The relationship between digital media and authoritarian rule in China is intriguing.1 In this book, I have aimed to look at the topic from a distinctive perspective with several counterintuitive arguments. The struggle over online expression is both a censorship game and a form of discourse competition. In the censorship game, the Chinese Party-state, intermediary actors, and netizens constantly engage each other in numerous boundary-spanning battles that define the taboo zones, gray zones, and free zones of online expression. In the discourse competition, all actors play within the boundaries prescribed by the state, but the struggle centers not so much on what is expressed, but on how information is effectively conveyed, spread, and manipulated. It is clear that the struggle is not simply one between the authoritarian state and digitally empowered social forces. The boundaries and landscape of online expression are shaped by internal fragmentation within the Party-state, the diverse capacities and agency of intermediary actors, and the heterogeneity of netizen groups. Such a pluralized terrain of online politics complicates the apparent authoritarian resilience in the digital age and at the same time undermines any technological-deterministic view of a democratizing Internet.
What I hope sets this book apart from current studies on Internet politics in China are two significant features. First, it examines several understudied but crucial elements in the struggle over online expression in China. The role of forum administrators in mediating state–society interaction online, for instance, is often overlooked. Considering that Facebook and Twitter facilitated mobilization in the Arab Spring, the state’s control over intermediary actors may have contributed to authoritarian resilience in China, and probably beyond (for example, in Russia).2 The phenomenon of the fifty-cent army, despite frequent mentions in Western media, is rarely studied. An analysis of this phenomenon provides an opportunity to evaluate state adaptation in the digital era and examine the internal dynamics of China’s fragmented authoritarian regime. Moreover, the book explores the pluralization of online expression by studying the voluntary fifty-cent army. Freer online expression is not only helping to erode state norms, but also—counterintuitively—discounting the impact of regime critics by creating their opponents.
Second, this book provides a fresh and provocative explanation of authoritarian resilience in the digital age. Current studies either suggest a “mutual empowerment” situation that strengthens both the state and society3 or imply an omnipotent state capable of optimally adapting to harness the benefits of free expression without risking overthrow.4 I have aimed to debunk the myth of state adaptation and problematize state capacity by demonstrating that the state’s efforts to shape online expression are at best quasi-successful. The fact that the Chinese authoritarian regime survives, and the fact that Arab Spring countries fell despite serious control efforts,5 together suggest that state adaptability alone is likely neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for authoritarian resilience. But ineffective state control does not automatically lead to democratization. Regime critics in China have yet to win the hearts and minds of netizens. In other words, authoritarianism can coexist with relatively free expression provided that the regime still enjoys popular support and/or that those criticizing the regime are popularly discredited, as in the cases of China and Russia.
AUTHORITARIAN RESILIENCE IN THE DIGITAL AGE
The central question of this book is how the Chinese authoritarian regime remains resilient despite the profound sociopolitical challenges brought about by the Internet. The Chinese Party-state was quite successful adapting itself to new challenges before the Internet age.6 Since the death of Mao and the end of the devastating Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party has undertaken a fundamental socioeconomic reformation7 and shifted its primary source of legitimacy from communist ideology and revolutionary rhetoric to economic development and improved governance.8 The Party-state has also transformed itself politically in the reform era since 1978.9 In addition to routinizing leadership change and improving cadre management, the Party has embraced institutional and organizational adaptations such as legal reforms, grassroots elections, and the introduction of intra-party democracy.10 Moreover, contentious politics scholars find that the Chinese Party-state has significantly enhanced its capacity to suppress and defuse popular unrest,11 not only to preserve social stability,12 but also to maintain an image of benevolent and responsive authoritarianism.13 As the “rightful resistance” framework suggests, the Party-state actually has managed to reinforce its rule and legitimacy by accommodating or even encouraging citizen complaints targeting local officials based on state-sanctioned claims, channels, and strategies.14 In this way, popular contention becomes “constructive noncompliance.”15
