Article
From modernization to
neoliberalism? How IT
opinion leaders imagine
the information society
the International
Communication Gazette
2018, Vol. 80(1) 7–29
! The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1748048517742773
journals.sagepub.com/home/gaz
Jing Wu
Peking University, China
Guoqiang Yun
Beijing Language and Culture University, China
Abstract
Before the information society becomes reality, it exits as discourses and arguments.
These narratives shape people’s expectations, imaginations, and understandings of the
concrete form of information society. The article first reviews some recent literature on
the social and cultural history of the Internet and information technologies. Then, we
will critically examine some prominent discourses on new information technology,
especially the Internet, by cultural intermediaries in China. We hope to understand
how the different imaginations of information society come into being, their internal
diversity, their sources of influence, and how they help imagine a social form in which
these technologies shape, belong, and work well.
Keywords
Information society, Internet, neoliberalism, social construction of technology, social
imagination
Introduction
Discourses of information society rose to prominence internationally around the
same time when China started its economic and social reform to catch up with
industrialized countries. Information as new forms of capital and technology, and
informationalization as new methods of social organization that carries refreshing
cultural values, necessarily captured the attention and imagination of the political,
scientific, and cultural elites who endeavored to draw blueprints for China’s newly
geared modernization drive. As social historians of new technologies observe,
Corresponding author:
Jing Wu, School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Email: jwu@pku.edu.cn
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technologies do not have innate qualities or meanings that influence society from
outside. The specific usage, organization, and effects of new technologies are influenced and shaped by human values, imaginations, and cultural traditions
(Barbrook, 2007; Flichy, 2007; Gitelman, 2005; Streeter, 2011; Williams, 2005).
It is therefore an interesting task to examine how Chinese society makes use of the
information discourse to imagine possible forms of modernization and to incorporate Western technologies in local social development. Before starting the discussion, however, it is necessary to provide a historical perspective delineating the rise
to centrality of the idea of information society in China’s post revolution modernization drive.
Before the opening up policy of the early 1980s, China had already developed a
small nucleus of electronic industry and begun to apply automation and cybernetics in industrial production, space adventures, and other military projects. The
guiding principles of these cutting-edge technological researches were national
self-defense in case of clashes with world super powers and increasing worker
control of the industrial production process under conditions of socialism
(Wang, 2014). However, the pre-history and social imagination of China’s information revolution are largely ignored in the post-revolutionary reform discourse,
which depicts the years before 1978 in general as times of craziness and ideological
irrationality that rejected Western technology and modernization in pursuit of
utopian socialism (Tsou, 1986). Thus, the new discourses of how information
technologies would change the world and China come mostly from the reform
ideology that constructs a Manichean divide between pre and post reform
Chinese society and looks mostly to the West for guidance in areas of economic
and technological modernization.
In the early days of the Internet booming in China during the 1990s therefore,
network and information technologies were seen as symbols of modernity that were
able to transcend old social and economic institutions and create brand new conditions for updating the Chinese economy. Outspoken opinion leaders of this
period were increasing numbers of overseas Chinese students of science and technology, prominent members of local scientific community, and media elites that
noticed the fast development of information technology. Both groups saw the
information revolution in America as a sign of the countries’ modernity and
hoped China should catch up with world trend. Imageries of speed, automation,
cleanness, and efficiency, all that signify a more rational and advanced society,
inundated the discourses about the Internet, information super highway, and the
‘third wave’ (Liu, 2015). These descriptions and imaginations of the future fit very
well with China’s local discourses of national development, four modernizations1
and knowledge as power (Zhao, 1984). The kinds of cultural values promoted
through these discourses were nationalism, techno-centrism, and devotion to education. Although socialism during this period was put on the back burner, it is not
openly rejected. Techno-nationalism (Adria, 2010) as its replacement provided a
different version of collective good from traditional socialist ideologies, which were
considered old-fashioned clichés that could not deliver results. In the meanwhile,
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with the fast construction of network infrastructure under the modernization craze,
Internet communities were booming in various forms, coinciding with the postCold War ideology of open societies and universal communication, which gave
rise to heated discussions of new forms of public sphere, civil society and communitarianism that the Internet could usher in, and help transform or transcend the
traditional social structure in China (Zhou, 2005).
With financial capital discovering the potential of the Internet and pouring
investment into new entrepreneurial projects globally, the Internet quickly turned
from a collective project for national competition and new community building to
a new class of individuals’ adventure toward unthinkable and easy wealth (Schiller,
2014; Srnicek, 2017). The deepening of marketization, privatization, and financialization in China also made the neoliberal understanding of the Internet as new
gold mine for entrepreneurs and technocrats more prominent than the socialist
imagination of information technology bringing upgrades to the national economy
(Hong, 2017). More technocrats with entrepreneurial spirits jumped into the ‘sea of
Internet start-ups’ and explore ways to attract international and domestic financial
capital, where new ideas for Internet usage are increasingly measured not by their
use value for society, such as ameliorating public service or public sphere, but by
their potential ability to cash out and attract heavy investment as soon as possible.
During this period, stories of individual heroes and nouveau riches in the information market became the dominant narratives that shape people’s imagination of
the Internet. The rise of state policies such as ‘mass entrepreneurship’ and Internet
Plus2 are also heavily influenced by these stories of innovative financial and techno
heroes salvaging the national economy mired in shrinking international market,
slowing down of infrastructure constructions, and de-industrialization after the
2008 world financial crisis.
In the following sections of the article, we will first review some recent literature
on the social and cultural history of the Internet and information technologies to
illustrate the social construction of technology thesis. This thesis claims that historically shaped and context-specific socio-cultural values and imaginations are not
derivative or dispensable attachment to technological development, but are integral
forces that participate in forming and reforming technology’s particular development and social usage. And then, in light of this thesis, we will critically read some
prominent discourses on new information technology, especially the Internet, by
cultural intermediaries such as technocrats, entrepreneurs, IT commentators from
the media or academia, etc. in China. By prominent discourses we mean media
articles, books, academic debates, influential discussions taking place on the
Internet, etc., voices that at their specific historical context drew public attention,
arouse debates or influenced government policies. We hope to understand how
the imaginations of information society come into being, their internal diversity,
their sources of influence, and how they imagine a social form in which these
technologies belong and work. By studying the shifting social imaginations of
the information technology, the article tries to map the spectrum of social values
that get connected to information technologies and the Internet and create
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a historical and critical perspective through which contemporary discourses such as
the Internet Plus can be understood and evaluated.
