The Evolution Of The Chinese Internet

This book addresses digital cultural formation through four dominant technological platforms over the past two decades in China.

Despite widespread consensus that China's digital revolution was sure to bring about massive democratic reforms, such changes have not come to pass. While scholars and policy makers alternate between predicting change and disparaging a stubbornly authoritarian regime, in this book Shaohua Guo demonstrates how this dichotomy misses the far more complex reality. The Evolution of the Chinese Internet traces the emergence and maturation of one of the most creative digital cultures in the world through four major technological platforms: the bulletin board system, the blog, the microblog, and WeChat. Guo transcends typical binaries of freedom and control, to argue that Chinese Internet culture displays a uniquely sophisticated interplay between multiple extremes, and that its vibrancy is dependent on these complex negotiations. In contrast to the flourishing of research findings on what is made invisible online, this book examines the driving mechanisms that grant visibility to particular kinds of user-generated content. Offering a systematic account of how and why an ingenious Internet culture has been able to thrive, Guo highlights the pivotal roles that media institutions, technological platforms, and creative practices of Chinese netizens have played in shaping culture on- and offline.

This book considers the Chinese internet as an ensemble of ideas, ownership, policies, laws, and interests that intersect with pre-existing global elements and, increasingly, with deepening globalizing imperatives. It extends traditional inquiry about digital China and globalization and encourages closer attention to contestation, shifting international order, transformation of states, and new requirements of global digital capitalism. Across the three foci of history, power, and governance, this book considers the ways the Chinese internet is entangled with transnational capitals, ideas, and institutions, while at the same time manifests a strong globalizing drive. It begins with a historical political economy approach that emphasizes the dialectics between structural imperatives and historical contingency. As for governance, the Chinese state has set out to re-regulate the internet as the network becomes ubiquitous during the nation’s web-oriented digital transformation. Such a state-centric governance model, however, is likely to affect China’s global expansion, apart from the fact that the state is taking an active interest in global internet governance. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Communication Studies, Politics, Sociology, Economics, Cultural Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Chinese Journal of Communication.

Featuring leading scholars on ‘Chinese internets’ – in the plural – from around the world, this interdisciplinary book explores the changing digital landscape in China and provides insight into contemporary Chinese techno-geopolitics. Policymakers, commentators and the mass media have widely viewed ‘Chinese tech’ as a unitary and statist monolith. This predominant view, however, is not only incomplete but has become increasingly obsolete. Using a pluralist and multilayered approach to analysing Chinese techno-geopolitics, this volume addresses the following important questions: Who are the key players in ‘Chinese internets’ today? What role do government agencies, state-owned enterprises, private companies and individual netizens play? How do ‘Chinese internets’ operate at the global, regional, national or local levels? How are external world or regional events influencing or being influenced by geopolitical patterns within China? The Geopolitics of Chinese Internets will be a key resource for policymakers, scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in Chinese techno-geopolitics and the changing digital landscape in China. This book was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.

The Internet and social media are pervasive and transformative forces in contemporary China. The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China explores the changing relationship between China's Internet and social media and its society, politics, legal system, and foreign relations.

This book explores China’s digital discourse and how the Internet influences social and ideological changes to the country’s political economy, within China’s historical context and through a variety of social and political actors. Analysing discourses as diverse as policy papers, addresses from the Xi-Li Administration, and speeches from CEOs of the dominant Internet companies in China, as well as those of Chinese Internet Users, this book illuminates the dynamics, complexity, and structural contradictions in China’s current network technology-enabled developmental path through the lens of ideology and discourse. The book proposes a multi-dimensional model to understand Marxist ideologies under capitalism, emphasizing the relevance of alienation, commodity fetishism, and reification in contemporary discussions of ideology and discourse. This insightful study offers fresh insights into Chinese digital discourse and will be of interest to upper-level students and scholars of communication studies, digital media, sociology, political science, and Internet and technology studies.

This title investigates China’s network society, both its online cyber society and offline real world society, by analyzing the trends and social foundations of society as network and the social challenges it poses, as well as structural changes in social space and social interaction. The first part of the book examines how network society in China forms and develops, analyzing the challenges and structural changes it poses. The author studies network power and uncertainties that lies in the supply, flow, and reception of a massive amount of information, revealing how this influences the government's administrative power as well as governance measures to stabilize social cohesion. The second part first discusses the social restructuring and characteristics of network social space in China. Based on case studies of several momentous social events, the spatial change characterized by an integration of absence and presence space and its influence on social interaction and experience is elucidated, including active absence interaction, mediated experience, spatial representation, and social identities of network aggregation. The book will be a crucial reference for scholars and students studying sociology, network sociology, and contemporary Chinese society.

‘Readers will come away startled at just how fragile the online infrastructure we all depend on is and how much influence China wields – both technically and politically' – Jason Q. Ng, author of Blocked on Weibo 'An urgent and much needed reminder about how China's quest for cyber sovereignty is undermining global Internet freedom’ – Kristie Lu Stout, CNN ‘An important and incisive history of the Chinese internet that introduces us to the government officials, business leaders, and technology activists struggling over access to information within the Great Firewall’ – Adam M. Segal, author of The Hacked World Order Once little more than a glorified porn filter, China’s ‘Great Firewall’ has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. But the effects of the Great Firewall are not confined to China itself. Through years of investigation James Griffiths gained unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it. As distortion, post-truth and fake news become old news James Griffiths shows just how far the Great Firewall has spread. Now is the time for a radical new vision of online liberty.