China Information

The internet is the latest phenomenon in China and has caught the attention of media and academia alike. However, attention has hitherto been primarily concentrated on the implications of the internet for China’s democratization. What is still missing is the inquiry about the sociopolitical diffusion and development of the internet in China beyond the democratization frame.

In this article the views and agenda of China’s techno-cadres, that is, the top-level advisors planning and implementing e-government projects, are scrutinized. Their goals for Chinese e-government not only focus on electronic service delivery to business—the ambition is to make the authoritarian governing process less opaque to citizens. Just as the former Premier Zhu Rongji used the WTO agreement to push overall reform, reform-minded techno-cadres utilize the expansion of e-government to further promote zaizao, that is, the restructuring to a more effective bureaucracy and a more transparent governance process. Nevertheless, China’s electronic government projects at various levels are still driven by a top-down approach and consequently electronic services are not helping Chinese people to hold government accountable. In the short run, the government seems more likely to be a winner than the Chinese population in the introduction of e-government projects. The documents analyzed in this article show that there are limits that even the techno-cadres do not wish to, and cannot, transcend.

E-government at the local level in China has emphasized numerous interactive features. One such feature has been the “leader’s mailbox” for citizen communications with the government. In the Yangzi Delta cities of Hangzhou and Nanjing, new reform-oriented mayors have emphasized e-government as an important tool for improving governmental performance; their decisions to publish many of the “mayor’s mailbox” communications online were intended to encourage grass-roots feedback, place pressure on bureaucratic agencies to change their behavior, and build a stronger popular image for local governments. The mailboxes in the two cities are managed differently, and differ in their articulation with other bureaucratic processes. Those differences may in part reflect somewhat different political priorities for the mayors, and may spell differences in the effectiveness and potential for institutionalization of this aspect of e-government. Ultimately, these mailboxes are effective because they work alongside other reforms in urban governance. By eliciting citizen feedback and increasing intragovernmental transparency, the mailboxes have become important information sources for government managers, but they are more likely to be effective in improving bureaucratic-administrative operations than in fostering participatory-democratic developments or progress towards civil society.

Using the ecology of games perspective, this article analyzes China’s regulation of internet cafes. Based on the analyses of regulatory documents, interviews, and news coverage, we identify three games fundamental to our understanding of the subject: (1) the establishment of national regulatory regime, (2) local policy implementation, and (3) market competition. We situate the discussion of game players, their goals, strategies, and performances in the context of rapidly increasing internet cafe penetration under intensifying government regulation, a manifestation of the inevitable clash between state and market at the local levels of internet development. This culminated in the April 2003 proposal by the Ministry of Culture for a national chain-store model, which led to a “nested game” involving key players from all three essential games including national regulators, local state agencies, cafe operators, user groups (e.g. students and migrant workers), and members of the urban elite (e.g. parents and teachers). We conclude by maintaining that there is a pressing need for more research on internet cafes as localized points of access control; that the processes of internet cafe regulation constitute a prism for the examination of the internet’s socio-political ramifications; and that the ecology of games provides an insightful theoretical framework for this analytical task.

Since embarking upon the processes of modernization and globalization in the late 1970s, China’s policy toward technology has been geared toward building the nation’s economic and political strength, and ultimately reinforcing and proving China’s superiority as a socialist nation. Ironically, US policy toward China has promoted technology transfer and technological transformation based upon a deep-seated mythology of technology, which assumes that technology will fundamentally alter China’s socialist economic and political system. This article examines the conflicting expectations of the two governments about the likely impact of the internet and the steps each nation has attempted to ensure that certain outcomes do occur. Finally, the article discusses the actual impact of the internet on governance and political change in China.