China Hacker Generational Thought Disparity (Late 20th Century to Early 21st Century)

China Hacker Generational Thought Disparity (Late 20th Century to Early 21st Century)

In the past, the 70-plus generation of hackers who supported the early days of the Internet in China valued technological exploration and ideological freedom, and acted as pioneers of cyberspace. At a time when state surveillance was still thin and Internet cafes were swelling as a new public sphere, they shared a genuine urge to use technology to peer into the world, and they recognized each other's existence as an anonymous friendship. Behind them, however, was the political stagnation of the post-1989 period and the instability of society as a whole, and technology was also a means of self-salvation.

However, since the late 2000s, the hacker culture has undergone a rapid transformation. By the time the younger generation came into contact with the Internet, hacking had already become a hotbed of black business, with fraudulent groups and a black market for the sale of information spreading. For them, hackers were a means, not a value, and the words of the old-timers, who talked about ideals and ethics, no longer seemed to be stories from the past, divorced from reality. This disconnection is the chronic disease of the Chinese hacker community: poor cultural inheritance.

Furthermore, as pointed out in web research (e.g., Qihoo360 and Tsinghua University's research report), the image of hackers in China has a dual structure in each period. In the early period, it is ideology, and in the later period, it is profit. In the early period, spontaneity; in the later period, marketization. For the old-timers, technology was an identity, but for the young, it was only part of their livelihood and skill trading.

Thus, the two groups, while bearing the same name of black customers, lived in very different worlds. The background to this is China's unique history of Internet development, in which the Internet rapidly became popular before the culture had matured, and state intervention and commercialization pressures came at the same time. The disparity in ideology between the 70's and the 90's, who speak of ideals and seek practical benefits, is the sharpest illustration of the cross-section of China's hacker culture.