1. China: People’s Tough Love
1.1. Controllability dilemma
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1.1. Controllability dilemma
The Chinese government was in the middle of a reform process where the integration into the global economic system was supported when the Internet was first introduced in China.
Following the introduction of the Internet to China in the 1990s, for a while a more or less laissez faire attitude was adopted because the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had not yet developed a well-organized strategy for dealing with the matter of new and emerging technology, including the Internet, so that different groups and regions were able to pursue their own individual strategies to some extent (Damm and Thomas, 2006). Currently, of these groups, some essential actor can be distinguished as the following: the government, which itself is divided not only into central and local levels, but also into different responsible authorities;
the national and international businesses and enterprises; the administration at different levels;
the news media; the citizens and, finally, the technologically enabled users who might now act within the newly formed virtual groups. Over the past decade the relationships between these key players have become more complicated.
This relatively open stance towards the emerging technology started fading after the introduction of the World Wide Web with its user-friendly interface that made the Internet potentially accessible to a mass audience in the PRC. To a great extent, the Chinese government deserves praise for rapidly building the data network and seeing that access is being granted to a quickly expanding number of the country’s population (Harwit and Clark, 2001). The struggle for control of cyberspace information, physical data pipelines, and network revenue, however, have a significant effect on the growth of Internet technology in the coming decade.
Such comprehensive control of physical network is where the unique narrative begins in the case of China. Thus, asking who built the actual data pipelines through which information flows, and who now regulates and profits from these systems is essential to lay out the actors in the reverse saliency framework.
There are a number of cases in which there found lacking components of the system, or some imbalanced areas in which the technology was found insufficient to serve actors’
interests during the adoption of Internet technologies, in other words, reverse salient is found but none were more threatening for China than the fact that the Internet technology allows control by all users. Networked-ICT, in this sense, does not meet the expectations of the first hypothesis of this research which presumes the more the controllability that a technology
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haven’t come to an end, it rather intensified. The unique development of infrastructure, network operators, content providers, demographics and end-to-end principle in China are all evident to this end which are individually argued in this chapter through looking into the dynamic of relationship between ICT governance, authority and power. In other words, there pursued to reveal how the unique feature of the Internet required such need for the comprehensive control of infrastructure, and it is also pursued to reveal who the actors are in this rival for the control, how the power relations between these actors; private actors (the non-state actors and individuals) and the government (the state actor) dynamics shaped the way of networked- ICT governance in China today.The technology that emerged in response to new communication technology requirements was the TCP/IP, also described earlier in this chapter under the title of Force that was developed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn (1974). The fundamental elements of TCP/IP involve flexibility and redundancy as well as openness, in other words, no reliance on the center/IP which was necessary in order to connect all users with different and incompatible operating systems. Security of the network and the ability to accurately identify those connecting to the Net (factors which would have considerable implications for national security concerns in the next step) appeared to have been low priorities in the TCP/IP principle. This can be partly explained by the fact that access to the first network was originally restricted to a small group of researchers in academia. Thus, the perception towards the qualities of flexibility, redundancy and openness was challenging the Chinese values and concerns which required a more comprehensive hand in adopting the technology mainly started from its infrastructure. This is an illustration of how certain norms, values and expectations shapes technology adoption in particular. But the structural change in design left to happen later mainly because the open and flexible architecture ultimately provided a rich environment for both innovation and collaboration (Cerf, and Kahn, 1974) similarly to the case of Chinese technological advancement.
The experiences of Chinese netizens with the peer to peer technology -also known as end-to-end technologies, and in response, how the peer to peer principle impact the balance of power between the Chinese government and netizens have been breathtaking, and often interested in dissident activities (Chase, Hachigian, Mulvenon, 2006). It obviously changed the government’s perception of the ICT technology, and the methods used in the balance of information control to counter the growing potential political impacts. It created a forever
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dilemma of which the Chinese government left to evaluate outcomes and measure each and every step they take in adopting a design that is made by the previous actor, the US, with different set of concerns and values: pursuing economic growth versus preserving its legitimacy.
While in the first data networks were developed as a defense-focused communication system in the US, and become an academic tool with public deployment, in China the first efforts at creating a data network mainly arose through educational networks and were funded by the state telecommunications regulator, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). The very first major network control and development followed as the product of MPT-owned network, ChinaNET, was established (Harwit and Clark, 2001). China gave considerably low priority to maintain to be the only power of the network infrastructure in the beginning because the benefit of competition was needed. Such that MPT was not alone in the field of infrastructure development, there was a competition between private providers and MPT for the control of Chinese data network. The major player in running China’s network in particular worked mainly as a wholesale network manager and leased its lines to provincial and other regional providers in cities across the country (APPENDIX B). Having effectively used their greater financial resources and pricing structure to maintain control over the Internet’s physical network, central and local providers made a good use of this competition with private providers in terms of financial benefits and efficiency by selling access to the control of direct sales of Internet service of commercial Internet users (Harwit and Clark, 2001).
