways in which increased Internet exposure may affect behavior and values of Chinese netizens. Can the Internet help liberalize Chinese society due to its innate pluralism? Has the Internet become an efficient tool assisting the ruling elite to remain in power given the tendency of Internet service providers and users to be easily manipulated by the Chinese state?

This book addresses these questions by focusing on the most digitally embedded segment of Chinese population – university students. Using survey evidence from more than 1200 observations, data confirm that Internet exposure to information generated by fellow netizens promotes democratic orientation, enhances political resistance to indoctrination, and boosts popular nationalism. However, exposure to government-managed websites encourages regime support and, at a less significance level, decreases democratic orientation, and elevates official patriotism. People who perceive the Internet as a tool enhancing the vertical communication between the Chinese government and netizens tend to become patriotic and supportive of the regime. Building upon quantitative evidence, this book draws a nuanced picture of Internet exposure and its political implications.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781315438559

1
Understanding the Internet

Introduction

Internet usage in China has recently grown exponentially, rising from 59 million users in 2002 to 710 million by mid-2016 (China Internet Network Information Center [CNNIC], July 2016). One in every two Chinese has currently been exposed to the Internet. This upsurge has made political communication among citizens and between the government and citizens less costly and almost instantaneous. Despite these advances, scholars are only beginning to understand and systematically explain the ways in which increased Internet exposure may affect behavior and values of Chinese citizens. Can the Internet help liberalize Chinese society due to its innate pluralism? Has the Internet become an efficient tool assisting the ruling elite to remain in power, given the tendency of Internet service providers and users to be easily manipulated by the Chinese state?
Although these seemingly diverging effects have often been recognized and discussed in research, scholars disagree upon the implications. Western-centrism drives researchers to discern any sign of democracy, which is the presumed destination for authoritarian regimes, and quickly conclude that authoritarianism will be terminated, or at least greatly weakened, soon by the liberal trend. Ever since the 1990s when the Internet became widely involved in the lives of the Chinese, optimism rapidly spread in scholarly studies, which declared the Internet a platform to breed liberal views and asserted that the increasing liberalism originating from the Internet would strengthen civil society, promote political liberalization, and ultimately fuel democratization in China (Lagerkvist, 2010; Yang, 2005 and 2009; Tai, 2004 and 2006; Esarey and Xiao, 2011; Zheng, 2008; Tong and Lei, 2013; Zhou, 2009).
By contrast, another group of scholars emphasize that Internet freedom is merely a result of tolerance and acquiescence of the state, which is always capable of ending pluralism on the Internet at any moment through a series of strategies, from hard and direct censorship (e.g., shutdown and blocking) to newly invented soft and indirect strategies (MacKinnon, 2007 and 2011; Brady, 2008; Kalathil and Boas, 2003; Zheng, 2008). According to this group of scholars, the ultimate winner in this game via the Internet is likely the state, and Chinese netizens cannot incite a regime change through the Internet under current institutional settings.
Another group of scholars (Herold, 2011; Marolt, 2011) propose that this dichotomy between the state and netizens is not always relevant. If Internet users always ignore the surveillance and censorship imposed by the state and the latter “fades into the background and ceases to be a motivating or influencing factor for the individual Internet user,” then the state’s control over the Internet will not entail any behavioral correction among Internet users (Marolt, 2011, p. 58).
The Internet is an institution (Lagerkvist, 2010; Herold, 2011), and the different understandings of the Internet lead to various conclusions about its political effects, which are captured by the following metaphors.

Panopticism of the Internet

The concept of the panopticon is borrowed to describe the intensive surveil-lance and censorship imposed on the Internet within China (Marolt, 2011). The panopticon, originally designed by Jeremy Bentham, is a disciplinary institutional system that upholds a power relationship by imposing an Orwellian supervision over people. It is structured as follows:
at the periphery, annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, and a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery.
(Foucault, 1977, p. 200)
The institution guarantees that “each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed” (Foucault, 1977, p. 197). “[T]he inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so” (Foucault, 1977, p. 201). Foucault (1977) argues that the panoptic surveillance tends to deter the defiance of inmates. The Chinese Communist Party state employs multiple means to guarantee a tight control over the Internet and thus maintain the level of panopticism of the Internet.

