Who Owns Informationization?
Kathleen Hartford ()
University of Massachutts/Boston
The danger is not of an electronic nightmare, but of human error. It is not computers but policy that threatens freedom…. Computers… are technologies of freedom, as much as was the printing press.(Pool 1998, p.339)
Becau of China's special national conditions (guoqing), agencies' (bumen) rigidity and
挑战头巾
interests are relatively strong; we can't leave it up to some popular (minjian) enterpris to
anymorepush it along, like in the United States. The state has to have a unified plan and unified
organization, and each agency and locality must from now own put its own informatization plan within the state's overall (zongti) construction plan….(Lu Qun, 1997; reporting on a speech
delivered by Vice-Premier Zou Jiahua)
[T]he most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious
新东方留学咨询combination of four elements…. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society….
The cond element is what I call a high-modernist ideology….
Only when the first two elements are joined to a third does the combination become potentially lethal. The third elements is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to u the full weight of its coercive power to bring the high-modernist designs into being….
A fourth element is cloly linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the
capacity to resist the plans.(Scott 1998, pp. 4-5)
In many different ways, the proliferating development and u of new technologies for "information" and "communication" (often referred to as ICTs for shorthand) have been said to po an insuperable challenge to state meddling, and a potent challenge to state control. This "technologies of freedom" perspective generally posits veral reasons for the undermining of politics (and possibly polity) by technology:
陪练网a. the are technologies characterized by the rapid pace of innovation, a process that by
学电脑组装维修
its very nature defies planning
b. the are technologies that both transcend and undermine geographic borders, the
foundation of modern state structures
c. the are technologies that alter the state/individual balance of powers resting upon
本末倒置是什么意思control of or access to information and communication, placing more autonomy in the
hands of individuals
ICTs, en from this perspective, reprent a natural, inexorable (and perhaps not coincidentally, globalized and globalizing) juggernaut shattering traditional means of state management and control.
Yet China's highest leaders have, increasingly over the past two decades, encouraged, urged, and embraced not only the development of ICT industries but the application and u of ICTs in all spheres of government, industry, education, culture, and even… agriculture. "Informationization," th
e term increasingly employed to describe this overall process, has in recent years become a linchpin of central and many local development strategies, and a talismanic device that is suppod to modernize the party-state system, upgrade ailing parts of the economy, turn the Chine into true denizens of the 21st century, and plug China into the wider world. And all without undermining the dominant position of the Communist Party and the Chine state -- indeed, while increasing its effectiveness and its reach.
Many investigations of the informationization process and its outcomes in China have concentrated, in effect, on which of the two foregoing perspectives is correct. My current rearch, while driven initially by the clash between the perspectives, is moving in a direction that I think fits within the more complex framework propod by the organizers of this workshop. This short thinkpiece address only a handful of the possible aspects of that fit, under three rubrics.
But first, let me provide a capsule summary of where my rearch has concentrated recently. After laboring over the study of the informationization process throughout China, from the inception of national policies for high-tech development and the respons in local policies and development plans; through the growth of high-tech companies; the development of telecommunications infrastructures; the adoption of computers, networking, and the latest telecommunications technologi
es; the types of applications both "correct" and "incorrect" of tho technologies; and the ways in which ICTs affected China's interactions with the global economy, international political communities, etc. -- I decided that I needed a narrower focus if the study were to stay grounded and rigorous. Therefore I recast the project to concentrate on a much smaller swath of China, the Yangzi River Delta area defined as the triangle described by the cities of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou.
贴纸英文>doomFor the past year, my work in that arena, while continuing to inventory developments in the veral dimensions enumerated above, has emphasized two main arenas: the development of "e-government" by municipal and provincial levels, and the interactions of online discour with censorship interventions. Both such foci provide more than tangential points of contact with the critical policy studies framework, and helped shape the ideas introduced (in embryonic and tentative form) under the cond and third rubrics.
I. Nature or nurture?
The first type of issue pod by this rearch project hails back to the perspectives introduced at the beginning of this essay. Is the direction of "informationization" somehow inevitably
determined by the very nature of the technology? Or is informationization not only driven by but also
shaped by deliberate human interventions?
The latter, "nurture" argument need not mean solely government policy or state action. As Lawrence Lessig (1999) has pointed out, the "code" that shapes rights and capabilities in cyberspace includes an architecture that embodies certain types of value choices. Abnt state choices, individuals or the "market" may commit to codes that privilege some values over others (intellectual property rights over access to information, for example; or surveillance over anonymity). But given deliberate and carefully applied state choices, the new technologies may be arranged in an architecture that restricts rather than expands freedoms, or that rearranges the priorities that might in the past have been impod, in part, by the limitations of existing technologies.a
If Lessig is on to something here -- and I confess to being clo to thoroughly convinced by his argument -- then it behooves anyone studying China's informationization process to look into the coded architecture that underpins and girds it, to understand who (what institutions and interests) is shaping the architecture (not simply the individual policies), how the architecture shapes power and privileges certain values. Informationization makes doing some things, or some ways of doing things, easier; it also makes doing some things, or some ways of doing things, much much harder.
Having said that, I must obrve that addressing such questions at the national level makes me
wef
a "Search and izure," for example, being assumed to refer to physical spaces enclod by walls and roof, until one's computer could be arched from a remote location without any physical intrusion or evidence of such arch.meiji
quail with trepidation, and I find it far more congenial to investigate them by probing the local instances.
II. Seeing like a modernizing state: the central and the local
Informationization has been emphasized as a key element in the national development strategy since the mid-1990s, and has entailed a number of initiatives spearheaded by the national government, including the massive rapid construction of modern telecommunications infrastructure and preferential policies to aid the growth of high-tech industry. Central "plans" have included the very concrete Golden Projects (initially only three -- cards, customs, and tax -- but later proliferating), and the somewhat more amorphous successive annual programs for Government/Enterpris/People Online. Central "policies" have played important roles in shaping the informationization process with money, rules (especially tho defining roles, boundaries and power), and preferences whether monetary or other. In introducing both plans and policies, central le
vel officials' language-of-informationization has emphasized goals such as national defen, national economic power and international competitiveness, economic growth, and integration-efficiency-control, with sometimes, almost as afterthought, the improvement of quality of life.
In many ns, though, the real work of "informationization" must be done at the local level, with local governments, local companies, and local residents all playing important roles. Tho local players often take "informationization" in directions neither foreen nor desired by the central state, or ize upon conflicts among central state bodies in order to expand their own
