Cyber/Information Sovereignty and the Internet’s First Decade in China: Academic Debates and the Official Bu Zhenglun

This chapter discusses the early, formative period of the Chinese approach to governing the internet from 1994 when China got connected to the global internet to the country’s participation in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2005. It examines and compares the Chinese academic discourse on cyber/information sovereignty and official policies of this period. It shows that the academic discourse preceded the official discourse in theorising and explicitly articulating cyber/information sovereignty, and that while the academic discourse was broadly compatible with the official stance, important differences existed between the two in terms of argumentative tonality and conceptual and theoretical orientation. Our sources reveal that the official policy of that time is decidedly pragmatic and characterized by Bu Zhenglun (不争论), a turn away from theoretical debate; in this context, particularly digitalization was uncritically promoted as a means to further economic development. In contrast to that, the academic debate of that time was critical of digitalization and underlined the need to develop a form of cyber/information sovereignty to protect Chinese society from the negative side-effects of digitalization, which were connected to fears regarding regime change and even imagined as ‘cyber colonialism’.