China’s Internet until 2012: fragmentation and policy challenges

The Internet governance framework developed during the 2000s was fragmented, as different sections of the bureaucracy each pursued diverging agendas. The telecommunications administration, as part of its economic growth strategy, pushed the adoption of information technology and the spread of telecommunications nationwide.³⁷ The public security apparatus pursued the development of surveillance and monitoring technology.³⁸ Propaganda authorities were somewhat less eager to embrace the emerging Internet. While not completely Luddite, they saw online media mainly as an extension of traditional propaganda tools, and regulated it accordingly. Institutionally, this system consisted of two Central Committee leading groups that outlined broad policies, the Central Propaganda Department that was in charge of the daily administration of the propaganda xitong, the State Council Information Office that monitored news, and a number of ministry-level bodies that exercised oversight over media outlets, which were all state-owned.³⁹ In regulatory terms, the system was buttressed by licensing obligations that imposed sectoral and geographical boundaries and thereby fragmented audiences, and by professional qualification schemes that enabled the state to monitor and manage media staff.

In contrast with traditional media, however, the online sphere was dominated by private companies. To better connect government with these corporations, the Internet Society of China (ISC) was established. To a certain degree, the ISC is an organization in the vein of the All-China Journalists’ Association or the All-China Lawyers’ Association: a self-regulatory body that connects a profession to the Party. It has issued a number of conventions through which Internet companies voluntarily accept duties and obligations in areas including blog and search engine management, fair-trading and copyright.⁴⁰ Its growing role as a conduit between not only the technical and telecommunications side of the Internet, but also the online content industry, is underlined, amongst others, by changes in its governing council. In 2008, some of China’s best-known Internet entrepreneurs, including Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Tencent’s Pony Ma and Baidu’s Robin Li, were selected among the 25 vice-directors of this Council. Before, such positions where mostly taken up by academics or high officers in state-owned media and telecommunications enterprises.⁴¹

As Internet use further expanded, however, the fractures in this system became visible. The division of labour between the different regulators made less and less sense in the light of rapid technological convergence, yet plans to integrate telecommunications and television networks with the Internet (sanwang ronghe 三网融合) proceeded only at glacial pace.⁴² Departmental turf battles arose in the dispersed censorship administration, such as when the popular game World of Warcraft was taken offline for a year due to a dispute over licensing powers between press regulator GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publications) and the Ministry of Culture. Most importantly the propaganda authorities seem to have underestimated the rapid emergence of social media, which permitted new forms of online interaction to which well-established management techniques did not apply. Instead of professional ‘engineers of human souls’ (renlei linghun de gongchengshi 人类灵魂的工程师),⁴³ trained to programme audiences’ worldviews in state-determined ways, social media were dominated by public intellectuals and characterized by explosive, interactive forms of communication and organization. In many cases, propaganda authorities were visibly unable to manage information flows concerning incidents such as the Wenzhou train crash. One particular regulatory failure concerned real-name registration. Since the mid-2000s, self-regulatory conventions and administrative regulations had called for the introduction of real-name registration systems for blogging⁴⁴ and other online services. However, these rules were often more honoured in the breach than in the observance, as Internet companies, perhaps understandably, were rarely eager to chastise their users and delete their accounts, while government departments rarely pressed for strong compliance.⁴⁵

The responses of the propaganda and public security departments were, perhaps, characteristic. Among propaganda authorities, the growing swell of online criticism was seen as a cultural deficiency. A steady stream of high-profile publications by scholars from institutions including the Central Party School and the Chinese Academy of Social Science, in Party journals like Seeking Truth and Red Flag Manuscripts called for closer allegiance to the ‘main melody’ (zhuxuanlü), embodied in a ‘Socialist core value system’ (shehuizhuyi jiazhi tixi) that provided a politically desirable definition of civility.⁴⁶ Both Internet users and the companies tasked with regulating their behaviour were called upon to act with cultural awareness and self-confidence, in order to ensure order in cyberspace. Public security departments, on the other hand, carried out trials with grid-based urban management models that combine real-time geo-mapping technology, surveillance cameras and informants in order to provide comprehensive monitoring of social management indices.⁴⁷ Data mining and online discourse analysis became cornerstones of stability maintenance efforts, as well as a lucrative business. The industry leader is the People’s Daily Online Public Sentiment Monitoring Office (Renminwang yuqing jianceshi), established in 2008. All together, it is reported that more than 800 public opinion monitoring businesses and governments now employ more than two million analysts to dissect China’s online public opinion and report social trends to government departments.⁴⁸

