Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China - Couverture souple

Zhou, Yongming

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0804751285 ISBN 13 : 9780804751285

Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is a pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes the manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing, and the internet in the contemporary period, to participate in politics.

Drawing upon insights from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and media studies, this book historicizes the internet in China and may change the direction of the emergent field of Chinese internet studies. In contrast to previous works, this book is unprecedented in its perspective, in the depth of information and understanding, in the conclusions it reaches, and in its methodology. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is accessible to a broad audience.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Yongming Zhou is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Yongming Zhou is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

"Zhou's book is an engaging and important addition to the literary of Chinese media studies."—New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies

It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is a pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes the manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing, and the internet in the contemporary period, to participate in politics.
Drawing upon insights from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and media studies, this book historicizes the internet in China and may change the direction of the emergent field of Chinese internet studies. In contrast to previous works, this book is unprecedented in its perspective, in the depth of information and understanding, in the conclusions it reaches, and in its methodology. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is accessible to a broad audience.

À propos de la deuxième de couverture

It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is a pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes the manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing, and the internet in the contemporary period, to participate in politics.
Drawing upon insights from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and media studies, this book historicizes the internet in China and may change the direction of the emergent field of Chinese internet studies. In contrast to previous works, this book is unprecedented in its perspective, in the depth of information and understanding, in the conclusions it reaches, and in its methodology. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is accessible to a broad audience.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Historicizing Online Politics

Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in ChinaBy Zhou Yongming

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5128-5

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................ixIntroduction.....................................................................................1Part I: Telegraphy1 Telegraphy, Culture, and Policymaking..........................................................192 Telegraphy, Newspapers, and Public Opinion.....................................................393 Telegraphy, Political Participation, and State Control.........................................594 Public Telegrams and Nationalist Mobilizations.................................................805 Telegraph Power: Textual and Historical Contexts...............................................104Part II: The Internet6 China and the Internet: Proactive Development and Control......................................1317 Negotiating Power Online: The Party State, Intellectuals, and the Internet.....................1558 Living on the Cyber Border: Minjian Online Political Writers in China..........................1819 Informed Nationalism: Military Web Sites in Chinese Cyberspace.................................208Conclusion.......................................................................................231Notes............................................................................................243Bibliography.....................................................................................275Index............................................................................................282

Chapter One

Telegraphy, Culture, and Policymaking

IN JUNE 1865, a British businessman, E. A. Reynolds, attempted to erect a telegraph line between Shanghai and Wusong, a distance of ten miles. To his dismay, after two-thirds of the line was completed, a total of 227 poles were pulled down and taken away by the local population. The British vice-consul, J. Markham, complained to local officials about the incident, but received the reply that the treaties did not permit the construction of telegraph lines and that foreign construction of telegraph lines overland would therefore not be allowed. Suspecting that the pulling down of the poles had been instigated by local officials, the British countered by arguing that the treaties did not prohibit telegraph line construction. They not only requested the right to continue construction but also demanded monetary compensation and protection of the line in the future. The district intendant, Ding Richang, declined all the British requests, claiming that the local population had acted out of their fear of the presumably harmful effects the line would have on the feng shui, the Chinese geomancy belief system. He insisted that there was no clear stipulation in the treaties of Chinese responsibility to protect such British undertakings-especially one initiated without Chinese permission. Official correspondence reveals that the British suspicions were well founded. It was indeed Ding Richang who, after discovering that the British had commenced their project, secretly instructed the local population to pull down the poles.

Telegraphy and the railroad were the two most important technological wonders that further accelerated the industrialization of European countries in the nineteenth century and ultimately helped to transform the world into a truly global community. The railroad appeared slightly earlier than telegraphy, yet the two were closely related. Some scholars have attributed the rapid spread of telegraphy to its association with the railroad. Even though knowledge of the railroad was introduced into China by foreign missionaries and Chinese pioneers in Western learning in the 1840s, it had received little attention by the 1860s. To Chinese, the railroad was as unfamiliar as telegraphy in the early 1860s, and the two were sometimes presented to Chinese by the foreigners as a package. But railways did not fare any better than telegraphy in China. In 1865, a British merchant constructed a half-kilometer narrow-gauge railroad outside Xuanwumen in Beijing, hoping in this way to advertise this new technology to the Qing rulers in the capital. It was dismantled by the order of the Office of the Gendarmerie (Bujun tongling yamen) because it had provoked "puzzlement and rumors" among capital residents.

The above incidents show that Chinese attitudes toward the telegraphy and railroad, the two most advanced technologies of transportation and communication of the time, were not only less receptive than attitudes to other modern forces but are also seemingly puzzling to readers today. Why did the local officials pull down telegraph line poles and pull up rails in Shanghai and Beijing in 1865? This was four years after the establishment of the Zongli Yamen, a new government bureau in charge of all foreign-related affairs, which adopted Western diplomatic practices, and five years after the end of the Second Opium War, which resulted in the signing of a series of treaties between China and major Western powers to open up more port cities for trade and grant protection to missionaries. The year 1865 was also important in the so-called "Tongzhi Restoration" (1862-74), when a number of extraordinarily capable officials tried to save the dynasty from a spiral of decline. Simultaneously, the Self-Strengthening Movement (or Western Affairs Movement), aiming to introduce Western technologies and artifacts into China, proceeded with the setting up of arsenals and dockyards in Nanjing, Shanghai, and other cities. To answer the puzzle of why telegraphy was rejected then, a brief history of the Chinese response to telegraphy will be a good starting point.