However, some scholars question the resilience of China’s authoritarian rule.16 Even former champions of the idea, such as the known Chinese politics experts Andrew Nathan and David Shambaugh, have somewhat shifted their view. In 2009, the Journal of Democracy published a special issue on the challenges facing the Party-state since Tiananmen. In his concluding essay to the collection, Nathan argued that the Party-state suffers from a fundamental legitimacy deficit, and thus a robust plurality of disaffected citizens, a catalytic event, and a leadership split may together contribute to a regime transition.17 In a March 2015 Wall Street Journal article, David Shambaugh asserted that “the endgame of communist rule in China has begun, and Xi Jinping’s ruthless measures are only bringing the country closer to a breaking point.”18 This claim echoes research by Cheng Li, another long-term observer of elite politics in China. After identifying the major tensions within the regime, including nepotism, rampant corruption, growing oligarchic power, and factional struggle, Li concludes that while China as a nation may be resilient, the Party-state’s capacity and legitimacy are fragile and perhaps even in the midst of a serious decline.19
Existing studies suggest two inherently conflicting but both well-reasoned images of the Chinese authoritarian regime. One image depicts the regime as resilient with a strong capacity to control its population and adapt to new challenges. Along this line, it is predicted that “China will continue to rise, not fade. Its leaders will consolidate the one-party model and, in the process, challenge the West’s smug certainty about political development and the inevitable march toward electoral democracy.”20 The other image depicts the regime as fragile, facing increasing challenges with declining and degenerating capacity. From this angle, the scholar Yasheng Huang states that China faces a “democratize-or-die” situation, and “what has held China back is not any lack of demand for democracy, but a lack of supply.”21 Both perspectives provide valuable insights into China’s authoritarian rule, its strengths and weaknesses, and its democratic prospects. However, what is missing in the debate is a closer examination of state capacity in relation to the challenges faced by the state and a subtler reflection on the nature of those challenges.
Many challenges have been brought about by the Internet, and the Party-state’s agility in adapting to digital challenges is impressive. Yet, the state’s strong capacity is a mismatch to the new tasks of information control and manipulation, rendering its adaptive efforts ineffective and even counterproductive. In other words, state adaptability is insufficient to explain resilient authoritarianism, at least in the Chinese case. In this regard, the real question is not how the state has successfully tamed the Internet, but why the Internet has so far failed to scuttle authoritarian rule in China, as many had expected. It turns out that the pluralization of online expression has ironically contributed to authoritarian resilience. The identity anxiety and animosity among netizens in online interactions have provided room for “state allies” such as nationalistic netizens and the voluntary fifty-cent army to sustain pro-regime discourses, who, in turn, have helped convert and neutralize regime criticism.
Strong State, Mismatched Capacity
The expansion of the Internet has broken down the state’s monopoly over the media, which has brought about two broad empowering effects on particular threats to the Chinese Party-state, namely facilitating collective mobilization and spreading general criticism.22 The first empowering effect is primarily concerned with expanding the political opening and enriching the mobilization resources that allow citizens to more actively participate in sociopolitical activities and to resist authoritarian rule. But as contentious politics scholars suggest, the Chinese Party-state has rich experience and sufficient capacity to deal with collective mobilization.23 Moreover, online mobilization may have actually made it easier for the state both to observe and interfere with citizen activism.24 This was precisely why the police force was ready when China’s pro-democracy “Jasmine Revolution” took place.
