Chinese Cyber Nationalism: Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications by Xu Wu

Author:Xu Wu [Wu, Xu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2007-02-23T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Chinese Cyber Sphere

Indeed, the ability or inability of society to master technology, and particularly technologies that are strategically decisive in each historical period, largely shapes their destiny.

—Manuel Castells1

Three factors underline the significance of study on China’s online sphere development and government’s cyber-strategy. First of all, China’s Internet development in the past decade has been so dramatic that, in retrospect, even some of the most enthusiastic predictions in the 1990s proved to be too conservative.2 Even put China’s great leapfrog development in the telecommunication and Internet sector against the broader background of the global information revolution, such an explosive boom is still unparalleled. For example, in the year of 1994, roughly 20 million Chinese people had fixed-line telephone at home; while by July 2006, more than 400 million Chinese people used mobile phones to contact each other, and 123 million people spent an average of 16.5 hours per week surfing online.3 Moreover, unlike in the United States, Japan, and some European countries where the Internet growth has gradually slowed down due largely to Internet saturation, China’s current Internet population, though already the second largest in the world, only accounts for 9.4 percent of the total 1.3 billion population. In fact, China’s Internet growth is still at the booming stage, posting an annual growth rate of 20 percent in 2006.

Second, the soon-to-be world’s largest online country is governed, and in the foreseeable future will still be governed, by the CCP government, which regards the cyber sphere as another component of its gigantic propaganda machine. However, China’s media landscape has been changed, dramatically if not irreversibly, by the emerging players from the private sectors. For example, on the Alexa Global Top 500 websites traffic ranking list released on 6 August 2006, four of the world’s top ten websites are Chinese websites operated by privately owned companies. They are www.baidu.com (the Chinese equivalent of Google at No. 4), www.qq.com (No. 5), www.sina.com.cn (No. 6), and www.163.com (No. 9). On the same list, AOL (www.aol.com) is ranked at 35, CNN (www.cnn.com) at 30, and New York Times (www.nytimes.com) at 78. The Xinhua News Agency’s official website (www.xinhuanet.com) is the only Chinese state-owned news site that has made to the top-100 list, at 80.4 All these privately owned Chinese websites provide up-to-the-minute domestic and international news and have become the primary sources for Chinese online people to search, receive, and disseminate latest information. For example, during the first twenty-four-hour after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, www.sina.com.cn posted a total of 590 news items, drawing a record-high 80 million page views on that single day.5 In a “Communist” country where privately owned mass media have been officially deemed illegal till today, such a development is revolutionary.

Third, China is the origin and cradle of “the first information processing revolution,”6 where the two key Chinese inventions, paper and printing, changed human history.7 Centuries later, as the most populous, as well as the largest developing country in the world, China once again wholeheartedly embraced the new information technology revolution.

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