Reinventing East Asia

After Bicycles, What?” was the fundamental developmental question posed to the Chinese by Canadian communication scholar Dallas Smythe at the dawn of China’s “reform and open-up” era in the late 1970s. Smythe raised this question in the context of China’s search for a socialist alternative to capitalist modernity, with the hope that China would avoid the capitalist path of development. Contrary to Smythe’s wish, those who would be considered by him as the “capitalist roaders” took charge in China after Mao’s death in 1976, and ultimately launched a spectacular “digital revolution” in an attempt for China to not only catch-up with the West, but also to “leapfrog” into the digital age. As the center piece of the Chinese program of market reform and global integration, China’s “digital revolution” has been characterized by a well-recognized and seemingly paradoxical feature. On the one hand, information and communication
technologies (ICTs) have been progressively promoted, and widely, although unevenly, diffused among the population. From television set in the 1980s to mobile phone in the 1990s, ICT products have replaced bicycles as the hottest commodities for the Chinese.
On the other hand, the regime of state control over content and access, from news
blackouts to Internet censorship and the temporary suspension of telephone services in
the homes of political dissidents, labor activists and other targets of state repression,
has been strengthened.