16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: China Today
- Sprache: Englisch
Few doubt that China wants to be a major economic and military power on the world stage. To achieve this ambitious goal, however, the PRC leadership knows that China must first become an advanced information-based society. But does China have what it takes to get there? Are its leaders prepared to make the tough choices required to secure China’s cyber future? Or is there a fundamental mismatch between China’s cyber ambitions and the policies pursued by the CCP until now?
This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of China’s information society. It explores the key practical challenges facing Chinese politicians as they try to marry the development of modern information and communications technology with old ways of governing their people and conducting international relations. Fundamental realities of the information age, not least its globalizing character, are forcing the pace of technological change in China and are not fully compatible with the old PRC ethics of stability, national industrial strength and sovereignty. What happens to China in future decades will depend on the ethical choices its leaders are willing to make today. The stakes are high. But if China’s ruling party does not adapt more aggressively to the defining realities of power and social organization in the information age, the ‘China dream’ looks unlikely to become a reality.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 316
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
China Today series
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Tables
Map
Chronology
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1: China's Cyber Ambition
How China Has Fared
A Leadership View
Ideal Values for Information Society Policy
2: Legacy Values
War Against Information and Society
Reform and Opening Up: Technology Please
Information Economy without Freedom of Information
Consolidating the Information Economy
Summary Assessment of Leadership Values in 1999
Conclusion
3: e-Democracy, i-Dictatorship
Freedom of Information Exchange in the Secret State
Protecting Information Exchange, or the i-Dictatorship
Trusted Information
Conclusion
4: Innovative Information Economy
Commitment to Transformation
Innovation System and Informatization
Innovator Class
Conclusion
5: Security in the Global Infosphere
Strategic Stability and Military Policy
Bridging Military Divides
Interdependent Informatized Security
Conclusion
6: The Road Ahead
References
Index
China Today series
Copyright © Greg Austin 2014
The right of Greg Austin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2014 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6979-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6980-9 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8588-5 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8587-8 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
This book is dedicated to Angelica and Elvira.
Tables
1.1 Priorities of the NIP, 2006–2020
1.2 Nine ideal values for an information society
2.1 Start-up dates for public Chinese internet platforms, 1997–1999
3.1 Start-up dates for public Chinese internet platforms, 2000 onwards
5.1 Selected additional international policy milestones, 2000
Chronology
Preface
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.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Li Maosen and the Ethics Centre of the Department of Philosophy at Renmin University for helping me understand during my stay there the Chinese view of the contours of information ethics and moral education. This book debates that Chinese view and I alone am responsible for that. It is to the credit of the university and China that I was received so warmly while conducting this research. I would also like to thank Professor Luciano Floridi of Oxford University for orienting my understanding of the information age as a set of ethical problems. I owe a debt to Professor Mervyn Frost of King's College London for showing me the centrality of ethical contest in international affairs and how it can be (and has to be) distinguished from social science. I am indebted to the Department of War Studies at King's College for my time there as a Visiting Senior Fellow while I researched and wrote this book. Dr Thomas Rid provided important support. The EastWest Institute, particularly John Mroz, provided a unique environment for policy debates on the issues.
The manuscript has been improved as the result of critical review by two anonymous colleagues who identified important gaps or inconsistencies in the draft. I am grateful to Eric Cappon, who acted as the surrogate ‘general reader’ at the final stage to test the readability of the manuscript for its target audience. The quality of the manuscript has been dramatically enhanced through advice from Louise Knight at Polity and at an earlier stage from Kay Templeton in Sydney. Pascal Porcheron at Polity made the finishing touches. Fiona Sewell undertook a most thorough and thoughtful final edit. Special thanks to my wife Kay for continued support.
Abbreviations
At the request of the publisher, this list omits commonly understood abbreviations from international relations (such as UN for the United Nations), common abbreviations from the field of information society policy (such as ICT for information and communications technology) and abbreviations that only occur within a couple of pages of first mention.
