Here are the key findings:
China
Contrary to some predictions, the Internet is unlikely to spark major political change in China in the near future, according to a report by RAND analysts Michael Chase and James Mulvenon. The Internet may ultimately provoke change in Chinese society and politics, but the change will probably occur in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, manner.
The authors found that the government's crackdown on dissident use of cyberspace has thus far succeeded. The term dissident refers not only to political dissidents active inside the People's Republic of China, but also to activists residing overseas, members of the quasi-spiritual Falun Gong movement, Tibetan exiles, and others who use the Internet for purposes deemed subversive by Beijing. The report is one of the most thorough analyses ever conducted of Internet use by Chinese dissidents and of China's response.
The Chinese government has managed to stifle the spread of Internet-based dissent primarily by employing "low-tech Leninist techniques," according to the report. These measures include searches, arrests, confiscation of computer equipment, strict government regulations, physical shutdown of parts of the information infrastructure, and the use of surveillance and informants. At least 25 people have been arrested in the past two years because of their online activities.
Simultaneously, the regime is becoming increasingly sophisticated in using high-tech measures, such as monitoring and filtering email, blocking email and web sites, and hacking web sites. Some nongovernmental groups have also launched "vigilante attacks" against dissident web sites, compounding the diffi-culty of ascertaining the level of official government sponsorship of such activities. There is also evidence that the government is using the Internet for its own political purposes, electronically spreading criticism of dissidents and bombarding their email addresses with thousands of bogus messages.
Internet use has spread quickly throughout China, growing from about 1 million users in October 1997 to more than 33 million by January 2002. Dissident political groups have adopted email and bulletin board sites as ways to spread information and ideas quickly and discreetly.
AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/GREG BAKER A woman walks past computers at a closed Internet cafe in Beijing on Oct. 8. After a fire in a Beijing Internet cafe killed 25 people in June, authorities closed thousands of the cafes across China, banned minors from the cafes, and demanded that operators keep records of customers and the information to which they gain access. The regulations took effect Nov. 15. |
Dissident tactics include "Internet guerilla warfare," which entails sending mass email messages (or "spam") to large groups of people, sometimes including government leaders. The use of one-way Internet communication, large distribution lists, and different originating email addresses gives dissident groups two advantages. It enables the groups to transmit uncensored information to an unprecedented number of people and provides the recipients with plausible deniability of ever having requested the information.
Online dissidents are restricted by the currently limited demographics of the country's Internet users, most of whom are young, well-educated men who live in eastern cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Less than two percent of China's Internet users are rural peasants, who make up the bulk of the nation's population.
Fissures within the dissident community present further challenges. "Enhanced communication does not always further the dissident cause," say the authors. "In some cases, it serves as a potent new forum for discord and rivalry among various dissident factions."
Commercial interests reinforce the government's strategy, say the authors. The commercial Internet sector operates within a complex web of regulatory relationships, fiscal relationships, and close partnerships with the regime. The business environment in China also encourages the commercialization, not the politicization, of the Internet. For Chinese and foreign companies alike, "the point is to make profits, not political statements."
Yet because China is committed to expanding its use of technology as a cornerstone of economic development and global prestige, the Internet is likely to become available to a wider segment of the nation's population in the future. The increasing prosperity of Chinese society will make it more difficult for the government to suppress information and easier for dissidents to expand their efforts.
"While Beijing has done a remarkable job thus far of finding effective counterstrategies to what it perceives as the potential negative effects of the information revolution," say Chase and Mulvenon, "the scale of China's information-technology modernization would suggest that time is eventually on the side of the regime's opponents."
Russia
Russia's internal development and its integration into the community of Western nations depend importantly on the extent of its participation in the information revolution. In January, in fact, President Vladimir Putin approved an "Electronic Russia" (E-Russia) program, calling for rapid acceleration in the use of information technologies in government, business, and society.
However, the Russian government is both limited in the resources that it can devote to the technologies and concerned about their political and national security ramifications. "It is very much an open question whether Russia has either the will or the capabilities" to fulfill its aspirations any time soon, say RAND analysts Jeremy Azrael and D. J. Peterson.
 AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/MISHA JAPARIDZE People surf the Internet in an Internet cafe in downtown Moscow on April 9. |
One priority identified by the E-Russia program is infrastructure development. Proposals have been made for the government-funded construction of a high-speed Internet "backbone" and for subsidized service to universities and research institutions. Numerous efforts are under way to organize high-tech "incubators" and "technoparks" around major universities and in communities—such as St. Petersburg, Zelenograd, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk—with large concentrations of highly trained programmers, mathematicians, and engineers.
Policymakers envision the technologies ultimately spreading throughout Russian society. The Putin administration has established the goal of having Internet access available in all higher educational institutions by 2005 and all secondary schools by 2010. The E-Russia program calls for the creation of a government-wide Intranet, the integration of agency databases, and the online drafting and discussion of federal legislation and regulations. Perhaps most intriguing given Russia's history, the program literature states that widespread diffusion of information technology is "a prerequisite for the development of civil society based on free access to information through the global Internet."
