Cost-Benefit Analysis of Implementing Internet Control and Censorship in China
This essay aims to do a benefit-cost analysis of China implementing internet control and censorship and reach a conclusion on whether it is recommended to continuous on adopting the current method in terms of long-term stability and economic grown.
By 2019, there are 854 million Chinese internet users, covering over 60% of the total population, meaning that more people get access to Internet. However, it is considered by Stephen Green that the Chinese Communist Party sees the Internet as a threat to its regime; Yongnian Zheng, a political scientist, in the book ‘Contesting cyberspace in China: online expression and authoritarian resilience’ had also stated that the party has established contain political control while managing the economic uses of internet, including censorship.
There are several ways of implementing such controls, including censorship, the social credit system and the Great Firewall. In brief, I felt the Chinese government needs internet control, but the scale can be smaller and less overt.
First, having a nickname of “The Great Firewall”, China’s strict internet censorship puts the entering of foreign companies into the Chinese market off. Under the Firewall, she bans many websites, including Instagram, Facebook, Google and YouTube. Victoria Mui, Managing director of Affluent Chinese™, said that it was for the unwillingness of these site companies sharing customers’ information with the Chinese government and to be under monetised. It then concludes this Firewall to be limiting the willingness of foreign companies, especially with the companies who seem freedom in speech as a core value, to enter China. Newly with the NBA, after Adam Silver, the Commissioner, spoke about supporting Morey the freedom of speech, the China Central Television announced later on the same day that they would not broadcast any games involving the Houston Rockets team. Besides, 11state-owned companies which the NBA has partnered with, stop the partnership shortly, including stop selling NBA-related tickets online. In sum, this harsh internet censorship is one element of slowing down the Chinese economy as it reduces the multinational companies’ willingness to entering China.
Second, by the large scale of censorship on the internet, it discourages people to be creative and to speak up for themselves. For instance, a few years before the government asked one of the biggest video websites in China, bilibili, to increase the level of self-censorship, resulting in a large number
Third, political and anti-government contents are banned heavily in China. For instance, a netizen (whom the name is censored) once commented about how the new policy on donating blood was putting his leukaemia mother into a dangerous place. He later found out that the comments could not be shared and so he immediately deleted the post and apologised.
Another method that the Chinese government adopts on controlling the internet is the Social Credit System. This system is used for helping parties to identify another party’s trust in finance, politics, bank’s credit and ethic. Within the system, it states that defamation is a serious sin and will deduce the credit heavily. When a person has low credit according to the system, he or she will be banned from a serious of services, including buying houses and luxuries; travel by trains etc. By 2018, 17 million and 5 millions people were banned from buying air tickets and trains tickets and 128 people were not allowed departing from China. This punishment method, although it proved to be effective and accepted by the majority of netizens in China (80%), on the Management side, is putting the China government regime into high potential risk as people may take actions when they do not trust the government with their personal information.
On the other hand, there are several benefits bought by implementing internet control: protecting people from receiving wrong, offensive, harmful, hateful and violent information; maintaining the Chinese regime from oversea; setting standards for publishing online, and the most important, limiting criminal activities. Having a 1393 million population size, China was surprised to have a low crime rate in 2016 by having 0.62 per 100k people. Meanwhile, reported by ChinaDaily, there was an increase in the online crime rate, including cyber gambling, pornography, attack and fraud in 2017. These can be concluded that while the Chinese Firewall can detect more various online crimes, it helps with lowering the actual crime rate. In sum, with a low crime and fraud rate associated with high political stability and population, China has great economic potential and will, therefore, attract more foreign investment.
To conclude, while needing to share the big data with the government, having high political stability and labour force will attract more foreign investment. For example, fashion brands like Timberland may be willing to enter the Chinese Market than social media companies as it obtains a lower level of customers’ information. However with the Chinese government’s regime, despite a high level of stability is currently shown, it may not be consistent and sustainable. It is therefore concluded that the internet control level can be reduced. This can be obtained by taking the cyber rules away from the social credit system.
