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    Virtual China: The Internet as Threat or Opportunity? A Response
    DANIEL KOLDYK
    With China set to overtake the United States (us) as the world’s largest Internet market, Gary D. Rawnsley focuses on a very interesting and equally important topic. Specifically, Rawnsley sets out to answer several key questions: To what extent is the Internet compatible with the aims of governance in a harmonious society? Does the Internet undermine the premise of stability, or is the call for a harmonious society a reflection of problems to which the internet has contributed? And can the ‘critical mass’ use the Internet to express its grievances, scrutinise the political elite, and ultimately overcome the fragmentary quality of opposition in China today? In answering these questions, Rawnsley brings up several issues that are worth highlighting. The first is that new technologies such as the Internet are creating ‘a revolution of rising expectations that, if not met, can lead to a serious credibility gap, which in turn erodes popular confidence in the government and damages governance.’ Since the Internet provides an open source of information, it has made it increasingly difficult for the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter referred to as ‘the party’) to effectively manipulate information and promote its version of events to the population. Prior to the mid-1990s, the party determined how news was reported in addition to what news was reported. Rawnsley is correct to point out that today this is no longer the case, and he uses the examples of the ep-3e spy plane incident and severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) as examples. Rawnsley could have also cited the 1999 bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade. In each case, Rawnsley points out that the Internet circumscribed the party’s ability to control the manner in which information was disseminated and reported. He writes that ‘Internet users were able to influence the political agenda and force the government through the force of popular pressure to respond to the event in a manner different to that it had originally intended.’ Indeed, a senior representative of Shandong University told me that the university was at a loss as to how they could control the fervour of their students after D. Koldyk, ‘Virtual China: The Internet as Threat or Opportunity? A Response,’ stair 3, No. 1 (2007): 58-63.
    
    news of the Belgrade bombing was broadcast via the Internet.1 Ultimately, the university’s administration was forced to act in a responsive fashion. A few years earlier, the university’s administration would have organised, or even scripted, the student protest, if they decided to report the incident at all. The best example of the power of modern communications, however, is the rise of the Falun Gong movement. Before the party suppressed Falun Gong, it grew into an enormous and influential organisation. Some reports claim that there were as many as 50-80 million members within China alone. It has been widely reported that their surprise protest in Beijing in 1999 was organised via text messaging and e-mail and that China’s security authorities were taken aback by the sophisticated coordination of the protest.2 Rawnsley concludes that these examples indicate significant implications for politics in China. These events imply ‘that the Chinese communist style of governance is under threat from the ability to access multiple sources of information that challenge the official narratives.’ He continues by stating that ‘a communist style political and social system is ultimately incompatible with market (capitalist) forms of economic organisation which are embedded in and depend on global information networks.’ Unfortunately, I believe Rawnsley’s argument falls short of providing sufficient evidence to support such conclusions. My primary criticism is that Rawnsley’s argument fails to take into account several realities about the Chinese state and population. While I agree that modern communications present new and significant challenges to the party’s monopoly of power, the fact that the party continues to rule unchallenged ten years after the introduction of the Internet indicates that we need to reconsider some assumptions about the power of the Internet. For the rest of this paper, I would like to call into question the underlying assumption of Rawnsley’s paper, namely that China’s authoritarian system of governance is incompatible with a market-based economy and that the power of the Internet (information) will ultimately lead to modernisation. I will do so by briefly discussing demographics and bloggers, resilient authoritarianism and political discourse.
    
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    Demographics and Bloggers
    When analysing the Internet’s impact in China, it is important to think about the demographic make-up of Internet users. The latest statistic for the number of Internet users in China is 137 million, which makes China the world’s second biggest market.3 As impressive as this aggregate
    
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    number sounds, it is somewhat misleading. If there are in fact 137 million users, then a further 1.25 billion people do not use the Internet. In other words, approximately 90 percent of China’s population is not online, a fact that calls into question Rawnsley’s argument that the Internet is causing popular trust and confidence in the system to falter. As such, when discussing the Internet in China, we are really only talking about a new and small urban middle class. This is an important point since it is exactly this demographic that has fared the best since Deng Xiaoping’s administration initiated economic reforms in 1978. While we read that popular protest is growing at unprecedented rates (the Ministry of Public Security has publicly stated that there were 87,000 ‘mass disturbances’ in 2005, up from 74,000 in 2004),4 most of these disturbances are led by rural residents and the urban working class. The urban middle class has instead been loyal to the party since it has more to lose than to gain by rocking the boat.5 Therefore, the demographic that has the most access to the Internet is also the demographic that is the least likely to challenge the party. Rawnsley rightly points out that there has been a good deal of blogging that has been critical of government policies and actions; however, this point is on balance not a convincing one for at least three reasons. The first is that bloggers rarely criticise either the party’s legitimacy or its right to rule unopposed. The second is the selfcensorship in which all websites (even popular websites like sohu.com) engage. A sophisticated network of filters and monitors, known as the ‘Great Firewall’, allows all websites to capture and embargo blogs and email traffic that contain sensitive terms such as Falun Gong and democracy.6 The degree to which the Internet can be used as a platform to sow dissent or challenge the party’s discourse is thus questionable at best. Rawnsley does give the ep-3e spy plane incident as an example of how this can happen, but at the end of the day ‘offensive’ bloggers were shut down. To date, even during times of heightened political activity, bloggers, or other potential activists, have not been able to challenge or hinder the party’s dominance. The third and most important reason why Rawnsley’s argument is unconvincing is his lack of primary data. Until we have data that is not based on anecdotal accounts, we cannot make any convincing claims that the Internet is challenging the party’s dominance.
    