Foreign Pressures on China to Adopt Telegraphy

By the 1860s, telegraphy had had a short but glorious history in the West. The technology was a result of efforts by multiple inventors in different countries in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. From the 1840s onwards, the technology matured, and its commercial potential was quickly recognized and exploited by Western countries. Thus it experienced explosive development in western Europe and North America. In America, the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore was constructed in 1844 and opened to public service the next year. Forty miles of telegraph wire at the beginning of 1846 had grown to more than 2,000 by 1848 and to 12,000 by 1850. By 1852, there were 23,282 miles of telegraph lines in the United States.

In western Europe, the situation was little different. The new technology was adopted at an increasing pace after the mid 1840s. In Great Britain, for example, the Electric Telegraph Company was registered in 1845 and for some years enjoyed a monopoly before it was challenged by other companies. The growth of the company was phenomenal and is readily comparable with the "dot-com" boom in the late 1990s. By 1851, the company owned a total of 10,000 miles of telegraph line; the mileage doubled in two years, and then increased to 30,000 miles by 1857. In 1851, the company handled fewer than 100,000 telegrams annually; by 1859, the number was over 1,000,000.

Since most Chinese were unaware of what was happening outside the boundaries of the Qing empire, it is not surprising that missionaries first introduced them to telegraphy. In 1852, Daniel J. Macgowan, an American missionary based in Ningbo, published Zhexue Nianjian (Philosophy Annals) in Chinese, in which he devoted six chapters to explaining the principles of electricity, electromagnets, and the working of a telegraph machine. The publication of the book caught the attention of local gentry-scholars and was reported by the North China Herald. Mainly out of a concern for commercial benefits, foreign merchants in Shanghai had long hoped for a telegraph line that would speed up communications between East and West. Meanwhile, submarine cable technology matured; a transatlantic line opened in 1866, and other lines were rapidly extended to many parts of the world. For the first time in human history, a truly global communication system was in the making.

It was in this context that Russians and other foreigners sought permission to construct telegraph lines in China in the early 1860s. In 1861, the Russian minister L. de Balluseck asked the Zongli Yamen for permission to construct a line between Beijing and Tianjin. His request was declined by Prince Gong, the head of the Zongli Yamen, saying that setting up the telegraph line would cause "many inconveniences," including the difficulty of protection of the line after its completion. Balluseck then requested, in 1862, an assurance that if China were to allow foreigners to set up lines in the future, the Russians should be granted the right to establish the first line. The Zongli Yamen granted his request but obviously did not foresee that this concession would put the Qing court in a very awkward position in its dealings with foreign powers on the telegraphy issue in the years to come.

The British, American, French, and Danes followed up with similar requests, but these were all refused by the Zongli Yamen. To the surprise of Qing officials, foreigners were united on this issue and very persistent. The Chinese used the phrase zhiyi shenjian, jouchan buyi (stubbornly determined and constantly nagging) to describe the situation. In 1865, the Zongli Yamen sent a letter to governors and generals on its policy concerning telegraphy and railroads, asking them to instruct local officials to uphold and follow the extant policy. Responses from provincial officials were overwhelmingly in agreement with the current prohibition policy, with the exception of Li Hongzhang, then governor of Jiangsu, who, after stating his support for the current policy, proposed that if the construction of the lines was inevitable, China should build them itself in order to prevent them from falling into hands of foreigners. His opinion was not listened to at the time, but his thinking predicted the policies that eventually guided the setting up of a Chinese telegraph network in the 1880s.

Nevertheless, the persistence of the foreign powers' efforts to set up telegraph lines paid off. The Atlantic line opened in 1866, and lines were being extended rapidly to other parts of the world. In 1870, the Qing officials were persuaded by the British minister, Thomas F. Wade, that there was a difference between setting up telegraph lines on land and at sea. The Zongli Yamen thus made a concession that allowed foreign companies to lay submarine cables along the Chinese coast, with the condition that the end of the line could only be on a boat some distance from China's coastline. After obtaining this concession, the British Eastern Telegraph and the Danish Great Northern companies reached an agreement to limit British operations south of Shanghai and Danish operations north of Hong Kong, while the two would share business between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Since the Great Northern had a plan to extend its lines from Vladivostok to Nagasaki, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, the British gave up their plan to construct a separate line at this time.

Although the Chinese attached conditions to their concession, the foreigners did not take them seriously. In 1871, after the completion of the proposed maritime lines, the Great Northern secretly extended its line from Wusong harbor to Shanghai, arranging for its terminus in the American concession without the knowledge of local officials. Frustrated by the frequent line damage caused by fishing junks in the harbor, the Danes went on to erect poles and changed the underwater line to a landline in 1873. At the beginning of the same year, the Great Northern extended another line to Gulangyu Island in Xiamen (Amoy). The Qing officials eventually found out about these two breaches of the agreement, but their repeated protests against the extension of the lines and requests to stop operations were simply ignored.

