Freedom of Information Exchange in the Secret State

In 2000, the Politburo determined that the information society would now become a primary goal of policy (Jiang 2010). The intent was to use information technology to achieve a ‘leap forward’ in social productivity. The Politburo started first to upgrade the economic information analysis assets that Deng Xiaoping had set his sights on back in 1984 when he linked the goal of informatization to the four modernizations. In January 2000, the MII officially approved a network called the China International Economy and Trade Net (CIETnet). In March, the Securities Regulatory Commission issued interim measures for online management of securities. In June, the China Electronic Commerce Association was created and in July the Enterprise Online project was set up (CNNIC 2013). The private sector was no longer a passive bystander. Sina.com, owned by a company registered in the United States, made an initial public offering through the New York Stock Exchange (followed by similar offerings by Sohu and Netease the same year). A private internet news consortium, Qianlong, was set up. The first Chinese search engine on the mainland, Baidu, was set up by private investors, led by two Chinese nationals returning from IT development work in the United States.

By 2000, the leaders of China were facing a progressive weakening of the monopoly over information dissemination they had worked so hard to nurture, and which they saw as central to their hold on power. As they took stock of this unfamiliar terrain, they could see that within ten years or so China would have more internet users than any other country and more internet users than the United States has people. The leaders also knew that quantitative measures of growth in hardware and platforms were in fact only a raw indicator of the trends in information exchange. The more staggering figures for a leadership intent on information control were those for the amount of new data created each day. For example, by 2000, the country's mobile phone users (about 100 million) were already sending around ten billion short messages in one year (Dai 2002).

One test of the leaders’ commitment to exchange of information in 2000 was their approach at the time to FOI and open government. They were only prepared to take a baby step, with the decision to promote ‘openness in government’ at the township level. This came after a move in 1998 for the village level. (There are five levels of government in China below the national level, in descending hierarchy: province or municipality with provincial status, prefecture, county, township and village.) Both open government measures (village and township) were understood as promoting transparency in the interests of grassroots democracy. But the openness did not eventuate. The first township (in fact the first administrative unit in the entire country) to practise open government by releasing full budget details (Baimiao township in Sichuan province) did so only in 2010 (Xiao 2012). Few have followed. Another small step towards open government occurred in 2000 with provisions in a new law on legislation that set in place, in principle at least, a commitment to public consultation on draft laws. This has never been consistently consummated in practice either, but has become reasonably well established as a principle of legislative practice in China. The idea of an FOI system in China, where citizens could request government-held information, was beginning to take hold then as well. The first public research on FOI legislation for China had been done in 1999 at the behest of the Law Institute in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), in a project designed to help the State Secrets Bureau understand the limits of the evolving interest of high-level political leaders in more transparency (Xiao 2012).

Yet, in spite of these signs of new openness, the government still sought to retain a monopoly on the dominant news messages and leading information indicators about public life at the national level. In 2000, a number of dedicated, government-owned news websites appeared for the first time: people.com.cn, xinhuanet, china.com.cn, CCTV.com, CRI Online, China Daily and China Youth International (Wacker 2003). Presumably the ideological departments and public security agencies were also feeling less than satisfied with their ability to compete. The government-owned media were (and are still) ideological mouthpieces of the CCP.

The CCP upgraded the SILG in 2001 and put it under the premier, instead of a vice-premier. This body had from its founding in 1996 been a largely economic and technocratic organization, intended to oversee development of the information economy. Now that the goal had become one of an information society (as opposed to merely an information economy), there was a new need to politicize this high-level policy group. The SILG has been supported for routine matters by the State Council Informatization Office (SCITO). Though the SCITO had a powerful hand to play in areas like e-government or technical administration of the internet, it could not move on more sensitive issues without CCP and MPS control. SCITO policy analysis was supported by the Advisory Committee for State Informatization (ACSI), set up initially with three departments in its secretariat (policy, application and security). The ACSI provided the clearing house for all policy initiatives on their way into the SILG for approval and on their way out for implementation.

The following two years saw a further dramatic step-up in leadership policy settings to promote the information environment. Several individual agencies had begun issuing measures on making more administrative information public. At that time, similar national-level provisions had been drafted by the SILG, but not promulgated (Qu 2010).The leaders obviously could not agree that they wanted to go very far with more public access. At this very time, the ambition for transparency that underpinned an information society was held up to some ridicule among the Chinese public because of a government cover-up in 2002 and 2003 of the outbreak of the epidemic disease severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

In one of the earliest moves by China towards open accountable government at the national level, the State Council in 2003 made its first release ever of a national audit report, unleashing an audit storm over the next year or two that evoked a massive amount of public interest. The audit report was held up by the government as an exercise in a new type of democratic supervision of government (Ling 2005). As a result of the findings, six officials of ministerial rank were charged with fraud-related offences and later convicted. Audits have continued to gain in stature and political significance in China as a form of government openness and as a vehicle for public scrutiny of official malfeasance and administrative effectiveness.

In 2004, the Politburo approved the first policy measures dedicated exclusively to the promotion of more rapid development of information resources that would inform policy decisions and help develop private sector economic interests (Qu 2010). Key elements of the policy included development of government information resources and mechanisms, developing public interest services, providing commercial information services for marketing, and improving the security environment. It emphasized three principles: transparency, sharing of information, and adding value in an economic sense (especially through private sector development).

Around this time, CCP leaders began to expound the concept of e-democracy with more frequency. This is the idea that public knowledge and public criticism of government policy through the internet are healthy and represent a new form of democracy. The idea was being held up by key leaders as the main plank of political reform being pursued by the CCP: that of consultative government and public supervision. They were presenting the new information freedom (opportunities for the public to react to government policies through the internet) as socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics. With the concept of e-democracy, the leaders of China were trying to represent the new voice possessed by the Chinese people through the internet as a continuation and deepening of the tradition of consultation embodied in the CPPCC, in place since 1949.

The government continued to monitor the flow of information very carefully while trying to promote its exploitation for economic advance. In 2005, some fourteen ministries and agencies, including Public Security, Information Industry and Commerce, issued regulations on non-profit internet information services. Throughout 2005 and 2006, the government put in place the first measures for the entry of private capital into the ‘cultural industry’, laying out measures for digital radio, TV, films, publications, animation and network games (Qu 2010). The government made progress in setting up nationwide databases in many key areas of policy, including population, natural disasters, patents, environment and traditional Chinese medicine. Internet platforms were being used for distance education, especially at primary and secondary level, and for graduate employment (job seeking). The online gaming industry and digital film and TV production were in full swing.

By 2006, internet platforms to maximize information exchange and social networking on a par with those in the developed countries were all in place and, in most cases, had been for several years. Table 3.1 shows a list of start-up dates.

