Internet Revolution in China?

It is not realistic to expect the Internet to change China, and one should not over estimate the role of the Internet in transforming the country.

So said Zhou Yongming in his June 2006 article titled Understanding Chinese Internet Politics.

Zhou noted that the seemingly "obsessive attention" to Internet in China stemmed from our high expectations of it.

But the Internet in China should be seen as a promising new technology, and that efforts to control it "are an integral part of Chinese media control mechanisms - which in turn are part of the current political system." Therefore, only by changing the entire political system can the Internet be used freely.

Zhou also reasoned that the same technology can be used by different parties in different ways to achieve diverse goals.

"The Internet can thus be used by the Chinese people to enlarge their space of political participation, but it can also be adopted by the Chinese state to consolidate its power."

As Zhou illustrated in his recent book, the telegraph, the newest information technology 100 years ago, was used by the Chinese government to conduct a nationwide mobilization against American goods to protect the Chinese exclusion treaty.

Zhou's studies on websites of fans of the military had also indicated that the Internet had been used by the Chinese to conduct online nationalist and anti-democratic mobilization. Hence. the democratizing function of the Internet is only "one of many possibilities of that medium."