Page 61 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 2. Literature review

2.5.3.3 Censorship

Zhou (2001, p.16) clarified the general principle of internet administration from
the perspective of the Chinese government as ‘developing it actively, strengthening its
management, seeking advantages and avoiding harmfulness, making it serve our pur-
pose’. In line with this principle, an ideal scenario for the state was clarified, which is

to encourage active development and make full use of new technologies to reinforce
control and avoid negative effects (Zhou, 2006). Hachigian (2001, p.118) also summa-
rised a three-part internet strategy proposed by the government: ‘providing economic
growth and some personal freedoms, managing the internet’s risks, and harnessing its

potential’. Therefore, it seems that the political authorities have recognised the potential
challenges to the regime posed by the internet, and the government has demonstrated
that the new media has been recognised and is being treated similarly to the traditional
media such as newspapers, radio and TV.

Regarding the administration mechanism of the internet, Lessig (1999, cited in
Zheng, 2008, p.8) once argued that ‘governments anywhere can most certainly regulate
the internet, both by controlling its underlying code and by shaping the legal environ-
ment in which it operates’. However, Zhang and Stening (2010) have indicated that the

prevalence of the internet, especially Web 2.0, makes it very costly to filter and monitor
online public content. They pointed out that the traditional method of oversight and
control has decayed and is reduced in its effectiveness with the advent of highly inter-
active media space on the internet.

There are two factors that can make the work of censoring particularly daunting
(Xiao, 2011, p.52):
• The exclusive many-to-many communication pattern on the internet sets few
barriers to entry access. It poses difficulty in controlling the source of infor-

mation and the dissemination process.
• The complicated network topology of the internet contains massive numbers
of connections, overlapping clusters and self-organised communities. The
growth of these nodes in the network is at an exponential speed, making the

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