Table 3.1: Start-up dates for public Chinese internet platforms, 2000 onwards

Brand name	Platform type	Year
Baidu	Search engine and MP3 site	2000
Taobao	Person-to-person sales	2003
Tianji	Professional social network	2005
Tudou	Video sharing	2005
Sina weibo	Microblog	2005
Xiaonei (RenRen)	Student social network	2005
Youku	Video sharing	2006

In a white paper on building political democracy in China, released in 2006, the government formally recognized for the first time at national level the role of open government in safeguarding democratic rights: the rights to know, to participate, to supervise and to express an opinion (Xiao 2012). Yet by then, seven years after the launch of the national e-government project for all government agencies to set up websites, the agencies were on average receiving failing grades for website performance, with county-level agencies failing even more seriously (Qu 2010). That year, three Politburo members from the SILG, including the premier, Wen Jiabao, as chair of the SILG, told a work conference on national e-governance that the situation of information exchange in the country was still poor. The premier issued written instructions aiming ‘to boost the reform of the administrative and management system, enhance government work efficiency and public service level, and create conditions for the public to participate in economic and social activities’. It was only in 2006 that a comprehensive national e-government strategy was devised and a centralized portal (www.gov.cn) was established. Its content was to be managed by Xinhuanet, the online arm of the official state news agency, and was to appear in traditional Chinese characters (for Taiwan and Hong Kong) alongside the simplified characters in use in the mainland, as well as in English.

In January 2007, building on earlier baby steps, China issued a regulation on the Open Government Initiative (OGI), which was an FOI measure for ‘safeguarding the legal access to government information by citizens, legal persons and other organisations’. This set of regulations, as already mentioned, had been in draft since 2002 – the delay representing in itself the degree of opposition within parts of the leadership to open government of the most perfunctory kind. In addition to public access, the regulations had other declared purposes: improving the transparency of government work, promoting a law-based approach to public administration, and fostering the use of government information for analysis that would increase productivity, economic development and social welfare. Thus, what had been a tentative experimental step in 2000 with the township-level open government initiative was now, seven years later, being upgraded and extended nationwide (at least in principle). The measures entered into force in May the next year, presumably to allow departments and agencies to prepare for compliance. The regulations vest in government authorities the right of refusal but do provide for independent administrative review of refused requests through an administrative suit.

Even as the government issued new regulations on open government in 2008 and sent inspection teams around the country to review practices in place, eight ministries and administrative offices jointly released a set of ‘opinions’ intended to increase controls over internet maps and geographic information system (GIS) websites. As this example shows, an inevitable consequence of China's secrecy regime is that scholars and policy analysts are denied the basic building blocks of the scientific analysis that makes an information society.

For China's leaders from Deng Xiaoping onwards, the opening up of information about the country was supposed to be one of the essential aspects of the information reforms. Qu's (2010) assessment was that by 2008, in spite of considerable progress, there were ‘still areas of concern’ with e-governance: databases were very basic, integration of government information was not strong enough, and public interest information resources needed more attention. In a Media Project blog in Hong Kong around this time, one analyst aptly observed that while social media have very often filled a gap in reporting left by mainstream media, that had had the effect of depriving Chinese of ‘substantive information and cool-headed analysis’ (Qin 2007).

One of the few motors for continuing reform in government openness, the Centre for Public Participation Studies and Supports (CPPSS) at Beijing University, began in 2009 to publish what was intended to be an annual assessment of the openness of Chinese government agencies. (The centre had been set up three years earlier.) With central government support, the CPPSS created an OGI Index Assessment Center to develop an appropriate review system, to prepare a watch report, to prepare a citizens’ guide on OGI, and to edit a monthly magazine called Transparency. According to CNNIC, 2009 was a good year for promoting public supervision through the internet, with a number of high-profile cases of exposure of official malfeasance (CNNIC 1986–2013). Citizens or journalists were increasingly using the internet, often anonymously, to expose the behaviour of corrupt officials or other miscreants, with such exposure leading to their arrest.

Also in 2009, the premier Wen Jiabao became the second Chinese leader to directly interact with netizens of China when he participated in a two-hour question-and-answer session jointly hosted by Xinhuanet and gov.cn, the government's official portal (China Daily 28/02/2008). (CCP general secretary Hu had undertaken a brief Q&A with netizens through the People's Daily website the previous year.) Wen staked a lot in his remarks on open government and public consultation, including his assertion that officials should declare their assets. He said the government was making active preparations for such declarations as a way of preventing corruption.

China published a white paper on the internet in 2010, an event that came a full fifteen years after the technology began to be introduced publicly. One of the primary motivations for publishing the white paper was to set out the public values around use of the internet. The white paper affirms freedom of speech, democratic supervision of government policies and the citizens’ constitutional right to know: ‘Vigorous online ideas exchange is a major characteristic of China's Internet development.’ The paper reported that ‘The leaders of China frequently log onto the Internet to get to know the public's wishes, and sometimes have direct online communication with netizens to discuss state affairs and answer their questions.’

The National Audit Office was becoming a major player in openness by scandal. In 2012, its just-released performance report for the previous year identified 38 cases of corruption uncovered in the previous three years and reported that, in 2011 alone, some 1,577 cases were handed over by the Audit Office to the judicial and disciplinary inspection and supervision organs, involving 2,395 people (www.cnao.gov). The total value of public funds used illegally in 2011 was just under RMB500 billion, a staggering figure.

The debate on open government had become public, wide-ranging and intense. In 2012, it came to involve CCP leaders directly, after publication of the stories by United States news outlets (New York Times and Bloomberg) on the personal wealth of the immediate family members of Wen Jiabao and Xi Jinping. After Wen said in reaction that he was prepared to disclose his personal assets, there were public calls for other Chinese leaders to do the same. While CCP provincial authorities in Guangdong indicated that they would lead, and some new measures were introduced in Hong Kong, China's central leadership did not embrace this proposal.

The current limits of leadership attitudes to transparency can be seen clearly in the sixty-point reform agenda released after the Third Plenum of the 18th Congress of the CCP in November 2013. One sub-point reads: ‘Explore moving forward with openness of State-owned enterprise finance and budgeting, and other such important information.’ The invocation is to explore the possibility, not actually to do it yet.

The limits of open government in China have been revealed in several high-profile cases that illustrate the way in which the OGI regulation is limited by other laws, including the law on state secrets, and by other regulations. One of the most notable is the decision communicated on 1 February 2013 from China's Ministry of Environmental Protection that the data from a national survey on soil pollution conducted in 2010 could not be made public because of state secrecy laws (Dong 2013). But state secrecy has also been imposed in other less formalized processes, with few recent cases being more prominent than the efforts by Chinese authorities to prevent the public from learning the death toll from the earthquake in Sichuan province in May 2008. In this disaster, more than 5,000 school students were killed, in part as the result of the shoddy construction of the buildings, an outcome that is likely to have resulted from corruption by local officials accepting bribes to overlook substandard completion. The people who tried to establish the death toll in the first year after the earthquake, including famous artist and designer Ai Weiwei, have been subjected to physical harassment, beatings, illegal detention, internet censorship and surveillance. These two cases indicate very clearly that for the Chinese bureaucratic apparatus, information can on occasions be treated as the enemy.

By 2013, the sheer volume and speed of information exchange in China, including information on state persecution of political activists or other hapless victims of administrative abuse, had defied totalitarian control of the traditional kind. China, with a population of 1.3 billion, had more telephone subscriptions than people and more registered internet users (people and organizations) than any other country in the world. The state monopoly on publishing that existed in the 1980s has been blown apart, though all private publishers still have to be licensed in some way. As the following section of the chapter recounts, all are subject to political censorship and review, even if that happens after the fact rather than before.