    Resilient Authoritarianism
    The second point that I would like to raise is China’s ‘resilient authoritarianism’, especially in terms of the party’s organisational structure and its ability to remain informed. Unlike the party, protesters and bloggers are disorganised groups that tend to be responsive and spontaneous in nature. The party has easily controlled these groups with an organisational system that reaches all the way down to the community level. Few appreciate the extent of this organisational capacity. While economic reforms dealt a blow to the party’s organisational structure and allowed space for groups like Falun Gong to rise up, the party reorganised its base with the shequ jianshe shequ (community construction) policy in the early 2000s.7 Reinvigorating shequ became an effective way to regain the ability to engage (through innovative new social and political programs), monitor and control potentially unstable populations that have developed grievances in the transition from socialism to capitalism.8 In terms of coercion, the party also regained its ability to employ a time tested strategy of ‘killing the chicken to scare the monkey’– arresting protest organisers to scare the protesters. Due to shequ jianshe, it seems unlikely that another group like Falun Gong will be able to gain a foothold, no matter how secretive modern communications like the Internet and mobile phones allow organisers to be. On the matter of information and feedback, Rawnsley states that one of the key challenges authoritarian regimes face during times of sustained economic growth is poor information networks. This is a fair point that is well established; however, not all authoritarian systems necessarily have poor information networks, or in the case of China, poor information networks need not be a permanent disability. During the Maoist years, for instance, poor information and feedback was one of the primary reasons for the Great Leap famine (1959-1960) that killed as many as 20-30 million people. But, this is no longer the case. Nor is it correct to assume that the Internet must be a critical tool for accessing information. Through partnerships with local and international research organisations, central and local governments are conducting myriad surveys on a wide range of social, economic and political issues. Rawnsley is mistaken when he writes that there is a lack of ‘consideration of public consultation.’ In my own personal experience, I have participated in joint research efforts between the Canadian International Development Agency (cida) and the Ministry of Finance and Commerce; cida, Shandong University and more than a dozen municipal governments;
    
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    Shandong University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (cass) and Zouping County; and Beijing Normal University and numerous municipal and district-level governments. In most of these projects, public consultation was achieved through interviews or sophisticated surveys. Chinese academic presses and journals also routinely publish books and articles that critique government policies that are in place, such as the one child policy, and debate the merit of policies that are under consideration, such as the new private property law. Innovative Chinese magazines such as Caijing publish investigative reports that are critical of economic policies and of the leadership. Behind closed doors, even more critical research and discussions take place. It is important to remember that the line in the sand for public discourse is not drawn at criticism of government policy but instead at criticisms of the party’s legitimacy and right to rule. This distinction allows dialogue to take place between decision-makers, experts and the population.
    
    Political Discourse
    The final point for discussion is political discourse. Rawnsley makes a very interesting point when he suggests that: Alternative sources of information means that observers are now discussing the existence of a credibility gap whereby the news and information Chinese are obtaining from the Internet conflict with the narrative circulating in the official media. The credibility gap exposes and discredits the government, and undermines popular confidence in the political elite. While Rawnsley does not provide any evidence of this, and I believe he is overstating this point, it is an important consideration. What is required is more research on the manner in which political discourse is formed and/or manipulated in China. Until we have better data on this topic, we cannot assume that the party has lost its ability to control political discourse, or that the adoption of the party’s wenming (civilisation) rhetoric by some netizens is purely instrumental. In a recent seminar at the University of Oxford, Luigi Tomba described how middle-class residents in Beijing have absorbed the party-state’s discourse on civilisation, individual rights and harmonious society.9 In fact, this is not altogether surprising to anyone who has polled the urban elite on the suitability of democracy. In my own interviews, the urban
    
    elite and senior academics routinely state that China’s rural residents and poor urban residents are not ‘ready’ for democracy due to their lack of education and understanding of politics, or their low suzhi (quality). On the whole, Rawnsley provides us with an interesting and provocative debate about the Internet’s growing influence in China. His argument may prove accurate in time; but without better support, it seems premature at best.
    
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    Notes
    Shandong University professor (name withheld), interview by the author, Jinan, Shandong, May 2003. For more information on this topic, see Vivienne Shue, ‘Global Imaginings, the State’s Quest for Hegemony, and the Pursuit of Phantom Freedom in China: From Heshang to Falun Gong,’ in Globalization and Democratization in Asia: The Construction of Identity, ed. Catarina Kinnvall and Kristina Jonsson (London: Routledge, 2002), Nancy Chen, Breathing Spaces Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), Clemens Stubbe Ostergaard, ‘Governance and the Political Challenge of Falun Gong,’ in Governance in China, ed. Jude Howell (Oxford: Roman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004).
    3 4 5 2 1
    
    ‘Beijing Opens Boot Camp for Net Addicts,’ Reuters, 12 March 2007. ‘China Confronts Public Disorder,’ Reuters, 19 January 2006.
    
    For a detailed argument, see Luigi Tomba, ‘Creating an Urban Middle Class. Social Engineering in Beijing,’ The China Journal 51 (2004). Vivian Wu, ‘Internet Police Keep Tight Grip on Blogs,’ South China Morning Post, 8 March 2007.
    6
    
    For more information on shequ jianshe, see Allen C. Choate, ‘Local Governance in China, Part Ii: An Assessment of Urban Residents Committees and Municipal Community Development,’ in The Asia Foundation Working Paper Series (Asia Foundation, 1998), Benjamin L. Read, ‘Revitalising the State’s Urban “Nerve Tips,’ The China Quarterly 163 (2000). James Derleth and Daniel Koldyk, ‘The Shequ Experiment: Grassroots Political Reform in Urban China,’ Journal of Contemporary China 13, no. 41 (2004).
    9 8
    
    7
    
    Luigi Tomba, ‘Community, Space and Authority in Urban China,’ (University of Oxford, 15 February 2007).

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