We mainly identify three stages of changing imaginations of the information
society in the Chinese context since the emergence of information discourse, infrastructure building, and industry development. They are national modernization
rhetoric, new public sphere and interactive community building and lastly neoliberal discourses of free market and entrepreneurship. Although the three forms
of narratives overlap and interpenetrate with each other, they do tend to dominate
the discursive field of information society in turn for about a decade in the Chinese
context.
Social imagination and the social shaping of technology
In media discourses that account for the history of information technologies, two
opposite but equally abstract and mysterious ways of understanding the relationship between new technology and social trends often occupy centre stage. One is
the claim that new advancement in technology and social life is the result of the
genius, originality, inspiration, persistence, or just good blessing of certain heroic
figures in history (Streeter, 2015). History happens in this particular way because
we are lucky to have the small number of elites that move things around and
forward.3 The other claim puts the emphasis of worship on new technology
itself, believing that information technologies for example, have innate qualities
of de-centralization, freedom, flexibility, creativity etc. that can change social structure and human nature once adopted (Castells, 2001; Grossman, 1996; Rheingold,
2002; Sunstein, 2008). The two seemingly opposite narratives, often appearing in
popular scholarship and mass media together in the celebration of technology’s
revolutionary change of society, actually share the same core understanding of the
process of human history. Historical changes are often depicted as consequences of
mysterious forces that human beings can only pick up and follow, rather than
intentionally create and shape. This kind of discourse fails to explore a more dialectical and contextual understanding of the interrelationship between human
intention and technological development, and thus fails to provide more insight
on how human beings make history under conditions of possibilities or
impossibilities.
In the larger literature on history of science and technology, there is, however, a
general consensus on the social and cultural moulding of technology as well as the
mutual influence and construction between society and technology (Haraway,
1985; Marx, 1994; Mumford, 1934; Schivelbusch, 2014). In his 1980, classical article ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, Langdon Winner (1980) illustrates two types of
relationship between technology and a society’s politics. One is that ‘the invention,
design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of
settling an issue in a particular community’ (p. 123). The second is that ‘man-made
systems’ could ‘require, or be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political
relationships’ (p. 123). Both perspectives are illuminating in understanding the
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social, cultural, and political intention in the design, development, usage, and
institutional arrangement of the Internet and other information technologies.
What is more interesting about the Internet is that there is a drastic transformation
of its cultural meaning and political significance from its birth in military context to
its prosperity under neoliberal global economy.
In recent years, several scholarly works on the social and cultural history of the
Internet and new information technology have started to pay more attention to the
ways in which cultural values, political ideologies, and social imaginations influence the development of information industry and its social penetration. Fred
Turner’s (2006) book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, The
Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, is one of the early works
to draw people’s attention to the discourses and activities of opinion leaders of
information technology and how they creatively articulate a culture of new technology that resonant with the dominant structures of feeling of its times. Turner
examines the phenomenon of popular celebrations of Silicon Valley and IT elites as
heroes of counterculture, embodying values of freedom, individuality and creativity, and asks how that came into being, since information technology used to be
considered by the counterculture community tools of domination and standardization of life and work, exactly opposite to the social ideal of individual freedom. He
argues that cultural intermediaries like Steward Brand represent a different version
of the counterculture movement in America. Contrary to the general understanding
that countercultural ideas of anti-establishment, environmentalism, seeking social
justice for subaltern groups, and artistic radicalism etc., are a set of relatively
holistic system of beliefs that stick together and are shared by most members of
the movement, Turner points out the internal diversity and even contradiction of
the movement. The version of counterculture that opinion leaders like Steward
Brand promote, through fashionable communication channels like the Whole
Earth Catalogue and the Wired magazine, is the middle-class solution to cultural
rebellion and resistance to authority, i.e., turning technology into the human scale
and making use of them to get information, communication and play, and to
change individual’s perception of the world, rather than mobilizing new technologies to serve collective actions and change social structure (Turner, 2006). Thus,
when giant calculating machines like IBM were turned into small desktop personal
computers, their cultural meanings seemed to change too, from machines of domination and standardization, to that of gadgets of freedom and individuality. The
shift of social realms of operation is also interesting to note: Mainframe computers
are for work and personal desktops are for leisure and fun. All of a sudden, the
dominant social imagination of information technology changed from embodiment
of instrumental rationality and enemy of freedom to the hero of individuality,
creativity, and the champion of the new economy without any substantial
change to the nature and design of the technology itself. In this way, countercultural discourses of information technology became more and more compatible with
the neoliberal hegemony that saw the commercialization and individualization of
information technology a way to get rid of the stagflation that was plaguing the US
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economy during the 1970s, all without any meaningful reform of the dominant
socio-political complex. From the perspective of the cultural understanding of the
history of information technology in America, we can see that the use of new
technologies in society are always already shaped and limited by culture, ideology,
and social imaginations. How a particular society imagines the future represented
by technology plays an important role in shaping its developmental course and
institutional setup.