1
China's Cyber Ambition
China's political leaders have expressed a vision of making the country into a world-class information society. This involves the widespread application in the economy and the society of advanced technologies in information processing and its exploitation, based on a pervasive communications infrastructure. Jiang Zemin, former general secretary of the Communist Party, laid out this general vision in at least three major speeches in Beijing in 2000: in addressing Communist Party members attending the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) on 3 March; in welcoming remarks at the opening of the 16th World Computer Congress on 21 August; and in a speech to a meeting of the Central Military Commission (CMC) on 11 December (see Jiang 2010). Wen Jiabao, former premier, saw the ambition as a ‘mega-trend for development in the contemporary world, a major force in promoting economic and social development and reform’ (www.gov.cn 04/11/2005). According to a former senior adviser, the country's leaders were seeing informatization as the ‘main power driving the country's overall economic and social development’ (Qu 2010).
The Chinese delegate to one of the preparatory meetings of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) signalled China's position as follows (Sha 2002). Countries with different social systems and cultural traditions will handle the transition to an information society differently. Information infrastructure will be the foundation of future economic progress but it is weak in developing countries (among which China counted itself). Managing the transition, he said, would demand policy responses across a broad front in line with national conditions (macroeconomic control, market regulation policies, balancing technological development and market growth, avoiding market risks and innovative financing mechanisms). The security of the state would be a high priority. The developed countries should have an obligation to transfer technologies and develop the human resources of developing countries (to bridge the digital divide). The private sector and civil society would be important drivers, but in framing international responses, the governments should be in the lead.
The earliest systematic and public presentation of the Chinese leadership view did not come until six years later, in the National Informatization Plan (NIP) 2006–20 (Central Committee and State Council 2006). The State Informatization Leading Group (SILG), chaired by the premier and comprising several colleagues from the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), had approved the NIP in principle in November 2005. There had been an informatization strategy in the 2001–5 Five-Year Plan but it was largely oriented towards information technology narrowly defined, rather than towards the information society ambition touted by its leaders at the time (see chapter 4 for more detail). The main lines of the NIP 2006–20, which are set out in table 1.1, covered a broad sweep of policy consistent with the transformational vision of an information society.
Table 1.1: Priorities of the NIP, 2006–2020
promote the information societypromote economic informationstrengthen the development and utilization of information resourcesimplement e-governmentbuild advanced internet cultureimprove the integration of information infrastructureimprove the competitiveness of the information technology (IT) industrybuild a national information security systemimprove national capacity by creating a pool of IT personnelimprove policy and researchimprove investment and financing policiespromote an IT legal systemstrengthen international exchanges and cooperation in ITimprove the promotion of informatizationIn China, the concept of an information society (like the term ‘harmonious society’ or ‘patriotic society’) differs according to the person using the term or even the occasion on which one person uses it. There can be no rigid definition of informatization or the information society. At a basic level, the terms suggest a prioritization of the value placed upon information and how it is used, especially through advanced technologies, products and networks. But, as outlined in this book, the intensity and scope of China's ambition, as documented in many places, suggest that the high-end version – radically transformative effect – is what at least some of the leaders had in mind.
One estimate of the scale of social and political transformation still ahead for China can be found in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) report Information Science and Technology in China: A Roadmap to 2050 (Li Guojie 2011). Its plan is staggeringly ambitious and complex. It is based on a commitment to approaching the frontiers of science, economics and social organization in the sphere of informatization by 2050. The report comes close to arguing for a new set of political values in order to make the necessary transition. While much of the argument about political change in China is made disparately and buried somewhat in the technical jargon, the Executive Summary gives a slightly clearer set of markers. Some sound simply technocratic, but as later discussion in the report suggests, they are also deeply political. They are clearly more humanistic (people-centred) than the summary points in table 1.1 from the NIP 2006–20. The CAS report says that the national information systems – presumably meaning in politics, science and the economy – need to:
be user orientedbe ubiquitousoffer ‘convenient’ access to informationprovide the ability for people to ‘more effectively cooperate’create opportunities for a ‘higher quality of life’be seen as a human and social phenomenon rather just as a technological enableroperate ‘free from monopoly’have Chinese characteristics through an expansion of Chinese language web contentmeet national security needsallow for the construction of a harmonious society.Towards the end of the report, in a short subsection called ‘social computing’, which appears at first glance to have only a limited technical meaning, the authors open up the political question without answering it. They say ‘social computing research and applications have become an urgent agenda for ensuring national security and harmonious development’. While observing the desirable growth of people-to-people networking, they note that ‘the entire community realizes that these new technologies will profoundly affect the structure, organisation and activity patterns of future society’. We might reasonably interpret this to mean the political system. The changes will be unpredictable, the report says, but will need to be managed. The authors call for urgent adoption of an overarching ‘theory of social computing’. This could be interpreted to mean new rules for less government intervention in cyberspace and in network supervision – what is referred to in the report's Executive Summary as the ‘monopoly’ over the information networks. The document would have been discussed with and approved by senior Communist Party officials, since the political implications of the objectives highlighted here are significant.
