Yongnian Zheng, Technological Empowerment: The Internet, State, and Society in China Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007, 272p. $50 hardback.

摘要

While China makes commendable progress in its informatization process, there has been growing attention to the implications of information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, on China's authoritarian political system. Many scholars have generated an increasing amount of research on this question in the disciplines of political science, communication, sociology, and business. The general expectation in the existing literature is that the Internet is a democratizing force, and China is an ideal test case for this presumption. China as a model of leapfrogging into the information revolution has generated a dilemma.