编者按：
今年四月，中兴遭遇美国商务部
“
掐喉
”
，面临购买美国零部件禁购制裁。美方手段引发中国社会强烈震动，如若波及华为等其余战略性企业，恐将严重挤压中国在新一轮结构重组中的内外布局。从全球政治经济视角看，该事件揭示通信技术在日益敏感的国际地缘政治中的支点位置，可谓是当今大国间博弈一触即发的痛点。此外，中兴的尴尬困境也撕开冰山一角，揭示中国通信技术发展在全球数字浪潮中的胶着状态，预示着中国发展转型道路上的诸多挑战错位、冲突与磨合。
基于中兴事件的冲击，本期
ICT
政策专题，三篇文章从理论和历史双重视角，检视以互联网技术为核心的
ICT
政策对中国在新时期发展转型的重大意义。从地缘政治、后发策略，再到劳动就业等多个视角，探讨传播与发展、技术与国际政治、国家与国际化互联网资本、国家主义与国家的全球性角色之间的关系与未来。
以下是第一篇文章《解读“十三五”：反思中国的ICT政策》,作者洪宇通过透视“十三五”规划，探讨本届政府在全球政治经济格局中，力图以互联网发展为手段，推动中国转型升级的战略意图和后续效果。结合地缘政治经济学路径与数字资本主义理论，本文指出，这一顶层设计预示着中国有望成为新一代全球数字经济的发展中心，但该策略也存在着深刻的矛盾和不确定性，特别是中国挑战现存全球秩序的声索与中国互联
网及其产业链深嵌国际经贸网络之间的矛盾。作为全球最大经济体之一的中国，正提速介入全球数字经济，使我们必须对其可能带来的社会冲突、权力转移与不可避免的地缘政治经济冲突做好思想准备。
（图片来源：网络）
篇幅限制，节选转载。全文刊载于
International Journal of Communication
2017
年第
11
期，
P1755–1774.
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6366/2007
Reading the 13th Five-Year Plan: Reflections on China’s ICT Policy
洪宇
China’s GDP growth in 2015 fell below the 7% benchmark for the first time in decades. Worldwide
deflation and slow recovery since the 2008 global economic crisis have been difficult macroeconomic
conditions for the country. The state-led transition from an export-driven and investment-dependent
economy to an economy based on domestic consumption and innovation proved to be difficult, further
compounding the already sluggish global economy. In this context, China’s 13th five-year plan (FYP) for
2020 is an important document, from both domestic and global perspectives.
The 13th FYP is the first chance for the Xi-Li administration, which assumed leadership at the
18th Party Congress in November 2012, to “solidify a new course” (Kennedy & Johnson, 2016, p. 2) that
began with other policy documents and speeches. The 13th Five-Year Plan announces a set of new
developmental principles—to pursue innovation-based, balanced, green, and open economic growth—that
also allow its benefits to be widely shared. If the 12th FYP shows that policy makers came to terms with the pitfalls of the old growth model and were embarking on transitional measures, the 13th FYP indicates
that they have worked out a vision for the future. But how does this vision parlay into policy and action?
Notably, ICT is the “highest priority” sector in the 13th FYP (Kennedy & Johnson, 2016). ICT is
the most dynamic sector in China and worldwide, especially after Internet-protocol networks have spurred
an outpouring of platforms, services, and applications. Burgeoning ICTs, from artificial intelligence to the
Internet of things to cloud computing, are enabled and integrated by the Web to infiltrate the economy at
large and, thus, portend the coming of another technoeconomic revolution. The question this article
focuses on is, What does the 13th FYP say about how to play the digital card, and how should we interpret
its intentions, thrusts, and limitations in view of structural possibilities and constraints?
From a communication perspective, this article highlights and characterizes the ascent of the
Internet in China’s national strategy. Premised on the interweaving links between text and the political-
economic contexts, this article examines the plan’s major principles and goals, policies intended for
achieving these goals, and specific targets and situates the plan within broader historical and political-
economic contexts, with sources synthesized from news, trade reports, government documents, and
scholarly publications. The article illustrates, on both the textual and political-economic levels, why and
how ICT development—accelerated by the spread of the high-speed Internet—is tasked to underpin
innovation, structural reforms, the new industrial revolution, and the new digital economy, all critical
restructuring goals the 13th FYP pledges to achieve. More important, drawing on and extending the
geopolitical economy approach that emphasizes the economic roles of the states, especially those of
contender states, in sustaining and animating the capitalist world order, on the one hand, and the digital
capitalism literature that deems the political economy of ICT as an increasingly primary dimension of
global capitalism, on the other, this article sets up a conceptual framework for interpreting this key policy
document and for characterizing major possibilities and constraints China’s ICT development in general
faces.
