This research examines China’s laws and regulations on digital media content, which have developed and transformed along with the market-oriented media reform and Internet growth. It argues that there has been a continuous effort to articulate legal criteria of content regulation since the early 1980s. The body of laws regulating digital content today does not show across-the-board vagueness, but an ‘unbalanced’ development with elaborated rules in some legal areas, yet ambiguous stipulations in some others. The ‘vagueness’ of the law is part of the political and ideological ambiguity of China’s reform and development and will not be resolved independently of larger and more profound transformations of the Chinese state and society. The development of digital content laws in China can only make sense in specific historical contexts rather than by comparing against an idealized Western legal order.
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