The second empowering effect is essentially an ideational and cultural war, or what can be considered a norms competition.25 The Party-state, no matter how resilient it once was, must now “account for the anomalies between its view of events and the public’s”26 and combat dissenting discourses for citizens’ hearts and minds. This is more detrimental for the Party-state, as the collapse of the Soviet Union started with a similar challenge. It was the “intellectual and moral quest for self-respect and pride that, beginning with a merciless moral scrutiny of the country’s past and present,” quickly “hollowed out the mighty Soviet state, deprived it of legitimacy, and turned it into a burned-out shell that crumbled in August 1991.”27
The Chinese Party-state has attempted to shape online expression through massive censorship and innovative PR tactics such as astroturfing, as discussed in chapters 2 and 5, respectively. How the state has implemented such adaptations not only demonstrates the regime’s adaptability, but also provides as an excellent opportunity to assess its capacity. The Party-state’s censorship and manipulation efforts confirm its formidable despotic and infrastructural power to regulate and control intermediary actors as well as to mute and punish dissidents and deviant netizens. In particular, with its organizational capacity, the Party-state has been able to mobilize tens of thousands of state agents at different levels in different sectors to enforce the daunting tasks of censorship and astroturfing. Take astroturfing as an example. Initially a local innovation, this tactic has now been incorporated into the state’s routine propaganda work, particularly in the Xi Jinping era. Through apparatuses such as the propaganda system and the Chinese Communist Youth League—the latter alone controls an army of at least 350,000 Internet propagandists and 10.5 million youth Internet civilized volunteers—the Party-state can potentially flood cyberspace with manufactured pro-regime content at any time.28 In fact, according to King, Pan, and Roberts, the state fabricates an estimated 448 million posts every year.29
But there is a mismatch between the state’s capacity and the challenges it faces in the digital age. The hard-to-control features of online expression—anonymity, creativity, and the volume of content—have made censorship an almost impossible mission. The censorship system, which relies exclusively on taboo-word filtering and intermediary actors, is ill equipped to counter creative expression. Using creative and playful tactics, regime critics and ordinary netizens have successfully circumvented state censorship and, at the same time, turned it into a target of online activism. In discourse competition, persuasive power builds on expressive, interactive, and cultural qualities, none of which is a strength of the Party-state. After all, the state does not speak the cyber-language, nor can it full-heartedly embrace popular cyber-culture or cyber-norms. Even when it attempts to incorporate popular expressive formats or to exploit the anonymity of online expression, its innovations often prove ineffective, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5.
The Party-state has encountered tremendous difficulty in translating its offline power into effective control over the online world. Through its massive apparatus, the state has mobilized sizable institutional, organizational, administrative, and technical resources to build the most sophisticated censorship system in the world. But the system suffers from the state’s internal fragmentation, which is driven by conflicts of interest, the division of labor among bureaucratic responsibilities, and intra-party ideological discrepancies. In particular, while the central state appears to be more concerned with the regime’s overall legitimacy, local authorities often use censorship to cover up their own scandals and to maintain their own images. Similarly, its strong organizational capacity has enabled the state to mobilize the massive fifty-cent army. However, the state agents undertaking the army’s delegated tasks are often not properly motivated or skilled enough to engage in and guide online discussion. Moreover, local authorities often expose the supposedly covert force as an achievement of their propaganda work. Apparently, for local officials, the priority is not to persuade netizens, but to demonstrate competence to their superiors. In other words, the state’s thought work apparatus, including the propaganda system and the Chinese Communist Youth League, are no longer effective tools of ideological indoctrination. They have increasingly become vehicles through which state agents seek promotion and rewards in exchange for political loyalty, which explains the “nauseating displays of loyalty” characteristic of local state agencies.30
The mismatch between the state’s capacity and the challenges it faces suggests that adaptations by the Chinese Party-state thus far are not optimal for authoritarian resilience. In fact, the state’s control and manipulation efforts may even have exacerbated the regime’s legitimacy and governance crises. First, state censorship provokes digital contention and substantiates criticism of regime repressiveness. In particular, rigid and arbitrary censorship often disturbs communications that are not politically sensitive at all. Such “collateral casualties” have resulted numerous complaints among netizens on Internet forums, blogs, microblogs, and other social media platforms, thus politicizing and alienating many otherwise indifferent netizens. Even innovative PR tactics like astroturfing by the fifty-cent army can backfire. Thanks to the state’s attempt to manipulate popular opinion, any voice supporting the government now becomes dubious. Indeed, the cases of netizens being labeled as the fifty-cent army and the “grass mud horse” fighting the “river crab” are vivid examples of how state censorship and opinion manipulation efforts have incensed netizens and fed online contention.