Turner’s historical research reminds us that the ideological shaping and the
cultural meaning of information technologies may not correspond to their actual
conditions of creation. Although commonly understood as the offspring of free
market and culture of individualism, the information revolution and economic
success of the IT industry during the 1990s actually have deeper roots in Cold
War quasi socialist or state capitalist organization of scientific research in the
defence and space sectors. This topic is further explored in Thomas Streeter and
Ben Peters’ works. In The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism and the Internet,
Streeter (2011) observes that technological and institutional designs in human
history are often mobilized by cultural inspirations and social visions of how
we wanted to live in the society with certain technology. Imaginations of information technologies not only as machines of calculation and control but also
tools of communication, creation, cooperation, and play were already available in
the military-university research complex during the era of Cold War, against
popular understanding of the centralized and instrumental culture of military
research. Streeter (2011) specifically talks about MIT scientist and administrator
Vannevar Bush’s idea of ‘corporate liberalism’ as the key institutional and ideological base for the successful launch of the ‘information/Internet revolution’ in
America (p. 24). The idea is that any development of new technologies is too
financially risky to be actively promoted by private investors, and public entities
such as the government, military, and universities should take the initiative to
fund exploratory research, and then turn relatively mature results to the private
sector for further commercialization. The idea is rooted in the New Deal tradition of active public sector involvement in social and economic development and
is so influential that it helped create institutions like the National Science
Foundation (Streeter, 2011: 24). Yet, the friendly cooperative relationship
between the government and the market was later rejected and demonized
by neoliberal ideology, even though the burst of new economy in Silicon
Valley that lead the American economy into a new era of prosperity was largely
indebted to the government–military–university concerted investment and organization of research in basic information and computational sciences (Barbrook
and Cameron, 1996).
This neoliberal attack on government–private cooperation becomes more ironic
if we look at Benjamin Peters’ (2016) study of the failure of the Soviet Union in
building up a network system comparable to that of the America during the Cold
War military competition. His study shows the conventional wisdom that the
triumphant rise of networked personal computer in America is the result
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of unregulated free market and private enterprise is very much misleading. On the
contrary, Peters contends,
It is a mistake, as the standard interpretation among technologists and some scholars
have it, to project cold war biases onto this history. Our networked present is the
result of neither free-market triumphs nor socialist state failure.
That said, let us begin with a slight twist on the conventional cold war showdown: the
central proposition that this book develops and then complicates is that although the
American ARPANET initially took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and
collaborative research environments, the comparable Soviet network projects
stumbled due to widespread unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and other key actors. The first global civilian computer networks
developed among cooperative capitalists, not among competitive socialists. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. (Peters,
2016: 2)
Moving into the Chinese context, it seems that the problem of ostensible uniformity concealing internal conflict that plagued the Soviet network project also accompanied the Chinese information politics. The divide was even more operative as
China’s new information ideology was closely associated with the reform and
opening up policy that put itself strongly against the social and economic regime
during the Cultural Revolution (Wu, 2002). The Chinese case is also peculiar,
because the beginning of its ambitious modernization project during the reform
era was situated in the last stage of the Cold War, when there were major ideological confusion and paradigm switch within the Chinese Communist Party and
intellectual elites (Harvey, 2007). As a matter of fact, both geopolitically and ideologically, China since the 1980s was heavily influenced by the U.S. intellectual and
political exports to formulize understandings of modernization, as alternative to
the Soviet model or radical programs during the Cultural Revolution. Upon this
note, we now can turn to the case of China and have a preliminary look at how this
refreshing historical perspective on information technology and its shaping ideologies can shed light on our understanding of the development of information and
communication industries in China in the intersection of modernization, reform,
technological nationalism and neoliberalism.
Nationalism substituting communism as the route
toward modernization
Before the reform, similar to America and the Soviet Union, China also had
government-led research programs on cybernetics and automation, mostly in the
military sector. The most famous achievements are nuclear weapons, long-range
missiles and space programs, which put China, still an agricultural society to
a large degree, among the first-tier countries in military power (Wang, 2014).
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During the Cultural Revolution, there were efforts to apply cybernetics in economic and civilian affairs, such as enhancing automation in factories of
Shanghai, by mobilizing ordinary workers to collectively conduct research and
development (Wang, 2014). The guiding ideologies about information technology
of this time, quite different from the two other countries’ ambition to set up
complex defence systems or manage a planned economy, were about national independence and self-reliance. Having China’s own computational and cybernetic
capacities was not merely a matter of crude necessity, but also an issue of national
pride in the shadow of Western supremacy in military and scientific power. This
nationalist concern was carried over well into the new era of reform, only expressed
in new languages of technological futurism imported from America. The factory
experiment also carried with it radical socialist ideals of worker control of the
production process and workers’ participation in R&D, which signified the transcendence of alienation caused by the division of labour between technicians that
develop technologies and workers who are controlled by new technologies (Wang,
2014).
Based on the rejection and denunciation of the Cultural Revolution, the reform
ideology adopted a pragmatic way of proving the legitimacy of the State – retaining
the appeal to nationalism while emptying out the radical content of socialist organization of production and replacing it with new values of efficiency, technological
advancement, and economic performance (Zhao, 2013). These new values received
timely confirmation and enrichment by the preaching of the ranks of Alvin Toffler
(1980) (The Third Wave), John Naisbitt (1982) (Megatrends: Ten New Directions
Transforming our Lives),4 as well as big corporations like IBM, who was among the
first to restart business association with China as early as the late 1970s. By the time
when these futuristic visions of information society, hyper modernity, and eulogies
to big business came to China, the countercultural criticism of machines and dominations was receding in America, and the radical enthusiasm to build a worker’s
industrial society was dead in China. Thus, the combination of specific historical
contingencies created a peculiar context in which the social roles of information
technology, computers and networks could be appreciated and understood.
Modernization was the dominating framework under which information technology and personal computers were introduced to the general Chinese public.
The dichotomy between giant calculating machines of IBM and small personal
computers that used to divide the American culture was nowhere to be seen in
China then, as all technologies were considered symbols of modernization, rationality and social progress, and information technology occupied centre stage as it
brought about evolutionary changes to the world, according to the teachings of the
likes of The Third Wave and Megatrends. In searching the biggest academic and
print media database in China, CNKI, we found the first article to introduce
Toffler and the idea of third wave was in 1980, the same year the book was published in America (Du, 1980). As the secretary-general of The Chinese Society for
Futures Studies,5 Du participated in the first Global Futures Conference held in
Toronto, Canada and provided a sympathetic summary of the themes of the
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15
conference, meaning to inform people in China of the new trends of thinking in
advanced countries. As the techno-futurist discourse came to China in the camouflage of advanced knowledge in industrialized countries, it enjoyed a very high
profile and mythological image in the country without much challenge more
than 30 years later. Toffler died in 2016 and major Chinese media exalt him as
the man who ‘influences the world with his future trilogy’.6 Panels participated by
elite intellectuals were held to commemorate Toffler and many expressed vivid
memories of the astonishment, excitement, and anxiety over China’s future upon
first reading the book.