The leaders have not succumbed to this pressure for relaxation of control. They could not by 2013 commit to open government on any substantial level. The CCP budget was 100 per cent unrevealed. The annual budgets for defence and internal security were still reported with only a very broad breakdown of main categories, to the extent that both are repeatedly the subject of wild misinterpretation by scholars inside and outside China. It was only in January 2013 that the PLA revealed that the unit designation for the group armies in China would no longer be a state secret (People's Daily Online 16/01/2013). (The irony of this is that for at least two decades the group army designations, their locations and their commanders had been public knowledge outside China.)

The stop–start, restrictive, reactive or baby-step profile of CCP policies on certain types of information exchange after 2000 has to be understood against the background of the ideological opening up of information flow among the intelligentsia and creative classes. Apart from information questioning the continued rule of the CCP, revealing sensitive actions by its leaders or officials or running contrary to key ideological campaigns (against Falun Gong or the Roman Catholic Church), most of the ideological constraints of former decades have gradually evaporated. More courageous people in the two main Chinese academies (CASS and CAS) led their own information revolution, in part because the CCP officials in key watchdog posts within the academies had adopted an increasingly hands-off approach to information flow and content. This transition was initially more evident behind closed doors than in public, but even this distinction evaporated too. In advanced research institutes and their publications, almost all opinions are tolerated – except those that advocate concrete action to change China's political system. That said, researchers who express more radical opinions (by Chinese standards) or who conduct challenging research can be effectively marginalized through administrative measures, such as dismissal from the university. Loyalty to a broadly defined, non-specific set of CCP values is essential for promotion in most institutions, the majority of which are led by CCP members.

One notable exception to the CCP's tolerance of the open exchange of ideas in research or academic settings is the student body in universities. They remain a focus of leadership attention because of past student opposition movements and rising cynicism inside universities about the CCP. University curricula and teaching methods are for the most part ideologically constrained by the CPP anyway. Yet, even in this environment, the CCP regularly issues instructions to limit discussion of sensitive ideas. This is precisely what happened sometime in early 2013 when news broke of a directive to lecturers not to discuss ‘universal values, freedom of the press, a civil society, civic rights, historical mistakes committed by the Communist Party, elite cronyism, and an independent judiciary’ (China Digital Times 10/05/2013 reporting the South China Morning Post). The report was originally leaked by a Weibo account. On a more serious level, in December 2012, a university professor associated with a new activist group called the China Democracy Party was forcibly incarcerated in a mental hospital, reportedly to prevent his further activism (RFA 2012).

The instruction mentioned in the previous paragraph may be linked to a ‘Circular Concerning the Present Situation in the Ideological Area’ issued by the CCP for study and action by its ideological workers. The document is tightly held, and paper copies may not be removed from offices where it has been distributed. As a media monitor project reports, ‘many blog posts or forum discussions referring to this document have been taken down’ (CC&M 2013). The mood of the leaders was revealed in April 2013, when one day after the New York Times received a media prize for its reporting on the wealth of the extended family of Wen Jiabao, Xinhua issued a strong and regressive measure: ‘All news outlets are not allowed to use news information from foreign media or foreign websites without permission.’ The instruction required news organizations with a Weibo account to report to the authorities for the record and to appoint a staff person to be responsible for ‘posting authoritative information and deleting harmful information in time’ (Reporters without Borders 17/04/2013). According to the Reporters without Borders press freedom index of 2013, China sits among the ten worst performers: 173rd out of 179 countries. (The United States is ranked 32nd.)

The CCP measures could not prevent the emergence, recurrence and escalation of information campaigns by civil society organizations or news outlets against government policies. One example is the campaign in 2010 led by a number of independent-leaning state media outlets through their editorials calling for significant reform of the household registration system. (Household registration is a process that determines a person's access to social services and social support for dependent family members, especially education for children. It discriminates between rural and urban workers, especially against the rural migrant workers in the major cities.) A leading figure in the activist group was dismissed as a result and the editorial was taken down from websites (Minzer 2010). Yet by November 2013, further though limited reforms to the system had been announced for second-level cities in China. This is a good example of the consistent tension between critique, repression and policy change. In some cases, it can be assumed that journalists, academics or others often venture a criticism on behalf of a CCP leader who is trying to advance (or oppose) reform in a particular area or policy.

Protecting Information Exchange, or the i-Dictatorship

China's leaders had prepared their defences for this information explosion long ago. The agency in China with the highest responsibility for security since 1980 has been the Central Political and Legal Commission (CPLC) of the CCP. It had been replaced briefly in 1988, at the height of the liberalization, by a Leading Small Group. In May 1990, after the Tiananmen crackdown, the CPLC was re-established. It is responsible for supervising policy and delivery of results in all aspects of internal security across the executive, the judiciary and legislature in one unified system subject to full political control from the CCP. The CPLC supervises the MPS, the MSS, the Ministry of Justice, the courts, the police and the preparation of all legislation. In concert with the CMC of the Party, the CPLC commands and supervises the operations and planning for the People's Armed Police (PAP), based on units decommissioned from the PLA in the 1980s and having responsibility as a paramilitary force for internal security and border security. The PAP's internal security forces comprise fourteen mobile divisions (140,000 troops) and guards troops (400,000 personnel whose responsibilities include leadership security).

The scale of CPLC power can be illustrated in many ways. In simple bureaucratic terms, its head had from 1980 to 2012 been a senior member of the Politburo, often holding several posts simultaneously that reached across different organizational realms, thereby making him exceptionally powerful. Cheng Li (2012) describes how, at a lecture in Beijing, two of China's most active proponents of legal reform, He Weifang and Xu Xin, had characterized the power of the CPLC as near infinite, with He alluding to the ‘invisible hand’ of the CPLC in ‘recent well known cases of injustice’.

Under the CPLC, the most powerful organization with an influence on information society policy has been the MPS. Its most powerful arm in information society policy appears to be the 11th Bureau, which has responsibility for supervision of the security of all public information networks. The bureau is the lead organization in electronic monitoring of information exchange in China. According to a Falun Gong organization operating outside China, it was in the year 2000 that a Chinese software company, Haitian, on behalf of the MPS (presumably the 11th Bureau), entered into a joint venture with Microsoft China to develop technology for monitoring dissident or unacceptable traffic inside China and from abroad, including Voice of America radio (WOIPFG 2005).

Internet censorship and monitoring, discussed later in this section, have become one the CPLC's main functions, but that is only one of many ways in which the CPLC and MPS influence is brought to bear on the information society. Through its seat as a vice-chair of the SILG and through its main administrative arm, the MPS, the CPLC has been able to veto or retard progress in all other aspects of policy that might materially affect China's information society ambition. These include education policy, technology choices, encryption standards, foreign trade, and legal regimes for foreign investment decisions (and their enforcement or non-enforcement). All the MPS has to do is claim a domestic security interest.

By February 2014, the SILG had been transformed in two ways. Xi Jinping became the first general secretary of the CCP to sit as its chair, while simultaneously announcing that a much higher priority would be attached to informatization policy. At the same time, the name and priorities of the group seemed to change, giving an even higher security and political complexion to policy in this area than had existed previously. Its new name was reported as the Central Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatization (Xinhua 27/02/2014).

