China's voluntary isolation: Internet sovereignty and the "China Wide Web"

In the last decade of last century, the advent of the Internet as the predominant medium of communication for the masses prompted countless observers and social sciences scholars to predict the end of physical borders; a revolution in the way we understood the nation-state and the concept of sovereignty. The Internet, a medium that seemed not to be confined to the same territorial delimitations that traditional media was subjected to, would simultaneously represent and promote the achievement of the “one world” scenario that globalization promised; a world in which information could flow free from governmental control and official censorship. Thus, the ideological foundation of authoritarian regimes, such as that of the People’s Republic of China, faced a dire threat – or so the theory went. Today, fifteen years after the Chinese incursion into cyberspace, the veil of idealism and simplistic thinking that elicited those initial claims has been lifted from our eyes, and recent events have further demonstrated that the web is still subject, and will continue to be subject, to territorial delimitation. This reality was further illustrated in June 2010 with the publication of the first Chinese White Paper entirely dedicated to the Internet, which revealed the overarching principle guiding Beijing’s Internet control efforts: the assertion of what it calls “Internet sovereignty”, the supreme authority by the Chinese Communist Party to control which kind of information enters its borders through the Internet and is spread within. While China is not the only country trying to restrict the access of online information from abroad to its borders, it is the first country in the world to actually make an official plea sovereignty over the Web. However, despite the boldness of its content, Section V of the Internet White Paper sparked “outrage, concern, but surprisingly not much discussion”. Ever since the first connection was established in the country, the examination of the political aspects of the Chinese Internet has mainly revolved around the issues of censorship and surveillance. Yet, the spat between the Chinese government and Internet giant Google raised the stakes in the debate considerably, as it prompted the Chinese Communist Party to make explicit its claims of sovereignty over the Internet and advance its strategy of fragmentation of the Web; something that a few years ago was considered nearly impossible. For this reason, this study seeks to answer the question: How does the Chinese government intend to apply its national sovereignty, which has traditionally been understood primarily in geographical terms, to a medium that seems to be exempt of geographical location