Political Pressure from Below in the Chinese Internet

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is David Kurt Herold, who shifts our focus to China. ‘Online China’ represents a very large population now (at more than 400 million users), but is connected with the rest of the world through only 27 major connections. The Chinese Internet remains government-owned, too – China owns the network backbone, and government control over the Net is therefore the default setting. There is also substantially less content creation on the Chinese Net; Internet use is consumption-oriented, and operates largely through fairly old-fashioned major portals and BBSes. It is also a very violent place, with ‘human flesh search engines’ (RRSS) that enable users to search for and harass other users.

The Net has also been used for self-help purposes, though, through very similar mechanisms; the site 5-1-Zhao-Ren is a people search engine used to find long-lost friends and relatives, for example, or to otherwise highlight people who have performed positive actions in the past. Such sites have been used to highlight abuse and abductions – a group of 400 fathers whose kids had been abducted as child slaves for a factory posted an open letter about this, for example, and most of the kids were rescued in the end.

Given the size of the Chinese online population, this can result in feedback from hundreds of thousands of people, offering both help and condemnation – in positive intervention or outright stalking. Chinese authorities are often pushed into action as a result, using the evidence compiled by online groups in police investigations and legal trials. This can also turn against the authorities, as official statements are debunked by online communities. Indeed, some of the leading community members have been invited to help with police investigations.

Local officials now often hate the Internet, because they are caught so often by these citizen investigators, and have frequently tried to shut down local Internet access. The central government, however, has a different view, as citizen action also helps them stamp out local corruption. Official central government statements now often highlight explicitly to the importance of the Net as a medium for direct communication between citizens and political leaders, and online chats between the Chinese president and premier and online communities have already become a tradition ahead of the major party congresses.

There is a new social contract between the central government and ordinary citizens which appears to be emerging here – directed at supervising and controlling the intermediary levels of the administration.