The Nanfang Dushibao, Guangzhou, on December 22 discussed a portion of the 2010 CASS Blue Book that remarks that the combination of cell phones and internet to spread information and excite a response exceeds the government's ability to respond to it. In their list of the top 77 incident that attracted wide attention in Chinese society, they found that in 30% of these cases it was postings on the web that attracted great popular attention to these incidents. The CASS report mentioned cases where local government cut off communications or even ordered hotels not to accept customers to stop information from spreading.
Failing to react, another response, resulted in public confidence in the government declining. The article concluded with a discussion of some hotlines to which people can complain about inappropriate internet postings and mentioned government websites that accept citizen complaints, mentioning that 37 provincial level leaders and 40 local level leaders have opened up mailboxes to receive complaints. A list of 20 incidents in which the Internet played an important role is listed after the article.
David Cowhig
I won't make any bold proclamations of how, but if anything was going to be a catalyst for a spontaneous out-of-control series of riots on a nation-wide scale in China, I'd wager it would start online.
To imagine what access to the Internet in China is like, imagine the chaos that would have happened if foreigners showed up in 16th century Europe and implemented 10 television networks. The point I'm getting at is that skipping all the procedural steps of a civilization ('core') developing a civil society domestically has drastic consequences. These procedural steps of civil society's development lead to the construction of new tools like newspapers, telegraphy, radio, television and the Internet that expand civil society further. These tools were all at one point in Western history, the cutting edge 'skin'/boundary of civil society as a communicable idea.
The Internet effectively overlays China's domestic civil society 'core' with a foreign civil society 'skin' it needs to expand to fit. Yet China's civil society 'core' hasn't been gradually expanding, like it did in countries where the 'skin'/tools that are newspaper, radio, television and now Internet were developed over time, it has instead exploded near-instantaneously in every direction out of simply having newfound mobility within the limits of the huge foreign civil society 'skin' it adopted (The World Wide Web).
The fact that the Communist Party wired their entire country in the late 80's and 1990's with the tools/'skin' of western civil society has lead us to where we are now. Rule of law is likely the only answer to these new 'core' civil society demands. However, rule of law hasn't been able to catch up domestically in China because rule of law generally evolves concurrently with the technology/'skin' of a civil society (and Law's origins are primarily to address the issues that the civil society creates). Accordingly, rule of law has historically developed through precedent and deliberation on boundary-pushing civil society issues over reasonably longer periods of time. China is being asked to have deliberation and develop precedents at an absurdly fast rate. Shifting to rule of law is important, but there is no other option than to do so gradually; concurrent deliberation around the nation-state concerning issues of the civilization 'core' brought up from the new technology 'skin' must (and will) establish many small precedents for addressing civil society needs that will then build on each other over time to 'reform'. There probably is no alternative.
Much more generally speaking, this case of a foreign civil society 'skin' being overlaid on an economic/geopolitical powerhouse with a radically different civilization 'core' has no real precedent in world history. The consequences of this are going to be ridiculously important to study going forward.
Full article available here.
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