In 1874, the Japanese sent troops to Taiwan, ostensibly to retaliate against the killing of Liuqiu (Ryukyu) fishermen and merchants by the aboriginal people on the island. Shen Baozhen, then the director of the Fuzhou Dockyard, was appointed the imperial commissioner to protect Taiwan from the Japanese intrusion. To speed up communication across the Taiwan Strait, and between Fuzhou and Beijing, Shen, along with local officials, proposed to the Qing court to construct telegraph lines in Fujian and Taiwan and connect the two places with a submarine line across the strait. This proposal was approved by Beijing. This was the first time that the Qing policymakers took the initiative and seriously considered constructing telegraph lines, and they chose the Great Northern to do the construction work.

Yet their relationship with the Great Northern turned out to be extremely unpleasant. For the Taiwan lines, Shen Baozhen asked his associate at the Fuzhou Dockyard, the Frenchman Prosper Giquel, to negotiate with the Great Northern to construct two lines, one from the government seat of the Taiwan prefect (then Tainan) north across the strait, extending to Fuzhou and Mawei. The other sea line was to connect Taiwan with the Pescadores. A contract was drawn up in which the total expenses were calculated to be 242,500 taels. However, when the contract reached the company headquarters in Copenhagen, it was disallowed by the board of directors, who demanded a renegotiation because the price was felt to be too low to cover even the costs of materials and labor. Shen was alerted of the intentions of the Great Northern and the new round of negotiations to raise the price was stalled.

In Fuzhou in early May 1874, the American consul, M. M. de Lano, petitioned the Fujian Board of Trade to allow the Great Northern to construct a line between Fuzhou and Mawei. Unaware of Shen Baozhen and the local officials' prior proposal to the court, the foreigners in both Fuzhou and Shanghai were surprised to hear that the petition had been approved in June. Overjoyed, the Great Northern responded in an unusually swift way, requiring only twelve days to complete the ten-milelong Fuzhou-Mawei line at a cost of a mere 4,000 silver dollars, and encountering no opposition from the local population. Encouraged, and aiming to expand its privileges of telegraph construction, the Great Northern asked the American consul to petition the Chinese again for permission to construct the much longer Fuzhou-Xiamen line.

The Great Northern proposed three options to the Fujian Board of Trade. The first was to permit it to construct a Fuzhou-Xiamen line, in return for which the Great Northern would allow Fujian officials to send official telegrams to Xiamen, Shanghai, and Hong Kong free of charge. The second was to construct two parallel lines at once, one belonging to the Great Northern and the other to the Fujian authorities. The Great Northern would be in charge of the operation of the latter line until the Chinese were ready to take it over. The third option was for the Great Northern to construct and operate the line under a contract from the government covering the costs of materials and labor. Of the three options, the second was the most tempting to the local officials, because it enabled them to obtain a telegraph line without spending a penny. However, the local officials did not realize that it would breach the long-standing policy of the Zongli Yamen that no foreigners were to be allowed to construct and operate telegraph lines on Chinese soil, and this caused problems for the court in the ensuing years.

Negotiations between the Fujian Board of Trade and the Great Northern continued and a six-article contract was drafted in August. In addition to the two-line arrangement proposed by the Danes, another key article gave the Great Northern the exclusive right to run the Fuzhou-Xiamen line for thirty years; the local authorities, however, could buy back the line at any time. Among the policymakers in Fujian, opinions differed on how to proceed with the telegraph project. Shen Baozhen wrote from Taiwan to Li Henian, the governor-general, suggesting that the line be constructed under the auspices of the government, thus retaining total control of it. Although Li considered the article allowing the buyback would have provided enough assurance of eventual Chinese control, Shen's letter made Li more cautious and he decided to postpone the signing of the contract. After further negotiations, the Great Northern was asked to estimate the total expenses incurred in building the line in order to prepare for a Chinese buyback upon its completion. Based on this mutual understanding, the Board of Trade agreed that the company might start erecting poles and lines.

The ongoing negotiations in Fujian had not yet been reported to Beijing when, on August 30, the Russians informed the Zongli Yamen that a foreign telegraph company had completed a line between Fuzhou and Mawei, and that other lines were being constructed. According to the agreement between the Zongli Yamen and Russians in 1862, Russia would have the right to construct the first telegraph line on Chinese land. The Russian claims caught the Zongli Yamen off guard. After making inquiries to local officials, it replied to the Russians claiming that "all lines were managed by Chinese officials and all expenses were covered by government funds. No permission was granted to any foreign country." Two months later, the Russians countered this claim by providing a copy of the contract draft between the Board of Trade of Fujian and the Great Northern. The Zongli Yamen found itself in a very awkward position and felt it imperative to stop the construction of the Fujian telegraph lines under the present terms.

(Continues...)

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2005
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0804751285
• ISBN 13: 9780804751285
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 290
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible