After the Internet, Before Democracy

"Yes, I wouldn’t say this is the layman’s guide to the internet. Maybe none of these books quite are. They get very deep into the ideological weeds, because that gets to the core of whether authoritarian management of the internet can work. In After the Internet, Before Democracy , Lagerqvist tries to find a middle ground between technological determinism/cyberutopianism – this notion that the internet will automatically bring about democracy in authoritarian states – and the much darker view that authoritarian states can control the internet and hold onto power regardless of how citizens use the internet. What he describes is a much more fluid, authoritarian internet. He looks at the different interest groups in China that use the internet. There’s the Communist Party, the Party-state, but there’s also what he describes as the subalterns: the people who sometimes have oppositional interests to the Party, who also have access to the internet and use it. That can be middle class Chinese with urban gripes, migrant workers, activists and people with environmental concerns. “I think what they’ve done with the internet shows that they can extend their ability to rule, by making authoritarianism more flexible.” He believes we’re in a phase now where the Communist Party is effectively maintaining control and surviving the embrace of the internet, but he sees the embrace of the internet as inevitably aiding the transformation to democracy. That is a more hopeful view than my own report takes. But in getting there, in his argument, he provides a very helpful roadmap of the history of the internet in China, the different conceptions of how the internet is managed, and how people are active online, that makes for an interesting read. Yes, there were 564 million people online as of the end of last year [2012]. There were 200 million people shopping online, and more than that watching videos every month. There’s lots of stuff going on besides political activism. It’s an extremely vibrant community inside what I call this giant cage . No, in fact the fastest growth right now is in the interior. Part of that is because there’s so much penetration already in cities and wealthier areas. But another part of it is that now it’s much easier to get online via mobile, so people can skip a step. Just as they skipped landlines to go mobile, they can get on the internet very easily. Some are. I did a story last year about a peasant activist in Hebei who has been online five or six years now. He’s a rabble-rouser, and a very effective one. He has a Weibo [the Chinese Twitter] account, and also Weixin (WeChat in English) and has contacts with the media. When they [the local authorities] were upset with him, the thugs in his village decided to try and destroy his computer. That gives you a sense of how important it is. (They didn’t know he’d already upgraded to a laptop). There’s an increasing number of farmers online. They’re not all activists, in fact most of them are not, but they’re definitely getting online."