Date
Tuesday, 20 July, 2021 - 12:30 to 13:30
Based on collaborative research with Dr Angela Xiao Wu (NYU), this presentation addresses the historical development of China’s provincial web in the late 1990s and its implications for China’s internet governance today including its recent conception of cyber sovereignty.
Often analyzing “the Chinese Internet” as a national entity, existing research has overlooked China’s provincially-oriented web portals, which had supplied information and entertainment to substantial user populations.
Through the lenses of critical political economy of media and critical media industry studies, our research excavates the ascendance of China’s provincial web from the late 1990s to the early 2000s by analyzing industry yearbooks, official reports, conference records, personal memoirs, archived webpages, and user traffic data. It traces the interactions between Internet service providers, legacy media organizations, commercial Internet companies, and the central and local governments—each driven by discrete economic interests, political concerns, and imaginaries about the new technology.