So how did leadership views of protection of the information dictatorship, working through this omnipresent set of watchdog organizations, develop after the turn of the century?

In 2000, the general secretary of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, made a speech to the CMC on the need for more attention to be paid to informatization because ‘sovereignty of information’ had now become an issue and the internet had become a new ideological and political battleground. It was in 2000 that the leaders took an important step to deepen the politicization and securitization of the SILG by making it a Party leading group (while keeping the nomenclature of a state leading group). The work of its local equivalents across the country also changed after that time (Yang Fengchun 2009).

China set up its first National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center (CNCERT) in 2000, and this was to become the focal point of national security management as well as international interaction on internet administration. While such a body might in other countries serve largely technical purposes, CNCERT would also serve as the hub for political control of the internet by the CPLC. A number of security-related laws and regulations were issued in 2000: the NPC Standing Committee Decision on Safeguarding Internet Security, bringing the internet explicitly under the preserve of the Administrative Penalties for Public Security; measures for the Administration of Internet Information Services; and the entry into force of Administrative Provisions on the Maintenance of Secrets in the International Networking of Computer Information Systems, a decree issued by the State Secrets Bureau. It was also in 2000 that Chinese provinces, beginning with Anhui, started to set up a specialized Internet Police Force. In 2000, the CCP issued detailed instructions for banned content on the internet, which were identical to instructions for banned content for print media issued in 1997 (Wacker 2003).

The political system in which the dialogue about the future of China's information society was conducted from 2000 onwards had to be optimized for control while still allowing for innovation. At around this time, the PSC made a decision that the CCP could only contain the effects of the internet through tight social control rather than through heavy state censorship of the sort foreshadowed in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The CCP now had to rely on a larger network of co-opted monitors inside a range of business entities and other administrative authorities who would be charged with censorship and other technical controls of the internet on behalf of the state. The decision was implemented through the newly established Internet Society of China, which immediately began asking internet service providers (ISPs) and other organizations to sign a voluntary commitment to censor what the government regarded as inappropriate, whether for political, anti-crime or social morality reasons.

In 2001, when the upgraded SILG met under the premier (then Zhu Rongji), other Politburo members joined the group for the first time, for the purpose of providing ‘stronger leadership to the promotion of informatization and to the safeguarding of state information security’ (www.asci.gov.cn/en). At this time, the new vice-chairs had backgrounds that were more political and propaganda-related than security-related. This turn in policy towards greater securitization of the internet was manifested in part by the establishment in 2002 of a new committee to coordinate the security of state information and networks (Qu 2010). At this time, the MPS was reported to have 18,000 dedicated information and communications police, with basic data on 1.1 billion citizens in its computer systems, and more detailed information available on around 600 million of them (Cisco 2002).

The leaders were quite content to buy the security services they needed from foreign corporations, and in 2002 Cisco seemed to be closely involved in negotiations with the MPS, as had Microsoft before it. This sort of relationship (which could provide the best available technologies, subject in some cases to export controls) gave the leaders strong confidence that they could shore up their policy of social control with the best IT hardware and software for internal security. The confidence was underpinned by rapid growth rates in the number of students admitted each year for university-level study of ‘public security technology’ between 1999 and 2002.

The following year, 2003, saw the further securitization of the SILG when Zhou Yongkang (later to become head of the CPLC) became minister of public security and a vice-chair in the SILG. It was at this point that the security aspects of China's information policy took an even sharper turn. That year, the SILG approved the Recommendation on the Strengthening of Information Security Protection. One insight into the mood at the time can be seen in a 2003 document from Shaanxi province cited by a Falun Gong organization (WOIPFG 2005). Referring to the ‘610 Offices’, a unit of the government set up exclusively to suppress Falun Gong, the document reads: ‘The Party committees of schools must solidly intensify the leadership over the Internet struggle…610 Offices of the schools should fully cooperate with the school Internet control units…strictly forbid people in the schools and especially “Falun Gong” members to visit “Falun Gong” websites.’

The intention of the MPS to exploit advanced information technology to the full was demonstrated in 2004 when it decided to set up a grid-based surveillance system in sensitive parts of Beijing, such as areas around Tiananmen Square. The system combined visual and internet-based surveillance, and relied on a team of six or seven people per grid to monitor groups of around 1,500 people. Reports are sent in by mobile phone and monitored in a sub-district office (Economist 2013). Also in 2004, the government set up the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre (CIIRC), supported by the MPS and other agencies. This was part of the Communist Party's reliance on social controls. It uses the CIIRC to enable public supervision of all internet activity. That year China almost doubled its intake of students in bachelor's courses for public security technology compared with the previous year, and the 2004 intake was 550 per cent higher than that for 1999.

The CCP had made control of the internet a very high political priority. In 2007, the general secretary, Hu Jintao, told a meeting of the Politburo that ‘Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the state’ (China Daily 25/01/2007). This sentiment has never been far from the minds of China's leaders since the internet was introduced into China. But they have exhibited a consistent determination to control the new medium to prevent the overthrow of the one-party state, and they have shown a high degree of confidence that they could control it. Leading American corporations, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, had been accused the year before by Amnesty International of being complicit in Chinese government censorship (AI 2006).

When the new Central Committee was appointed according to the five-yearly timetable in 2007, the SILG had a large leadership core of five Politburo members, representing a far more powerful constellation of political power in the SILG than in 2000. No other country in the world had probably concentrated so many of its highest political leaders in a committee for informatization. The SILG contained other members below Politburo rank from different organizations and ministries. What is also remarkable about this structure by 2007 was the heavy representation of security, military and propaganda institutional interests relative to that for technology, education or scientific interests. Beyond the premier, there were no scientific, technological or education interests represented at leadership level in the peak body even though some twenty-five ministries participated in its work at lower levels. There also appears to have been little sign of private sector or civil society representation, in contrast to their highly visible presence in corresponding high-level bodies in many other countries.

Each innovation in information exchange, such as the introduction by Sina in 2009 of a Twitter-like service, Weibo, created new peaks in usage to which the information dictatorship had to adapt. But such daunting changes only strengthened the determination of leaders to stick with entrenched principles. In 2009 and 2010, a number of official statements revealed an intensifying focus on control of the internet and online communities, with the operational goal of striking early and preventing the snowballing of any unrest (CECC 2010). The leaders called on MPS personnel to ‘place greater priority on correctly guiding online public sentiment’. The Party started a second phase of the Golden Shield project, the IT-based public security project for automated monitoring of all public security affairs (political dissent and crime) and automated record-keeping about citizens (dissenters and criminals alike). The new phase would emphasize command and control enhancements to increase coordination between local, provincial and national authorities for crisis or sensitive events, such as protest demonstrations.

The white paper on the internet in China, issued in 2010, reported that the CCP had set up ‘informant websites’, thereby reminding the public that someone would always be watching – as most Chinese already knew. As liberating as the internet might be, the CCP was in this way in 2010 simply reaffirming that the Party was going to use the internet as an instrument of control.

