The Internet Society in China

A 2016 Report

Shaojie Liu, Jianmin Wang, Shaojie Liu, Jianmin Wang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811382369
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811382376
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

 

© China Renmin University Press 2020

Shaojie Liu and Jianmin Wang (eds.)The Internet Society in ChinaSociology, Media and Journalism in Chinahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8237-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Social Dimensions of the Internet Economy

Jianmin Wang¹ and Chunjin Wang²

(1)

School of Society and Psychology, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China

(2)

Jilin Bank Changchun Pearl River Branch, Changchun, China

Jianmin Wang

End Abstract

1.1 Introduction

First of all, we would like to introduce the significant place of the Internet in the economic development in China as well as the great importance attached to the development of the Internet by the government through three important conferences. From November 19 to 21, 2014, the first World Internet Conference was held in Wuzhen, attracting more than 1000 network elites from approximately 100 countries and regions. This was the first Internet conference of the largest scale and the highest level in China, and also an unprecedentedly grand summit meeting worldwide in the Internet sector. Held by the government of the People’s Republic of China, the World Internet Conference aims to build the international platform for the interconnection between China and the world and the Chinese platform for the co-sharing and co-governing with the international Internet, where all countries seek the consensus in disputes, establish cooperation based on the consensus and achieve the win-win situation through cooperation. It is jointly organized by China Internet Networking Information Office and the People’s Government of Zhejiang Province and is held once a year, with Wuzhen as its permanent site.

In the first World Internet Conference, Ma Kai, the Vice Premier of the State Council, delivered an address which indicated that China would make better use of the Internet to strengthen and perfect public services including education, medical care, traffic and hygiene and so on and bring convenience to the masses and practically support and improve people’s livelihood. According to Ma Kai, the Chinese government attaches great importance to the development of the Internet, and, in the following two decades, China will actively integrate into the worldwide tide of the Internet development, promote the Internet development in China in an innovative manner, formulate the strategies for national information development, implement the policy of “Broadband China”, plan for the development of the third and fourth generations of mobile communication, carry out “triple-network integration” across the country, actively develop the Internet of Things, big data and cloud computing, facilitate the Internet applications such as the e-commerce, e-government and Smart City, and vigorously advance information consumption and so on.

The second important meeting is the Third Session of the 12th National People’s Congress, which was inaugurated in the Great Hall of the People on March 5, 2015. Li Keqiang, the Premier of the State Council, had made a report on the work of the government in this session and proposed to draw up the Internet+ action plan. Li stated that

Emerging industries and new types of businesses are areas of intense competition. We will launch major projects to develop high-end equipment, information networks, integrated circuits, new energy, new materials, biomedicines, aero engines, and gas turbines, helping a number of emerging industries to become leading ones. We will develop the ‘Internet Plus’ action plan to integrate the mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things with modern manufacturing, to encourage the healthy development of e-commerce, industrial networks, and Internet banking, and to guide Internet-based companies to increase their presence in the international market. In addition to the 40 billion Yuan government fund already in place for investment in China’s emerging industries, more funds need to be raised for promoting business development and innovation.¹

Apparently, the strategy for the Internet development is quite an important one that involves several economic sectors and concerns the overall social and economic development.

The third important meeting is the second World Internet Conference held between December 16 and 18 in 2015, with the theme of “Connectivity & Sharing – Jointly Constructing a Community with a Shared Future for the Cyberspace”. In the opening ceremony, President Xi Jinping made the keynote speech. He pointed out that the rapid advancement of information technology represented by the Internet today had brought about new ways of social production, created new space for people’s life, opened new horizons of state governance and enhanced people’s ability to understand and shape the world. He also stated that China would attach great importance to the development of the Internet, observe the principle of active utilization, scientific development, rule of law and safety guarantee, advance the construction of information infrastructure, develop the network economy and bring benefits to the people.

