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The Internet in China 101power of technology). The appeal of techno-nationalism greatly intensifiedafter the communist takeover in 1949 when fanatical modernization projectssuch as the Great Leap Forward were implemented, emphasizing technologyand engineering sectors. Of these attempts, many were too idealistic, poorlyplanned, and followed by disastrous consequences (Yang, 1998; Shapiro,2001). Still, the PRC became a nuclear power in 1964, launched its first satellitein 1970, and sent a man into space in 2003.Just as Maoist cadres aspired to emulate Soviet industrial statism, Chineseofficials since the 1990s have been fully engaged in building a Chinese informationsociety (Hachigian, 2001). Proponents of China’s Internet often quoteformer President Jiang Zemin (a former Minister of the Electronics Industry),who said “Each of the Four Modernizations (of agriculture, industry, education,and the military) has to depend on informatization.” 10 While addressingthe Sixteenth National Congress of the CCP, Jiang also emphasized the needto “prioritize the information industry, and widely apply information technologiesin economic and social domains.” 11 Unlike the failed Maoist GreatLeap Forward, this campaign, centered on the Internet, has succeeded bymeasures of growth indicators, sustainability (so far), and the capacity of theChinese state to boost the new economy via investment, purchase, assistancein research and development, and the acquisition of foreign capital. China’ssuccesses are comparable to the developmental state model practiced in Japanand East Asian “tiger” economies for decades (Johnson, 1982, 1995; Castells,1996: 172–90). However, China’s advantage as a latecomer, its enormousmarket potential, and its relative independence from the capitalist worldsystem enabled it to limit the damage of the Asian financial crisis as well asthe global downturn in hi-tech industries.The historical legacy and state sponsorship being the same, China’s Internetwould have developed differently had it occurred in the 1980s beforeTiananmen, before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and DengXiaoping’s call for all-out marketization in 1992 (Baum, 1994:119–368). Theoverlapping aftermath of these three interconnected events led to a fundamentalparadox that characterizes contemporary Chinese society in general and thesocial construction of the Internet in particular: state agencies take new technologiesas a means to improve people’s living standards but not citizen participation.In short, China tries to reap economic benefits, while sustaining andreinforcing the political status quo. The policy-makers’ objective is to castcomputer networks primarily in the economic domain. 12 Nonetheless the posthocreaction of Chinese authorities to the many social, economic, and politicalchallenges they face is becoming a major point of reference for theconfiguration of national information infrastructures in authoritarian countriesworldwide (Kalathil and Boas, 2003).That the party-state attempts to construct the new technology as an entirely