Initial regulatory reforms were made towards the end of the Hu administration. The newly enacted Tort Law explicitly circumscribed the use of the Internet to infringe personal rights.⁴⁹ A new department, the State Internet Information Office (SIIO), was established within the State Council Information Office, in order to coordinate online content regulation. Although it did not have its own staff, and its formal authority was unclear, the SIIO was put in overall charge of online content in draft regulations for all online information services.⁵⁰ Under the auspices of a then little known propaganda official called Lu Wei (鲁炜), municipal-level rules targeting microblogs were introduced in Beijing, instituting licensing requirements, information censorship demands and a real-name system.⁵¹ The 6th Plenum of the 17th Party Congress in October 2011 was dedicated to regaining ideological leadership, and paid particular attention to the emerging online sphere.⁵² Perhaps in order to forestall stricter regulation, Sina Weibo instituted a self-policing system for its microblog community.⁵³

Strengthening online content control under Xi Jinping

The Xi administration rapidly demonstrated a firmer commitment to online order. Partly in response to an escalating online debate about constitutionalism,⁵⁴ a secret Central Committee communiqué was circulated among senior officials.⁵⁵ This document, later nicknamed Document No. 9, identified seven categories of potential ideological risk, and noted that the Internet in particular was a channel for ‘mistaken thinking trends’ to enter mainstream discourse. It was accompanied by a media campaign in which central Party media published a series of articles calling for ideological rectitude and vigilance against infiltration and a loss of control, particularly on the Internet. One noteworthy contribution in left-wing Party journal Red Flag Manuscripts came from Ren Xianliang (任贤良), the director of the Shaanxi provincial Propaganda Department, who would be promoted to vice-director of SIIO later that year. Ren stated that

However, it rapidly became clear that Lu’s main targets were the opinion-leading Big Vs. While still in his Beijing post, he organized amicable dinners with a number of them, which he repeated in May.⁶² By the summer, the conviviality had ended. In August, Lu Wei convened a CCTV television broadcast, hosting a number of online celebrities, in order to lay down seven so-called baselines (dixian 底线): respect for laws and regulations, the Socialist system, the national interest, citizens’ lawful rights and interests, public order, morality and the accuracy of information.⁶³ A few days after this shot across the bow, Xi Jinping’s secret speech declared that the Party found itself in a new public opinion struggle, with the Internet as the most important battlefield. With regard to Big Vs, Xi indicated that ‘we must strengthen education and guidance of online opinion leaders, we must encourage the good ones and restrain the bad ones, we cannot let things slide.⁶⁴ A People’s Daily editorial on 26 August 2013 stated that ‘Big Vs’ must not become ‘Big Rumours’ (dayao 大谣). On 30 August, the American–Chinese businessman Charles Xue (or Xue Manzi), a Big V with 12 million followers, was arrested and publicly pilloried on CCTV. While he was officially charged with solicitation, his detention was widely seen as retaliation for his online behaviour.