‘Information society’ became the new catchword that perfectly stitches together
the renewed and reconstructed centennial dream of modernization, technological
nationalism, and depoliticized worship of scientific and engineering knowledge in
China. This enshrinement of knowledge and technology can be vividly illustrated
by the widespread slogan – ‘knowledge is power’ and later ‘knowledge can change
our fate’ – in China during the last two decades of the 20th century. As a symbol of
keeping up with the steps of information society, there appeared in urban Chinese
market in the 1980s a type of student PC compatible with Apple II, whose name is
very symptomatic of its age – the studying machine of China (Zhong Hua Xue Xi
Ji)! Students all over China, at the inspiration of Deng Xiaoping’s famous instruction during a visit to an exhibition of technological development in Shanghai in
1984 – ‘the dissemination of computer knowledge should start from kids’7 – studied
typing, BASIC language, English and even game playing, all in the name of
modernization.
The modernist enthusiasm continued into the next decade when networks and
networking of computers caught the attention of China’s elites. Although later
popular histories of the Internet tend to glorify individual talents in miraculously
bringing the boom of Internet and the new information economy based on it,
serious historical studies already show that decades of state investment in basic
research and infrastructure building are necessary conditions for later civilian and
commercial uses of the Internet (Edwards, 1996; Flichy, 2007). These necessary
conditions were certainly not easily ignored and sidestepped by pioneers of Internet
builders in China, as technological nationalism presupposes a strong, determined
and dedicated state in inviting and mobilizing the nation’s elites and coordinating
their efforts in upgrading the national economy and technological systems. Tian
Suning, one of the key figures working in the area of building communication
infrastructures in China, was among the first to introduce Al Gore and the
American government’s promotion of the information super highway into China
and urge the Chinese government and elites to not miss the opportunity to catch up
with the new round of industrial revolution (Lin, 2009).
Tian, a biology and environmental engineering student, got into contact with the
then nascent Internet in America when he organized a Sino Ecologist Club
Overseas, the beginning of his long-lasting career in Internet infrastructure building. In 1993, he published an article in Guang Ming Daily, one of China’s national
party organ newspapers, entitled ‘The US Program for ‘Information Super
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Highway’ and Its Inspiration for China’, in which he likens the American interstate highway system to the current information infrastructure building, reminding
people that it is the necessary condition for the new round of upgrading of the
mode of production from industrialization to informationalization. In this article,
he specifically emphasizes the important role of the government in bringing about
new advancement in technology:
Even in the so-call free economy of America, the role of the government in organizing
and directing development of new technology is becoming bigger. Take the ‘‘information super highway’’ for example, from conceptualization to the formulations of
plans, the federal government is always a key player. . . One of the lessons of American
information industry is its lack of unifying standard in different products. Private
companies in pursuit of their own specific commercial interests developed contradictory technical standards, which wasted social wealth as a whole. The Chinese government should have careful planning of the information industry from the very
beginning. . . (Tian, 1994)
As a technological modernist familiar with socialist traditions of planned economy,
Tian reaches a similar conclusion about the state’s role in the information society
with Vannevar Bush’s corporate liberalism that the government and the market
should cooperate in bringing the best and rational result of technological development. It is also worth noticing that Tian went beyond Vannevar Bush in pointing
out the social mission of developing new technologies, partly perhaps thanks to his
background in environmental science:
The peculiar urgency and importance of the ‘information super highway’ project to
China is that it might provide solutions to difficult problems that are facing our
modernization project – traffic, environment and energy, etc. In the fast development
of Chinese economy, these problems cannot be easily avoided in traditional ways. To
some extent, China may be able to find a new way, by making use of the information
super highway, to reduce destruction of nature, depletion of natural energy and overcrowding of cities and traffic. (Tian, 1994)
Tian was not alone in understanding the Gore-led ‘information super highway’
project in terms of China’s socialist modernization mission. In 1995, on The
People’s Daily, China’s top party organ newspaper, an interesting debate occurred
between two top scientists over whether it is premature for China to develop information super highway. When arguing against a famous philosopher of science He
Zuoxiu, who says that ‘it is a waste of limited resources to build Internet infrastructure in China when the rate of penetration of landline telephone is less than
3%’, another scientist Feng Zhaokui insists:
As we all know, our long-term mission is to catch up with the world’s top-level scientific development. In the days of fast spread of scientific information network,
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joining the international network of knowledge production and circulation has
become a necessary condition for us to catch up. At the same time, we are building
a socialist market economy that demands information and efficiency. It is therefore an
objective requirement of the market economy to have high speed information networks. . . If there is any ‘special occasion’ for China, it is that we are more in need than
others to leap frog toward it, in order to quickly solve the problem of unequal development of education across China.8
It is therefore not difficult to see that there was a strong consensus during the early
introduction of Internet technology in China over its social usage and social mission,
i.e., to create a technological condition for socialist modernization and for solving
the social problems of inequality. However, the implicit criticism of the negative
effects of industrialization and the social vision that new and well-intended, carefully
studied technologies should be able to solve these problems are gradually losing their
grasp of the public’s imaginations of the information society when, toward later
years of the 20th Century, pioneers of a new kind – entrepreneurs and financial
capital – were taking over the centre stage of innovation and claiming credits for
the prosperity of the Internet all over the world.
Network communities that cultivate new forms of social
and political organization
Similar to the dominant modernization framework that shaped the introduction of
personal computers in China during the 1980s, the initial development of the
Internet during the early 1990s was also influenced heavily by academic, professional, and state imaginations of the new technology as new tools of spreading
education and public service. In Flichy’s (2007) historical account of early designs
and promotions of the Internet in the US, the government, universities, research
institutes and think tanks took it as the responsibility of the public sector to lay
down the infrastructure for knowledge society of the future (p. 19). This consensus
had strong echoes in China then, as the government and intellectual elites also took
it as their duty to introduce and implement the most advanced technologies and
developmental plans initiated in the industrial world.