In 2011, the Chinese government issued a white paper on China's legal system, reaffirming that China is a ‘people's democratic dictatorship’. Over more than a decade of struggle in the new information world, the preferences and values of the leaders as a collectivity had not changed and had not even wavered. They found that their ambition for political dictatorship could tolerate and survive a massive liberalization of media activity and information exchange (Esarey and Xiao 2011). By 2012, the number of dedicated internet police had reached 30,000, according to an informed source from a Western intelligence agency. But the bulk of the censorship effort did not lie with them. Rather, it lay with a larger number of censors or internet monitors operating within ISPs and within all institutions reliant on state support or subject to CCP direction.

Censorship was moving with the times. Even though the leaders had opted for a policy of social control over the internet after 2001, they had obviously pursued technical means as well. The process has been unrelenting, with budgets for the MPS rising steadily ever since. A project at Hong Kong University, called Weiboscope, identified 200 million posts deleted by the authorities or their proxies between 2011 and May 2013 (Chiu 2013). A study of the speed of take-downs of sensitive material by internet censors targeting Sina Weibo found that almost 30 per cent of the total deletion events occurred within 5–30 minutes, and almost 90 per cent of the deletions were happening within the first 24 hours (Zhu et al. 2013). The study showed that discussion of sensitive topics is short-lived, indicating that the CCP has established a capability to stop the ‘viral’ spread of hot issues. As reported by Time Magazine in 2009, after Uighur protesters rioted in Wulumuqi (Urumqi), leaving 200 people dead, the government restricted internet access in Xinjiang, blocked Twitter and Facebook, and closed down a microblog service called Fanfou (Ramzy 2011).

The CCP had decided on a more tightly focused criterion for its censorship: the potential for an internet activity to stimulate or promote undesirable collective action (King et al. 2013). This meant that the subject of an internet discussion was itself not seen as being as important as whether the discussion indicated plans for group organization of public action, protests or meetings.

A necessary corollary of the dominating status of the CPLC over the information society throughout this period was the weak rule of law. The overall policy setting on information policy from the top down was not FOI but control of it in order to contain political reform. This set of values was summarized by a member of the PSC, Wu Bangguo, who in 2011 as chairman of the country's NPC (the legislature) famously declared the Party's continuing commitment to its dictatorship. This has come to be known as the “Five No's” policy: ‘we have made a solemn declaration that we will not: employ a system of multiple parties holding office in rotation; diversify our guiding thought; separate executive, legislative and judicial powers; use a bicameral or federal system; carry out privatisation’ (Wu 2011).

Yet by mid-2012, the future of the CPLC was under a cloud because of the emergence of a phenomenon referred to in the press as ‘internet terror’. The CPLC chief Zhou Yongkang had been identified as a political ally of the ousted Politburo member Bo Xilai, who had been implicated in serious violations of Party discipline, large-scale corruption and a brutal crackdown on criminality in Chongqing that caused widespread resentment. Of special note is that Bo had been accused in some reports of using advanced technologies to monitor the conversations of other Party leaders. Their suspicion would be that he had too much help in that from people under Zhou's control. One of these was the head of the Public Security Bureau in Chongqing, who was subsequently jailed for fifteen years for abuse of power, defection to the US consulate in Chengdu and taking bribes. The unfolding of this case coincided with the publication in two US news outlets of separate stories of the wealth of the immediate families of senior leaders, Wen Jiabao and Xi Jinping. The detailed listing of the assets of the two families was only made possible by internet search of records in China (including Hong Kong) and elsewhere. And the censors in China could not completely block dissemination of the story there. Thus in two separate ways (new technical surveillance of private conversations and the blasting out in public of private information) the leaders came to feel directly the same internet terror that ordinary Chinese had been feeling about their exposure to similar threats. In late 2012, responding perhaps to a speech by Xi Jinping on the need for firmer measures against corruption, public use of internet exposure implicated three senior leaders (two ministers and one Politburo member) in separate cases of nepotism, false representation and corruption (Cheng Li 2013). It may have been no coincidence that by December that year, one month after the new CCP leadership was appointed, the Standing Committee of the NPC approved regulations on internet privacy (protection of electronic data) that had been stalled for more than a decade after they were first issued in draft.

The new CPLC appointed after the 18th CCP Congress in 2012 was led by a new secretary, Meng Jianzhu, who had been public security minister and who remained as a Politburo member. His replacement as minister, Guo Shengkun, was named as deputy secretary of the CPLC. In its first meeting in December 2012 after the Congress, Meng called on his subordinates to boost their capabilities in social communications in the new media era (Xinhua 18/12/2012). In April 2013, Meng returned to the theme of how the security agencies could use the internet to promote their interests, especially through good public relations programmes (Xinhua 26/04/2013). The news report mentioned that the Sina Weibo site of the Beijing Police already had 4.87 million followers, a rather staggering number. Whether this high figure illustrates community trust or suspicion, or more pragmatic considerations like traffic updates, is unclear. But it does reveal the potential reach of the CCP in social co-option of Chinese netizens.

In the sixty-point policy reform agenda released after the Third Plenum of the CCP in November 2013, the leaders committed yet again to ‘expand forces to manage the network according to the law, accelerate the perfection of leading structures for Internet management, guarantee the security of the national network and of information’. In this section on social governance, they also endorsed the establishment of a National Security Committee, with a mission to ‘perfect national security structures and national security strategies, and guarantee national security’. The establishment within the framework of public security of yet another high-level committee is a reliable indicator of deepening leadership concern about their ability to control the internet. Every few years, beginning in 1993/1994, they have created some new mechanism like this as an add-on to pre-existing committees or leading groups on internal security. On this occasion, however, the leaders will have been motivated by several factors. The most important may have been concern over the extreme power of the CPLC under Zhou Yongkang. Another consideration would have been the sense of vulnerability to foreign electronic espionage as a result of revelations by Edward Snowden, the former US National Security Agency employee who, beginning in June 2013, leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents on US and allied cyber espionage. A third factor would have been the rapidly accelerating social unrest, facilitated in part by access to the internet and by internet-associated exposes of official misdeeds. The leaders’ sense of insecurity is also evident in new measures announced around the same time to require every one of China's 200,000 journalists to pass a written test on Party ideology if they wanted to retain their press accreditation.

By 2013, the leaders’ view of social control of the internet had become more nuanced. But its intent was perfectly clear. Some of the nuances that were emerging were summarized well in an interview with Fu Siming, a scholar in the Politics and Law Department at the Central Party School, published in Study Times, one of the school's journals (Bandurski 2013). In a five-point formula, Fu called for building a sound legal system (including industry self-regulation); using the internet to improve relations between the government and the public; ensuring public access to authoritative information and observance of the principle of OGI; making the ability to conduct network politics a necessary qualification for political leaders; and the effective channelling of public opinion, especially in connection with fast-breaking events.

As of 2013, according to a senior official, successful outcomes in criminal investigations were made possible in more than half of all crimes solved because of the use of technical surveillance data in MPS operations (Mattis 2013). While not without challenges, like inadequate training and bureaucratic turf wars, the enhanced effectiveness of the MPS surveillance through informatization is illustrated by a report of the large number of informants who feed information into the automated systems. Mattis (2011) cites several reports: one county-level MPS with a 12,000-person informant network out of a total local population of 400,000, pensioners assigned to watch for ‘unstable elements’, and intelligence units operating within universities.