Where foreign observers mainly focused on Xue, the Chinese Party press made examples of two other online culprits, nicknamed Qin Huohuo and Li’erchaisi. They were accused of mobilizing an ‘Internet Water Army’ (wangluo shuijun), which flooded social media with false information, often for commercial gain. According to the Party press, such rumours, including murmurs about a resurgence of the SARS virus, exorbitant compensation being paid to foreign victims of the Wenzhou crash, and iodine salt and nuclear pollution after the Fukushima incident

The social media crackdown and associated propaganda campaign of 2013 addressed some of the more pressing short-term concerns about the Internet, and were the logical product of a process of escalation of content control that had started at the 2011 6th Plenum. Afterwards, a series of more long-term documents was issued with the purpose of instituting a regulatory ‘new normal’. Online video websites now bear responsibility themselves when posting films uploaded by individuals, and the new rules also mandated stricter checks on commercially produced content.⁶⁹ In a subsequent crackdown, Sina lost its license to distribute online content, while The Big Bang Theory, a few other popular US television series and the edgy domestic programme Dior Man (diaosi nanshi 屌丝男士) were banned from streaming websites.⁷⁰ In August, a plan to facilitate the convergence of traditional and online media was approved, followed by guiding opinions on reforming the online literature sector in December.⁷¹ Journalists in selected online news outlets were permitted to apply for press cards, subject to their obtaining an ‘Internet Newsgathering and Editing Training Certificate’.⁷² Regulations on public information services clearly targeted WeChat’s public accounts: service providers were obliged to report public account details to the SIIO, and special permission was required to set up a public account to disseminate news and current affairs.⁷³

New Internet governance structures

In parallel with these regulatory evolutions, significant institutional changes took place in order to consolidate and streamline Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policymaking processes. A new Central Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatization (zhongyang wangluo anquan he xinxihua lingdao xiaozu) was established early in 2014.⁷⁴ This new group, chaired by Xi Jinping himself, put the realization of the informatization agenda at the heart of political and economic reform. Its membership comprises economic and technological policymakers on the one hand, and departments concerned with ideological and international security on the other. The SIIO was reformed as an independent entity, separate from the SCIO, and designated as the host for the administrative office of the Leading Group. Its English name was changed into Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), and it gained explicit responsibility in regulating online content.⁷⁵ Expert and technical bodies, such as the Advisory Committee for State Informatization and addressing registry CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Centre) were made directly responsible to the CAC.

The structure of this new ICT xitong mimics that of its propaganda counterpart: a high-level coordination body that groups the heads of all important administrations, combined with an administrative entity that is in charge of drafting policies and high-level regulations on the basis of the decisions made in this coordination body. In turn, the State Council and its ministries are responsible for shaping the concrete measures implementing the CAC’s decisions, although the formal relationships of authority between these bodies are still unclear. Tensions between the CAC and other departments remain, particularly in the field of security.⁷⁷ Nevertheless some observers have suggested the CAC is rapidly exceeding the traditional propaganda system in terms of importance.⁷⁸ The Wuzhen World Internet Conference it organizes has rapidly become an event of great political prominence. Moreover, the CAC now has direct authority over a number of crucially important technical bodies, including domain name registrar CNNIC.⁷⁹

Making society legible

The central element of the leadership’s control strategy is to enhance society’s legibility. As Scott has argued, for any state to be able to govern effectively, it must rationalize and simplify social forms, transforming a complex territory into a readable map.⁸³ A corollary for cybergovernance proposed by Lessig is that, for governments to be able to assert power online, the chief challenge is regulability, which depends on their capability to find out who is doing what from where.⁸⁴ In the online environment, legibility can be conceived at two levels: the level of the platform and of the individual user. With regards to companies, it is easier to govern an environment dominated by a few large players, than one in which many small actors exist. As indicated earlier, the regulatory environment for the Internet created in the 2000s focused largely on the former. Licensing requirements have been imposed for online operators, enabling the state to shut down unlicensed operators and easily sanction licensed ones. Furthermore, market forces and network effects conspired to create large, dominant players in the Internet environment. The sheer size of companies such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent means that effective control over a few companies enables the state to regulate the majority of online activities. Yet where the government previously largely outsourced the burdens of regulating individual behaviour to those enterprises, it has now drastically expanded the range and scope of legal and regulatory measures directly affecting Internet users.

