Virtual China Information Technology - Analysis: E-Business, pg 5

Analysis

E-China

IV. Controlling the content

Squashed between the promise that information networks offer for improved administration and e-commerce is the threat the Internet poses to the Communist Party's control over information flows. This is not a trivial matter, but the government believes it can cope, and it probably can. Certainly, it is not complacent. It is experimenting with a whole range of strategies for coping with the challenges to its monopoly over information which the Internet presents. Three stand out:

Repression.
Restricting access.
Using the Internet as a legitimising tool.

Repression. Top of the list is repression. The government has never shown any hesitation about using this tool in the past, and there seems no reason to see why it should act any differently now or in the future. As Internet use has surged in the second half of 1998 and early 1999, the government has clearly felt compelled to show that it is neither ignorant nor complacent about the use of email or web-sites to disseminate anti-government material. Hence the jailing for two years of a Shanghai man, Lin Hai, for selling 30,000 email address to a New York-based dissident group. Aside from this case, 1999 has already seen several incidents actions suggesting that the security authorities are taking a harder line over the Internet. In January, the Ministry of Public Security was widely reported to be planning to set up computer crime monitoring units in the police department of every city. The same month the government announced new registration requirements for Internet cafes aimed at limiting the potential for anonymous use of their facilities. February saw various moves apparently aimed at closing down on-line discussion groups which explored political issues such as the student-led democracy movement of 1989.

Restricting access. A second route adopted by the government is experimenting with alternative networks that are shielded from the rest of the world. The one alternative to ChinaNet's 163 Internet is China Telecom's 169 network, also named after its dial-up access number and occasionally referred to as the China Public Multimedia Network. This network is an attempt to build a China-only Internet. Started in 1998, it is run by China Telecom's Data Communications Bureau. Despite its title, it uses the same telecom backbone as 163, the public network. Its main distinguishing feature to date is that all its material is in Chinese.

It is also difficult to access the network from outside, making it far more secure than Internet proper, while at the same time it allows users controlled access to the real Internet. The network is being pushed as the best home for the country's On-line Government project, a scheme aimed at getting ministries and other state organisations to have an on-line presence. Government departments which are not yet connected with the 163 network are being encouraged to go on-line via the 169 network.

The future of the 169 network is by no means assured. It is the latest in a series of ventures aimed at developing Chinese-only versions of the Internet walled off from the rest of the world. Among other similar schemes have been a model proposed in 1996 by China Internet Corporation (CIC), a Hong Kong-based company linked with Xinhua news agency. It first suggested it would control all international Internet gateways, and then that it would build a "China Wide Web", which would offer the Internet in China serving only palatable material, initially Chinese-language Reuters and Bloomberg wires, minus any politically sensitive stories. The company has faded into obscurity since then, as has Yinhaiwei, another attempt to build a Chinese-only network walled off from the Internet. This network, established by a Chinese businesswoman, was based on domestic information sources -- travel, book reviews and so on -- and chat groups. Modelled on the services of CompuServe and America Online, it was made available via proprietary software. It attracted a certain amount of attention, and succeeded in selling the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation a one-third ownership stake. Users, however, never rose beyond a few thousand.

The Internet as a legitimising tool. Making the 169 network's future more likely than these predecessors is Beijing's commitment to the On-line Government project. This is currently envisaged as a three-stage process. Stage one is to connect around 800-1,000 government offices and agencies to a network. Stage two, planned to take place over the next two to three years, involves getting the offices and agencies to move their information systems into sharable electronic form. Stage three, which is not foreseen as happening before a few years into the next century, calls for all offices and agencies to move to paperless working.

As with the Golden Projects, the purpose is to create a centrally accessible and controllable system, which collects and transports data to and from users, who are planned to include the public as well as government departments. The digitalisation of government is an ambitious programme, especially considering the backward nature of many departments now, which either are using a hotchpotch of stand alone IT solutions, or are still using paper. But as the two previous sections have shown, China's on-line environment is not being developed from the bottom up, but very much from the top down. The networks which carry the Internet across the country have been developed specifically to allow the state to exercise greater control at a distance by providing it with the tools to gather information and thus exercise greater direction.

This project has the added benefit of allowing the government to coopt some of the people who might otherwise be questioning it, in particular the technical and administrative elites. Part of the implicit deal is that these people are being enrolled in the government's projects, and becoming beneficiaries of its patronage, while at the same time they are enrolling the government in their schemes.

Further strengthening the government's on-line needs and objectives is the restructuring and streamlining of government started last year. The reduction in both the number of ministry level bodies (from 40 to 29) and officials (by half) is aimed at producing more efficient and effective government. One of its key goals is to remove the government from line management of industry and leave it play a governing and regulatory role. Implicit in this is a restructuring of the political hierarchy that will leave the centre strengthened on two counts: as a setter and overseer of rules, and by being able to intervene strategically. To achieve this, it wants greater information flow to it, and more directives flowing from it. Paradoxically the government is distributing pieces of administrative control in order to have a clearer view about what it is managing. And even more interestingly, it seems to be taking on the role of manager of information, not of concrete things.

By combining its traditional repressive techniques with attempts to build-out Chinese-only alternatives to the Internet and a leaner government better able to manage the country, the leadership clearly believes the Internet will both be something whose opportunities it can utilise and whose threats it can cope with. Depicting China's on-line roll-out as a bottom-up development is totally misleading. Indeed, worse than this, it leads to an over-emphasis on the question of why the government, so intolerant and wary of anything that threatens its control over information flows, should tolerate the Internet at all. This, as we have seen, is simply the wrong perspective. As has been pointed out, the Internet is being developed for the government's own agenda, both for administrative purposes and for the economy. The government is searching for the tools to intervene -- hence the need for knowledge/information -- and with which it can act.

Given this, while the Internet is clearly of assistance to China's small dissident movement in circulating information, this nothing, and can be coped with, compared with the potential benefits. As Internet usage continues to grow in China, arrests are likely to increase of people who from the government point of view are using it for criminal or subversive purposes. Such moves, however, should not be mistaken as moves against the Internet, but as moves to encourage its developments in a "healthy" manner.

V. Conclusion: The thin red line >>>

This Article

	Introduction
I.	China on-line: Real-time change or virtual reality?
II.	Top down: It's all about the network
III.	It's the e-conomy, stupid
IV.	Controlling the content
V.	Conclusion: The thin red line