The Development of Internet and State Capacity in Taiwan: The Case of Cybertrade in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Tun-Cheng Chang, 張敦程
• Other Authors: Hsin-Hsien Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/95769459135196855419

碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 公共行政暨政策學系 === 98 === In recent years, there has been a dramatic proliferation of research concerned with the Internet issues. With the continuing development of Internet and increasing consideration of society, Internet researches also have become more critical in the field of political science. The current researches of Internet in political science have three major focuses. First, it’s an instrumental discussion about the possibility if internet can solve the inefficiency of modern democracy. Second, there’s also an instrumental viewpoint claimed by academics in public administration. The core of their discussion focuses on the promotion of efficiency in the governing process. Third, in the field of international relationship, there is a widespread common consensus about that Internet, as the funeral bell, will destroy the border between states. Though these three categories of discussions have been described in their literature to catch their multidimensionality, as all other academic research in the early stage, those discussions still have some imperfections about lacking of sufficient understanding toward Internet issues. Therefore, critics can easily constitute powerful attacks on their teleological and reductive theories. Most of all, little literature has been done on the role of state in the process of Internet’s development, and the dismissed state role will be the main threat to those researches. According to history of Internet, it can be easily found that state played an important part of Internet’s development. Besides the role of state, other actors like technological elites and normal Internet users are also excluded from the dynamical picture. In light of these concerns, the purpose of this dissertation is to describe major actors’ interaction under the development of Internet to overcome these shortcomings of existing researches, especially on the role of state. For these objectives to be achieved, the dissertation is structured as follows. The first section deals with indicators to observation of state, and the “state capacity” is the chosen approach to do so. After which research approach is presented, the next step of the dissertation is using broad review of the literature to capture the role of state in the development of Internet as possible. Finally, the dissertation will use the indicators of state capacity to observe and interpret the case of cybertrade in Taiwan.