China has been experiencing a digital explosion. On the back of massive increases in the sales of personal computers China’s online community – those who have regular access to the global internet – has been increasing at an astonishing rate. In 1996 it was estimated (exact figures were hard to come by) that there were 40,000 internet users in China. A year later it was 250,000. At this growth rate you would have expected the Chinese online community to have grown to more than three million by 2001. In fact reliable estimates suggest that by the end of 2001 the figure was more like 33.7 million, an unprecedented, breathtaking exponential growth rate.
This has not escaped the notice of critics and analysts in the west, who read into this – based on the curious assumptions of the total unfreedom of China and the absolute freedom of the internet – the potential freeing of the Chinese mind and an end to what they assume is the still existent “Chinese totalitarianism.” Thus, the Beijing Financial Times recently was confident enough to predict the “change [in] the ideological complexion of the communist state” as a result of increased access to uncensored information provided by the internet.
That kind of approach is not new. It is in fact part of customary western thinking, as prevalent in newsrooms and influential “think tanks.” These analysts seem to have the works of Karl Popper (Open Society and Its Enemies) and Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism), firmly in mind, if not close at hand. That is to say most western critics, who examine the consequences of China’s recent, rapid entry into the global digital information society, take as read the following axioms:
- China has no open society; it still displays the essential features of a totalitarian state.
- Socio-cultural forms of ‘increased consumerism’ – like the reception of (pop-) music trends, fashions, mobile phones, and the internet boom – can only increase the alienation between citizens and the state.
- The everyday adjustment to the ‘American way of life’ creates not only demand for imported western goods. It also prepares political liberalism and thus a new political climate.
In this context, the dominating powers and their consultants in the leading think tanks of the west are gleefully watching for signs indicating the exact speed and extent as well as the implications, of such “socio-cultural undermining” of a supposedly monolithic Chinese public opinion.
The hypothesis that western interest in China is really focussed on the possible subversion of a seemingly monolithic, foreign cultural bastion, is confirmed by the subtitle of the two page cover story Surfing the Dragon by Julie Schmit and Paul Wiseman in the daily USA Today (16 March 2000): “Web surfers find cracks in wall of official China.”
The imagery of the subtitle speaks for itself: the official China has surrounded itself with a ‘Chinese’s wall’ holding at bay foreign cultural influences. The nimble internet users have ripped a hole in this wall, through which information once tabooed can easily infiltrate. Therefore, one often finds in the western discussions on the internet in China terms like ‘cyber dissidents’ or clichéd puns like ‘the Great Firewall’.
China’s internet: Wolf, demon or Pandora’s box?
The story of the internet in China is as yet only a short story. What is characteristic of the internet in China is the combining of the familiar ‘information-superhighway’ rhetoric with something called hailiang. This Chinese word is used to describe someone who can hold his drink – a jolly drunk, perhaps – and is written with two characters: hai (the sea) and liang (volume). In the context of the internet, the word is to be understood in its etymological sense. The providers of online news are striving explicitly for simultaneity, interactivity – and hailiang. But as simultaneity might not be meaningful enough by itself, still another Chinese idiom has been apppled: shunxi wanbian or ‘ten thousand changes in a moment’.
Is the internet a challenge to traditional media? Or to put it another way: Has the wolf come? ‘Yes’ is the answer. The wolf here is not meant entirely negatively, the big bad beast of children stories, but as the metaphorical ‘demon’, which was popular for a long time in the Chinese internet debate. ‘Demon’ is certainly also to be understood in the literal-historical sense of those troublemakers and rebellious agents of the romantic school of Europe (from Byron up to Petöfi), whose subversiveness has been apostrophised in the Anglo-Saxon world as ‘satanic’. In the same reasoning one compares the internet also with the ‘devil’ or Pandora’s box. He / it comes with force, means destruction of an old state of affairs as well as the surfacing of new conditions; once opened the box cannot be closed – its effects are irreversible.
The possibility of a debate on the decisive questions of the res publica in relation to the internet now seems very real in China: Sooner or later an internet-supported debate about fundamental social goals and priorities may well articulate experienced needs, and could become the starting point for a wide debate on the real needs of its population and for rational and democratic planning from below (rather than the present chaos of the markets or the once cherished voluntaristic-irrational, bureaucratic planning effort imposed by omnipotent ‘expertocrats’ from above). The development of critical ability and the access to information free of government control, manipulation and falsification are essential moments of an emancipative process of a public that has long stopped to be passive but that still has to discover the possibility of serious reflection and truly autonomous action.