The first computer networks in China were built during the early 1980s by the
railway system, banks, meteorological institutions, and other industrial and
research departments. In 1986, the first connection to international networks
was launched by Chinese Academic Network, built and operated by Beijing
Applied Computer Science Research Bureau in cooperation with Germany’s
Karlsruhe Technolgie Hochschule. Soon after, The Chinese Academy of
Science, The National Committee on Science and top universities in China all
built academic network systems with connections to international networks
through their counterparts in America or Europe. The first Internet connection
open to the public was launched in 1994. The operator was China Telecom and
the contractor was Sprint. Tian Suning with his newly found company AsiaInfo
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Technologies was one of the key players in this launching (Wu, 2006). This
extremely brief historical account is to illustrate the international influence, academic and educational approach and global connectivity of early Internet development in China.
Early network users were mostly academics, researchers, business managers,
college students, etc. The culture they adopt in those burgeoning Internet communities is similar to intellectual communities all over the world – rational,
cooperative, argumentative, exploratory, and critical. They saw the Internet as
new tools of knowledge building, information sharing, and expansion of intellectual exchange. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) are the most representative operations of the early virtual communities before the coming of age of commercial
applications. The first BBS in China was Tsinghua University’s SMTH BBS
launched on 8 August 1995. It soon became a trend in other top universities
to set up their own BBS platforms on CERNET (China Education and Research
Network, state-funded and run by a team led by Tsinghua University). These
early BBSs were non-commercial, populated by college students and alumna
circles, and cultivated a culture of information sharing, civic discussion and technical avant-gardism. These communities are also primal places where new
civic consciousness and organized social actions came into being. With its participatory and interactive technical features, and the friendly and trustworthy
environment provided by the initially non-commercial platform and measures
of anonymity, BBS fosters a culture of engagement in public debates over
social issues. Almost all important issues fiercely debated in the public sphere
of China since the early 1990s originated from or had their most heated articulations in various BBS platforms, quickly expanding their user base from campus
to include larger sections of Chinese society, thanks to the fast dissemination
of Internet infrastructure. Observers of Chinese culture and society during
this period cannot help but notice the role of the Internet, especially BBS, in
constructing a new culture of activism, civic engagement, self-mobilization,
and resistance to authority, against the old tradition of silence in public and
obedience to established rules of the party-state (Yang, 2003, 2009; Zheng,
2008; Zhou, 2005).
Unfortunately, however, the uniquely non-commercial, college-based, and selfregulating BBS format did not have much time to grow itself into a self-conscious,
mature form of communicative activity before commercial adventures adapted the
original format into mass platforms of publicity, market developments, and organized communications in the form of media events. This scenario corresponds very
well with what Habermas describes as the mutual penetration of the private and
public spheres during the commercialization of the modern mass media, which
constitutes the re-feudalization of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989). In commercial media’s own account of the historical role of early BBSs, it is more than clear
that the non-commercial forms of communicative practices only serve as a training
ground and stepping-stone for the growth of legendary entrepreneurs. In a piece
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appeared in the website focused on the development of information industries, a
veteran of the BBS era claims:
Some see the BBS communities as battlegrounds, where heroes fight their ways out.
The earliest netizens of China found the BBS their best socializing space. . . . From
1993 to 1998, hundreds of BBS communities appeared all over China, Ma Huateng,
Qiu Bojun, Wang Juntao were BBS leaders of Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Fuzhou. Lei Jun
devoted all his vacation time to Qiu Bojun’s BBS, writing more than 400 posts per day
at the most. While at the same time, the young Fang Zhouzi – yes, the Fang Zhouzi
you know – wrote the code for China’s first generation MUD game in cooperation
with others in a BBS community of overseas Chinese students.
Now, it is difficult for us to forget those BBS communities that accompanied the
teenage years of China’s Internet, and the stories and cultures associated with them.
Their retreat in front of the commercial jungle is not a defeat. In fact, in this glorious
history, nothing can be called a defeat. (Lan, 2015)
Nostalgic? Yes, a little bit perhaps, but that is all the respect the article pays to early
BBS communities. The decline of the primordial type of BBS is inevitable, the
author argues, because ‘it cannot turn user faith into advertising money,’ for
‘users may stay online for three-hours a time, but they may not come back in
three weeks.’ It is not ‘sticky’ enough for users and therefore not a viable business
model (Lan, 2015). The legitimization of commercialization of the Internet is so
natural that there is even no mentioning of a possible non-profit, public support,
and running of these platforms. And this naturalization of Internet as business
continues and exacerbates well into the era of social media. Ever since then, marketing stunts, manufactured grassroots stars, and paid publicity inundated the
Internet communities in investors’ eager search for ‘viable business models’. The
participatory and collegial dreams of early BBS communities, as the article asserts,
were left behind as childish and idealistic, in order for the Internet to ‘grow up’ into
big business. Today, the spirit of early BBSs can still be found in small social
network site (SNS) applications such as Douban and Zhihu (the Chinese counterpart to Quora). They insist on user-generated content and separate groups by
interests or expertise, thus safeguarding the quality of discussion on the one
hand and having to remain small and somewhat exclusive on the other.
The culture of Internet communitarianism, although inadequately developed
and short-lived, does find the most enduring articulation in the writings of one
of China’s most well-known IT opinion leaders, Fang Xingdong. Fang’s college
education was in engineering. In 1996, he entered Tsinghua University for PhD
studies, where he started a career as IT observer and commentator. Soon he changed the direction of his PhD research from electronic engineering to IT industries.
In 1999, he created China Internet Lab, a platform for his experiments on Internet
applications. Fang is famous for two things, both of which are related to the
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idealism cultivated during the pre-commercial years of Chinese Internet. The first is
his almost single-handed resistance of Microsoft monopoly in China and criticism
of aggressive copyright protection, which is the key to Microsoft’s huge global
business success. The second is his promotion and celebration of blog and Web
2.0. In 2002, he started China’s first blog platform, Blogchina. He is thus entitled
the ‘godfather of blog’ in China (Lin, 2009).
