The Internet in China

Cyberspace and Civil Society

Zixue Tai

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781135869908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

The Internet in China examines the cultural and political ramifications of the Internet for Chinese society. The rapid growth of the Internet has been enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese government, but the government has also rushed to seize control of the virtual environment. Individuals have responded with impassioned campaigns against official control of information. The emergence of a civil society via cyberspace has had profound effects upon China--for example, in 2003, based on an Internet campaign, the Chinese Supreme People's Court overturned the ruling of a local court for the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.
The important question this book asks is not whether the Internet will democratize China, but rather in what ways the Internet is democratizing communication in China. How is the Internet empowering individuals by fostering new types of social spaces and redefining existing social relations?

1

The Idea of Civil Society from Early Modern to Contemporary Social Thought in the West

Few concepts in the social sciences have appeared in theoretical deliberations, intellectual debates, and research programs as often as the idea of civil society in the past two decades. Yet even fewer concepts have been as undertheorized, controversial, and oftentimes confusing. An examination of the rich terrain of the genealogies of civil society can yield new horizons in our discussion of this concept within today’s environment, and an explication of the long tradition in its conceptual development will help us critically evaluate the prevalent democratizing, liberating, and other claims in the anachronistic employment of the term “civil society” under various contexts. Thus it is appropriate that this book start with an overview of the historical, political, and philosophical evolution of the concept of civil society in occidental thought.

Although the genealogies of the idea of civil society can be traced to ancient Greece, immediate inspirations for contemporary debates come more directly from social theories in early modern Europe. Therefore, this chapter starts with a brief overview of the ancient and classical heritage of the idea of civil society, and then examines theoretical deliberations on civil society in early modern European social thought, followed by a review of the historical context in which the concept of civil society was revived in the twentieth century. Next, I analyze the different strands of theoretical foundations explicating the democratic potential of civil society. To rejuvenate the theoretical thrust and augment the practical utility of the concept, I end this chapter with some theoretical propositions on how to adapt the theory of civil society to the changing political and social conditions of the new millennium.

Ancient and Classical Social Thought, the Emergence of Modern Capitalism, and the Idea of Civil Society

It is generally believed that the notions of politics, democracy, and political theory were invented in the fifth and fourth centuries BC in ancient Greece, where the Athenians turned the practice of politics into an “art” (techne) (Finley, 1985; Wallach, 2001). John Ehrenberg (1999) summarizes succinctly the classic understanding of civil society in Greece as “a politically organized commonwealth” (p.3), which differentiated civilized Greeks from barbarians without any membership in political association. However, Plato and Aristotle, both masterminds of political discourse of their times, approached civil society differently.

The political commonwealth of Plato’s Greece was organized into numerous relatively small separated regions of self-contained political units varying in sizes called poleis. The size of a polis (often translated as city-state; see e.g., Howland, 1993; Klosko, 1986) was typically small and its citizens were adult males, although the community as a whole included women, slaves, and foreign businessmen (who were confined to limited spheres outside the political world). The polis came into being for the following reasons:

The origin of a city (polis) lies hellip; in the fact that we are not, any of us, self-sufficient; we have all sorts of needs hellip; Different individuals, then, form associations with one person to meet one need, and with another person to meet a different need. With this variety of wants they may collect a number of partners and allies into one place of habitation, and to this joint habitation we give the name “city” (polis).

(Republic 369^b-c)¹

These associations in Plato’s polis were nothing less than civil society in the sense we use the term today. The polis was not only a geographic entity; it was a civic, social space where politics of the day was practiced (Ophir, 1991). The Athenian democratic politics was made possible by ennobling and energizing frank public discourse (e.g., Republic 557^b-d). Plato’s ideal city-state was organized into a system of classes comprising three types of men: “the lover of wisdom, the lover of victory and the lover of profit” (Republic 581^c). The three classes of citizen would become Ruler(s), Guardians, and Ruled in the polis. Plato’s political art strives for a unity of different interests of society into a God-orchestrated division of labor among the different classes, and civil society is made possible by the intellectual power of the Rulers in attending to the welfare of all citizens in a rigidly structured polis (Monoson, 2000; Nichols, 1987; Ophir, 1991). Different classes live within different specialized civic spaces, yet each contributes in its own way to the harmonized city-state.

