Rethinking Chinese Modes of Social Control and Cybercrime Prevention/李兴安法律论文网

re life of human beings. Those who grasp the information, control the network, will possess the whole world. Thus, a series of social problem, of which the most serious is cybercrime, have an inkling of the matter. Although there are different standards to defining a crime, surprisingly, a framework of common recognition about cybercrime is reached as yet. As the rise of the network, cybercrime surmounts the limits of material and spirit, becoming the phenomenon that attracts the attention and deserves the reprimand by the whole world. At this point, even the creators of the atom bomb would be surprised at the historical effect emerges from the invention of those who made a computer. But today, those who are neither the creators of the first atom bombs nor the inventors of the computer have to confront with cybercrime.


I. Situation of Cybercrimes in China

i. Historical development of cybercrime in China

The first cybercrimes took place in China in mid-1980s, 20 years later than in USA. The banking system became the first victim from which money was embezzled, misappropriated and defrauded. The first period began from midst of 1980s, and ended in the midst of 1990s.

In this period, the forms of cybercrime were simple. Cybercrimes were mainly crimes against property; especially those committed in one's duty. In the meantime, the number of the cases is few, while the harm of the cybercrimes was great. It evoked wide social repercussions. Chinese began to be vigilant: there exists such a kind of monster, called cybercrime.

Central issues drawing public attentions was on one occasion focused on computer viruses, because the "Ping Pong" virus, the first virus that sneaked into the Chinese boundary via technical route, made the computer users, who never set up defences before, turned pale at the mere mention of computer virus. Then the harmfulness of the cybercrime was considerably critical. Computer viruses occupy the system resources, and slow down the operating, break the computer down, damage and delete data. Creating and spreading computer viruses was an important form of cybercrime, which is so difficult to investigate that that the detection rate is rare. Computer viruses have broken down some stock exchanges and supermarkets then. In 1989, viruses of political propaganda emerged. Only then, Chinese government realised that cybercrime is really a "crime" but not a "game".

The second period of cybercrime in China began from 1996 with the spread of network. The Chin

ese economy is developing rapidly, creating a growing demand for newer and better information technologies. China is becoming more and more open to the outside world, participating in the world trend toward the construction of a global information infrastructure.8 Network, however, was developed somewhat lately. The first e-mail from China to the outside world was sent in 1987. The first Chinese network connected to the outside world was the China Academic Network (CANET), established in 1988.9 The first commercial accounts were established in 1995. At that time, about 15,000 people were online.10 Since then, the Internet has seen explosive growth in China. 1996 witnessed a 4x increase in the number of service providers and a 10x increase in the number of subscribers.11 China has about 20 Internet Service Providers (ISP) and about 100,000

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