According to Xi Jinping, while the current world was going through the hardships and setbacks in the process of economic recovery, the Chinese economy also faced the pressure of economic downturn. The key to solve these questions lies in adhering to innovation-driven development. China was carrying out the Internet+ action plan, advancing the construction of “Digital China”, developing the sharing economy, supporting the Internet-based innovations and improving the quality and effect of the development. The vigorous growth of the Internet in China had provided a broad market for enterprises and entrepreneurs from all different countries. China would constantly maintain the policy of Opening Up, continue to make use of foreign capital, always safeguard the legitimate rights and benefits of foreign-capital enterprises and persist in providing better services to foreign enterprises investing in China. China warmly welcomed enterprises and entrepreneurs from all countries to invest and run businesses in China as long as they observed the laws, and China would like to strengthen cooperation with all countries to promote the development of investment and trade worldwide and advance the development of global digital economy by developing the cross-border e-commerce and constructing the information economy demonstration area.²

China initiated and organized the World Internet Conference and the state leaders personally attended the conference and delivered important speeches, which exactly reflected the high attention paid to the development of the Internet by the Party and the government. According to the lecture given by Xi Jinping in the second World Internet Conference, in addition to being the traditional communication media and the virtual space, the Internet also plays an important role in promoting the economic development and social governance in both China and the world. Exposed to an all-round influence exerted by the Internet, the society has ushered in the real “Internet age”. It has become a part of the national strategy of China to drive the economic growth and advance the comprehensive development of society through the Internet, which can be summarized as the strategy of Internet+.

With regard to the relation between economy and society, economic development constitutes the foundation for social development, while the economy requires certain social foundation for development; and, at the same time, economic development also shows certain social influence. Therefore, the rise of the Internet economy shall be analyzed from the perspective of society or sociology. This chapter mainly analyzes the connection between the Internet economy and society based on the background and social foundation of the rise of the Internet economy and its influence on social development; and theoretically analyzes and reflects on the social implications behind the Internet economy by combining some specific phenomena of the Internet economy, such as “the online shopping lifestyle” and “the rise of online takeaway”.

Background to the Rise of the Internet Economy

As an inevitable outcome of the development of science and technology, the rise of the Internet economy marks the beginning of a new era of the development of human civilization. As to Chinese society, the rise of the Internet economy is not only driven by the worldwide science development and the globalization trend, but also closely related to the stage of social development and the social structure of China.

The New Era of the Science and Technology Revolution

In the 1980s, Alvin Toffler, the famous American futurist, proposed a shocking idea in his book The Third Wave: Agricultural civilization was the first civilization wave human beings experienced; industrial civilization was the second wave; and the new technological revolution represented by information technology and biotechnology that had begun to take shape at that time is the third civilization wave human beings are going through.³ Instead of being temporally successive, the three waves may co-exist at the same time, but each of them may dominate different countries or regions.

According to Alvin Toffler, the future society, where the production field, the social field and the political field exert mutual effect on each other, is characterized by non-popularity. In his opinion, the second wave abided by the laws of standardization, centralization, concentration, synchronization and the fascination in bigness and so on. Industrial civilization corresponded to the collective communication, the centralized political system, the market-oriented economic system and the linear time-space view and gender separation and so on in the ideological system. With the approach of the third wave, the producer and the consumer are merged into one “prosumer”; all social sectors are exposed to corresponding changes; the renewable bioenergy gradually becomes the focus of the energy sector; the communication shows the non-popularity trend; the transnational corporation will replace the nation state as the basic political unit; and families will turn to be more electronic. Moreover, education, social attitudes and organizations will see corresponding changes.

Alvin Toffler believes that the rise of the Internet technology constitutes the third wave. Compared to new technologies such as biotechnology, what’s unique about the Internet technology is that it turns a large number of “offline” actions to “online” activities and significantly improves the convenience and efficiency of social intercourse and communication. Under these circumstances, economic subjects’ economic activities such as production, exchange, distribution and consumption as well as economic behaviors of financial institutions and governmental departments and so on are increasingly relying on the Internet in this era of the Internet economy, as they have to depend on the Internet to acquire a great deal of information, to make predictions and decisions, and to directly conduct transactions online.

