China Confessions of former patriotic hackers (with historical background of the time)

China Confessions of former patriotic hackers (with historical background of the time)

In China from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the Internet was rapidly spreading, but institutional development was lagging, and a unique era of freedom and disorder coexisted. Young people gathered in Internet cafes throughout the night, and early Internet communities supported by anonymity emerged spontaneously, and the atmosphere was filled with competition for technology. This immature environment encouraged the activities of the "red-light" hackers, or patriotic hackers. They did not act under the orders of state agencies, but rather were motivated by a sense of technical excitement and solidarity among their peers. In the background, there was a sense of social stagnation after the Tiananmen Square protests, disparities that emerged in the shadow of rapid growth, and growing friction with the West, and the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing and the 2001 EP3 clashes rapidly amplified online nationalism. Nevertheless, the Red Chinese themselves do not see themselves as heroe
s. They say that their political mission was more about youthful impulse, curiosity about technology, and the transient heat that flared up in the cracks of the system than about their political mission. It is this calm self-awareness that best describes the real image of the Bengaku of that time, that they were nothing more than a phenomenon unique to their era, born of an immature society and a crude Internet culture.