In the book that made his fame as a belligerent IT opinion leader in China –
Arise! Challenging the Microsoft Hegemony (1999) – Fang Xingdong attacked
Microsoft’s aggressive measures to monopolize computer operation systems in
China. The book is a collection of his IT columns published in the press during
1999, the year when Microsoft launched its Venus Plan in China to provide
a cheaper alternative to get on the Internet. The plan was to sell a TV set-top
box installed with Windows system, so that Chinese consumers can use their television sets to get online, a device much cheaper than PC. Fang’s attack came with
a mixture of nationalism and anti-big business populism:
If Microsoft whole-heartedly wants to help promote informationalization in China, it
is of course a good thing. Yet the Venus Plan, aiming at connecting Chinese consumers to the Internet through television, is breeding with greed and danger. If we do
not respond carefully, it will directly affect the future of China’s information industry.
This Plan, in the name of a new opportunity to China, is in fact a new battle launched
against us. It is aiming at taking control of an entire generation of Internet terminal
equipment, such as set-box, hand-PC, PDA, etc., and thus consequently taking control of China’s next generation industrial platforms. (Fang, 1999)
In explaining his criticism of the copyright system aggressively enforced by
Microsoft, Fang asserts that his attack is less from a nationalistic perspective,
but from a belief in the openness and fairness of new information technologies:
We have to realize that in the information age, any narrowly nationalist action is
doomed to fail. What we are criticizing is Microsoft, not all foreign enterprises.
To balance companies like Microsoft, it takes global market and technical forces.
Up to now, the counter forces we appreciate mostly come from the west: Linux,
Java, Netscape, etc. They are helping the whole industry, or even, the entire human
kind, to fight against monopoly. In the end, the book is not even against Microsoft,
but against monopoly of knowledge. (Fang, 2001)
As we can sense from this self-defensive explanation of the intention of his book,
his arguments were extremely controversial and was greatly subdued at major
commercial Internet opinion platforms such as sina.com and sohu.com. In an
interview, Fang mentioned that Microsoft was said to have mobilized four
public relations companies to block the spreading of his criticism on Chinese
media and Internet. ‘A friend introduced a foreign blog site and tell me to post
Wu and Yun
21
my articles there,’ Fang claims, and once he was there, he found a new and liberating territory and immediately became the most enthusiastic advocator of blogs
in China (Bu and Su, 2005). In his many writings celebrating blogs, two key
arguments appear constantly. One is that bloggers are willing and capable communicators and their efforts help enhance knowledge and breed creativity. The
other is that bloggers as non-professional reporters and opinion providers greatly
expand the horizon and content of traditional mass media.9 These visions are
consistent with the values he mobilizes when reflecting on Microsoft’s monopoly
– the belief that Internet communities should be open, sharing, participatory and
most of all, non-instrumental. Yet, all these were easily ignored in the thrilling
competition to dig the gold mine of the Internet. Soon, Fang Xingdong was
labelled a failed investor in the Internet boom because his vision of blogs is too
‘student-like’ and too ‘poetic’, and he ‘does not have management talent’
(Ge, 2009). Toward the end of the 20th century, futuristic visions of the information society are increasingly connected with the expansion of business and market,
rather than the development of public service, knowledge communities and open,
amateur platforms.
The road ahead: The neoliberalization of the imagination
of the internet and information society?
In 1994, Bill Gates visited China the first time, a tour that brought about the
Chinese version of Microsoft 95 and his company’s continued business expansion
in China. The then Chinese president Jiang Zemin personally received Gates, signifying the degree of eagerness of the Chinese elites to follow and copy the
American success in the new economy. Up to 2007, Bill Gates was to visit China
10 times, almost once a year, and he was first of the series of legendary figures that
came to represent driving forces behind the information society and economic
boom. Others to come were people like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry
Page. Being popular role models, they all have very similar features, dispositions,
and experiences in mass media narratives of their success stories. They are usually
young, restless, independent, contempt of tradition, smart of course, and most of
all, they do not follow conventional routes to success, dropping out of college early
on for example to start up their own business in backyards or garages. The disconnection between business success and state and public efforts is a significant
shift of rhetoric in a country with long tradition of collectivism. These descriptions
isolate individuals away from their social conditions and networks, focusing more
on the successful results of their business rather than the personal and social contingencies that lead to those results. In his research on the relationship between
social imaginations and the development of the Internet, Streeter (2011) points out
that contrary to the popular fantasy that successful entrepreneurs in the information economy come from nowhere and create miracle purely because of their
insight and talent, legendary companies such as Apple almost always have
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the International Communication Gazette 80(1)
well-connected and well-financed managers who have access to investors and
experience in marketing products and creating fame for the business.
The Apple was not the first microcomputer; there were many hobbyists tinkering with
tiny computers at the time Apple was started, and already some of them were manufacturing and selling them. What distinguished Apple is that it led the fledgling
industry beyond the hobbyist market into the larger world. Markkula, arguably, is
the one who made this happen, who distinguished Apple from all the other early
microcomputer builders by using his knowledge and connections to turn a business
run by and for hobbyists into something capable of growth beyond those bounds.
(Streeter, 2011: 69)
Very similarly, the exalting of Bill Gates and later Chinese IT elites such as Zhang
Zhaoyang, Li Yanhong, Ma Yun, etc., all follow the same pattern of focusing on
the miracle and bypassing the political economy. Although actually around
the same time, people like Tian Suning were dedicating their efforts to statecorporation-coordinated projects of information and communication infrastructure building and expanding access, the popular social imagination of the new
technology and new economy has changed drastically. The previously modernist
understanding of the ‘third wave’, which must come from rational thinking,
technological know-how, government foresight and devotion of the research community, shifts to visions of countercultural individuals who think and create freely,
playfully, and purposelessly. Entrepreneurs rather than scientists, geeks rather than
serious students of computer science, and free market rather than government
regulation must account for the thrilling prosperity of the information age.