However, this balance of economic benefits from technology adoption and political stability was once again disrupted. As of 1994, there were only around 5,000 users in the entire PRC, the Internet population passed 22.5 million at the end of 2000, and as of June 2019 China had somewhere around 854 million netizens (IMF Working Paper, 2019). This tremendous growth in number of netizens resulted in the allowance for independent Internet service providers, such as InfoHighway, with the desire of aggressive cross-regional or nationwide expansion through secured inter-provincial licenses from the MPT (Harwit and Clark, 2001).
For example, some offered dial-up service in over 80 cities across the country (Harwit and Clark, 2001), while the national operator, ChinaNET only provided coverage within limited localities. The controllability that the physical network infrastructure offers for its providers increased the risks of being dethroned for the state actor and state-owned providers, although it is assumed in the first hypothesis that would decrease the risks. Therefore, the integration of independent Internet service providers was long avoided. The Chinese government was aware of being the single control of physical network services is the only way to prevent the
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challenges to its legitimacy as a hegemonic power due to the possibility of realization by other actors of the hegemon’s power (Waltz, 2005). However, the need for the private providers emerged due to the number of users skyrocketed by leading to the decrease of the states’
efficiency in providing network to masses. This is where the story of reverse saliency began for China.
The Internet infrastructure adoption in China followed a R&D path that lead it ascending until the maturing point which is where the Internet service became available for all users. The decline in efficiency is started as soon as the ambitious aims of independent providers’ fell far beyond the control of the Chinese government, there left nothing but to take measures for the Chinese government to overcome the insecurity of losing control over the network. As mentioned before, technological systems are not self-driving vehicles. They have an internal drive and ever-changing momentum that is derived from commercial and political concerns and decisions, economic concepts, institutional design, legislative limitations and backings, geography and history (Rouse, 2007). So, the technology was shaped and developed in a large part in response to human-defined ambitions, but once it’s placed, it has ongoing and sometimes contentious implications. The key here is to reckon who prevails as the power to impose its concerns and values into a technology design while the technology offers such controllability to all users simultaneously, therein. It is demonstrated in Chapter II that how the change in preferences for flexibility and openness has impacted the further use of Internet technology and generated a controllability dilemma.
The sense of the importance of economic growth is deeply embedded in Chinese government’s political views on global power. The response to being economically behind on the global seen and the installation of ChinaNET typify an instrumental approach to technology.
As explained in Chapter I, this is an approach in which the relationship between technology and power is combined with a realist approach, which had been consistently sustained in the context of Industrial Age technology that regards innovation as an unquestionably positive and progressive impact on state power and that more technology leads in a fairly direct manner to enhanced power. However, as this study shows, it would prove less useful in the Information Age, especially, in the case of China. The perceptions of, and the measures taken by the Chinese government has led two groups of these key actors to become prominent beneficiaries of the current technology development in China: the users through their self-determined role, and Chinese enterprises through tremendous investments in the ICT sector (Damm and Thomas, 2006). However, the use of ICTs for economic purposes and the role of government in the Information Age have remained at the center. Discussions about the use of ICT for economic
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purposes, the potential trend of transitioning traditional ways of commerce into a so-called
‘digital economy’, in other words, the potential of a globalized/localized structured e-commerce/ e-business have widened since the burst of the new economy bubble (Damm and Thomas, 2006).
Unlike any other state, even unlike those with similar governmental system, the Chinese government through having control over network infrastructure, and having near monopoly control on consumer Internet service leasing rights, has shown their perception of information technology to be the driving force behind economic development, but also a threat to its sovereignty if not controlled. These threats caused a series of challenges that is testing the Chinese governments’ ability to balance the competing essentials of the security requirements of internal stability and the information-related needs the economy (Hachigian 2002). It is particularly important in the case of China because economic growth depends on the extent to which the state is integrated within the global information technologies, as well as being directly linked to social stability for the Communist party’ leadership. Preserving the prosperity is the arbiter of the regime legitimacy, so its survival. Therefore, installation of such advanced telecommunication infrastructure to facilitate economic reform greatly complicates the state’s internal security concerns and targets. While facing these contradictory forces of openness and control, the Chinese government is actively promoting the growth of Internet technologies but also set significant constraints on online content and the political use of information technology (Hachigian 2002; Harwit and Clark 2001). As Hachigian (2002) stated, the challenge is to
“…prevent commercial goldmine from becoming political quicksand.”
At this point, the delusion becomes real that whether Internet technologies favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor, or vice versa. Despite the fact that the first hypothesis of this research defends that the more controllability a technology has a function of design, or the more a technology allows its users to control its design, the less a state perceives risks out of that technology, internet technologies proved this is a double-ended game in which the control neither belongs to the oppressor, nor to the oppressed alone. It has become obvious in too many contexts that Internet technologies provide nothing certain; it empowers the strong and disempowers the weak. Controllability makes the technology both more and less risky for authoritarian regimes depending on the context; depending on the actor of which is stronger -or not. This expands over the following examples in this chapter.
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