The Business of Governance: China's Legislation on Content Regulation in Cyberspace

Abstract

The launch of the Internet in the early 1990s opened new frontiers, awakened new dreams, and offered new opportunities for many, but it also brought new challenges to ruling regimes and their subjects. Such challenges are exemplified in the case of China. The Internet has given rise to a new generation of “netizens” in China who crave information. According to a survey by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), there are more than 100 million Internet users in China as of June 2005, a drastic leap from 620,000 when the CNNIC first carried out its survey in October 1997.1 These netizens each spend more than one hour a day on the Internet, and 83.5% of them rated news as the most sought-after information.2 Many netizens have turned chat rooms and bulletin board systems into an active virtual public sphere,3 and in some cases the Government has been forced to respond to discussions on such bulletin boards.4 Although the Internet is highly cen-