ABSTRACT
The emergence of digital communication, while providing enormous opportunities and potentialities for human development, presents immense challenges to the governing of human society at the same time. Authoritarian governments face particular challenges, because the nature of the Internet and the way it spreads information are in principle at odds with monopoly of public power and state control of mass communication which feature political authoritarianism. Special skills and sophistication are required of the Chinese authoritarian regime to be able to manage the nation’s involvement in the worldwide revolution of information and communication technologies as it struggles to maintain the difficult balancing act between global economic and technology participation and resistance against the political values this participation may bring to China.1