The Party-state’s control over online expression also jeopardizes its relationship with IT business entrepreneurs. Internet service providers and other intermediary actors, who are delegated censorship responsibilities, play a pivotal role in online content control. As chapter 3 showed, intermediary actors generally demonstrate “discontented compliance” toward censorship, which implies a pattern of state–business relations different from what is depicted in the literature. Earlier studies suggested a rosy picture of mutual dependence between the Party-state and business: The Party-state promotes business, as economic development has become its source of legitimacy, while business elites are closely tied to and dependent on the current regime both economically and politically, thus maintaining the status quo or even allying with the authoritarian state.31 The scenario is different in the censorship system. State censorship is often at odds with business interests (and those of other intermediary actors) because it increases operational costs, political risks, and market uncertainty. Thus, the compliance of intermediary actors is less a voluntary choice than the result of a fear of being punished.
By controlling and manipulating the flow of information online, the Chinese Party-state has also impaired its capacity to respond to citizen complaints and improve governance. As in village elections and rightful resistance,32 online expression can serve as a safety valve,33 provide a channel for policy feedback,34 and help discipline local agents.35 However, as state censorship clearly prioritizes repressing online expression over responding to popular demands,36 it prevents the Party-state from turning online citizen complaints into “constructive noncompliance,” which thus hurts its image as a benevolent, responsive regime. Likewise, the deployment of the fifty-cent army distorts the policy-feedback function of online expression; given the state’s internal fragmentation and local officials’ priority of pleasing their superiors, top officialdom may have difficulty distinguishing manufactured expression from genuine opinions from ordinary citizens.
What is particularly worth highlighting is that state control may disable the fire-alarm function of online expression and weaken its capacity to discipline local agents by delegating too much power to local authorities. Local officials have been trying their best to suppress citizen complaints, to cover up local scandals, and to please their superiors. State censorship and online opinion manipulation efforts provide them with convenient tools to do so. In particular, since local authorities mostly target tangible grievances, which tend to provoke citizens’ wrath more than abstract issues, their control efforts are ultimately detrimental to regime legitimacy and social stability. Considering that tangible grievances can be addressed relatively easily by accommodating limited demands and disciplining local officials, local control initiatives only decrease citizens’ trust in both the local officialdom and the regime as whole. After all, allowing local governments to block online petitioning indicates the central government’s failure, or even worse, its lack of intention, to discipline local agents. And, as China scholars have discovered, trust in the central government’s intention to side with citizens and punish deviant local cadres is critical for the regime’s survival.37
Empowering Expression, Miscalculated Threat
The Internet, with its inherently uncontrollable characteristics, has been thought to empower social actors to challenge authoritarian regimes. Though social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook indeed played a crucial role in the Arab Spring, optimism about the Internet’s political impact is challenged by cases such as Singapore and China. In fact, though observers find the new technology empowering as a tool for public expression, social connection, and collective mobilization in China, expectations for its democratizing effects have not played out. Existing studies offer different explanations: The state has achieved sufficient control over the Internet;38 cyberspace is a forum only for everyday resistance, which slowly expands the public sphere and transforms norms;39 and the Internet has contributed to liberalization, but not democratization.40 I argue that we should consider an alternative explanation: The struggle over online expression is not a two-player game between the state and society. Rather, to assess the Internet’s empowerment effects, we need to understand online politics in a broader sense, acknowledge the diversity of social actors, and examine how society is empowered.
Though the Internet has undoubtedly provided opportunities for political activism, not all of the population using the Internet may be politicized. It is inappropriate to assume that all Chinese netizens are preoccupied with resisting the authoritarian regime. As Mark Priors argues, “lack of motivation, not lack of skills or resources,” may be the main obstacle to active political participation in an environment characterized by a great deal of choice.41 Indeed, scholars find that “political content comprises only an extremely tiny portion of China’s cyber-cacophony,”42 and “the Chinese Internet is more a playground for leisure, socializing, and commerce than a hotbed of political activism.”43 The analysis of pop activism in chapter 4 confirms such findings to a large extent by revealing apolitical motivations in online expression and online activism, as well as a fusion of popular entertainment with politics. In short, one should neither dismiss apolitical uses of the Internet, nor overestimate the political impact of online activism.
