The Internet in China: From Infrastructure to a Nascent Civil Society

268 Pages·2017·3.461 MB·English

by  Gianluigi Negro (auth.)

The Internet in China
From Infrastructure to a Nascent Civil Society
Gianluigi Negro
The Internet in China
Gianluigi Negro
The Internet in China
From Infrastructure to a Nascent Civil Society
Gianluigi Negro
University of Lugano
Lugano, Switzerland
ISBN 978-3-319-60404-6 ISBN 978-3-319-60405-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60405-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949479
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To my family
F
oreword
The role that the Internet and its services has assumed on a worldwide
scale is plain for anyone to see. In less than 30 years, the Internet has
become, in many countries, one of the main and, in many cases, the
most important channel for communicating and circulating information
within social, economic and political life. In the West, its rapid develop-
ment has almost always anticipated a nation’s ability to regulate its use.
On several occasions, there have been tardy and hasty interventions that
have only served to highlight this inability to correct the malfunctions
and have triggered large-scale adverse reactions. Even today, conflict and
widespread problems regarding the Internet abound. There have even
been cases where public agencies have been accused of illegally using the
Internet to “control,” “spy on” or interfere with the activities of other
countries. Among the main countries involved in such “scandals” are
the United States and Russia. For some time, one of the major issues
being discussed within the European public agenda is the position of
power that certain US companies have assumed throughout the conti-
nent through the Internet, the most well-known being Amazon, Apple,
Facebook, Google and Twitter. The case of Google is currently the most
relevant as of the end of June 2017, the European Commission, after
eight years of investigation, ordered the company to pay 2.42 billion
euros for abusing its position of power in Member States. The same US
company has also previously been accused by some European nations
of collecting advertising resources without paying the due taxes in their
respective national markets and has been ordered to settle its debt with
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viii FOREWORD
their treasury. The accusations made against Google, however, concern
not only economic but also political and cultural aspects. The sentiment
of many Europeans is authentically represented by a senior executive at
Axel Springer, one of the largest European media companies, who, after
pushing the European Commission to continue its investigation into
Google without accepting compromises, wrote an open letter in 2014 to
Google’s president, denouncing the influence the company has had on
“our values, our understanding of human nature, our view on the world
social order and the future of Europe” (quoted in Financial Time, 1–2
July 2017, p. 7).
The Internet’s role and its problems in the West and, in particular,
in Europe, presented above are in stark contrast to the substantial igno-
rance and little interest that the West has shown in the activities, role and
problems represented by the Internet in China, where it is now used by
the majority of the population, with a penetration that continues to grow
at a lively pace: users currently number more than 700 million, equipped
for the most with mobile connections, and have long exceeded the num-
ber of European and US users. Although China is the number two world
power and plays a leading role in world political and economic affairs, in
the West, studies, analysis and research on the Chinese communication
system and media are still only just taking off. However, some valuable
research within the academic sphere has been done and that number is
growing. This is probably because while the persistent simplification of
China’s economy has been partially overcome, that of its communica-
tion and media has not. Many still envision China as a place lacking in
democracy and the full freedom of information, where the Communist
Party and Government transform all media into propaganda, manipulat-
ing information and conditioning the public opinion. As a result, there
is little interest in studying and understanding the communication and
mass media models that have been widely experienced in Europe since
the 1900s in major countries like Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain and the
Soviet Union. Gianluigi Negro’s book is refreshing because it is a deci-
sive contribution toward overcoming this reluctance. His book provides
the tools necessary for those who want to overcome the myopia and
open their eyes to the reality in China in a field that is probably more
complex and difficult than any other as it intertwines the political, eco-
nomic, socio-cultural and technical factors that characterize it with the
speed of innovation and the great mass of people involved.
FOREWORD ix
Scrolling the index and reading the author’s introduction, one can
easily absorb the content and structure of the book, so I don’t have to
mention it here. My intent instead is to draw the readers’ attention to
certain aspects that allow them to better appreciate the research work
behind the book and highlight the findings that I consider to be of par-
ticular interest.
The first item of note is Gianluigi Negro’s education and scientific
expertise, which is derived from the combination of two major disci-
plines. In fact, he studied sinology at Ca ‘Foscari University in Venice
and holds a doctorate in communication sciences from the Università
della Svizzera italiana (USI). He also speaks and reads Chinese fluently,
which he has perfected during prolonged stays in China.
This background allows Negro to analyze and interpret the Internet
starting from the historical, cultural and socio-political reality of China,
