Political contestation in Chinese digital spaces: Deepening the critical inquiry

Abstract

Although research on the Chinese Internet is thriving, our understanding of its multidimensional character, its diverse forms, actors, and dynamics remains limited. This is due to a tendency to focus on technology at the expense of meaning and people, as well as a bias towards sweeping and dichotomous analytical categories, such as state vs. netizens, politics vs. entertainment, and authoritarianism vs. democracy. One of the perniciously appealing ways of sensationalizing the Chinese Internet falls under this either/or dichotomy. The seven contributions in this special issue of China Information challenge such binaries, thus deepening the critical inquiry into the multiple dimensions of the Chinese Internet. The authors show a more complex and nuanced picture of actors and contestation in Chinese digital spaces, as well as the symbolic forms and consequences of these contestations, illuminating new meanings of the political and new dimensions of digital contestation, including race, class and their interactions with the nation. Together, these articles exemplify an analytical orientation that I refer to as ‘deep Internet studies’. They explore the Internet as a facet of a deep China by linking it to people’s practical, perceptual, and moral experiences as well as to the contexts of institutions, politics, and policies.