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Technology does not have a unidirectional impact on society. The technological determinist view and teleological assumption that the People’s Republic of China (henceforth China) is being fundamentally democratized by and through the Internet needs to be interrogated. As Lokman Tsui eloquently puts it, “Technology is never isolated from a context but is always enmeshed in social constructs consisting of models of thought intertwined with habits, beliefs, and values in a specifi c culture.”2 Yet, at the same time, the techno-social enmeshment in this specifi c cultural context is not necessarily seamless or unproblematic. A case in point is the presence of the so-called “Great Firewall” of China, which is a comprehensive Internet content fi ltering and blocking system that serves as a censorial device and functions as a state-controlled bulwark against unwarranted external infl uence. Rebecca MacKinnon’s epigraphical statement goes some way towards encapsulating the ambivalences in the status quo, while simultaneously gesturing towards the need for refl exive qualifi cation and ongoing assessment of staid precepts, particularly in relation to democracy and the Internet in China.
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