Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: A new approach to the geopolitics of Chinese internets 1. Digital sovereignty and internet standards: Normative implications of public-private relations among Chinese stakeholders in the Internet Engineering Task Force 2. The geopolitics of infrastructuralized platforms: The case of Alibaba 3. Zoom in and zoom out the glocalized network: When transnationalism meets geopolitics and technopolitics 4. The challenge of the cloud: Between transnational capitalism and data sovereignty 5. Storing data on the margins: Making state and infrastructure in Southwest China 6. The interactive field of open government data: Inter-administrative dynamics, trans-local networks, and local geopolitics of environmental data activism in China 7. Embedded symbiosis: An institutional approach to government-business relationships in the Chinese internet industry
