Since deciding in 2000 that China must become an advanced information society, the country's leaders have at different times gone on record supporting in some measure each one of the nine policy values held up in this book to be essential for realizing such an ambition. These are listed in table 1.2 and provided the framework for this analysis. Since 2000, the leaders have been consistently self-critical in broad terms of their own policy dispositions that have undercut their ambition. They have referred to the need to be more faithful to the overarching goal either of achieving an information society or simply of comprehensive informatization. Thus, the idea that what is good for the information society is good for China has some resonance with its leaders. As Xi Jinping said on 27 February 2014, on taking over the lead in all cyber policy: ‘No informatization means no modernization.’ He also laid out a long list of shortcomings in cyber policy, all of which have been highlighted in this analysis. He said China had to address these so that it could become a ‘cyber power’ (网络大国 wăngluò dàguó). His time-frame was the two-step approach mentioned earlier for PLA informatization (2020/2050), but he linked it to the ‘two hundreds’ theme in his idea of the China dream: moderate informatization by the hundredth anniversary of the CCP in 2021 and full informatization by the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 2049.

In the area of free exchange of information and protecting that exchange, China's leaders have followed a dual policy. On the one hand, there has been amazing and inspiring progress in the sheer volume and types of information that became newly available to Chinese for the first time as their information revolution took hold. In this environment, the leaders come to accept, in principle at least, ideas of e-democracy and open government, holding out the promise both of participatory or consultative democracy and of access to information on how the country is governed.

On the other hand, these processes of e-democracy and transparency peaked early and appear to be stalled. China remains a non-transparent country. The leaders have maintained a policy of dictator's control within an atypical environment of highly liberalized mass communication. So it has looked deceptively different from previous dictatorships, but there should be no confusion: China remains an i-dictatorship. The leaders became less focused on opposing a broad sweep of ideas and critical commentary, and this has been a small miracle in itself. Yet the new technologies allowed them to detect and silence at an earlier stage those people who might organize a political or social movement around opposing ideas. The leaders’ use of advanced technologies and armies of censors to suppress errant statements, and their purveyors, appears to be 100 per cent inconsistent with the information society ambition. The information ecosystem in China is anything but trusting and secure. The leaders have not demonstrated a strong commitment to the idea that information that matters to its citizens should be freely accessible and widely exchanged, or the idea that such exchange should enjoy strong protection in the legal system.

In pursuing an innovative information economy, the leaders have demonstrated similar dualism. They have committed to the idea of a transformative and innovative information economy. China's corporations, such as Huawei and ZTE, have gone global. Yet the leaders have not liberalized and empowered several key drivers of social and scientific innovation, especially universities. They have confused manufacturing prowess with technological innovation; they have prioritized innovation in machine building (supercomputers) at the expense of social innovation; and they have maintained a nationally bounded concept of innovation, which favours the domestic over the foreign. They have removed the stultifying hand of Party control from private business but not from key centres of knowledge and social innovation.

In managing China's national security in the global information ecosystem, there has been one remarkable success story. This is the way in which the deepening relationship with Taiwan over twenty years, especially in the ICT sector, has bridged the very strong two-camps divide that defined their relationship after 1949. But when it comes to wider international settings, leadership values towards cyberspace have only exacerbated the two-camps divide with the United States. While the leaders have articulated a framing of national security that situates the country in a secure and cooperative international system, they have not followed through on that in their policy decisions. One reason for this failure is that they feel obliged to participate in a cyber arms race that they feel they did not start. Yet it would appear that their preferred framing for now (their default value) is an adversarial one. While the US push for the technological frontier of cyber military power is aggravating the negative tendency, China's leaders have also allowed their sense of vulnerability to aggravate tensions. This negative trend has emerged in spite of countervailing forces, particularly an increasingly open international economy and WTO membership, which have been fuelling the spectacularly cooperative economic relations.

These conclusions leave room for us to return to the departure point of the book – the idea of a transformational information society in China – with a more critical eye. Should we see it as an all-embracing and dominating system (the radical, transformationalist view), or as just one part of a larger society in which a range of other issues, such as political power, land ownership, urbanization or industrial hollowing-out, might seem to be of higher priority? The latter policy approach (informatization as just one of several strands of policy) may be more appealing because it is more familiar. Most Chinese leaders certainly identify instinctively with it. But this is their dilemma. They say they want an advanced information society that is transformational (the radical view) but, as this analysis has shown, they situate that ambition in a mixed bag of competing ambitions, where the priority attached to individual elements changes all too often. Their policy values are very conflicted.