Aristotle’s intellectual undertaking was primarily developed in his Politics,² which, in combination with Plato’s Republic, marks the start of political philosophy as a field of study. Aristotle shared with Plato the idea of the centrality of the polis in studying political communities. However, he attacked the aim of Plato’s ideal polis as the highest degree of unity of individuals who compose the polis. For Aristotle, Plato’s unity of individual human beings defeated the exact purpose of the polis: to unite people with distinctive differences. A community, of course, implies a sense of sharing. There are three possibilities of sharing in the polis, according to Aristotle: the citizens might share (1) in nothing, (2) in everything that can be shared, or (3) in some things but not others (Politics, Book II, 1261^a). Aristotle quickly eliminates the first option because it is impossible for citizens to have nothing in common. Then the question comes to which is better, a state that has as many things as possible in common or a state that shares some things but not others? Plato’s Republic obviously opts for the second one: an ideal state would allow its citizens to share as much as possible. Aristotle makes his position very clear from his arguments in Book II of Politics: an ideal polis allows its citizens to share some things in common but not others. For Aristotle, unity of the polis is not only undesirable but also practically impossible mdash; by nature the polis is less of a unity than the household, which in turn is less of a unity than the individual. A polis with a high degree of unity ceases to be a polis (Politics Book II 1261). The survival of the polis depends to a great extent on the plurality of its citizens because only diversity makes it possible for individual citizens in the polis to exchange services and products, and only through this is the binding relationship among individuals created to let the polis maintain its self-sufficiency (Mayhew, 1997, Stalley, 1991).

The beginnings of Aristotle’s polis can be found in the most primitive forms of association mdash; “unions of those lsquo;who cannot exist without one another,’ man and woman, master and slave” (Bradley, 1991: 23). Plato would have been appalled at Aristotle’s inclusion in the polis of the basic relationships of the family and villages as well as many other forms of association: schools and educational institutions, fraternal associations, religious communities, and more importantly, close personal friendships.

But families, villages, and other associations only become a polis when they are components of a whole with a common good as its end, a whole in which the individuals directly participate as virtuous citizens. Hence the polis exists by nature for the fulfillment of human perfection and assumes priority over individuals (Miller, F., 1995). Because humans are political animals and the polis as a political community is the natural affiliation for them to reach the common good, there is no distinction between the state and society or civil society. The polis combines them all mdash; civil society is the state.

Both Plato and Aristotle were suspicious of the divisive acids of commercial activities and other private pursuits in the formations of civil society because they tend to place self-interest above the highest good. Religion for both Plato and Aristotle is tied intricately to the politics of the polis. The ideal state is a rule of virtue and therefore of God’s will. Church as an exclusive religious sanctity is nonexistent because all religious activities are practiced in the public space of the polis toward the good life.

The downturn of Athens as the center of political discourse shifted the search for political thought and action to the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages. Christianity, which was instilled as the official religion of Rome, was fundamental to the development of political and philosophical ideas at the time. The Christian doctrine justifies the use of the political power of the state to save the fallen humanity under the guidance of the Church, and it finds full exposition in Aurelius Augustine (AD 354 to 430). The domination of Augustine’s intellectual tradition continued until the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose legacy in moral and political philosophy still finds passionate followers today. For Augustine and Aquinas, civil society (city of man), which includes family and the state as well as other secular organizations, exists side by side with the city of God: the former fulfills the material, the immediate, and the temporal happiness while the latter is for the attainment of man’s eternal and spiritual destiny of the Divine Order. Man’s ultimate end, of course, takes precedence over his material well-being; but only the ecclesiastical power at the will of God can help man achieve his complete fulfillment (Benkert, 1942; Dyson, 2001, Elshtain, 1995; Finnis, 1998; Mueller, 1987; von Heyking, 2001).

During the second half of the eighteenth century, Scotland, the “great eighteenth-century incubator of intellectual innovation” (Muller, 1993: 16), was leading Europe to become a commercial society in which economic activities were at the center of human life. Adam Smith (1723 to 1790) was among the first to observe the hindrances created by classical Aristotelian philosophy, Christian rationalism, and medieval theology to emerging social conditions in an age of dynamism of economic growth and commercial activities, and he set out to develop a brand-new worldview with an intention to integrate economic motives and morals (Fitzgibbons, 1995). Spending most of his life in Scotland, Smith benefited enormously from many seminal ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. Through his writings, Smith intended to demonstrate that acknowledgment and discovery of the “scientific” laws of Nature could solve both economic and moral problems (Fitzgibbons, 1995). Smith’s writings not only provide a base line for economic and social theorists for generations to come, but they also establish his founding father status in the political economy of civil society (Madison, 1998).

First of all, Smith starts to conceive of his science of economics by frankly recognizing the motivating force of self-interest. This is best summarized in a passage widely cited by Smithian scholars:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, of the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages (The Wealth of Nations, hereafter referred to as WN, Vol. 1, Book I, Chapter ii, p.18).

(Smith, 1976)

Man is by his very nature dependent on others. But Smith’s social nature of man is bound by his commercial affairs: “In civilized society he stands at all times in need of the cooperation of assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons” (Cited in Muller, 1993: 71). This dependence is demonstrated by the capacity of human beings for exchange. It is the possibility of exchange that differentiates human beings from one another, because it “encourages every man to apply himself to a particular occupation, and to cultivate and bring to perfection whatever talent or genius he may possess for that particular species of business” (WN, Vol. I, Book I, Ch. Ii, p.19) (Smith, 1976).

