Revisiting Cyber-Diplomacy: Canada-China Relations Online

China Perspectives, 2006

2011

Political leaders, activists, and academics have all shared a common expectation regarding China's relationship to the Internet. Given the explosive growth of the number of users, China's innovative use of technology, and the tension between the “Internet wants to be free” technology and China's highly controlled political and social sector, the scene is a set for a classic “battle royale” between state control and a newly empowered citizenry led by issue advocates and Internet campaigns.

China Perspectives, 2020

As a preliminary study, this chapter aims to clarify the links between the proliferation of ICTs and contentious activities in contemporary China. Analysts observe that ICTs drive a number of profound changes in political activism and contentious politics: information is free from centralized control, costs are plummeting, interconnected networks enable participants to access information stored on millions of computers beyond boundaries, and real time as well as asynchronous multicasting support entirely new modes of communication. Nevertheless, for researches about ICTs and contentious politics in China, few studies so far disaggregate and distinguish the political use of ICTs (or “the internet”) into more discrete phenomena, on the one hand, and to scrutinize the interplay between the political roles of different digital applications and platforms during contentious moments. This chapter extends such limitation by taking ubiquitous internet as a platform of integrating diverse digital devices in the process of contentious politics. As it demonstrates, the ubiquitous internet enables and facilitates the emerging of real-time contentious politics, in which it acts not only as means of overcoming censorship, but also as means of organization and mobilization. In this way, the ubiquitous internet integrates the dynamics of real-time politics into the process of contentious activities and transforms the contentious politics in contemporary China.

This article explores how state and society relations have been affected by the development of information technology in China over the past 20 years. It argues that despite all the transformative changes that such technology has helped bring about, ‘benefits’ have to be weighed in terms of both empowerment of society and strengthening of state capacity. Ultimately, the digital challenge has not translated into a weakening of the authoritarian state, and this can be explained by the very nature of the party-state in China and how it has managed to make use of communication tools that prove to be both constructive and divisive.

Chinese Journal of Communication , 2020

The cybersphere constitutes a global disagreement space. There, the contested, ongoing ties that link states and the internet come into being. A critique of sovereignty and political economy is offered to evaluate contemporary controversies concerning authority, independence, regulation, and access to communications as matters of relationality, materiality, and disagreement. We review China's promotion of cyber sovereignty as a complicating episode that expresses development stresses of the sphere. China wishes to establish guardrails for the practices of multipolar global digital capitalism; yet, it has ushered in an Internet keyed variety of global issues-security, privacy, material well-being, developmental justice, and planetary futures. These complex aims invite and expand the dialectical spaces animating the cybersphere.

Global Studies Quarterly

Governments all over the world are constructing discourses of digital sovereignty. However, the history of this concept is understudied. This paper delves into the Chinese academic publications from 1994 to 2005, where concepts such as “network/cyber sovereignty” (网络主权) and “information sovereignty” (信息主权) began to emerge. The period is marked by the introduction of the internet in China in 1994 and the 2005 Tunis Agenda, a pivotal moment in the internationalization of demands for sovereignty over the internet. By reconstructing the post–Cold War geopolitical, economic, cultural, ideological, and regulatory context of the examined publications, we highlight the academic discourse as forming part of a sociotechnical imaginary of digital sovereignty, which is characterized by a peculiar mixture of the explicit critique of “cyber colonialism” (网络殖民主义), authoritarian positions, and the embrace of digitalization and its possibilities.

In light of the Google-China conflict, this article discusses the issue of Internet sovereignty and, in particular, draws attentions to the various sources of regime legitimacy that undergird the Chinese government’s claim to Internet sovereignty. By building and promoting state legitimacy in economy, nationalism, ideology, culture, and governance, Beijing has been arguably successful in gaining popular compliance and cementing its political rule despite grassroots challenges. In the foreseeable future, China’s Internet policies will continue to reflect an Internet development and regulatory model – authoritarian informationalism – that combines elements of capitalism, authoritarianism, and Confucianism. Engagement with the regime’s cyber policies and its Internet users needs to recognize not only the demand to tear down the Great Firewall, but also the larger Chinese populace’s aspiration for economic growth, social stability as well as greater transparency, accountability, and freedom.