Moreover, social actors may be empowered to engage in politics, but not necessarily in ways or to an extent that will bring about democratizing effects. Many observers argue that freer online expression has contributed to the rise of a public sphere44 in which citizens can express opinions and deliberate public affairs despite state constraints, which in turn erodes the Party-state’s legitimacy. However, the conception of the public sphere in these studies is often imperfect, emphasizing its lack of control rather than its deliberative features. In fact, online experience may well have increased cynicism among netizens, since expressions of dissatisfaction or political engagement are often restricted to cyberspace, where there are no tangible implications. This is why netizens often refer to online dissenters in a negative sense as “keyboard freedom fighters.”45 They argue against investing too much into online debates because “you will only lose if you are serious” (renzhen ni jiu shu le, 认真你就输了). Moreover, labeling wars among netizen groups and the polarization of ideas witnessed in online discussions suggest that Chinese cyberspace is far from being a public sphere characterized by rational debate.46 Instead, it is highly fragmented, with a number of relatively independent and isolated communities that sustain widely different discourses, both civil and uncivil.
Since netizens go online for a range of purposes, with varying concerns and prior beliefs, any theoretical framework that focuses exclusively on the state–society interaction is inadequate to fully capture the dynamics of online politics. As this book has shown, some netizens have even developed a particular identity that leads them to attack regime critics and defend the authoritarian regime. In other words, the discourse competition in cyberspace is not only fought between “young subaltern norms” and “state norms,”47 but also among various ideational camps among netizens. This perspective, though quite novel in the field of Internet politics, is in accordance with scholarship on Chinese politics: Despite its legitimacy deficit, the Party-state still enjoys considerable popular support. In fact, survey studies repeatedly reveal that the Chinese Party-state enjoys one of the highest degrees of political support in the world.48
It is quite intriguing that many netizens support or passively tolerate a regime that is nondemocratic and suppressive. According to Johan Lagerkvist, there are two possible explanations for Chinese citizens’ tacit acquiescence to state control of freedom of expression: They may hold “private truths” while telling “public lies” by repeating official discourse, or they may be seeking psychological coherence to rationalize the current political status quo.49 Yet, the backlash against regime critics and the rise of the voluntary fifty-cent army suggest that Chinese netizens’ support of the regime can also be genuine and rational. Indeed, netizens may side with the state in discourse competition for nationalistic causes. Though nationalist activists and intellectuals may have “espoused democracy as a means to defending the nationalist interest,”50 popular nationalism in China today is often positioned against democracy and democratization. Why? Chapter 6 showed that it is not that the state has successfully co-opted nationalism. Rather, it is because regime critics, including democratic activists, pro-liberal media professionals and intellectuals, and Western powers have lost their appeal among nationalistic netizens. Given such a nationalistic framing, dissenting expression is then not about defending the citizenry against the repressive state, but about patriotic netizens allying with the state against subversive actors.
Similarly, the voluntary fifty-cent army is not a group of true believers in the Party-state or communism. They harbor their own critiques of the regime but choose to defend it because they have doubts about the intentions and competence of regime critics. These netizens acknowledge the historical role of the Communist revolution and the Party-state, and, more importantly, they trust the state’s intentions and capacity to cope with current governance and development problems. They believe China needs a strong government to continue the country’s revival and that a transition will not solve all problems, but instead may cause some to worsen or possibly lead to social turmoil. In contrast, they see regime critics as having an overly hypercritical “anti-establishment” tendency when criticizing the government, which renders their criticism meaningless or even harmful.51 In their eyes, it is unfair to attribute all social ills to the regime, and regime critics’ call for regime transition is considered morally dubious, factually slippery, and logically flawed. They question regime critics’ ability to establish and run the democratic government they promise. They also see regime critics as being impatient and intolerant of netizens who disagree with them. In fact, some have claimed that they decided to join the voluntary fifty-cent army because they got sick of regime critics.