In the early days of the Internet boom, it was still necessary to create romantic
personalities and anti-establishment rhetoric in order to legitimize the sudden rise
to wealth and power of young people obviously without much expertise, experience, and devoted efforts (Streeter, 2011). Streeter argues that this cultural form
continues in America after the 2008 financial crisis, to maintain the illusory hope of
having a capitalism with integrity (Streeter, 2015). Yet in the Chinese context,
where capitalism is considered more as a lack rather than excess, the celebration
of business tycoons in the new economy is rather more crudely independent of
considerations of morality, social good or economic viability. Success alone can
explain and whitewash everything. Take Eric Ma (Ma Yun), the founder of
Alibaba, now one of the biggest operators of platform capitalism in the world,
for example. His road to success – the aggressive business model of Taobao, labour
policies of the company, the consumerist and regressive gender culture promoted
by its publicity outlets and his problematic political manoeuver – are all abound
with controversies to say the least. Yet, it does not prevent him from being the most
prominently exalted entrepreneur in China in mainstream media nowadays, despite
countless criticisms in social media and popular opinion.10
The neo-liberal turn in social imagination, which stipulates that entrepreneurship and free market are the key to a free and prosperous society and government
Wu and Yun
23
intervention curtails rather than encourages innovation, now found its symptomatic articulation in the celebration of Internet entrepreneurs, venture capitalists,
and the boost of consumer and leisure products in information industry. New
bibles of this era were books like The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Being Digital
by Negroponte and Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, all best sellers in China, and the
authors frequent China with high profile and generously paid lectures accompanied
by Chinese Internet celebrities (Lei, 2016). Making some comparisons between
them and previous futuristic best sellers of a decade ago – The Third Wave or
Megatrends – we can observe how exactly modernist discourses of technological
evolution was rearticulated with and transformed into the strange coalition
between post-modern style of counterculture and conservative reassertion of
market fundamentalism.
Since the new set of futuristic writings are usually produced by people who are
directly connected to the business and commercialization side of information
industry, they often describe possible advancement of technologies and their benefits from the perspective of urban, middle-class individual needs and convenience.
Both Gates and Negroponte tell their readers about teleconferencing, virtual shopping, fast transmission of media contents, online education, paperless office, navigation service, virtual communication, and interactions, etc., things that are mostly
miniaturization and commercialization of previously existing information systems
developed earlier. This reminds people of Fred Turner’s argument that the middleclass youth’s countercultural enthusiasm is mostly directed toward solving personal
problems and alleviating individual anxiety, rather than seeing the world as interconnected and looking for systematic solutions (Turner, 2006). Compared to the
more historical and structural discussions of the new technology’s social role in
works like the Third Wave, the new futuristic writings look quite similar to product
catalogues, alluring people to buy new and fancy gadgets by promising fashion,
coolness, and miracle. In Negroponte’s Being Digital for example, he predicts the
digital future by introducing to the readers several concrete digital media technologies, many of which he himself was directly involved in developing into consumer
products (Negroponte, 1995). The similarity between semi-academic futuristic writing and business public relations discourse is certainly not accidental, for in the era
of Internet entrepreneurship, futurism becomes a means to create willing consumers, and research institutions increasingly lend their authority to the business
world of new information technologies. The fantastic visions and possibilities presented to readers are intermingled with the R&D process of corporations, and in
this light, predictions are not easily distinguishable from product promotions. The
new futuristic discourse thus constitutes a shaping of social imaginations of information technologies in the direction of individual consumptions rather than social
change, which in turn limits the imagination of industry-leaders and policy-makers
in envisioning a future networked society (Friedman, 2005: 3).
Another significant change in the imagination of information society is that this
is a world where entrepreneurs and the free market, rather than engineers, universities or the public sector, take the lead of creating new ideas and push things
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the International Communication Gazette 80(1)
forward. The modernist ideal of university being the engine of innovation and the
smartest people devoting themselves to science and technology is silently buried as
in the new narratives of success, heroes are usually college dropouts or have no
interest in formal education. In China in the past two decades, Internet heroes
recognized in mass media have shifted from scientists, engineers, to college graduates with odd ideas and strong personality, to simply people with money – venture
capitalists investing in the Internet new economy. In the end, it is people who use a
different angle to look at and get around an existing problem rather than develop
technologies to solve the problem, catch the public imaginations of the new economy. For ordinary people, they can only get connected to the information society
by becoming passive and hedonistic consumers. The movers of technological progress are a few smart or rich people (Lin, 2009). Yet only less than 20 years ago,
China’s technological nationalists and early computer and Internet users used to
believe that information technology can be integrated into people’s everyday life by
providing a public platform for everyone to grasp the knowledge of computers.
They once held an alternative social vision that information technologies are to
increase productive efficiency, better the working conditions of workers, increase
the quality of public service and, build equal, sharing and open virtual communities. These visions today, not completely disappearing of course, are in danger of
becoming only platitudes in light of the grandiose success stories of heroic entrepreneurs and visionary venture capitalists.11
Conclusion
In the years of 1971 to 1972, in the depth of China’s Cultural Revolution, Canadian
political economist Dallas Smythe visited China. He visited and talked to officials
and scholars in science, education and media, hoping to discover an alternative
route toward social use of technology. To his disappointment, he found that
Chinese technocrats were actually quite oblivious of the political implications of
technology. He wrote a report entitled ‘After Bicycles, What?’ to top leaders then in
sincere hope that China could develop and make use of modern technologies more
conscientiously toward a vision of socialist life world. He emphatically pointed out
that technologies are not independent of political intentions and power relations,
and that consumerist and individualist usages of technologies in capitalist societies
should not be the goal of a socialist country (Smyth, 1994). Almost half a century
later, it is in plain view that China’s answer to his question is the exact opposite to
what he had hoped – automobiles and consumer culture. Economic policies, such
as the Internet Plus or mass entrepreneurship, are increasingly motivated and conditioned by designing and promoting new forms of consumption and financialization, without connecting these policies to more general social goals and visions of
social relationship.
