Twelve years after the introduction of reform policies in China and two years before the next expected major change at the summit of the country's leadership, China's political system is facing a series of tremendous changes. Perhaps one of the most important challenges is rooted in the effects of new information technologies on political decision-making and above all on relations between people and rulers.
The potential impact of these changes can perhaps best be explained by an example. In March 2001, the international media published reports of a deadly explosion in Fanglin school in a remote eastern Chinese mountain village. Official reports (including a statement by Premier Zhu Rongji) blamed a 'lone madman' for having set off two bags of explosives in a third-grade classroom. 'Here comes a madman' was the immediate reaction on the Internet in China. Angry users of Internet chat rooms did not buy the story. Instead they spread information that children no older than nine years of age had been forced to stuff fuses into firecrackers without any pay. Whatever the truth behind this story may be, the times are gone when the official media was so powerful that it could disseminate, free of the risk of being accused of deliberate misinformation, whatever version of history the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) liked most and wanted to make public: the basic character of the decentralised spread of information runs counter to political attempts at centralised information control. Consequently, the times are also gone when the party's claim to power could go undisputed.
Research on China's political development and above all on prospects for the country's political stability will have to take account of the collapse of one of the most important pillars of the political rule of the CCP: absolute and unrestricted control of political information. Official explanations of major (and in our example also relatively minor, but highly publicised) events will meet diversified and non-corroborating competition from thousands of alternative opinions. The mere opportunity to gain this kind of alternative information may endanger the basis of authoritarian rulers' political legitimacy.
Political science has been comparatively slow in taking up this new type of challenge to political stability. Western analyses of the development of the new communications technology in China have analysed the Internet, first, as a new forum for the activities of political dissidents, at least in China's urban centres; second, as a major factor promoting economic development; third, as an indicator of China's opening to the outside world, and finally, as an instrument of possible change in China's political system. Partly overlapping research within China has concentrated, first, on the problems of external impacts and a possible 'Sinification' of this new technology. A second major issue is concerned with possible political changes, and finally, there is an intensive discussion on how the Chinese State could and should protect itself against destabilising influences.
For all these different approaches, the most obvious and most important question, of course, is: Can the Internet and non-democratic rule co-exist? In other words: Is there a 'built-in incompatibility between non-democratic rule and the Internet?' (Taubmann 1998) While the similarly obvious answer to this question seems to be simply 'yes', it should not allow one to lose sight of a second, and perhaps even more important set of questions: What will be the political reaction to the Party's loss of its information monopoly? Can the Party meet one of the most basic challenges to its continuing power monopoly? And what strategies are available for successfully containing the effects of political contamination through as uncontrollable a medium as the Internet? As with all major technological inventions (such as dynamite, x-rays, atomic power, genetic manipulation and so forth), information technology may have positive, as well as negative consequences. Use and abuse of these technologies are Siamese twins.
Internet technology may thus become one of the most prominent symbols of the CCP's own entrapment: On the one hand, it offers a major stimulus to development and prosperity. On the other hand, the results of attempts to regulate Internet access have been ambiguous at best, and have thus aggravated the problems the Party is likely to face in stabilising its political rule beyond the next change in top leadership positions scheduled for 2002. After more than two decades of successful economic transformation in China, the CCP is haunted by the spectres of this very success: growing pluralism, growing individualism and growing exposure to global influences have contributed to the Party's loss of political control. These trends will be further aggravated by the impact of technological changes primarily in the fields of communication, the media and advanced information technologies.
However, given what we know about the extent to which and how it is currently being used, the Internet must, for the moment, be seen at best as a potential threat to continued authoritarian rule. It may increase the dangers of destabilisation, because it offers:
· access to free political information (though the overwhelming interest of current users still seems to be focused on non-political issues);
· an unrestricted opportunity to compare lifestyles on a really global basis - comparison being a major element in political dissatisfaction and ensuing social upheaval;
· potential access to uncontrolled political communication;
· considerable opportunities for opponents of official policies to build organisational capacities (the crackdown on Falungong being just a first example of the Party's fear of such capacities).
Our future research agenda will have to concentrate not only on whether and how use of the Internet may endanger political rule in non-democratic systems, but also on whether and how such systems might be able to use modern information technologies in order to stabilise the rule of their political leadership groups. The Janus-faced character of information technology means that it may not necessarily lead to imminent dangers for autocratic rule; it may also hold out the prospect of a much more efficient indoctrination of larger parts of the population - angry nationalistic reactions to the bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade perhaps offering just one good example.
For the time being, the CCP is far from being helplessly exposed to an incalculable threat to its rule. Our future research agenda will therefore have to include not only possible destabilisation effects and growing problems of legitimacy, but also the task of observing institutional learning in terms of political adaptation to information technology's challenges (as demonstrated by, for example, the Chinese government's policy of active adaptation to the online world). Whatever the exact outcome of these developments may be in the years ahead, the changes in information technology mean that 'modern times' seem after all to be increasingly difficult times for authoritarian rulers.
Reference
Taubmann, G. (1998), 'A Not-so World Wide Web: The Internet, China and the Challenges to Nondemocratic Rule', Political Communication, 15, 255 - 272.