In short, Russia's policymakers see the information revolution as spurring economic change and development, boosting Russia's international competitiveness, improving the productivity and responsiveness of government, and creating a more educated, informed, and engaged citizenry.
Russia has made remarkable progress, especially considering where the country was a little over a decade ago, when the abacus was still used for accounting. Today, financial analysts and traders in Moscow monitor international markets in real time. A small but dynamic "New Economy" sector has emerged to meet the domestic demand for information and communications technologies and services. Well-educated Russian programmers have gained the esteem of Silicon Valley engineers. And more and more average Russians, including a variety of civic groups, are hopping onto the information superhighway.
Nonetheless, Russia remains far behind those nations with which Russian elites like to compare their country (see figure). Russia's long-term capabilities are also in doubt. In 1990, 1.6 million Russians were reportedly employed in the science sector. In 2000, that number had fallen by half. With basic research in Russia hobbled by a lack of steady funding, many Rus-sian scientists have left for Germany or the United States.
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Meanwhile, Putin has authorized steps to bolster the government's ability to monitor electronic communications and to ensure that they are used, in his words, "with particular responsibility." In September 2000, he signed off on a national Information Security Doctrine. The doctrine warns against foreign penetration of Russia's "scientific-technical space" and subversive efforts of Western governments "to reorient the scientific and technical ties" between Russia and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States toward the West. In January 2002, he signed legislation to give a national security organ control over online transactions.
The impact of these control efforts is unclear. Azrael and Peterson predict only that "Russia's more active participation in the information revolution seems certain to exacerbate the tension" between the E-Russia vision and the Information Security Doctrine.
As in China, the trade-off is between economic growth and political stability. "While protagonists of a truly open society are hard to find among Russia's top officials, there are many who understand that heavy-handed efforts to prevent access to and use of information technologies would jeopardize the economic benefits they are hoping to reap from the information revolution—and thus would threaten a key element of the regime's legitimacy."
Latin America
For the information revolution, there is no "Latin America." Differences across the region are vast. The countries might be divided into three groups:
Among the leaders, Mexico is probably the leader, according to RAND analyst Gregory Treverton. Mexico also epitomizes most of the issues common to the region's relatively advanced countries, particularly the broader political, social, and historical forces at work.
In Mexico, there are intriguing parallels between the Internet today and the railroad boom of the 19th century. Then, as now with the "digital divide," the growing disparity of wealth that resulted from railroad building was socially disruptive. Owned by foreigners or local oligarchs, railroads generated growth but worsened the income distribution. The backlash against the social impact of the railroads contributed to the revolution of 1910. The railroad bubble burst, and Mexico has laid few railroad tracks since.
Today, there are few Internet start-up companies based in Mexico. Most of them are organized outside the country, even if they intend to conduct business in Mexico. The 125 firms in Mexico's own "Silicon Valle" of Guadalajara, where high-tech start-ups are beginning to thrive, are all, like the railroads a century ago, foreign-owned—four-fifths American and the rest Asian.
The current hub-and-spoke configuration of global Internet fiber-optic cables is a metaphor for Latin America's connections to the richer countries. The cables link Latin American countries primarily to the United States, not to each other. This metaphor evokes age-old concerns regarding national security and autonomy—with powerful echoes in Latin American history. If recent Internet history is any guide, advances in information technology will continue to be exploited fastest in the United States and Europe, leaving Latin America perhaps further behind and possibly reinforcing Latin American suspicions that the global "game" is rigged against it.
However, Mexico decided through the North American Free Trade Agreement that it couldn't escape the United States and so should benefit from the U.S. economy as best it could. Mexico weathered the financial crises of the 1990s better than other Latin American regions because it was so closely tied to a booming U.S. economy. Other nations either will not choose or will not be able to connect themselves so directly to the information revolution's dominant nation.
 AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/MARCO UGARTE Lack of education is a primary obstacle to economic progress. Oracio Covarrubias, a young campesino, connects to the Virtual University in Santa Ana de Allende from his small town of Hidalgo on April 25. The Hidalgo Institute for High School and University Education has used a satellite link to substitute for phone lines, which are unavailable, and has converted a room in the town's only high school into a branch of the Virtual University. |
The successful "outliers" in the region include Costa Rica and some of the island states in the Caribbean: the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, St. Bart's, Aruba, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. These countries share several things in common. Their governments are founded on trust and transparency. They have a well-established rule of law, high literacy rates, economic cultures in which businesses can prosper, populations that are fluent in English (in Costa Rica's case, tolerable working knowledge), and, perhaps most important, political stability.
