China’s Globalizing Internet: History, Power, and Governance

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.

Yu Hong is Professor at the College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. She has a PhD in Communication from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. She has published widely on the political economy of Chinese communications, including the book Networking China: The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy (2017).

Eric Harwit is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, USA, and an adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center. He has a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He has published widely on China’s telecommunications development, including the book China’s Telecommunications Revolution (2008).