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106 Jack Linchuan Qiuquickly proliferating in satellite towns surrounding big cities, where costs arelow and regulations loosely enforced. Urban adolescents often travel in groupsto these locations for online gaming, chatting, and to take part in a new youthsubculture. Business people and migrant workers are also found seeking jobrelatedinformation on the Net.THE INTERNET AND THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE:ENDOGENOUS AND EXOGENOUS CONDITIONSThe Chinese party-state is convinced that the Internet is essential to China’seconomic modernization. Therefore, the state has played a critical role inpromoting and diffusing the new technology. Since 1992, major efforts haveincluded the “Golden Projects” and “Government Online” (Harwit, 1998;Fries, 2000: 121–57). There have been ministerial reshuffles and focused useof foreign capital, 20 all for the purpose of building an advanced national informationinfrastructure. Government spending on the Internet has escalated. TheState Council Informatization Steering Group (SCISC), established in 1996,included representatives from telecom regulators, key national economic planningcommissions, and the People’s Bank of China. 21 With mostly state investmentsand a combination of private funds, foreign loans, and venture capital,China’s fiber-optic network had grown from 286,000 kilometers in 1995 to1.25 million kilometers in 2000, forming a web of “eight horizontals and eightverticals (bahengbazong)” that covers most of the country. 22Beijing, in most of its economic policy-making, is emulating the developmentalstate model identified by Chalmers Johnson (1982, 1995) and definedby Manuel Castells in the East Asian context as a governance structure whoselegitimacy resides in “its ability to promote and sustain development, understandingby development the combination of steady high rates of economicgrowth and structural change in the productive system” (Castells, 1998: 276).In the domain of the Internet, like the earlier processes of industrialization inneighboring East Asian “tigers,” the Chinese enthusiasm for information technologyshould be understood as resulting from “the politics of survival”(Castells, 1998: 278). Internet expansion is part of an explicit effort to rebuildthe nation via the acquisition of technological excellence. The early 1990s wasa difficult time for Chinese leaders because of the conservative backlashfollowing Tiananmen, continued problems in the state-owned sector, a plungein international trade and foreign investment due to US-led sanctions, and,most important, the collapse of the Soviet Union which foreclosed any lingeringidea of another world system. Although Deng Xiaoping issued a rallyingcall in 1992 in his famous Southern Tour Speeches, confirming to the nationand the world the continuation of China’s reform and opening-up policy