By November 2013, the leaders had endorsed a set of sixty reform measures (or principles) at a plenum of the Central Committee of the CCP (Central Committee 2013). Without using the term ‘informatization’ or ‘information society’, many of these measures called for the establishment of relevant information systems and their exploitation as an underpinning of national advance. For example, the leadership made demands for:
more rapid movement to an innovative societynational uniform economic accounting systems and ‘other basic data for the entire society’more open information on budgets and finance for state-owned enterprises (SOEs)more interdepartmental information sharingacceleration of the perfection of leading structures for internet managementguarantees for the security of the national network and of informationpublication of environmental information in a timely mannerfull utilization of informatized means to stimulate balanced distribution of high-quality healthcare resourcesperfection of leadership systems and the unified management of information assets and technologies in the armed forces.Reading these 2013 priorities, with a new leadership installed only one year previously, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the strength of leadership commitment to informatization as an overarching and all-encompassing policy had weakened somewhat. This was further evident in December 2013 when the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) singled out agriculture as the weakest of the ‘four pursuits’: industrialization, informatization, urbanization and agriculture. This was a novel framing suggestive of a downgrading of the informatization goal over previous years away from being the overall driver of economic prosperity and social organization.
How China Has Fared
Since 2000, China's gains against its informatization ambition have been impressive. To illustrate the point, we can take five dimensions of an information society as examples. In industry, from a very low (negligible) base three decades earlier, China was claiming by 2009 to have the biggest IT industry in the world and to be ranked first in production of many related items (Jiang 2010). On the social front, there has been explosive growth in the exchange and use of information, raw and processed, through many different internet-based systems or through mobile computing: news sites like Sina, microblogs like Sina Weibo, YouTube lookalikes Tudou.com and youku.com, personal meeting sites (such as Mimiwang.com.cn), business networking sites (such as 365ju.com) and the Flickr lookalike Youpoo. In scientific research on information technologies, China is making great strides, exemplified by the news in November 2012 that a group of six Chinese scientists were claiming the ‘first teleportation between two remote macroscopic objects’, a process that provides a building block for the development of quantum networks and distributed quantum computing (Bao et al. 2012). In the field of internet architecture, China has taken a leading role in the development of an Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). In the security sphere, China has created the largest and most effective network of internet monitors and censors in the world and it is credited with spectacular successes in cyber espionage against the United States and other countries.
As a counterpoint to these and similar successes, China's government and informatization specialists see them as niche gains that are ahead of the play in terms of China's march towards an information society. An article published in 2012 reported the low standing of China in international comparisons of informatization, in both Chinese indexes and international indexes (Chao et al. 2012). The CAS Roadmap to 2050 (Li Guojie 2011) made similar observations. A similar view can be found in non-Chinese sources, such as the 2013 Network Readiness Index (NRI) of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which had China sitting at 58th in world rankings for its use of information technologies to advance its national competitiveness and its citizens’ lives (WEF and INSEAD 2013). China had slipped to that position from 36th in the 2011 rankings via 51st in 2012 (WEF and INSEAD 2012, 2011). The NRI provides an indexed comparison of the ‘network readiness’ of nearly 200 countries using a wide range of indicators. In the 2001–2 report, China ranked 64th (Kirkman et al. 2002). The United States, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia are all ahead of China in the 2013 NRI.
