This article examines the development of online newspapers in China through a ‘social environment’ framework and finds several adverse factors in policies, regulations, economic structure, business conventions and telecommunications infrastructure. Through a ‘virtual community’ framework, it analyzes the operation and content of those newspapers and finds that they are still in a primitive stage of ‘virtual communities’. The article’s contribution to the field lies not only in its exploration of what is behind the development of online newspapers in China, but also in that it has developed two conceptual frameworks that are of universal interest in the study of online publications.
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