[LINK] Will The Internet Change the Chinese Government?

[Tom Worthington]

Professor Greg Austin, Professorial Fellow, EastWest Institute (New 
York) will speak on "China and Ethics in the Information Age", 12:30pm, 
6 May 2015, at the Australian National University in Canberra: 
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/china-and-ethics-in-the-information-age-tickets-16813462519

Professor Austin is the author of Cyber policy in China (John Wiley & 
Sons, 2014) and a talk on the book from the Brookings Institution is 
also available: 
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2014/12/09-cyber-policy-in-china

Abstract:

"China’s leaders want the country’s citizenry and other governments to 
believe that the Communist Party controls the ethical settings of the 
country’s participation in the global information society, especially in 
respect of the principle of “internet sovereignty” and state censorship. 
This is a propaganda claim that can be challenged on several levels. At 
the theoretical level, relying on philosophers of the information age, 
we can conclude that once China’s leaders made a commitment to transform 
it into an advanced information society, deeply integrated into a global 
information ecosystem, they became subject to new ethical realities.

     A theoretical view of the information age as portending some sort 
of ethical transformation finds support among China’s ruling elite. 
These theoretical views are being reflected in public source analysis in 
China of the evolution of ethics in response to the dilemmas of the 
information age. On the basis of both theory and observed reality, one 
can argue that the macro-ethical settings for China’s participation in 
the information age are very different from what Chinese leaders want it 
to be and say it is. There are, simultaneously, powerful universalizing 
effects of the information age, for better and for worse, and powerful 
fragmenting forces, for better and for worse, that the Chinese leaders 
say they can contain but almost certainly cannot."


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/