I argue that during the 13th FYP period, China will become a new epicenter of digital capitalist
development, the process of which nonetheless will generate new contradiction and contestation in the
political economy. Prioritizing digital technology and the digital economy in the quest to contend in the
existing world order and better China’s position therein, the Chinese state, although a contender state, is
still conditioned and constrained by the broad, contradictory Chinese and global political economies.
Therefore, its actions may reflect and even reinforce the dominant global digital capitalist system.
Moreover, if China’s rise is predicated on its internal transformation, China’s 13th FYP—focusing on
technology, innovation, and industrial upgrading—may begin to overcome the contradictions that were
generated by the investment-export model on which China has relied, but only at the price of introducing
still other contradictions, different but perhaps equally severe.
Economic Crises, Digital Capitalism, and the State
China specialists have duly scrutinized the 13th FYP to infer the possible nature, direction, and
pitfalls of the state-led reform. Defying any teleological trajectory of transition toward a full-blown market
economy expected by Western mainstream analysts (see Kennedy, 2016a), the plan shows that the proactive involvement of the state in economic development will continue because it entails ambitious
industry policy and pledges to strengthen state-owned enterprises. On the philosophical level, the plan, as
the “defining document of the state’s approach to economic governance” (Kennedy, 2016b, p. 51), also
refuses the state-market dichotomy. The debate is not about accepting market forces or not, but “whether
they can be saddled and yoked to the party’s preference” (Rosen, 2016, p. 3), especially for the sake of
strengthening the economic foundation of the party’s ruling at home and enhancing China’s position in the
hierarchical structure of global capitalism (Martin, 2016).
As a token of active state involvement in the economy, industrial policy has the strongest
expression for ICT in the 13th FYP. The Chinese state was and continues to be active in ICT development.
In the past three decades, the state hosted a world-class ICT-dominant export-processing regime and
encouraged systematic adoption of Western ICT products. While actively embedding China’s ICT
development in the major global value chains, the state has also used policy levers from ownership to
market access to standards, all intended to change China’s position. The 13th FYP affirms and fortifies
industrial policy, especially but not limited to ICT. Why?
This is part and parcel of a global trend. The 2008 global economic crisis fractured the old
capitalist world order and accelerated the drifts of change. In this context, many developed and
developing countries, regardless of what they say, have geared up industrial policy for select industries in
a scramble for next-generation competitive advantages (Wade, 2014). But the dominant thinking of
economics embedded in such disciplines as international relations and international political economics
continues to problematize active state intervention from a neoclassical economics perspective (Desai,
2015b). The unapologetic intention of state intervention manifest in the 13th FYP, therefore, creates a
feeling of unease and even pessimism in this ambiguous ideological milieu marked by “the strange non-
death of neoliberalism” (Crouch, 2011, cover).
The visible hand of the state can be theoretically traced back to the contradiction inherent in
capitalism between overproduction and underconsumption. In light of incessant capitalist crises, states
take both domestic and international economic actions, although the configuration of state intentions,
abilities, and practices is historically formed and thus varying, and although the outcomes accruing to
economies and capitals can be contingent (Pratschke, 2015). This basic Marxist view, however, has been
marginalized since the 1980s, when the neoliberal antistate and free-market policy became the dominant
prescription for national economic growth (Desai, 2013). Still, the “developmental states” literature and
the “varieties of capitalism” literature have insisted that capitalist states always play “critical and, indeed,
indispensable” (Desai, 2015a, p. 449) economic roles and that developing-country states should use
industrial policy as an “inner wheel of the diversification and upgrading process” (Wade, 2014, p. 796).
States take economic actions not only to manage capitalist crises. The uneven nature of global
capitalism also encourages contender states to accelerate capitalist development to contest the world
order, thus making imperialism, empire, and hegemony incomplete projects (Desai, 2013). China is a
contender state. Deviant from the outright neoliberal Washington consensus, the Chinese state oversaw a
gradual approach toward economic global integration. The state allowed market liberalization in the
margin where transnational capital and private capital were ushered in to jumpstart an export-processing industrial economy. Meanwhile, it deliberately sustained protection and even state domination in strategic
sectors. Although this dual-track approach cultivates serious problems, such as corruption, price distortion,
and market fragmentation, and is even partly responsible for reinforcing the old growth model, this
Chinese approach characterized by an active interventionist state is credited by economists for enabling
China to reap the latecomer advantage for nearly 30 years and to grow into the second largest economy
in the world—an achievement not shared by any other developing countries (Lin, 2014; Wu, 2014).
