The internet came to the public in China in 1995. Twenty years later, China has the biggest population of netizens in the world; it has become the world's biggest producer of desktop computers; and two of its telecommunications equipment providers are among the world's largest. Is China on a pathway to dominance in cyberspace? It could be. Yet, as impressive as those few manifestations of China's digital prowess are, they can be viewed as part of a much bigger canvas – the idea of an information society. This concept predates the creation of the internet by several decades and is defined by many features much more wide-ranging in scope than the sorts of measures just mentioned.

The idea of an information society evolved from an earlier concept of ‘information economy’ or ‘knowledge economy’. In 1962, economist Fritz Machlup estimated for the first time the monetary value of knowledge production in the United States and how this form of production had transformed the economy (Machlup 1962). By the early 1970s, various commentaries on his work had elaborated on the concept of the ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘information economy’, portending an information revolution every bit as transformative in social and political terms as the industrial revolution.

The world was now in an information age. The transformative effect of the new age was seen early on as extending beyond the industrial and the economic domains to reach the very moral fabric of society. Norbert Wiener (1964) penned a short work appropriately titled God & Golem, Inc., with the subtitle ‘A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion’. Bell (1976) predicted that the information revolution would be the catalyst for a post-industrial society and that information exchange would become the basis of all economic and social exchange. One of the most insightful antecedents, however, was probably Masuda (1981 [1980]), who coined the word ‘computopia’, thereby anticipating the comprehensive and profound effects of information technologies and their use. Masuda foreshadowed ‘the realisation of a society that brings about a general flourishing state of human intellectual creativity, instead of affluent material consumption’. He also anticipated e-democracy, the globalization of a new renaissance, a shattering of previous conceptions of privacy, the emergence of a new concept of time-value, and a new intensity in system innovation – all premised on the complete objectification and commodification of information.

By the early 1990s, the concept of the information society had become globally prominent as an important goal of national and international policy. In 2000, China's leaders embraced the goal of an information society in a series of policy statements and administrative acts that are documented later. By 2002 and 2003, the United Nations (UN) system got behind the goal and convened the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). There was one basic reason. The advent of the information society was seen as global in scope and revolutionary in its impact on state power. The vision accepted by most countries participating in the WSIS, including China, was a grand vision of society transformed by the material, intellectual and social attributes of information technologies and the knowledge economy. The ideal has been described by the UN as a society ‘where everyone can create, access, utilise and share information and knowledge’ to ‘achieve their full potential’ in ‘improving their quality of life’ (UN Docs WSIS-03/GENEVA/DOC/4-E 12 December 2003). The idea in this formulation is ‘people-centred’.

In Chinese, information society is most often rendered as xìnxī shèhuì (信息社会). A common substitute for the term ‘information society’ is the term xìnxīhuà (信息化), which can be translated as ‘informatization’. It is often used in Chinese sources (as in English ones) to contrast with industrialization (chănyèhuà or gōngyèhuà) as a period in social and economic history. In China, informatization has been defined as ‘the historical process, during which information technology is fully used, information resources are developed and utilized, the exchange of information and knowledge sharing are promoted, the quality of economic growth is improved, and the transformation of economic and social development is promoted’ (Central Committee and State Council 2006). It is broadly cognate with the Chinese government's concept of an information society, though it could be interpreted as less people-centred than the UN vision and more in the mould of the materialist and technocratic traditions that Chinese Communists have preferred. The idea of an information society cuts across a wide sweep of policy (politics, culture, art, economy, industry, education, science, technology, diplomacy and security).

The analysis here started as an effort to evaluate China's progress towards its goal of becoming an advanced information society. Within a short time, given China's political system, I came to see the preferences of the country's leaders as a key determinant and a worthy subject of study. What do Chinese leaders actually want from the information society and what dilemmas have they confronted in framing their policies? This then led me to look more closely at their political values – their ethics – not least because Chinese figures prominent in informatization policy made this connection themselves, as had statements from many delegations to the WSIS.

On the assumption that outcomes in the information society are ethically determined, the analytical framework used in the book revolves around ideal policy values for achieving an advanced information society. This framework is derived from a study of ethics. Thus, the analysis is not presented as a work in social science (be that political science, political economy, industry policy or strategic studies). It is a more simple effort to situate the values of China's leaders within an ethical framework implied by their acceptance of the ambition to become an advanced information society. Since the analysis is intended to give a sense of the trajectory of China's ambition (where has it come from and the likely timeline for achieving the goal), it relies on a chronological treatment in each section.

Chapter 1 sets the scene for later chapters. It offers an introduction of China's ambition to become an advanced information society, identifying the year 2000 as the time when the leaders first adopted the information society ambition in policy. The chapter then sets out the framework of nine ideal policy values needed for an information society. Chapter 2 provides a short interpretative overview of China's information society prehistory in the period from 1949 to 1999. It shows how the leaders worked hard for almost three decades to suppress the emergence of an information society. Then, after 1978, they had to struggle to reverse the worst effects of that repression, opening up gradually to the idea of an information economy and later the idea of an information society. The following chapters look more closely at the leaders’ policy values in the fifteen years since the start of this century, comparing them with the ideal values. Each of chapters 3, 4 and 5 takes three of the nine ideal values in turn, looking at them from the Chinese leaders’ perspective. Thus, these chapters are titled ‘e-Democracy i-Dictatorship’, ‘Innovative Information Economy’, and ‘Security in the Global Infosphere’. As already suggested, chapters 2–5 blend thematic issues with a chronological presentation. The presentation of developments sequentially by year is intentional and essential. Without it, the reader would not get a sense of the trajectory of China's information society policy. How quickly and how nimbly have its leaders moved? How well and how enthusiastically have they adjusted to opportunity or to failure? Are they on schedule to meet their targets? A short conclusion (chapter 6) looks at the feedback effect between these three domains of policy and the associated ideal policy values, and how that positions China going forward.