Surveillance and censorship

In 2005, an estimate of more than 30,000 Internet police scrutinized the cyberspace and immediately erased posts believed to be harmful because they contained pornography, rumors, or criticism against the party state (Watts, 2005). Around mid-2006, the Shenzhen government decided to make Internet police visible to further deter potential offenses. Two cartoon mascots called “Jingjing” and “Chacha” appeared on all websites accessed in Shenzhen; the presence of these characters encouraged self-regulation and reminded Internet users that they were supervised (Dickie, 2006; Marolt, 2011). The online images of Internet police reinforce panopticism by promoting a sense of continuous surveillance. The line between acceptable and unacceptable content in cyberspace is deliberately left blurred, generating an uncertain atmosphere that causes citizens to remain cautious about what they say online (Marolt, 2011).
Censorship limits the access of Internet users to the outside World Wide Web (WWW) to maintain “the closing of the town” (Foucault, 1977, p. 195). The sovereignty of the state over the Internet within China is derived from the fact that the government literally owns bandwidth and that private companies have to rent it to provide Internet service. The state is capable of upholding the “Great Firewall of China” (GFC) through regulations and technical maneuvers (Fallows, 2008; Herold, 2011). The GFC results in the slow access and loading speed of websites outside China, discouraging casual viewing. Particular websites can be permanently or temporarily blocked from Chinese Internet users, causing “quasi-separation” between the Internet within China and the rest of the WWW (Herold, 2011). Blacklisting words deemed sensitive or offensive is another censorship strategy. When an Internet user within China attempts to view websites containing sensitive terms or phrases, Internet connection is intercepted. For instance, terms related to the Tiananmen Square Movement in 1989, Falun Gong, and the independence of Tibet are all blocked. The websites of human rights groups and Western and Taiwanese media are also frequently blocked (The Guardian, July 16, 2002). At different critical periods, the list of offensive terms is often modified, and users usually have to identify sensitive terms through trial and error.

Self-censorship

More importantly, Internet companies in China are urged by the state to impose a strong self-censorship. The public pledge of self-regulation and professional ethics for the Internet industry in China was launched by the Internet Society of China, a semigovernment organization, in 2002. After the launching, not only large web giants based in the country (e.g., Baidu, Sina, and Sohu) and universities (e.g., Peking and Qinghua Universities), but also foreign companies (e.g., Yahoo!) chose to sign and abide by the pledge because these entities depend on the state’s approval to operate (The Guardian, July 16, 2002). According to the pledge, Internet companies should be “[r]efraining from producing, posting or disseminating pernicious information that may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability 
 Monitor the information publicized by users on websites according to law and remove the harmful information promptly.” 1 Some companies take proactive actions and engage in internal oversight by training self-discipline commissioners (Xiao, August 29, 2010). 2
A reputation mechanism has also been adopted by the state to encourage the compliance of Internet companies. The Internet Society of China grants adhering Internet companies the China Internet Self-Discipline Award on a regular basis. 3 This award recognizes companies for creating “harmonious and healthy Internet development” (MacKinnon, 2011, p. 35). Since 2008, this government-affiliated organization has also worked as a credit rating agency that evaluates the performance of Internet companies and publicizes their ratings. 4 Large Internet companies, including Baidu, Tencent, Sina, and Sohu, managed to be rated the best. 5 Recent official news also indicated that the Chinese government planned to embed the Internet police in major Internet companies to impose further surveillance on both netizens and web enterprises (Dou, 2015).
Thus, the institutional organization of the Internet industry in China enables the state to impose panoptic surveillance by directly supervising individual users and penetrating into Internet service providers. Profit-seeking Internet companies in China often choose to cooperate with the state (Stockmann, 2013; Stockmann and Gallagher, 2011). The state remains capable of further intervening in online communication when necessary. Control is tighter than normal during certain periods. For instance, Internet users have been facing a series of tightenings under the current Xi-Li administration since 2013. A series of campaigns in 2013 strongly signaled ideological rectification. Influential bloggers (big Vs) were harassed, and some were arrested. The next round of government-led campaigns for web cleaning followed immediately in 2014, which combated online pornography, violence, and rumors (Rose and Roche, 2014). Since 2015, popular virtual private networks (VPNs) that grant Chinese Internet users encrypted channels to uncensored servers to “climb over the Great Firewall” and circumvent domestic censorship such as Astrill, have begun to be blocked (Chen et al., 2015; Griffiths, 2015).
Has the Internet literally become the panopticon? The big data generated through the new media make surveillance more efficient than the pre- Internet age (McMullan, July 23, 2015). But, one feature of the panopticon that immediately invalidates the Internet is the division of inmates. Individuals are isolated in separated cells in the panopticon. By contrast, the Internet grants opportunities for netizens to network and even organize and mobilize a collective action. Therefore, rather than panopticism, some scholars emphasize the pluralistic nature of the Internet and propose that the Internet functions as a public sphere.

The Internet as the public sphere

The Internet, particularly Web 2.0 and above, is intrinsically different from older media instruments in that it flattens the structure of communication and transforms it from media centered to citizen centered. Rather than remaining a passive receiver of information, a netizen can initiate and contribute to communication with other netizens. The CNNIC (July 2016) data show that half of the Chinese population experiences convenient and inexpensive access to the Internet as a result of the technological advancement. Particularly with a rapid proliferation of smartphones, individuals are networked as long as their phones are connected to a telecommunications network. Netizens may outperform Internet police by reposting in a large group simultaneously, which may de facto delay and even bypass censorship. Although the state is very capable of delaying data transferring and slowing down the loading speed of some websites, the Internet has overall compressed time and space and enabled netizens to network and spread the word efficiently. The decentralizing nature of the Internet has weakened the surveillance and censorship imposed by the state. Thus, the innate pluralism of the Internet promotes efficient communication between netizens, and greatly reduces panopticism.
Habermas’ (1989) concept of the public sphere is introduced to capture this nature of the Internet in scholarly studies. The Internet is believed to establish a public agenda and grant a place for public deliberation th...

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