Untitled - socium.ge

The Internet in China 107(Baum, 1994: 341–68), the rhetoric was still emerging. It was not just a coincidencethat Beijing officials were mesmerized by the hype of the InformationSuperhighway, whose Chinese version might induce sustainable development,strengthen national pride, and integrate China into the global economy.The success story of the building of an Internet infrastructure in Chinashould be told cautiously. Achievements in network construction since themid-1990s are not a result of pro-Internet policies alone. They also arise froma host of institutional legacies and sociohistorical factors. The still centralizednature of national-level economic planning contributes to organizational efficiencyin putting together a new technocratic state apparatus and mustering aformidable amount of resources. Moreover, the Internet boom is also the resultof several decades of concentration in basic science and engineering research,which has been systematically furthered since 1978 (Bianchi et al., 1988;IDRC/SSTC, 1997).Two other factors contributed to the shaping of China’s Internet. First, thesize and complexity of China made it more difficult for the state to implementpolicy than it was for the neighboring “tiger” economies, particularly at thelocal level, where everyday decision-making depends on “bureaucratic entrepreneurs”(Hsing, 1998) who have intricate ties to Chinese business networksthat extend beyond the Chinese border. The tendency of local state authoritiesto form “local state corporatism” (Oi, 1995) or “quasi-autonomous localeconomic empires” (Baum and Schevchenko, 1999) has been an essentialfactor for Internet projects in South China’s Pearl River Delta. 23 For example,in Nanhai, Guangdong Province, which hosts several national e-governmentmodel projects, the city government advocated the Internet as the key toeconomic growth, global competitiveness, and even an increase in local propertyvalue. The city invested heavily to connect all villages in Nanhai via fiberopticsand set up touch-screen computers in the main office of everyadministrative village. Similar enthusiasm was evident in the Taijiang Districtof Fuzhou City, Fujian Province (Damm, 2003), but was absent in other citiesof the Pearl River Delta. This disparity reflects suspicion toward the informationalmodel of modernization that characterizes most Chinese localities,where traditional industrialism holds as a more affordable route to economicgrowth. Thus, although informationalism, strongly advocated by the centralgovernment, has gained strongholds at the local level, the Internet is not yetuniversally recognized as an indispensable tool of governance and business inless-developed regions or localities with concentrated vested interest in agricultureand traditional industries.While engaging in its project of national reinvigoration, the Chinese developmentalstate remains highly dependent on the global space of flows, technologically,financially, and in terms of personnel. Hardware and softwaretransfers from Western countries, some of dubious legality, have been critical