Political dissidents, such as the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, or public interest activists like the artist Ai Weiwei, have not been able to garner significant public support against the implacable resistance of the CCP. It now has the biggest political and social apparatus in history for monitoring and controlling the social organization and distribution of information activities and the technologies that support them. As reported in July 2013, Xinhua carried the following exhortation: ‘China's historical experience has shown over and over again that the nation's long-term stability can only be secured by protecting the authority of the central leadership’ (SCMP 26/07/2013). This is still the leaders’ highest value in terms of information exchange, and it trumps any consideration of protecting such exchange (FOI) for its own sake.

Trusted Information

In the environment sketched so far, with political control such a dominating force, and exchange of essential information on public policy quite restricted, it may be difficult to imagine a commitment by the leaders to building an ecosystem of trust in cyberspace. In fact their version of trust in cyberspace has focused very heavily on combating cyber crime, ensuring national security, and setting national standards for security of information systems. When they have addressed broader issues of social trust, they have focused most heavily on the need to prevent false information and rumours, especially about the CCP, from being spread via new media.

The leaders have had to deal with the same set of cyber crime problems faced by other countries. Chinese leaders see several factors making the environment in China even more challenging than that in the United States, Japan or the European Union, which are themselves struggling to cope with rampant cyber crime. First, the legal system in China is weakly developed, having been fully subordinated to political considerations at the whim of the leadership at all levels until quite recently. Second, the enforcement of existing law is subject to widespread corruption. Third, the education base for a workforce skilled in information technology skills appropriate to fighting cyber crime, or even to basic IT levels, has only reached a mass scale in the last five to ten years.

In 2000, in his speech at the World Computer Congress, Jiang Zemin advocated an international convention to promote internet security against cyber crime. Otherwise, the leaders were not saying anything too specific about this topic at the time. That year, a government-led National Information Security Report graded China at 5.5 on a scale of 9 (the highest level of security) – between relatively secure and slightly insecure (Qu 2010). The grading may have been a little optimistic. The report indicated that only 180 financial crimes in China had been perpetrated via the internet by 2000, while in 1999 alone there had been more than 900 attacks on financial networks. In the same year, the Standing Committee of the NPC approved a set of measures on internet security, and the MPS issued a set of measures for the prevention and control of computer viruses. Overall, the country was poorly placed to address the challenges of cyber crime even though the MPS had been active over the previous decade in laying the legislative groundwork.

A year later, in connection with a crackdown on unregistered internet cafés, the MPS (joined by the MII, the Ministry of Culture, and the State Administration for Industry & Commerce) released regulations on ISPs. The Measures on the Administration of Business Sites of Internet Access Services were regarded as so important and urgent that they came into force immediately. They provided the legal foundation for an immediate campaign of ‘rectifications’ against internet cafés. The China Information Technology Security Evaluation Center was formally approved by the government, two years after it had started operation. The central government joined with the Shanghai municipality to launch an S&T park devoted exclusively to developing a stronger domestic information security industry.

In part to counter cyber crime (though for political control as well), China in 2002 made the first moves to introduce a real-name registration system for internet users. Despite occasional claims that it has been successful, and completed, it clearly has not been, even more than a decade later. One of the main obstacles has been the sheer size of the population of internet users and the lack of effective control over the large number of ISPs, which are reluctant to commit the funds to undertake the registration consistently. Another constraint on implementation of the real-name system has been widespread public opposition, revealed in public opinion polls (Farrall 2008).

In 2003, the SILG made a significant fresh move when it released ‘Opinions on Strengthening Information Security’ (Qu 2010). These opinions, issued in the joint name of the Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council, were as political and social as they were technical or counter-crime in asserting several principles: protecting opening up and reform, balancing development and security, seeing management and technology as equally important avenues of security policy, boosting informatization and protecting the interests of the general public. With MPS involvement, work proceeded on setting up a risk assessment process and a graduated protection system.

It was not until 2005 that the Chinese government announced that all ministries and agencies should have a Chief Information Officer (CIO), a role that had emerged in the United States in most large organizations by the late 1980s, and which by the early 1990s was becoming an executive role (usually with a mix of responsibilities, ranging from strategic management of IT assets to maximizing exploitation of information resources and ensuring the security of IT systems and services.) That year, China's law on electronic signatures entered into force. For information professionals like Qu Weizhi, this was the country's first informatization law (Qu 2010). It controlled the use of and authentication processes for e-signatures, and associated measures for information security. The government also set up in 2005 a National Administrative Committee for Certification of Information Security Products (from the private sector).

Through 2005 and 2006, the government launched information security risk assessments in two cities (Beijing and Shanghai), two provinces (Heilongjiang and Yunnan) and more than twenty agencies, including the People's Bank of China (PBoC) and the State Grid (Qu 2010). Agencies involved in this process included the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets, the State Cypher Code Administration and SCITO. In 2006, the State Council promulgated Opinions on the Development of the Internet Credibility System, which set 2011 as the target date for achieving an effective information security national system (Qu 2010). By the close of the year, the government had completed work on a national network credit system with appropriate standards for authentication.

New security measures followed almost every year. In 2009, seven key ministries or commissions, led by the MPS, the State Council Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the MoC, turned the spotlight on governance of vulgarity on the internet. The Office of the National Campaign on Anti-Prostitution and Anti-Delinquency issued an emergency notice to take down mobile website production and the spreading of obscene and pornographic information. As a result, the government carried out ‘special actions’ to reduce obscene, pornographic and vulgar information on the internet and mobile media.

Cyber crime was slowly coming more sharply into focus. In 2011, in China's biggest ever public breach of data, the stored information (username, password and email address) of 6 million users in the Computer Software Development Network in China were leaked and posted to the internet. The perpetrator was caught six months later.

In May 2012, an executive meeting of the State Council chaired by the premier, Wen Jiabao, approved a series of Proposals on Boosting Informatization and Safeguarding Information Security. On security, the State Council laid an emphasis on combining designs, construction and operation of important systems and networks with those of security protection facilities, improving infrastructure for network and information security, strengthening monitoring and early warning, and increasing reliance on research and development (Xinhua 10/05/2012). Two months later, police in China arrested a gang of fourteen cyber criminals involved in hacking government websites to allow them to make false certificates using stolen government seals. An official at the time said the crimes might have been avoided if the government policy of real-name registration for IP addresses had been fully implemented (China Daily 26/07/2012).

Yet for all the measures, the practice of information security (outside of the security services) in China remains weak. The size of the country, its overall developmental level in education and information technology, and the mass numbers of machines, networks, websites and users have presented daunting challenges. The effect of these underlying structural factors has been complicated by several other problems. For example, a large percentage of users in the country were using pirated Microsoft software that would not receive security patches (updates). Furthermore, many users were still using Internet Explorer 6.0, which had an unusually high number of known vulnerabilities. A snapshot of the situation at the end of 2012 could be seen in the Annual Report of CNCERT:

14 million IP addresses infected by Trojans or Botnets (an increase of 64.7 per cent over 2011)
China's share of new infections by the Conficker virus per month the highest of any country in the world
an increase of website defacements by 6.1 per cent compared with 2011
52,000 websites attacked by malware, with backdoors allowing remote control
22,000 thousand phishing sites targeting banks, with 96.2 per cent of the IPs used being outside China (80 per cent of them hosted in the United States)
58,000 backdoor control IP addresses
163,000 mobile computing and telephone malware samples collected. (CNCERT 2013)

Thus by 2014, almost twenty years after the internet first came to the public in China, there was something of a contradiction in play on the issue of security and trust. The world's biggest community of netizens was prepared to use the networks and machines, and consume the data, on a mass scale in spite of overall weak technical standards in the security environment, weak law enforcement against cyber criminals, and the certain knowledge that the government and its proxies were able read their email, SMS and tweets. So how can we understand the contours of trust inside China's information ecosystem and how can we understand the leaders’ commitment to it?