Whether China eventually becomes an advanced information society or not will ultimately be determined by a range of political, economic, social and legal factors, all with domestic as well as international dimensions. It will not be decided exclusively by leaders of the Communist Party. But at this stage of history, the CCP leaders are still playing a very influential role that gives a green light for progress down certain pathways, while giving a red or amber light for others. This plays directly into the attitudes of innovators inside and outside China. Why labour in China when there are other, more welcoming places to work, where the rewards are better and there are reasonable standards of legal protection?

The Chinese political system (the Party-state apparatus) has some features that advantage pursuit by the leaders of the information society ambition. This system has proven to be adaptive and there has been a steady stream of remarkable institutional innovations. The most remarkable included the dismantling of the agricultural communes, the re-establishment of private property, the opening of the Communist Party to business leaders, and the decision to join the WTO on terms negotiated with the United States. China's embrace of globalization has been surprising and against the grain of its modern history. The government did lift the heavy hand of the state off individual choice by eliminating many controls, such as the right of decision over where one worked or studied, and for people to choose their own housing. The leaders have presided over a massive liberalization and pluralization of the society, exemplified first by allowing and then fostering the growth of civil society organizations and criticism of the government through ‘democratic supervision’. The liberalization has occurred in large part because of the leaders’ willingness to allow privately owned media operations (including foreign media) and a flourishing internet culture (albeit censored). The economy has developed in ways that have created much opportunity for individual fulfilment for those who could benefit.

Yet the political system that is for now commanding the pace of development of the information society in China is not by nature an innovative one, nor is it transparent and informational. It does not allow freedom of association, an independent legal system, organized political opposition to the one-Party state, or even sustained organized opposition to government policy by civil society groups on non-political issues.

We can see some agreement at the highest levels in China about the character of the domestic challenges involved in resetting policy to achieve the information society ambitions. The former prime minister Wen Jiabao told a press conference on the sidelines of the NPC in March 2012 that ‘without a successful political reform, it's impossible for China to fully institute economic reform and the gains we have made in these areas may be lost’. While Wen did not say it, this applies as much to the information society ambition as to others. In his formal work report to the NPC, Wen replayed many of the important themes outlined above. The same sort of sentiments were expressed in the CCP's sixty-point reform agenda of November 2013.

As Ken Lieberthal observed in a 2004 publication and as recently as a TV interview aired in China on 10 December 2012, the country has been good at making organizational change but probably needs to do better at building social institutions (Lieberthal 2004). By that he meant institutions that endure beyond political cycles because they have an independent status and a stature that ensures their ability to survive and strengthens their influence. The best example of this in China may be the CAS. For the information society ambition, there are several other sets of institutions that count as well: the legal system and the education system being two of the most important.

Does China have to wait for new leaders to quicken the pace of transition to an information society? Does it have to wait for a collapse of the Communist Party for the information society ambition to be advanced more decisively? The answer to that is: not necessarily. The Party state can oversee the transition to an advanced information society and probably retain its power if it begins to adhere more closely to the nine ideal policy values. Singapore, which has been ruled by one political party continuously since its independence in 1965, today ranks very high in most international comparisons of a country's information readiness. Could a one-party system like that in Singapore be as conducive (perhaps more so) to the achievement of the goal of an advanced information society as a multi-party system? The answer may be yes. But it would have to be a one-party state that gives a very high priority to the nine ideal values, as Singapore does.

If the obstacles to the information society ambition in China are political values, then the only way for the CCP to achieve its objective is to change its political values, and adopt ones that are consistent with the ambition. If this CCP has been able to admit capitalists, restore private property and even partially privatize SOEs, then surely it has the wit and the capacity to move more aggressively to build the institutions that promote an advanced and open information society. But it has to have the right ethical setting. It has come to where it is today largely on pragmatism, but now it needs firmer political values (the ethics) that match the information society ambition.

There is a visible tension within the leadership about values. China is as close to a tipping point in this area of policy as it could be. In 2013, the leaders realized this and clamped down very firmly on FOI, on journalists and on rules for commentary on the internet.

My best judgement is that by 2025 China's leaders will have opted in favour of better choices. By then, we will probably not be debating whether China is likely to overtake the technological lead of the United States. That will not be anyone's highest priority because it is a pipe dream. Knowledge has no flag. The content of GDP is not purely national any more, if it ever was. By 2025, we will be more interested in whether the two countries are working together in a global infosphere as effectively as they can to marshal shared information assets in the fight against global and national problems, including such basic challenges as fresh water availability and climate stability. China looks set to become an advanced information society on a par with other developed countries within several decades. However, current indications are that to arrive at that point, there will probably need to be some sort of crisis to push China's relatively new leadership out of the ethical dead end into which it has been marched. China needs new thinking from its leaders, a clear shift to ideas of common security, if it is to enjoy the sustainable prosperity that the capabilities of an advanced information society can offer. Only a stronger embrace of the spirit of the information age – full transparency in governance at home and deeper integration with a free and open international knowledge society – will deliver on China's ambitions.