The voluntary fifty-cent army phenomenon suggests that though authoritarian regimes may suffer from a legitimacy deficit, fighting autocrats does not automatically win the hearts and minds of the people. In China, regime critics have yet to provide the people with a viable alternative to the current regime. Such a depiction is not entirely unfounded, as democratic activist organizations, such as the Federation for a Democratic China (FDC), suffer from a number of internal plagues. As the veteran sinologist Jean-Philippe Béja has insightfully pointed out,
Finding a basis for cooperation proved difficult, however, and the FDC’s status as an exile group unavoidably left it cut off from ground-level Chinese realities. Debates among its members were abstract and had no impact on developments in China. Competition for the support of foreign political forces provoked fierce inner struggles, and the dream of the emergence of a new Sun Yat-sen evaporated…. The exiles’ greatest achievements have been to help keep the memory of the 1989 movement alive and to inform foreign governments, publics, and media outlets about violations of human rights in China.52
In sum, despite the repression of the authoritarian state, online expression has empowered Chinese citizens to contest authoritarian rule in a number of ways. In particular, freer online expression has challenged the state’s monopoly over information and, ultimately, its ideational leadership. Some studies even claim that the state has already lost the war of position in cyberspace.53 However, the state’s loss is not regime critics’ gain. Those attempting to bring democracy to China via online expression have thus far failed to convince the populace that democratic change would be an improvement. For many netizens, the risks and uncertainties of regime transition far outweigh its potential benefits. They worry about a possible decline in social stability, economic growth, and national security, as well as the possibility of achieving a nonfunctional democracy. Such fears, together with netizens’ suspicion of the intention and credibility of regime critics, explain why the erosion of state legitimacy—as observed by many scholars54—has thus far failed to move China toward inclusive democracy. In this sense, the pluralization of online expression has worked to the advantage of the Chinese authoritarian regime.
THE INTERNET AS A CHALLENGE OR AN OPPORTUNITY
The Chinese Party-state faces two distinct challenges or crises. The first challenge, which might be called a legitimacy crisis, calls into question the right of the Party-state to rule its population. The regime’s image as a “people’s republic” and socialist state collapsed after it crushed the democratic movement of 1989, and its ideological foundation, communism, has been eroded by the ever-expanding market economy and proliferation of liberal democratic values.55 In Patricia Thornton’s words, China, like all other nondemocracies, “suffers from a birth defect that it cannot cure: the fact that an alternative form of government is by common consent more legitimate.”56
But, in many cases, Chinese citizens do not directly question the Party-state’s right to rule. They instead contest how the state and its agents exercise power in specific cases and seek immediate remedies to their grievances. This explains why popular unrest in China has been highly localized and compartmentalized, with “hardly any sign of mobilization that transcends class or regional lines.”57 This second challenge, which might be called a governance crisis, demands that the state improve its provision of services and address social ills. There can be many reasons why citizens choose not to negate the regime’s legitimacy entirely: Rapid economic and sociopolitical developments in the reform era have helped the regime to accumulate some performance-based legitimacy, and focusing on specific issues rather than pursuing fundamental regime change may be more effective for citizens looking to address issues of immediate concern. Even political dissidents may choose to prioritize governance deficits and addressable problems as entry points for bigger political changes. For instance, Huang Qi, a human rights activist and the creator of the “June 4 Heavenly Web” website (Liusi Tianwang, 六四天网; www.64tianwang.com/), once commented,
I think it has to start with protecting ordinary people’s rights to petition and oppose corruption without being arrested. If that can happen then it’s really a significant improvement. You can oppose the Communist Party, but someone will rule the country—and even if they call themselves the “Democracy Party,” without a change in structures it’ll be the same…. If all we do is call out “down with the Communist Party” or whatever slogan you want, it isn’t as good as actually doing something.58
The distinction between the challenges of governance and legitimacy is crucial to an accurate assessment of the impact of online expression on the authoritarian regime. With most citizens more concerned with governance deficits than regime legitimacy,59 the authoritarian state finds it more essential to demonstrate its ability and intent to solve governance problems than to limit criticism or engage in debates about its own legitimacy.