State and commercial providers
Those interested in the problems of Chinese news control, might know not only the restrictive ‘regulations for the control of the Internet’ (February 1996) but also the government directive regulating online-news of March 1997. This ‘branch of industry statute’ strives for information monopoly, and stipulates that all media institutions, which would like to go online, have to apply for authorisation and have to make their content accessible via the central provider in Peking.
But the crux of the matter is: who is ‘all’? The reality is that there are mainly two sorts of online-news-suppliers in China: The websites of the traditional print media with the party newspaper peopledaily.com.cn the outstanding exponent and the commercial providers with sina.com.cn the leading brand name. The government directive however only affects the traditionally state-controlled print media and their electronic version. The second group, which is much more influential really, remains untouched by that legislation (Sina was only founded in September 1998).
Over the last few years, the regulations have been relaxed gradually, and there is already a large sector of ‘independent’ news-portals which may publish news directly. Naturally, the information suppliers know, far too well, what is considered ‘system destabilising’ or ‘subversive’ in China or could appear so once perceived as a challenge to the political leadership. Thus there might well be a kind of self-policing (although of course, to get this in perspective, the skillful and inconspicuous striving for conformism and willingness to toe the line and impress the boss in pursuit of job security is not entirely unknown even in the ‘free’ west).
But who reads what where? As far as online-news is concerned, a report from 2000 showed: ‘Peopledaily’, the most read print newspaper, has on average 1,890 pageviews a day on their online-version, compared to 63,918 for Sina, 57,163 for Netease, and 56,147 for Sohu. In other words, the online readership of Sina is thirty times higher than that of the state supported Peopledaily. The Chinese ‘netizen’ prefers alternative sources of information online.
The emergence of ‘public opinion’
The internet is the most important source of alternative information in, officially still communist, China. It also has an impact on the form and content of the traditional media – including the party organ Peopledaily. While the Chinese government is trying to profit from the new force by betting on a coexistence of market-based economic dynamism and old-style party rule, the future is as open today as never before. But as in the west, the most stabilising aspect of the status quo certainly is a widespread desire to forget about politics and snatch a small piece of the tempting cake offered by the stalwarts of the “consumer society”. Unquestionably new influences and information sources will weaken old authoritarian ways – but to be replaced by what? Emancipation? ‘Freedom of opinion’ is already much more prevalent in China than taken for granted by most western China watchers or anticipated by Chinese laws, and there is a new degree of ‘information accessibility’ and perhaps even ‘source credibility’ which the internet is driving. It remains to be seen who will benefit from it.
With the spread of online-news and commentaries and the concomitant development of independent public opinion, aspect of what some call ‘democratisation through the phone socket’ are certainly recognisable. Themes, emphases, and style might still be different between official and unofficial sources, but the official ones do in some respect emulate the unofficial sites already – in the furious fight for user attention. Without doubt, television remains the most important source of information for most Chinese but considering the growth rate of internet-use this might change soon.
Online, below nearly every news item, there is an interactive link to ‘your opinion’. In these forums one can post one’s own opinions and read what others have said: To some, this is the space in which a genuine public opinion might be emerging, perhaps the embryo of internet-supported democracy. This new possibility arrived in China, as elsewhere, with the internet and has facilitated, to a certain extent, a structural change in the public sphere in China. In this new interactivity of news, this active moment of reception, we also see a departure from the old sender-led infrastructure in which the receiver was sentenced to passivity in the face of all pervasive, one-to-many, mass media with its supposedly powerful influence on behaviour. Whether it will be used by “the many” for the purpose of serious debate, remains to be seen.
China will never be the same again
By the end of 2001 China had 33.7 million netizens. According to the latest China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) report of January 2003, this increased by another 25.4 millions by the end of 2002. There are now more than 59.1 millions internet-users in China.
To focus on the numbers, as I have, is to reproduce a kind of quantitative fetish which colours almost all reporting and discussion of Chinese internet use – in China and in the west. The growth rate is extraordinary, no question, but it should not lead us to forget that 59.1 millions is still only 4.6% of China’s population. Thus statements like ‘the Internet is transforming lives across the country’ or ‘the thing you see on the Web is the real face of China’ should be treated with caution. They are at least hasty, for hardly anybody can forecast whether and to which degree the growth rate will flatten once the pool of 15 to 35 year-old, affluent Chinese urbanites is exhausted.
Nevertheless, the expansion of China’s internet users is astonishing, and given its potential for supporting the emergence of a genuinely independent ‘public opinion’, something unprecedented in history, the attention focussed on this subject is justified. Any form of antiquated state control over the information flow seems a vain task due to the structure of the internet and the sheer multitude of information. The task of analysing the impact of the internet on China is only just beginning, but the early evidence tends to support the view that China will never be the same again.
Translated from the original German by Michael Rebehn
