How Snowden’s revelations have influenced youngsters’ attitude and behaviour in the PRC and Taiwan
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-08-2016-0025 |
| Pages | 213-231 |
| Published date | 14 August 2017 |
| Date | 14 August 2017 |
| Author | Kiyoshi Murata,Yasunori Fukuta,Andrew A. Adams,Dang Ronghua |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information & communications technology |
How Snowden’s revelations
have influenced youngsters’
attitude and behaviour in
the PRC and Taiwan
Kiyoshi Murata and Yasunori Fukuta
School of Commerce, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan
Andrew A. Adams
Centre for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan, and
Dang Ronghua
School of Commerce, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
Purpose –This study aims to investigate how Snowden’s revelations are viewed by young people in
the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan through questionnaire surveys of and follow-up
interviews with university students in the two countries, taking into account the histories and current
status of state surveillance in these countries and the current complicated and delicate cross-strait
relationships.
Design/methodology/approach –Questionnaire surveys of 315 PRC and 111 Taiwanese university
students (a majority studying in those places but a few studying abroad) and semi-structured follow-up
interviews with 16 master’s course students from the PRC and one from Taiwan (all studying at Meiji
University in Japan)were conducted, in addition to reviews of the literatureon privacy and state surveillance
in the PRC and Taiwan. The outcomes of the survey werestatistically analysed and qualitative analyses of
the interviewresults were also performed.
Findings –Youngsters living in the PRC had greater interest in and more knowledge about Snowden’s
revelations than those living in Taiwan, and the revelations were positively evaluated in both countries as
serving publicinterest. However, PRC students indicatedthey were less likely to emulate Snowden than those
from Taiwandid.
Originality/value –This study is the first attempt to investigate the social impact of Snowden’s
revelations on PRC and Taiwanese youngsters’attitudes towards privacy and state surveillance as part of
cross-culturalanalyses between eight countries.
Keywords China, Surveillance, Privacy, Social impact, Edward Snowden
Paper type Research paper
This study was supported by the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and
Technology, Japan) Programme for Strategic Research Bases at Private Universities (2012-16) project
“Organisational Information Ethics”S1291006 and the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
15H03385, (B) 25285124 and (B) 24330127. The authors appreciate the cooperation for developing the
questionnaire and conducting the surveys provided by Ana Maria Lara Palma, Jessica Chai, Chen
Xuan, Duan Xiongfang, Iheng Lirong, Jiang Xinghao, Wang Yang, Wei Yi and Zhang Ao.
Youngsters’
attitude and
behaviour
213
Received 15 August 2016
Revised 17 October 2016
Accepted 7 November 2016
Journalof Information,
Communicationand Ethics in
Society
Vol.15 No. 3, 2017
pp. 213-231
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1477-996X
DOI 10.1108/JICES-08-2016-0025
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1477-996X.htm
1. Introduction
In June 2013, The Guardian in the UK and The Washington Post in the USA began
publishing internal electronic documents from the US’signals intelligence (SIGINT)
organisation the National Security Agency (NSA), provided to them by Edward Snowden
who had obtained the documents while being employed as a systems administrator at the
NSA for contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.As was done previously, the NSA and other parts
of the US Government generally did not confirm or deny the validity of the documents;
however, on 21st June 2013, the US Department of Justice charged Snowden with violating
the Espionage Act. The activitiesdetailed in the documents included activity undertaken by
the NSA and its main SIGINT partner the UK’s GovernmentCommunications Headquarters
(GCHQ), and with the SIGINT agencies of three former British colonies (Canada, Australia
and New Zealand), as well as joint activitieswith similar agencies in other countries such as
Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).
Pew Research Center (2014) (Madden, 2014)undertook the first of a number of surveys of
US citizens’attitudes to Snowden and the documents he revealed. In particular, they asked
questions such as whether respondents believed that Snowden’s revelations had served or
harmed the public good, whether Snowdenshould be prosecuted. Inspired by these surveys,
a group of academics at Meiji University in Tokyo developed a pilot survey deployed in
Japan and Spain by use of students as the primary research population (for reasons of
resource constraints) and conducted follow-up interviews. The results of this pilot survey
are presented by Murata et al. (2017). Having revised the survey after analysis, it was
deployed with the cooperation of local academicians in Mexico, New Zealand, Spain and
Sweden (in English), and in translation in Japan and Germany. With the aid of graduate
students studying in Tokyo, it was also translated into Chinese and deployed in Taiwan
(using traditional Chinese characters) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (using
simplified Chinese characters). The choice of countries was a combination of deliberation
and pragmatism. The following countries had suitable resources available: New Zealand
was chosen as a Five Eyes member; Germany, Spain and Sweden provide an EU
perspective; Mexicoprovides a US neighbouring perspective as well as a Spanish-influenced
culture outside Spain; and Japan, China and Taiwan provide a Southeast Asian viewpoint.
This paper presents the results of the surveyin the PRC and the Republic of China (Taiwan).
Analysis of the survey and interviewresults has been done with reference to the histories
of state surveillance in both places and the current complicated and delicate cross-strait
relationships (the island of Taiwan is separated from mainland PRC territory by an area of
sea called the Straits of Taiwan, and PRC–Taiwanrelations are usually referred to as “cross-
strait”in English-languagepress and government reports from/about the region).
1.1 Roadmap
This paper focusses on the local content of Snowden’s revelations in the rest of this
introduction section. In Section2, an overview is given of the general cultural and historical
context of government surveillance. Section 3 gives an overview of the survey and of
respondent’s demographicinformation, while Section 4 provides the detailed survey results.
Section 5 presents the politicaland cultural impacts of Snowden as perceived by the authors,
while the final section offers some conclusionsand identifies avenues for future research.
1.2 Snowden’s revelations and China
On 13th June 2013, eight days afterEdward Snowden’sfirst revelations appeared, the South
China Morning Post (2013) published an article including Snowden’s claims that the Prism
Programme included people and institutions in the Hong Kong Special Administrative
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