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

Rethinking Chinese Modes of
Social Control and Cybercrime Prevention

Li Xingan 1


Introduction

As digital technologies has advanced over the past 50-odd years with a force unprecedented in history, governments, businesses and people around the world have been affected immeasurably. The already enormous and exponentially growing capacities for electronic storage, transmission and rapid manipulation of binary data changed the modern landscape virtually overnight. The changes have included substantial benefits. However, such fundamental restructuring in society also results in certain disadvantages, on all levels. Our vulnerability increases with the perceived value of and reliance on the technologies. Increased opportunities for the industrious to be more productive also allow the less-upright new avenues for malevolence.2 If cyberspace is a type of community, a giant neighbourhood made up of networked computer users around the world, then it seems natural that many elements of a traditional society can be found taking shape as bits and bytes. With electronic commerce comes electronic merchants, plugged-in educators provide online education, and doctors meet with patients in offices on-line. It should come as no surprise that there are also cyber criminals committing cybercrimes.3

In China, the wording of Internet is that it is a modern tool in an ancient land.4 It is an environment that takes nerves and offers big returns but also possible catastrophic loses.5 Cybercrime is paid close attention due to its high speed of increase of 30 percent per annum. As late as in 1997, the Criminal Law of P. R. China provides the basis of conviction and punishments. Together with several other laws and regulations, a legal system is being formed to suppress the spread of the so-called new century's pestilence in the cyber space. In some other country, writers doubt that explosion of new and pertinent statutory laws over the past two decades reflects society's attempts to wrestle with an ancient phenomenon in a modern context.6 It remains to be seen whether the current approaches to deter and redress cybercrime will prove successful.7

The invention of computer was a bit later than atom bomb. But atom bomb is born a killing tool, while computer is the extension of human wisdom, created as a help to human beings to realise welfare. They are seemingly different at this point. Outlook on value is, however, always the opinions of those who look at things through coloured spectacles. If something in common have got to be picked, it may be said that the atom bomb is the tool by which someone conquers others, while computer is the tool by which they subjugate themselves. If computer is utilised as the tools of self-subjugation, its essence is realised. Someone nevertheless, uses computer as the tool to conq

uer others, and conquer society. That should be regarded as the artificial alienation of its essence, when computer in essence degenerates to the extent that it is not different from the atom bomb.

Network is usually thought as that its establishment and popularisation will change the ways of the existence and life of human beings. And those who control and grasp the network are the dominators of the futu

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