In much of northern South America, skilled people who can leave do leave, most often for the United States. The people are pushed out by violence, lack of opportunity, and populist politics that discourage innovation and individual enrichment. Many people flee to Miami, Los Angeles, or other U.S. cities that combine technological prowess with large Spanish-speaking populations.
Technology alone will be insufficient to propel Latin America forward. Education is the primary obstacle to economic progress generally in Latin America, whether in narrowing the income gap or in joining the information revolution. Dropout rates are high, rates of those repeating a grade in primary school are very high, teaching materials are outdated, and the worst teachers are in the primary schools. At universities, the teachers are poorly paid; moonlighting and part-time teaching are the norm.
Only a handful of Latin American countries have adult literacy rates at or above 94 percent. Since the opportunities afforded by information technology usually pertain to gathering information, literacy is an absolute prerequisite. Sadly, Latin America is not investing enough in literacy.
Greater Middle East
Afghanistan and its neighbors to the west—the developing countries of the Middle East—are missing out on much of the information revolution. Although pockets of high access to the Internet exist in these countries, they generally lag far behind developed countries.
The gargantuan task of rebuilding Afghanistan has naturally been the focus of much attention recently. But developing countries throughout the Middle East face challenges similar to those faced by Afghanistan, albeit to a lesser degree, according to RAND analysts Elham Ghashghai and Rosalind Lewis. All the countries need to strengthen and diversify their economies, educate and engage their young people, develop infrastructures to support economic growth, and lure back the educated professionals and businesspeople who have fled to other countries.
Information technology will be instrumental in meeting these challenges, but recent history shows that Afghanistan and the Middle East are often suspicious of, and resistant to, technological change. Many Middle Eastern states fear two by-products of the Internet in particular: dissemination of Western political thought and the spread of pornography. Many Middle Eastern leaders view the Internet as a Western-based agent of moral and political subversion. As a result, many countries strictly enforce limits on Internet connectivity.
Moreover, the information technology strategies that do exist in the region may serve only to widen the digital divide between the few "haves" and the more numerous "have-nots." Current strategies are typically developed either to attract external investment for new infrastructures or to market hardware and software. These strategies give too little consideration to the plight of the poor and to the strengths of the local environment. If information technology is supposed to build and strengthen the economies of these countries, it must be adapted to local needs and cultures.
 AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/KAREL PRINSLOO Afghan men listen on Aug. 8 as a worker at the Kabul post office explains how to use mobile phones. Many Afghans have never made a phone call or even heard of the Internet, let alone sent an email. |
Ghashghai and Lewis propose a two-step approach to test the feasibility of enhanced Internet access in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The first step is to conduct research on the needs of potential users, on what they consider to be the benefits and drawbacks of using the Internet, and on what might induce them to use it. The research should also gauge the level of support from local government and private industry. The second step is to establish a prototype Internet center in a small town or village to test whether such a center can be tailored to local needs and traditions while helping inhabitants to realize the advantages of the Internet.
One or more small towns or villages should be chosen for the feasibility analysis, which should do several things. It should assess the needs and levels of interest and support. It should identify the institutions—such as mosques, schools, or cultural centers—that would attract widespread Internet usage. And it should identify the changes in local conditions—such as health, education, infrastructure, the environment, and political systems—that would be conducive to usage.
Based on the information gathered, Internet companies should be invited to form partnerships with a local business or development organization to establish a prototype Internet center. The primary motivations for establishing the center would be business development (putting local artisans and craftspeople in touch with end buyers rather than with middlemen) and job creation.
A successful Internet center would have a "human face." For example, the center would probably feature one or more facilitators to provide translation services, to relay messages, to help make business contacts, and to facilitate use of the Internet in general. To address any governmental concerns, the facilitators could be licensed or supervised by the government.
Middle Eastern governments will not be able to bar connectivity to the Internet indefinitely. On the contrary, the pressing needs of Afghanistan, and the slow pace of economic progress throughout the Middle East, suggest that steps should be taken promptly to develop a practical and culturally acceptable approach to help the general population take advantage of the benefits of information technology sooner rather than later.
Related Reading
The Future of the Information Revolution in Latin America: Proceedings of an International Conference, Gregory F. Treverton, Lee Mizell, RAND/CF-166-1-NIC, 2001, 84 pp., ISBN 0-8330-3017-5, $25.00.
Issues Affecting Internet Use in Afghanistan and Developing Countries in the Middle East, Elham Ghashghai, Rosalind Lewis, RAND/IP-231-CMEPP, 2002, 6 pp., no charge.
Russia and the Information Revolution, Jeremy R. Azrael, D. J. Peterson, RAND/IP-229-CRE, 2002, 10 pp., no charge.
You've Got Dissent! Chinese Dissident Use of the Internet and Beijing's Counter-Strategies, Michael S. Chase, James C. Mulvenon, RAND/MR-1543, 2002, 132 pp., ISBN 0-8330-3179-1, $20.00.