In recent years, China 's leaders have taken decisive action to transform information, communications, and technology (ICT) into the nation's next pillar industry. In Networking China , Yu Hong offers an overdue examination of that burgeoning sector's political economy. Hong focuses on how the state, in conjunction with market forces and class interests, is constructing and realigning its digitalized sector. State planners intend to build a more competitive ICT sector by modernizing the network infrastructure, corporatizing media-and-entertainment institutions, and by using ICT as a crosscutting catalyst for innovation, industrial modernization, and export upgrades. The goal: to end China's industrial and technological dependence upon foreign corporations while transforming itself into a global ICT leader. The project, though bright with possibilities, unleashes implications rife with contradiction and surprise. Hong analyzes the central role of information, communications, and culture in Chinese-style capitalism. She also argues that the state and elites have failed to challenge entrenched interests or redistribute power and resources, as promised. Instead, they prioritize information, communications, and culture as technological fixes to make pragmatic tradeoffs between economic growth and social justice.

Social Networks in China provides an in-depth guide to Chinese social networks, covering behaviors, usage, key issues, and future developments. Chinese scholarship and cultural idiosyncrasies in technology remain a relatively under-researched area. While such issues may be sporadically reported in popular media, it is often difficult to obtain a true understanding of authentic Chinese behaviors and practices. One such study area delves into whether Chinese users utilize technology to socialize in the same ways as people from western societies. As no book currently exists to address issues concerning Chinese social networks, this book takes on that shortage and opportunity. - Offers an exploration of Chinese social networks and Chinese online social behavior - Addresses issues concerning Chinese social networks and their development - Presented by authors with extensive experience working in China

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, he presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China—and across Asia.

Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has revolutionized popular expression in China, enabling users to organize, protest, and influence public opinion in unprecedented ways. Guobin Yang's pioneering study maps an innovative range of contentious forms and practices linked to Chinese cyberspace, delineating a nuanced and dynamic image of the Chinese Internet as an arena for creativity, community, conflict, and control. Like many other contemporary protest forms in China and the world, Yang argues, Chinese online activism derives its methods and vitality from multiple and intersecting forces, and state efforts to constrain it have only led to more creative acts of subversion. Transnationalism and the tradition of protest in China's incipient civil society provide cultural and social resources to online activism. Even Internet businesses have encouraged contentious activities, generating an unusual synergy between commerce and activism. Yang's book weaves these strands together to create a vivid story of immense social change, indicating a new era of informational politics.

This volume assesses the evolving role of guanxi (social networks) in China's transforming society.

China and the Internet: Politics of the Digital Leap Forward is a comprehensive assessment of the political and economic impact of information and communication technologies (ITCs) on Chinese society. It provides in-depth analyses of topics including economic development, civil and political liberties, bureaucratic politics, international relations and security studies. The book covers the aspirations of Chinese policy-makers using the Internet to achieve a 'digital leapfrog' of economic development. Avoiding technical jargon, the book is accessible to anyone interested in the social impact of the Internet and information and communication technologies, from those in academia to business and public policy-makers.

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.

China's telecommunications industry has seen revolutionary transformation and growth over the past three decades. Chinese Internet users number nearly 150 million, and the PRC expects to quickly pass the US in total numbers of connected citizens. The number of mobile and fixed-line telephone users soared from a mere 2 million in 1980 to a total of nearly 800 million in 2007. China has been the most successful developing nation in history for spreading telecommunications access at an unparalleled rapid pace. This book tells how China conducted its remarkable "telecommunications revolution". It examines both corporate and government policy to get citizens connected to both voice and data networks, looks at the potential challenges to the one-party government when citizens get this access, and considers the new opportunities for networking now offered to the people of one of the world's fastest growing economies. The book is based on the author's fieldwork conducted in several Chinese cities, as well as extensive archival research. It focuses on key issues such as building and running the country's Internet, mobile phone company rivalry, foreign investment in the sector, and telecommunications in China's vibrant city of Shanghai. It also considers the country's internal "digital divide", and questions how equitable the telecommunications revolution has been. Finally, it examines the ways the PRC's entry to the World Trade Organization will shape the future course of telecommunications growth.

The Internet in China examines the cultural and political ramifications of the Internet for Chinese society. The rapid growth of the Internet has been enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese government, but the government has also rushed to seize control of the virtual environment. Individuals have responded with impassioned campaigns against official control of information. The emergence of a civil society via cyberspace has had profound effects upon China--for example, in 2003, based on an Internet campaign, the Chinese Supreme People's Court overturned the ruling of a local court for the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. The important question this book asks is not whether the Internet will democratize China, but rather in what ways the Internet is democratizing communication in China. How is the Internet empowering individuals by fostering new types of social spaces and redefining existing social relations?

This book provides a comprehensive review of China’s Internet development in the past 23 years since the country’s first access to the Internet, especially since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. It offers a systematic account of China’s experience in Internet development and governance, and establishes and presents China’s Internet Development Index System, covering network infrastructure, information technology, digital economy, e-governance, cyber security, and international cyberspace governance.