which he knows well. At the same time, it allows him to deal with the
theme not as a neophyte, an observer, but as someone who exploits a
solid knowledge of the science of communication and the media. This
background is indispensable for interpreting not only how the Internet
has developed and structured itself in China, but also why it has followed
that path and achieved those results, namely the political, economic and
social factors that have determined it. In addition, at the Università della
Svizzera italiana (USI), Negro has found a particularly suitable context
for work on both sides of China and the media and communication pro-
vided by the China Media Observatory (CMO), which has, since the
early 2000s, worked closely with the university and research centers in
China.
The second factor is the quality of research, in particular, the meth-
odological approach and sources used by the author.
As I’ve already mentioned, Negro was formed by the “Lugano
School,” which has always applied, throughout its extensive research, a
“multifocal” approach to investigating and interpreting the phenomena
analyzed and is where the analysis grid adopts and compares different
points of view from economic to political, sociological to culturological.
This approach has allowed Negro to avoid technological determinism
and offer a “holistic” view of the phenomenon analyzed. The reader will
thus learn about and evaluate the role political and institutional power
has played in the development and functioning of the Internet, together
with the role of businesses, users and, more generally, civil society.
x FOREWORD
The third factor that makes this research particularly interesting is the
language tools available to Negro that have allowed him to mine a range
of particularly rich sources in Italian and English, as well as in Chinese.
Being able to study the original documents from political and govern-
ment institutions and Chinese-language scientific literature, all of which
are largely untranslated into Western languages, and to be able to talk
and interview important experts working in Chinese institutions, busi-
nesses and research centers has provided Negro with a solid documen-
tary and bibliographic base together with first-hand testimony and
interpretations of the reality of the Internet in China.
But there are many other elements of research highlighted in the
book that are of great interest and reveal the complexity and importance
of Internet activities in the world’s most populous country. I would like
to mention least two.
The development of the Internet in China has been characterized by
a contradiction that is yet to be resolved. Since the second half of the
1990s, the Chinese government has allocated strong impetus to the
technical and territorial development of the Internet, allowing it to play
the principal role in the country’s economic growth. At the same time,
it has had to deal with new forms of social communication and the free-
dom of information that the Internet offers its users. As Internet pen-
etration has spread within the Chinese population, as new forms of
social communication and services have emerged, political institutions
(the Party and Government) realized the risk inherent in the loosening
of information and communication control and in a growing number of
people coming to consider the Internet as a useful tool for freedom of
expression, organization and criticism. In the book, the reader can follow
the various attempts made by the Government to resolve this contradic-
tion by adopting different forms of control (not always successful) and
creating their own sources of information, sometimes “masked,” to take
advantage of the Internet’s information potential.
Those responsible for applying this rule are the operators of (private)
telecommunications networks and the Internet service providers who
must adopt the management and technical processes necessary to prevent
the transmission of “any kind of illegal information.”
The second aspect of particular interest is that despite the many
attempts to rein in the Internet with rules that prevented loss of con-
trol and avoided antagonizing political power and public institutions
presented in the book, it points out how the Internet has favored the
FOREWORD xi
formation of a public opinion autonomous from public administration
and political power. On a number of occasions, a large number of peo-
ple, through the Internet, have been able to challenge (especially at a
local level) behaviors considered unjust, illegal and contrary to the inter-
ests of the citizens by public administrators and political exponents or
to call for more information, comprehensive explanations and true rep-
resentations of events that the political powers had an interest in mini-
mizing or even concealing. The Internet has on several occasions been a
major support in the mobilization of groups of citizens and the organiza-
tion of public protests and rallies.
Among the many aspects of great interest that are analyzed and inter-
preted in Gianluigi Negro’s book worthy of mention is the conflict
between the various public power centers for control of the Internet, the
profiles of and role played by the largest Chinese private enterprises born
and grown around the Internet and the Chinese prevalence in the use of
mobile Internet, e-commerce and daily use of a wide range of applica-
tions to organize their day-to-day life.
In summary, this book, in analyzing the Internet phenomenon, speaks
of the China phenomenon by highlighting many of the little or least
known aspects that allow the reader to get an idea of China that’s less
superficial and stereotyped than the one prevalent in today’s reality. This
is not only useful but necessary considering the increasingly important
role that China is also likely to play also in Europe.
Lugano, Switzerland, Prof. Giuseppe Richeri
July 2017 Hemeritus Professor
Università della Svizzera italiana