Still, entangled with the global capitalist economy, China shares a good portion of the structural
imbalances exposed by the 2008 global economic crisis, and the country’s further rise as a global
economic power is contingent. Dependent on investment- and export-driven growth, China’s economy has
built up serious gluts in traditional manufacturing and real estate markets. When overseas demand
slackened, China’s economy slid into a structural gridlock as the wage-depressing mode of accumulation,
well entrenched in the economy, has kept residential demand from becoming a replacement, and as fixed-
asset investment is unlikely to continue without evoking serious financial crises. The economic complexity
has contributed to social instability. According to the China Labor Bulletin (CLB, n.d.), the occurrence of
labor unrest ratcheted up from February 2014 to January 2016. Faced with downward pressure in global
trade and rising labor tension at home, and caught up in intense competition in the global capitalist
system, the Chinese state is forced to undertake economic restructuring in a way rarely seen before—notably, by actively accelerating digital capitalist development.
It is still debatable under what circumstances and at what costs active state involvement,
specifically industrial policy, will facilitate economic restructuring and digital capitalist development. But
for analytical purposes, state–business interaction, instead of their opposition, was and continues to be a
key variable in the evolving Chinese political economy. So, instead of dismissing ambitious industrial
policy as an anomaly that needs to be fixed (see Kennedy & Johnson, 2016; US–China Business Council,
2016), this article suggests an alternative reading of the 13th FYP, to both recognize the economic roles of
the state and to underline contradictions and contestations that follow. In light of the ascent of the
Internet in the 13th FYP, I specifically analyze the complex, evolving, and contingent bonds between the
state and capital on the domestic front and explores the contradictory geopolitical-economic implications
on the global scale.
From Network to Core Technology:
The Anatomy of State-Led Digital Capitalism
“Building ubiquitous and efficient information networks” is the first task for the purpose of“expanding the Internet-based economic space” (Kennedy & Johnson, 2016, p. 2), continuing the
prioritization of infrastructure spending in the 12th FYP. It is estimated that during the 13th FYP period,
total investment in information networks will exceed 2 trillion yuan (Y. Hou, 2015). Indispensable for
supporting a full-blown Internet-based economy in which things, alive or not, are connected and
communicative, which the next section will discuss, the investment-driven buildup of a world-class digital
infrastructure, largely managed by the state, also supports science and technology programs for
technologies central to creating a “strong network nation.” Because using the commodity chain to promote
import substitution and even ICT innovation is a strategy incorporated into the 13th FYP, an anatomical
dissection of the political economy of ICT, especially variegated state-business relations, is required to
understand the links between industrial policy and network investment. For this purpose, a matrix is
illustrative.
The commodity chain concept provides a vertical axis for the matrix. Scholars have used several
terms to describe the dynamic ICT sector that has many moving boundaries and dynamic techno-business
features. The “new ICT ecosystem” (Xia, 2016, p. 82), for example, captures the shift of the central
gravity from telecom operators to platforms and mobile applications. In comparison, the concept of “Web-
oriented communications commodity chains” (Schiller, 2014, p. 7) enables an “outward-looking inclusive”analysis, while disaggregating the ICT sector into networks, access devices, and services and applications.
Such sensibility of “opportunities and constraints in the world economy and interstate system” (Wade,
2014, p. 792) counters the weakness in the developmental states literature that tends to ignore larger
structures and focus exclusively on the internal capacity of the state.
Economic geography defined in terms of ownership provides a horizontal axis. From the outset,
the state has managed economic global integration at its own “gradual, measured” pace (Kim, 2009). It
deliberately deploys differentiated regulatory approaches for various sectors, depending on their strategic
values (Hsueh, 2015). This differentiated regulatory system extends to the Web-oriented commodity chain.
As a result, Internet industries span two different yet interconnected sectors in the economic geography:
the liberalized market economy and the state-controlled economy inside the system.
Exemplified by telecom operators, enterprises inside the system are headed by a small network
of bureaucratic-executive elites a short distance from the epicenter of power. Although the state authority
has already thrust them into the global financial networks, creating outward-looking imperatives and
practices in their info-tech businesses, central state bureaus, such as the state-owned Assets Supervision
and Administration Commission and the National Development and Reform Commission, still have power
to hold these state enterprises accountable to political and economic edicts. In contrast, network
equipment and device manufacturing have been flung open to foreign and private capital. Also, cyberspace has been quasiliberalized because cyber companies have used convoluted ownership
structures to access global financial capital way above the legal cutoff—and the state has condoned such
practices.
Along this commodity chain, the state has used its unevenly distributed regulatory power to make re-regulatory efforts. It uses its network ownership and planning power to facilitate industry policy
intended for liberalized equipment and device manufacturing. A review of the period covered by the 12th
FYP illustrates this mechanism. Infrastructure spending was a major priority. And the realm of
communications was no exception, where infrastructure projects created obvious successes when state-
led construction drives in the potentially mighty domestic markets served to outflank foreign giants and
ultimately to support ensuing domestic business and technological catch-up and even leadership.