There have been many surveys trying to understand the nuances of this situation. Trust in the ICT sector in China was not high at the outset. Snell and Tseng (2002) documented low levels of trust in ‘network capitalism’ through surveys in industrial enterprises. They attributed their results to a weak legal system, weak civic accountability, crony capitalism, public cynicism and a disempowered workforce. A longitudinal survey from 2000 to 2005 by the World Internet Project in partnership with the CASS showed that ‘trust among Internet users in the reliability of online content has decreased significantly over the five years’ (CASS 2007). The same survey found that users in China trusted non-internet foreign media news more than online news (regardless of the origin of the online news). Less than 50 per cent of the respondents believed content on the internet was reliable, and they saw it more as an entertainment (or infotainment) location than an information location. In a 2009 survey, China recorded a more trusting response: it had the highest level of confidence (54 per cent of respondents) among the participating countries that about half of the information available on the net was reliable, while another 32 per cent thought most of it was reliable (WIP 2009). In 2011, the People's Daily Online reported results of survey-based research suggesting that local government and central government websites (the latter including People's Daily Online and Xinhuanet) both fell into the low-trust category. Commercial websites, such as Sina.com and Sohu.com, received the lowest rank, ‘indicating that the respondents have little trust in them’ (People's Daily Online 05/05/2011). In early 2013, the CASS released its annual ‘blue book’ (academic research compendium) on social mentality, which included survey results indicating that trust levels in China had dropped to a record low and that, while having low levels of trust towards strangers, more respondents trusted strangers they met face to face rather than those they encountered on line (China Daily 18/02/2013).

There are several elements to the trust needed in an information society: the reliability and value of the information that is available, the political colour of the analysis of it, the security of the data that is transmitted or stored, and personal privacy. The lack of reliability of information circulating through modern ICT platforms in China is a constant theme of leaders and commentators. One Chinese writer, Yu Hua (2012), painted a very grim picture: ‘the country is now awash with supposition, half-credible news stories and libel against individuals, with the only real protected territory being the elite leaders and their lives. The rest of society is overwhelmed by rumors, campaigns and other material carried by social media.’

The problem of trust has been addressed by some Chinese scholars from the more general perspective. The conclusions from some of these studies allow us to conclude that lack of trust in the internet may be part of a broader lack of trust across the board in China. For example, one 2012 study concluded that ‘Due to severe damage from the disappearance of trustworthiness, trust problems are multiplying in fields ranging from the economy, government, to culture’ (Zeng 2010). The study cited data showing poor compliance rates with business contracts and high economic loss from fake goods. He said that the trust deficit would lead to a crisis in legitimacy for the government, undermine economic confidence in credit markets and result in a crisis in belief among the population. That study cites numerous social science surveys conducted in China with similar results.

But trust in the information sector was particularly damaged by the SARS crisis in 2002 and 2003 and has never fully recovered. One effect of this was to give an impulse to the idea of ‘information ethics’. It is no coincidence that the sector in China in which this field is now most developed is the medical sector. Yet that interest in applying new ethics to information management has emerged across the board, with a clear surge in academic articles on the subject towards the end of the first decade of this century.

The turn to information ethics has been exemplified by increasing attention to the issue of privacy and its legal protection. The formal adoption of principles on privacy by the NPC Standing Committee in December 2012, already mentioned, followed more than a decade of planning and seven years of review. Typical of the calls for a new privacy standard was a proposal by one of the members to the 2012 NPC for information security to be developed as soon as possible, both to promote the development of modern information services and to protect the legitimate rights and interests of individuals, especially their individual security. That call was made by Xu Long, general manager of the Guangdong division of China Mobile (Ma 2012). On a similar theme, one Chinese researcher concluded that the situation of privacy protection in China is a ‘fractured, episodic…patchwork of laws’ (Wang Hao 2011). Wang observed that the ‘understanding of the protection of privacy in China should lie in the understanding of what has not been done in Chinese legislation, rather than what has been done’.

The principles incorporated in the 2012 NPC Standing Committee resolution set out ‘significant and far-reaching requirements applicable to the collection and processing of electronic personal information via the Internet’ (Hunton & Williams LLP 2013a). By the time they were executed in the MIIT regulations of July 2013, the measures were seen as an effort to ‘contemplate international data protection concepts’ and ‘an intention to import and apply these concepts in China’ (Hunton & Williams LLP 2013b). As that analysis discusses, personal information is defined as ‘any information collected during the provision of telecommunications or Internet information services that would identify the user if used alone, or in combination with any other information’. The measures adopted in China follow a number of broad international standards on the collection and use of personal information, including ‘obligations regarding notice, consent, collection limitations, use limitations, access and correction rights, fair and lawful collection, adopting security safeguards and notification in the event of a severe breach incident’. Penalties for violations in China's regulations include administrative warning, fines and, in some cases, criminal penalties.

On a parallel track, in February 2013, China's first national standard on data privacy came into force (Leu 2013), even if only in the form of guidelines. They defined personal information; made a distinction between sensitive and general personal information; and provided for consent for data retention, proper notification of purposes of the data collection, limits on international transfer, obligations to notify a breach, and provisions on retention and deletion. They are voluntary standards issued by the China Standardization Authority. To support the public release of the guidelines before they came into effect, the China Software Evaluation and Test Center (CSTC), part of the MIIT, announced in January 2013 that it would set up a multi-stakeholder group (government, business and standards centres) called the Personal Information Protection Alliance to serve as a consultative and self-regulatory body (Livingston 2013).

While promulgated in language that borrowed from international best practice, the philosophy behind the standards and measures was distinctly Chinese, or at least distinctly CCP. As one Chinese scholar observed with continuing relevance for today, the ‘protection of privacy in contemporary China, compared with its past, has relatively increased consideration of personal benefits, but still takes social benefits as the centre of gravity’ (Lü 2005). He said that the protection of personal privacy would continue to be limited by the ‘social benefits and national interest’. He predicted some change to that balance: ‘in public consciousness, the respect for privacy will become more widespread and more mature’. He saw quite some impact of international commitments, including by the WTO, on the evolution of privacy law in China. He foreshadowed that any convergence with international standards ‘may particularly emphasize privacy protection consonant with more general Chinese ideas and values’.

In this situation, many of China's most creative citizens do not trust their more valuable communications to the internet or mobile communications platforms, nor do they trust Chinese government information on the internet and elsewhere. On the other hand, the majority of Chinese do. Within the political constraints they have imposed, China's leaders have shown an increasing commitment to building a secure and trusted environment for the non-political information ecosystem.

