Abstract
The internet in China is a hot academic topic. While some hold optimistic views about its role in democratising China, others argue that it is used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a means of improving governance and shaping people's minds. Both views tend to be technology-deterministic. Against this scholarly debate, Greg Austin's book offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of China's cyber policy and highlights the CCP's dilemma in the digital age. The core of his argument is that there is a mismatch between the CCP's cyber ambition and its political values, which puts it in this dilemma: it is determined to modernise and informatise Chinese society while continuing to maintain the traditional ways of governing the people and dealing with international affairs. In Austin's view, China remains an i-dictatorship (p. 171).
After introducing the CCP's cyber ambition, Austin reviews the context of the CCP's legacy values up to the year 2000 when the leaders decided to informatise society. The subsequent three chapters elaborate the CCP's dilemma in terms of the national information ecosystem (Chapter 3), the innovative information economy (Chapter 4) and the global information ecosystem (Chapter 5). In the conclusion, the author suggests that if the CCP wants to be successful in forming an information society, it has to have ‘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’ (p. 176).
The substantial part of each chapter primarily follows a chronological treatment. However, as detailed as Austin's explanation can be, the book sometimes reads like a historical review of cyber development in China and can become confusing when many different abbreviated names of the sophisticated institutions are mentioned in a straight timeline pattern. As most emphasis is put on the development of cyber policy in China, the author's opinions can be difficult to find in the main body of each chapter. As these interpretations are valuable, this reader would have welcomed greater focus on a critical examination of the dilemma that the CCP confronts in the digital age.
Overall, the book offers an essential introduction to cyber policy-making in China, through which students and scholars in China studies can gain a deeper insight into the challenges and risks that the CCP is facing on both the domestic and international fronts. It is a welcome contribution to studies on China.