One dominant element of this strategy is the expansion of real-name registration requirements. Learning from earlier failures of such attempts, recent efforts have focused on incentivizing compliance. SAPPRFT documents on audiovisual works and online literature put full responsibility for the negative consequences of harmful content on online publication platforms, if their creators cannot be identified. The SIIO demanded real-name registration for WeChat accounts, with the proviso that users would be permitted a public handle or nickname. A Judicial Interpretation on online infringement of personality rights, promulgated in October 2014, provides that courts may order Internet companies to provide names, addresses and contact methods of users, where these are deemed to have published defamatory information. Companies refusing to carry out such requests would be liable for punitive measures.⁸⁵ A self-regulatory convention on mobile telephone apps passed in November 2014 committed developers and app stores to broaden the implementation of identity authentication systems.⁸⁶ These efforts seem to have had some success: it was reported in January 2015 that more than 80% of WeChat users had registered under their real identities.⁸⁷ Moreover, real-name registration duties are not limited to online content; they were also mandated for the purchase of telephones, enabling the identification of online activities through individual pieces of hardware.⁸⁸ In February 2015, the CAC mandated a real-name registration system for all account-based online information services.⁸⁹

Real-name registration sits at the heart of the effort to connect the vast amount of potentially useful information generated through individuals’ interactions with technology. Partly, these data are generated through conscious activity, for instance through posts on social media platforms or online purchases. However, sensors in mobile gadgets may also be used less wittingly, in order to geo-locate users, for example. It is in this respect that the Panspectric mode of surveillance and monitoring differs considerably from the Panopticon. Where the latter relied on the capturing of impressions by a central observer, information is now actively generated by multiple sensors scattered across the lives of its subjects. Furthermore, as the cost of storing and processing that information has greatly decreased, it now becomes available for longitudinal or interregional analysis.

Where the authorities desire to make society legible to themselves, they equally seek to prevent horizontal legibility among social actors. In that sense, messaging applications such as WeChat are much preferable over the greater publicity of Weibo. Its private nature means it is more difficult to rapidly spread information, while it is still reportedly possible for public security departments to monitor conversations.⁹⁰ These surveillance and monitoring capabilities are increasingly being integrated with technology-driven systems that provide consistent nudges towards compliance. Perhaps most importantly, an ambitious proposed social credit scheme is intended to create a range of benefits and sanctions for online and offline behaviour. According to State Council plans, it is intended that social credit information will be connected with individuals’ identity card numbers, creating unique and traceable files that can be used to facilitate citizens’ access to financial and government services. At the same time, the plan called for the introduction of real-name identity-based appraisal and scoring of individual online comportment, as well as of blacklists for those perpetrating various kinds of fraud, deception and ‘harm to others’ lawful rights and interests’.⁹¹ In other words, it is not unlikely that undesired behaviour online may affect citizens’ ability to gain a livelihood, find schools for their children or take out insurance.

Reconfiguring the purpose of control in the online sphere

What is the purpose of these modes of control? Citing Lenin’s What Is to Be Done, Thornton suggests that the evolution of public opinion management can be conceived as an iterative project to contain the spontaneity of China’s citizenry⁹² and create a predictable political environment. At the most basic level, the pursuit of predictability has led the leadership to attempt to eliminate the possibility or limit the impact of unforeseen events, particularly those resulting from unfettered public activities. After the Democracy Wall movement of 1979, and again after Tiananmen, the leadership took measures to exclude the citizenry from the political process and prevent the possibility of organized, cross-cutting opposition. One tactic has been to fragment the public environment and erect spill-over barriers between different localities and social strata. Traditional media were subjected to licensing criteria that constrained their audience on the basis of geographical or sectoral definitions. This ensured that damage from rogue media outlets could be contained relatively easily, and that propaganda authorities would have some time to respond.