The NRI gives only a partial picture of China in the cyber world, but it mirrors quite critical sentiment within the country about its weak position relative to others. The slippage by China in global informatization rankings has been specifically addressed by Chinese specialists (Chao et al. 2012). While these authors offered some critique of three indexes including the NRI, they also concluded that the ‘analysis of the reasons for the rankings change contributes to an objective assessment of China's position in the global information wave’. Such analysis, the authors said, would ‘help promote the rapid and healthy development’ of the country's information technology.
A Leadership View
Many constituencies have been involved in setting policy for China's information society, more so since 2000 than previously. These include the CCP, government officials (the technocrats), the armed forces, internal security agencies, business leaders, scholars, civil society, the media, religious groups and bloggers. Foreign companies, foreign governments and foreign civil society actors, alongside international organizations, have also played a highly visible role. There is now a cacophony of views in China on most policy subjects and the internet has transformed the character of the political dialogue on informatization policy. As the number of stakeholders has increased, opinions have become highly pluralized, and all ideas, including extreme right and left, can be widely disseminated (subject to post-publication censorship). Yet, while the internet may have opened up the dialogue massively, it has not broken the power of the one-party state. Leadership views remain decisive in most areas of policy even though their ability to enforce their directives has been weakened by the pluralization of society.
There is insufficient evidence to be able to assess what individual political leaders in China actually believe about anything. That is due in part to the fact that, in all political systems, leaders are obliged to temper personal values according to the political exigencies of the day. The actions of an individual leader therefore do not necessarily provide direct evidence of her or his views. Lack of insight into the personal views of this or that leader in China is also due in part to the closed nature of its political system, the lack of reporting on what the leaders say in private, and the high political cost for its leaders of being seen to be diverging from the leadership consensus. So, in focusing on the leaders, this book acknowledges that it is setting aside, for the purposes of argument, a detailed study of the many ‘intervening variables’ of political process (Duan 2012). The book is in effect hypothesizing a leadership view based on the net effect of their actions and statements in respect of four interrelated processes: awareness building and vision setting; resource mobilization; enhancing institutional performance; and setting trends (Duan 2012).
In looking at outcomes as evidence of leadership views, we need to acknowledge that a leader by himself or herself achieves nothing. Policy is shaped and executed (or diluted) by those lower in the hierarchy. This process of surrogate leadership by the second and third tier of leadership has been particularly evident in information society policy in China. The way in which China's leaders have come to their decisions at each milestone en route to this goal has in large part been due to a class of people (some leaders but mostly technocrats, scholars, bureaucrats and more recently entrepreneurs) who were able to bridge between an inherently conservative and isolationist CCP and the outside world, not just in information technology, but also in economic policy areas such as decentralization and competitiveness (Duan 2012).
Ideal Values for Information Society Policy
There are many different views on what constitutes an information society and the appropriate policies for achieving it. In terms of practical policy, most countries have developed some sort of national-level plan, with some having started several decades ago, and all having variations from others according to national conditions and political priorities. As internationalization of the issue took hold after the turn of the century, a number of global guides, templates or indexes were set in place.
China set up its own informatization index in 2000 on the instructions of the SILG. They were determined to track progress of their informatization ambition against a national baseline as well against international comparisons. Research sources used for creating the index included similar assessment tools from Japan, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the European Union, Seattle city government and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) (Xu 2004). Yet even these sources were largely about the information technologies, rather than a broader social concept of informatization. Around 2007, the CCP committee of the CAS approved a science-led assessment of China's informatization, including an alternative index that started collecting data in 2008. It too focused less on the social aspects and more on the technical aspects (information security, informatization construction, informatization services and informatization promotion).