Evolution of the Ways to Acquire Information

In the traditional agricultural society, the quantity and speed for people to acquire information was directly proportional to the time of contact with others. In other words, when people were contacting each other more frequently and for a longer time, they would be more acquainted with each other and therefore could obtain a greater deal of information more quickly. For this reason, in the traditional agricultural society, the elderly had more information and experiences and thus enjoyed the higher social authority. In this case, time was not the calendar year or the clock time in modern sense, but it represented experiences and events. The acquisition and understanding of information featured the spatial dependence.

To put it simply, the spatial dependence of information acquisition means that a person in the traditional agricultural society mainly acquired information in the limited and fixed space. Only in the limited space can verbal communication be convenient and efficient; and only in the fixed space can information be easily spread and the consensus be reached. In regard to the village community where “though hearing each other’s cocks crow and dogs bark, people are completely isolated from each other all their lives”, each village had their own “local knowledge”. A knowledge might not be recognized outside the community, and customs might vary within a short distance. As a saying goes, give a dog a bad name and hang him, which takes place only in a relatively enclosed and stable environment. Only in such an environment the information can be spread rapidly, giving rise to the group pressure in a very short time.

Due to the temporal and spatial restrictions, “hearsay” had become the main way for peasants to acquire and spread information. “Hearsay” consisted of at least four factors: the speaker, the hearer, verbal communication and the place of interaction and was an information communication mode that happened at a specific time and a specific place. Therefore, people acquired information through daily questions and answers, so information could not or could hardly be acquired or spread without frequent daily contact and verbal communication. In the limited time and space, “hearsay” provided all information necessary for people’s daily life, and the writing was not that important.

While “hearsay” constituted the main way for information acquisition in the traditional agricultural society, in the industrial society where the mass media dominated, “you say I listen” (such as radio) and “you play I watch” (such as film or TV) had become the new forms of information acquisition. Along with the development of science and technology, labor division and urbanization in the industrial society, people had a wider range of activities and conducted temporary, anonymous and one-off social exchanges more than ever. Decreasingly relying on time and space, people could acquire information leaping over space and time through the communication media such as radio, TV and film. The revolution of the communication media had greatly changed the scope, quantity and nature of the information people acquire and widely expanded people’s field of vision, hearing and touch. In this sense, Marshall McLuhan considered “the media is the message” and regarded the media as the “extensions of man”.⁴

In the developed industrial society, people acquired much more information from “you say I listen” and “you play I watch” than that from “hearsay”. However, by comparison, the “hearsay” is a kind of interpersonal communication, a way not only to acquire information but also to express feelings and build consensus; while with “you say I listen” and “you play I watch”, the mass media is instilling information unidirectionally with few or even no interaction or emotional communication. Along with the rise of network society, “reprint and search” has become an important approach to acquire information and understand society, in addition to “hearsay” and “you say I listen” and “you play I watch”.⁵ Distinguished from “hearsay”, “reprint and search” does not make a sound or directly talk to a man but only needs a computer (or other tools) connected to the Internet. People can acquire endless information instantly by merely tapping the keyboard, clicking the mouse or touching the screen.

Compared to “you say I listen” and “you play I watch”, “reprint and search” realizes the “two-way selection”. On the one hand, “information selects the audience”, and people passively accepts the information unidirectionally delivered and, on the other hand, when accepting the information, the audience actively selects the infor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Social Dimensions of the Internet Economy
• 2. The Big Time for WeChat Business: “Moments” and “Wealth Dream”
• 3. Space Compression of E-commerce in Rural Areas and Its Value: Case Study
• 4. Marketing Chaos and Development Transformation of E-commerce Market: Reflections After the Bustling “Singles Day”
• 5. Spatial Turn of Network Information Consumption and Its Social Risks: Case Study of “the Sale of Baidu Hemophilia Post Bar”
• 6. Two-Way Embedding: A National Carnival of Electronic Red Envelopes
• 7. “The Differential Mode of Association” in Cyberspace: Sociological Research on “Crowdfunding”
• 8. Network Power Construction in Micro Public Welfare 2.0: A Case Study of Tianjin Explosion
• 9. Network Expression of Social Problems: A Case Study of Forwarding “Death Penalty for Human Traffickers”
• Back Matter