Online media, however, tore down these barriers, and introduced an environment in which information goes viral rapidly. With far less time to respond, propaganda authorities were often reduced to passive responses. One often-cited cause célèbre was the Wenzhou train crash. Not only did some of the first distress calls and pictures from the accident appear on Weibo nearly immediately, the subsequent clumsy response from government officials dominated Chinese news and social media for weeks, greatly damaging public confidence in China’s railway ministry.⁹³ Other scandals often became known by the catchphrases and memes they generated, such as ‘brother wristwatch’ (biaoge) and ‘uncle house’ (fangshu) for two officials who had respectively amassed a collection of expensive timepieces and real estate through improper means. While Big Vs rarely generated this kind of information themselves, the impact of their retweets brought these stories to the attention of millions in a very short time span. In response, the ‘500 retweets’ rules provide a strong disincentive against amassing an online following, and in favour of more private communications platforms, such as WeChat. There as well, public accounts came under closer scrutiny, as demonstrated by the deletion of dozens of public accounts in March 2014 and January 2015. The March crackdown hit left and right, closing accounts belonging to liberal-leaning news organizations Truth Channel and Phoenix WeMedia, as well as the neo-Maoist collective Utopia.⁹⁴ In other words, one way of generating predictability is to render it technologically impossible or for sudden online incidents to occur.

Apart from the fragmentation and policing of the public communications sphere, surveillance and monitoring are also intended to provide Party and state bodies with information about socio-economic processes and early warning about the occurrence of potential unrest and incidents. In fact, one of the centrepieces of the informatization and social credit initiatives is the expansion of big data analysis.⁹⁵ At a broader level, the reassertion of online control has accompanied systemic efforts to impose top-down, predefined notions of civility and public morality, such as the Socialist core value system and the untranslatable (and ungraspable) concept of suzhi In contrast, counter-narratives are marginalized. Part of these efforts are directed to generate ‘positive energy’ (zheng nengliang), a term that has become a leitmotif for online governance. In short, rather than pointing out what’s wrong in China, online commentators should focus on positive examples and uplifting stories of effort and heroism.⁹⁶

In rhetoric, central Internet authorities seek to present the benefits that the Internet brings as conditional, enabling a legitimizing role for state power. Only with strong, Leviathan-like leadership are citizens protected online against abuses committed by officials, and against harm from private individuals or corporations. Online fraud, blackmail, defamation and data insecurity were foregrounded as threats to citizens’ ability to use the Internet in a safe manner, and many of the initiatives of 2013 and 2014 were justified primarily with reference to economic abuses and infringement of personality rights. In fact, the first regulatory document on the Internet enacted during the Xi administration was a National People’s Congress Standing Commission decision concerning the protection of online information,⁹⁷ which precipitated the promulgation of a series of data protection norms and standards. The ‘500 retweets’ rule is part of a document aimed at preventing and punishing defamatory statements. Recent campaigns have taken aim at malicious software⁹⁸ and black PR. The latter followed the arrest of Gao Jianyun, a high official in the SIIO, who was charged with taking bribes to remove online information.⁹⁹ In other words, going far beyond media control, the state presents Internet governance as part of a social contract in which stability and material welfare are guaranteed in return for loyalty and legitimate authority. In Lu Wei’s words: ‘The more we pursue freedom, the more we require order’.¹⁰⁰ This social contract is, however, defined and interpreted by the Party-state alone.

The Internet reconfiguration has also had considerable impact on internal Party discipline. The numerous revelations of corrupt acts on Weibo were problematic for Party organization, as they constituted an autonomous platform to censure officials, external to the Party’s intricate web of patronage, guanxi and discipline inspection. However, it was also recognized that corruption tainted the image of the Party as a whole and—more cynically—crowd-sourced corruption monitoring could provide easier means to alleviate the pervasive principal–actor tensions that characterize central–local relationships.¹⁰¹ At the end of 2014, therefore, the Central Discipline Inspection Committee (CDIC) launched an online procedure for reporting corruption and embezzlement, followed by the launch of a mobile app in January 2015, which currently permits the direct filing of corruption reports to the CDIC. Furthermore, the CAC has spearheaded initiatives to improve information circulation on central and local government websites, and has encouraged and assisted local governments with setting up their own social media accounts, for closer engagement with the citizenry.¹⁰²