The test will come as China adapts to cloud computing, a global industry that stakes much more on trust and privacy than almost all other developments in application of IT technologies. The business model involves a decision by users to store or process client data in externally owned servers using externally owned software as a means of eliminating high capital costs and life-cycle costs for IT architecture. In 2013, as Chinese companies such as Alibaba and Huawei geared up to exploit the need for such services, and as global leaders in the field such as Amazon negotiated with Chinese cities and business partners to set up local affiliates, the Software Alliance (a group of globally prominent software businesses) ranked China quite poorly in its readiness and reliability for cloud computing (BSA 2013). On its annual scorecard, the Alliance ranked China nineteenth out of the twenty-four countries it surveyed, with a score of only half the best possible (51.5/100) and with especially low evaluations for privacy protection (4.7/10), security regimes (2.8/10) and anti-crime environment (4.8/10). Only one of the countries in the twenty-four scored worse than China for security regimes, and none scored worse for anti-crime environment.

Conclusion

This chapter compared leadership values with the first set of three values listed in table 1.2 as ideal for an information society: freedom of information exchange, protection of such exchange by law, and promotion of trusted information.

Freedom of information exchange:

The flood of information circulating in China had intensified as new forms of electronic media (such as the smart phone) and new platforms (such as Facebook or its lookalikes) came into being and found their place in China. There was visibly greater acceptance by the leaders that this was both natural and politically manageable. (Facebook was blocked beginning in 2009.) The major evolution in leadership values on FOI occurred in the emergence of the concept of e-democracy as a new form of citizens’ supervision of the government and their society. This was portrayed by several leaders as a vindication of China's system of government, with a form of consultative democracy being held up as the right form for China. The leaders showed some commitment to open government and some acceptance of the principle of transparency in government, but these remained largely rhetorical in practice. There was a visible narrowing of the subjects that were considered state secrets, but it was only at the margins. By early 2014, as in 1999, state secrecy and state ideology were the dominant values in respect of information exchange.

Protection of information exchange:

There has been a visible trend towards more respect for the rule of law by China's leaders than in 1999, but this has developed alongside an iron-fisted strengthening of their information control apparatus on a scale that matches the information explosion. China has now built the biggest and technically most advanced surveillance apparatus in human history, designed to prevent free exchange of information and to help punish people who breach government guidelines in information exchange. Throughout 2012 and 2013, advocates of greater protection in China of constitutional rights to freedom of speech became the special targets of a new crackdown. In 2013, as in 1999, arrests and imprisonment of journalists were stepped up, more liberal publications were closed, and issues from foreign news outlets were banned.

Trusted information:

The leaders now place a much higher value on the reliability of research data and publicly circulating information than ever before. But their main motivation remains political, as defined by CCP needs and not by any inherent right to protection independently of that. The leaders have placed a much higher priority on the technical level of security of information networks, but China still lags significantly. The weak rule of law in China and political corruption affecting court cases together ensure that there are few protections for citizens. Moves by the leaders in 2012 and 2013 to protect privacy of information were weak and came after almost a decade of review.

What does this evolution of values after 1999 portend? Information exchange as a public value in China is alive and well (though with several important exceptions). Cross-border mobility associated with China's international exchanges in many areas (investment, trade, culture, education, military and political) has transformed the access of Chinese citizens to information beyond the control of the CCP. This is not a question of the internet as the main influence, but rather of globalization in all its dimensions.

China's political system has been irreversibly changed by the advent of a global information society, but there are clear exceptions to the unfettered flow of information. As MacKinnon (2011) observed and as this chapter confirms: ‘Chinese authoritarianism has adapted to the Internet Age not merely through the deployment of Internet filtering, but also through the skilled use of second- and third-generation controls.’ This is still an information dictatorship even if in political science terms it looks unlike any dictatorship that existed previously. In spite of the overwhelming pluralism of thought and information so visible in China, the CCP has been able to achieve what looks more or less like a steady state in terms of the secrecy of the government. One of the underpinnings of this appears to be a social contract that trades ‘online activism’ for ‘offline obedience’ (Herold 2013). Part of this contract is that ‘Problems are to be defined as social, not as political problems, all problems are local in nature, not national, and the government is very responsive to citizen complaints’ (Herold 2013 citing China Youth Daily 2009). China's leaders must be content with the fragmented authoritarianism that has emerged (Lieberthal and Oksenberg 1988; Benney 2013). They will be satisfied that even though media pluralism has contributed to the ability of citizens to confront the authorities and assert change, the citizen voice is also fragmented. The activism of lawyers around emerging lines of public protest, like ‘rights defence’ or constitutionalism, is unlikely to move the government from its path of fragmented authoritarianisms (Benney 2013).

As long as the Chinese leaders can marshal popular support through a mix of good policy, good propaganda and effective repression of opposition, they will continue to benefit from the information explosion. Zhao Yuezhi (2008) concluded that the leadership agenda of legitimation through e-democracy had benefited from the way in which the political economy of the communications system in the country had developed. He suggested that ‘commodified media and popular culture’, including watchdog journalism, popular television dramas and internet chat rooms, created a ‘buffer zone for the party-state to redefine and reestablish hegemony over a deeply fractured and rapidly globalizing Chinese society’. Yet Zhao also concluded at the same time that ‘the party's revolutionary legacy, its socialist pretensions, as well as popular demands for social justice and equality continue to feed into multifaceted elite and popular resistance’ through the new media, and serve as a countervailing force against this legitimation of CCP governance by the same media. His assessment was that even though the Party had succeeded in ‘capturing the commanding heights’ of the political economy of new media, the effects had been to deepen the contradictions in the country. He talked of the pervasive conflict between the rulers, the capitalist class and its ‘subaltern classes’. There is no single-minded party state, he says.

The underlying ethical stance of China's leaders on their information ecosystem is captured well by Xiao (2012) in his study on ‘China's limited push model’ of FOI. While pleading for recognition that at least there is an FOI debate in China and corresponding legislation, Xiao concludes that in spite of ‘multiple paths for information flow’, China's current official approach to FOI is undermined by several factors, ‘including a limited access mechanism, broad and vague exemptions and omission of the maximum disclosure principle’ present in some other countries’ legislation.

The current state of China's information freedom (especially in academic and policy settings and in public) is at about the maximum it could be in a country that remains in practice a secret state governed by a secretive party. The constraints imposed by politics and ideology on freedom of information exchange, including through repression of individuals, are probably at their lowest since the Communists came to power. The focus of restrictions is probably at its narrowest as well. Yet, in their commitment to transparency, China's leaders have not yet equalled the commitment shown by Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR beginning in 1987 with his policy of glasnost (meaning ‘openness’ or ‘candour’), even though the volume and quality of information exchange in China today are massively greater than in the Soviet case. What this comparison highlights is that China's leaders, while still determined to repress certain forms of information exchange, could not be much closer to a tipping point in this area of policy if they tried, in spite of their own values. The quantity, frequency and speed of communications by ordinary citizens, specialist researchers, commercial interests and political activists in China and outside it are all now so great that information exchange seems like a political tsunami approaching China's political leaders with inexorable force to wash away the secret state. The publication globally of detailed information on the wealth of the immediate families of Xi Jinping and Wen Jiabao by Bloomberg and the New York Times was just a warning tremor of the character of the CCP's looming information catastrophe. The CCP could only survive such an event if it was itself able to construct a deeper consultative democracy and dilute its i-dictatorship.