In the end, the neoliberal imagination of information society is limited in that it
provides individualized solutions to structural problems, satisfied at changing perceptions of things rather than changing material conditions, and singling out
Wu and Yun
25
financial capital and the market as the solution to everything. History tells us that it
is human imagination that shapes the direction and mode of development of technology, rather than the other way around. At a time when neoliberal thinking is
monopolizing our vision and imagination of the future of Internet and information
technologies, we need to go back to history to find inspirations. We not only need
to study the historical conditions of possibility for today’s achievements but also go
beyond the neoliberal thinking that sees people as lonely homo economicus, and
market relations as all possible relationships that human beings can establish with
each other. There are other expectations and imaginations of what new communications technologies can do to human society, such as public service, mutual understanding, sharing of knowledge and information, and inspiration of the ordinary
and marginal. In an era when the design and development of information technologies are closely linked to the social visions we have and social structures we hope
to build, it is highly important to explore alternative imaginations of the information society and information technology.
Acknowledgements
The authors want to thank the editors of the special issue and two reviewers for their helpful
comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Notes
1. The ‘Four Modernizations’ is one of the most widespread official slogans that indicate
the shifting of the central mission of China’s reform era political leadership from politicization of everyday life to economic development. The content of ‘Four modernizations’
includes modernizations of industry, agriculture, defense and science and technology. It
was first articulated by top leaders as early as 1954 and slightly modified and reiterated in
1964, both during the National People’s Congress. However, it was not until the 1980s
that this slogan became dominant and ubiquitous in Chinese society, signifying the sharp
rejection of the Cultural Revolution politics and ‘return’ to the ‘correct party-line’ of
economic development.
2. ‘Mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation’ and ‘the Internet Plus’ are two economic
policies promoted by Premier Li Keqiang’s State Department. The first time Premier Li
mentioned the concept of ‘mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation’ was at the World
Economic Forum at Davos in 2014. In 2015, the State Department issued ‘A Position
Document on Several Policy Measures to Promote Mass Entrepreneurship and Mass
Innovation’ (2015, State Document No. 3). Internet Plus: National Strategic
26
the International Communication Gazette 80(1)
Movement Road Map (2015), is a book written by Ma Huateng, the creator and CEO of
Telcent, one of China’s biggest Internet companies. In the book, Ma argues that the
Internet is at the center of China’s economic development, and the upgrading and
development of every industry should use the Internet and information technology as
their infrastructure. This concept since became well-known catchword of the political
and media discourses.
3. This is most obviously manifested in commercial biographies and mass media celebrations of legendary figures in IT industries. The worship of ‘genius’ is widespread
and generic in media representations of people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark
Zuckerberg, etc.
4. Both were best sellers in China during the early 1980s. They served as important enlightenment for Chinese intellectuals and media elites just coming out of the Cultural
Revolution to understand the megatrends toward global modernization and created
anxiety about China’s role and position in this trend.
5. The Chinese Society for Futures Studies was founded in 16 January 1979, affiliating to
China Science Society, also having close working relationship to World Future Studies
Federation. Its members come from privileged universities and research institutes,
including China’s top scientists and dignitaries such as Qian Xuesen, Maoyisheng, Yu
Guangyuan, etc. http://baike.baidu.com/link?url=fH2MoY7V57IHdBwVkoldMc1V
cNhRtOdyvmccDojkrgAuWElg6yP6Mig0xR80TTMEIOsXFtGKkDkAf6dAB4rK6_
BX7Oti3YZMzQ6CTYmnpwMOWA0ZqO2CwTyXQqoy-uBKmfD_SWD77ZyL4Z
UrcZqzXHAMHCDvhVYp4hiKyUBSypG
6. An article reporting the death of Toffler by Xinhua News Agency, China’s state organ,
is entitled ‘The Author of The Third Wave Dies, Whose Future Trilogy Influences the
World’, http://news.xinhuanet.com/book/2016-07/04/c_129113540.htm
7. When Deng Xiaoping was visiting the Exhibition of new technologies in Shanghai in
1984, several school students were sitting in front of PCs and demonstrating computer
code writing to the state leader. Deng came up close and touched the head of one
schoolboy, named Li Jin, and uttered the famous sentence. It became a national
legend ever since and was repeatedly cited to show the importance of computer and
information science in the minds of then Chinese top leaders. See http://it.sohu.com/
20090916/n266774054.shtml
8. The two articles published in People’s Daily are, He Zuoxiu, ‘The Advocacy for
Information Super Highway should be Tuned Down’, 18 January 1995; Feng
Zhaokui, ‘The Information Super Highway is Not Unrealistic for Our National
Conditions’, 29 March 1995. The second article is a direct counter argument against
the first one.
9. Please see archive of Fang Xingdong’s blogs here: http://fangxd.bokee.com/archive/
200407/1
10. A big data analysis of People’s Daily announced that in 2015, Eric Ma is the most
frequently mentioned entrepreneur in the prestigious party organ. He was mentioned
78 times, and the number for 2014 was 62. Four articles are his interviews or speeches,
and others are mostly in columns and important news sections. ‘The Most Frequently
Mentioned Entrepreneur on People’s Daily in 2015: Ma Yun’, People’s Daily website, 5
February 2016. http://politics.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0205/c1001-28114595.html Also
see ‘The Most Frequently Mentioned Entrepreneur on People’s Daily for Three
Consecutive Years: Ma Yun’, People’s Daily website, 5 January 2017. http://politics.
people.com.cn/GB/n1/2017/0105/c1001-29001009.html
Wu and Yun
27
11. It is by no means to say that the flourishing of Internet platforms driven by business
initiatives only produce monolith ideologies of individualism and consumerism. Much
academic research notices the production of counterculture or resistant discourses in the
increasingly open and diversifying public sphere of China’s Internet environment,
including the authors of this article. However, this piece is focused on how elites such
as the technocrats, the state, and mainstream media are constructing a hegemonic discourse that more or less shapes the realpolitik in information policy. Some examples of
these cultural studies work are: Meng (2011), Wu (2010) and Zhang (2016).
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