My findings suggest that the Chinese Party-state has been overreacting to online expression. Though online criticism sometimes challenges the regime’s legitimacy, it is far from effective in mobilizing a revolution. The Internet first and foremost serves as safety valve that allows netizens to vent their anger concerning both personal and social grievances. In this regard, state censorship has done more harm than good to the regime’s resilience, and reducing censorship would not be a disaster for the regime. In particular, less, but more accurate, censorship may lead to less critical, more supportive voices in cyberspace. After all, censorship has been the major source of grievance for many apolitical netizens and intermediary actors, and reducing it would certainly alleviate such complaints. Further, netizens who still trust the regime will be able to defend it with more confidence. After all, state censorship has effectively muted supportive voices, as it both justifies resistance to and dampens supporters’ enthusiasm for the regime. In fact, rigid state censorship has often resulted in the indiscriminate elimination of both supportive and challenging voices. The irony—that the regime does not allow netizens to defend it—is disheartening for regime supporters. As Hu Ping, editor in chief of the New York–based dissident magazine Beijing Spring, has commented,
Currently, the Chinese Communist Party is suppressing voices from both liberals and leftists and Maoists. Under such a circumstance, it is ridiculous for someone who perceives himself as a leftist, whose voice [is] suppressed, to defend the repressive regime.60
Instead of censorship, the Party-state could have used freer online expression as an opportunity to improve its governance. As David Shambaugh points out, the Chinese Party-state “is in the simultaneous state of atrophy and adaptation.”61 The survival of the regime to a large extent depends on whether its adaptations will outpace its atrophy. Systematic political reform will of course be crucial,62 but so will the state’s efforts to address specific governance deficits. The Internet and other new communication technologies can be convenient tools for the state. Of late, it appears the state may be recognizing this point by signaling its intention to improve government efficiency, transparency, accountability, and responsiveness by taking advantage of the Internet.63 Recent speeches by top leaders, the “government online project,” various local e-government trials, and efforts to engage citizens on popular social media platforms all seem to point, at least generally, in this direction.64
But more serious action needs to be taken, particularly in terms of responding to popular demands related to specific governance issues. Although Premier Wen Jiabao has urged “creat[ing] conditions that allow the people to criticize and supervise the government,”65 heavy-handed censorship and punishment of outspoken netizens make it hard for citizens to believe the government’s sincerity. Even if the state is still primarily concerned with stability and would prefer to continue censoring the web, it needs to tolerate complaints about governance issues and show its commitment to solving such problems by responding to netizens rather than habitually covering problems up.
CHINA IN THE WORLD
Findings in China certainly have broader implications when put in a comparative context. Authoritarian and illiberal regimes across the globe have adapted to the digital era and employed control tactics highly similar to those of China.66 In addition to censorship, regimes such as those of Kenya, Russia, Syria, Turkey, and Venezuela have all deployed their own versions of the fifty-cent army.67 A study on China—a most-likely case of strong state and authoritarianism—could thus lead to a better understanding of these cases, as well as digital authoritarianism in general, by providing a theoretical framework that could be adapted to similar situations. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that although Russian government-sponsored trolls are more dedicated, more professional, and better paid than Internet commentators in China, they have an equal lack of motivation, morale, and skill in implementing their tasks.68 Similarly, the rise of spontaneous regime-defenders in China echoes studies on Putin’s popularity and its political implications in Russia,69 highlighting the necessity of examining the competing beliefs, values, and identities in authoritarian regimes.
Moreover, the finding that online expression has done more to delegitimize the regime than to spread civic and democratic norms in China may contribute to the literature on democratization. In particular, it provides a possible explanation for the resurgence of authoritarianism in some Arab Spring countries, as well as in many other countries that have experienced a democratic transition yet have failed to consolidate the new democratic regime.70 After all, the pluralization of online discourses is as much a sign of authoritarian pullback as the erosion of social trust or social capital, which is crucial for democracy.71 In other words, the findings presented in this book imply that certain problems that plague new democracies may relate to the legacy of the liberalization process rather than authoritarian rule.72 For democratic activists anywhere, including those in China, this is a reminder that construction (of civic norms and democratic values) is at least as important as destruction (of state norms) in order to achieve an inclusive democracy.