Many have linked selfishness, egoism, or selfish passions to Smith’s concept of self-interest. Contemporary scholars have challenged this reading of Smith (e.g., Fitzgibbons, 1995; Muller, 1993; Werhane, 1991). Smith believes, they point out, that the pursuit of self-interest is not without its restraint, and self-love can be virtuous. According to Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,hereafter referred to as TMS,(1892), self-interest can be channeled, moderated, or redirected to produce socially desirable behavior, because “man’s natural lsquo;sociability’ mdash; his desire for the sympathy, attention, and approval of others mdash; makes him capable of subordinating his egoistic desires to the demands of shared social rules” (Muller, 1993: 99).

One important concept in understanding Smith’s idea of social interaction is “the impartial spectator.” There is an element in human nature that leads us to pursue self-interest within limits and care for the welfare of others. The key to this realization lies in our imaginative ability to understand what others would feel if they were in our situation. The word Smith uses for this is “sympathy,” a “fellow-feeling with any passion whatever” for other people (TMS, Part I. Ch. I., p.5) (Smith, 1892). In a similar vein, other people display concerns for our feelings. Thus the desire for a shared sympathy serves as a social motive for people to accommodate to one another’s sentiments. Because sympathy allows people to disengage themselves from their own feelings and to evaluate the actions and motives of selves and others without any bias, a standard of what Smith calls “the impartial spectator” is reached. It is through acting as “the impartial spectator” that individuals measure their behavior by the imaginative standards of others to gain the approval of others in their social behaviors. So human passions can be disciplined by the market, which is comprised of buyers and sellers freely engaged in day-to-day commercial activities, and civil society, rather than government, creates what Smith calls the “natural order” in society.

Another important notion of Smith’s civil society is his metaphor of the Invisible Hand, which refers to the positive unintended consequences in civil affairs resulting from cooperation in economic activities necessitated by a free market economy. It appears only once in the Wealth of Nations:

As every individual hellip; endeavours hellip; both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value hellip; He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it hellip; and he is in this hellip; led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention hellip; By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. (WN, Vol. I, Book IV, Ch. II, 477ndash;478).

(Smith, 1976. Emphasis added)

So through self-seeking operations, each individual also makes a contribution to the common good of society. Thus the moral promise of commercial society lies in its capability in civil society to channel individual self-interested passions into positive directions that benefit the society as a whole.

Smith again uses the term “Invisible Hand” only once in his Theory ofMoral Sentiments, echoing his theme in the Wealth of Nations. Although the rich are driven by their “natural selfishness and rapacity” to accumulate and purchase, they unwittingly distribute a large residue of their goods to the poor.

They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life that would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants; and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. (TMS, Part IV, Ch. I, p.264–265. Emphasis added).

(Smith, 1892)

Thus, the Invisible Hand helps us achieve the natural harmonious order in civil society.

Although Smith argues against direct government interference with the economy, he also thinks that the state is the most important institution on which commercial society depends. The state is essential, according to Smith, because it provides the authority and security for the survival and functioning of commerce. On the one hand, there is the potentially destructive force of group self-interest in civil society that the state has to reckon with. In every state, Smith writes, there are numerous orders and societies of civil affairs concerned more with their particular interests and privileges (TMS, Part VI, Sect. II, Ch. II.) (Smith, 1892). Because all these civil institutions invariably go to the state for prosperity and protection, it is the responsibility of the state to balance among these orders and societies to maintain the stability and permanency of the whole society. On the other hand, civil society also provides the necessary balance and check on state power. Where there is a paucity of civil associations, an arbitrary and despotic government results (Muller, 1993).

So Adam Smith believed in the beneficial effects of the economy of competition, the profit motive, and the free market on the moral developments and ublic virtue in society, as well as their contributions to freedom and civilization (Reisman, 1976). This is Smith’s idea of, to use his own words, “commercial humanism.” But this is only made possible by a panoply of nongovernmental institutions that channel individual passions toward socially desirable outcomes. The role of civil society, therefore, is its capability of transforming the base human desire of self-interest into promoting not only the materialistic but also the spiritual and moral wealth of the nations.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 to 1831) explicitly made the conceptual separation of civil society and the state as we understand it today for the first time (e.g., Cohen and Arato, 1992; Seligman, 1992). Indeed, this separation is one of the most important features of Hegel’s political philosophy. Prior to Hegel’s time, in ancient Greek and medieval thought, there was no distinction between the political and the civil mdash; “civil society” was used interchangeably with “political society” (Riedel, 1984). Hegel’s conceptual scheme of the distinct sphere of civil society was to answer the call of the changing socioeconomic conditions of his time.

Heg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Idea of Civil Society from Early Modern to Contemporary Social Thought in the West
• 2 The Idea of Civil Society in the Chinese Context
• 3 Government Policy and State Control of the Internet in China
• 4 Historical Development of the Internet in China
• 5 Communication, Empowerment, and the Emergence of Network Public Opinion in Chinese Cyberspace
• 6 A School Explosion, a Fatal Virus, and the Internet Factor
• 7 Online Activism, Internet Protest, and Social Movements in Cyber China
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography (English)
• Bibliography (Chinese)
• Index