Information Technology and the Future of the Chinese State: How the Internet Shapes State-Society Relations in the Digital Age

Autor(en)

Christian Göbel

Abstrakt

By the end of 2015, every second Chinese will have access to the Internet. The ability of an increasing number of Chinese people to communicate and consume online has inspired a wide array of scholarship on topics such as censorship, surveillance and the use of social media. While much of this research is premised on the notion of antagonistic state-society relations, the impact of state-sponsored and Internet-based channels of communication between government officials and Chinese individuals on the transformation of China’s one-party authoritarian regime remains poorly understood. This article addresses this issue by examining China’s e-government strategy in relation both to global developments and to the changing incentives that have driven political reform in China in the past two decades. It argues that the confluence of two challenges has benefited the integration of the Internet into China’s governance apparatus. The first challenge was that avoiding the Internet would have come at prohibitive economic cost. If economic development was to continue, there was no way past the Internet. The second challenge was China’s brittle governance apparatus at the time, which hindered economic development and was deemed unfit to meet the demands of an increasingly assertive population.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften

Journal

Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung

Band

26

Seiten

56-74

Anzahl der Seiten

18

ISSN

0940-3566

Publikationsdatum

2016

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

506002 E-Government, 506017 Wissenschafts- und Technologiepolitik, 506014 Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

Schlagwörter

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 8 – Menschenwürdige Arbeit und Wirtschaftswachstum

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/da7eed72-85b0-4084-9fd6-b264c0868213