Outside China, in 2002, the WEF partnered with the Center for International Development at Harvard University to produce The Global Information Technology Report 2001–2002: Readiness for the Networked World, described by the editors as the ‘most comprehensive documentation to date of how ICTs are being used around the world’ (Kirkman et al. 2002). One purpose of the report, which has become a widely referenced annual publication (cited earlier), was to address the ‘major opportunities and obstacles that global leaders face as they try to more fully participate in the Networked World’. The WSIS Geneva Action Plan agreed in December 2003 provides a comprehensive view of the character of an information society, while allowing for national variation (www.itu.org/wsis). Of special note is that it calls out the ethical, human rights and political aspects as well as economic and social development. In 2004, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) set up the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development ‘as an international, multi-stakeholder initiative to improve the availability and quality of ICT data and indicators, particularly in developing countries’ (measuring-ict.unctad.org). The ITU has a series of annual publications, Measuring the Information Society, dating back to 2007 (see ITU 2013), which grew out of earlier work on an ICT opportunity index.
At the scholarly level, there is a vast literature on the information society. Most notably, there are studies that critique the transformative pretensions of the information society ambition, and others that embrace it, going so far as to elucidate a new philosophy of the information age. In the first group, one might mention Frank Webster's Theories of the Information Society (2006). He wisely questions the idea that the information society is a dominant new paradigm that sweeps other modes of analysis and social relationship aside. He leaves the reader believing that the idea of the information society is merely a way of instrumentalizing certain aspects of social change and does not in itself redefine our reality. He prefers the ‘idea of an informatization of life which stems from the continuity of established forces’.
Robert Hassan's The Information Society (2008) takes on the ‘boosters’ and critics of the information society idea, with a political economy perspective that is persuasive. He rests his case on the conjunction between neo-liberal globalization (capitalism) and the ‘revolution in the development and application of computer-based technologies’. He suggests that the information society has created not just ‘pathways of possibility’ but also a ‘democratic vacuum’ that will need to find a new controlling impulse from within, or ‘we will continue to accelerate towards destinations unknown’. Manuel Castells, in his Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012), offers the view that politics has been forever transformed in certain dimensions, for better and for worse, by the new information technologies and their mass application, especially in social media forms. He concludes with an observation about ‘the uncertainty of an uncharted process of political change’ as the main political force unleashed by mass actions supported by modern social media. He sees political power resting with the established institutions, especially if they can co-opt the more popular themes of activists. But he warns that the more citizens can convey their messages, the more their consciousness is raised, and ‘the more the public sphere becomes a contest terrain, and the lesser will be the politicians’ capacity to integrate demands and claims’.
On the philosophy, Luciano Floridi at Oxford University is one of the leading scholars, with his 2013 volume, The Ethics of Information, providing deep insights into the moral implications of the information age. Such works debate an issue of the highest relevance to Chinese leadership choices on this subject. Just how transformative is the information society? Is it indeed revolutionary and overarching, affecting everything in fundamental ways? Or is it just another new factor that leaders must address alongside traditional preoccupations like urbanization or globalization, industrialization or education? China's leaders have faced the challenge of working out just how much they should stake on informatization, a process that few of them have really understood that well anyway.
Floridi and Sanders (2002) suggest a values-based approach is needed. They provide an overview of four possible approaches to characterizing the information society: the professional approach, which sees the field of information technology as something akin to medicine or law, and therefore demanding a set of professionally bounded information ethics; the radical approach, seeing the information age as transformative and novel – ‘absolutely unique issues, in need of a unique approach’; the conservative approach – we only need a ‘particular applied ethics, discussing new species of traditional moral issues’; and the innovative approach (one step down from the radical approach) that ‘can expand the metaethical discourse with a substantially new perspective’. Floridi and Sanders conclude that the ethical issues raised by the information age ‘are not uncontroversially unique’ but ‘are sufficiently novel to render inadequate the adoption of standard macroethics’, such as utilitarianism. These authors argue for an information ethics in which the moral character of an action is evaluated according to its ‘contribution to the growth of the infosphere’ or, conversely, whether it ‘negatively affects the whole infosphere’. They use the idea of ‘infosphere’ to enable an analysis about preservation and protection of the information society, by analogy with the idea of ‘ecosphere’ for the natural environment. In the philosophy of environmentalism, all parts of the ecosystem (living and non-living) have a potential moral value. These authors suggest that this approach is directly applicable to the infosphere: all information objects have a potential moral value.
