Thirty years of the Internet in China: On writing Chinese Internet histories

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue on “Thirty Years of the Internet in China.” The goal is to highlight insights and lessons which are particularly relevant to the burgeoning field of the study and writing of Chinese Internet histories. Through a careful review of the 24 articles in this special issue, we identify five clusters of analytical issues. They are (1) periodization and panoramic views, (2) texture and scale, (3) the digital everyday, (4) unsettling and recentering scholarship, and (5) methodologies and archives. The 24 essays in this special issue are discussed under these five thematic clusters.

In 2014, the China Internet Information Office and Beijing Internet Information Office (2014) published a 360-page chronicle to mark 20 years of the Internet in China. Although it traces the early developments, such as the famous first email sent on 20 September 1987 by Chinese scientists in Beijing to colleagues in University of Karlsruhe in West Germany, the chronicle treats those early developments as prehistory. Instead, the year 1994 was hailed as Year One of the Chinese Internet (中国互联网元年), and for good reason. On 20 April 1994, the National Computing and Networking Facility of China (NCFC), which was launched in November 1989, for the first time was connected to the global Internet via the American telecommunications corporation Sprint. On 15 May 1994, the first web server and the first set of websites were set up in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Also in May, the then National Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems (NCIC) set up China’s first electronic bulletin board (BBS) known as Shuguang BBS (曙光站). And later in 1994, CERNET (China Education and Research Network), the major network infrastructure which served Chinese higher education institutions, started operating. A year later, with the launching of SMTH (水木清华) in Tsinghua University, the first university-based electronic bulletin board system, China saw the first wave of popular Internet use. The rest is history.

By 2024, the Internet in China has run its course for 30 years. Reflecting on its 30-year history is like watching the course of the Yellow River—China’s Internet is as changeable and full of twists and turns as the mighty Yellow River. In fact, given the increasingly complex and multi-layered character of China’s Internet development, entangling economics, politics, culture, labor, leisure, entertainment, and everyday life at multiple scales, many scholars have come to talk about the Chinese Internets. In this introduction, we subscribe to the same pluralistic notion of the Chinese Internet. If we still sometimes use the singular Internet, it is only out of convenience.

This special issue features 24 essays which examine the past and present of the Chinese Internet. It is a collective endeavor to start studying the Chinese Internet as history. Of course, numerous studies have appeared over the past three decades, and many of them cover some aspects of the Internet’s historical development in China (e.g. Guo, 2021; Han, 2018; Hockx, 2015; Hong, 2017; Hu, 2008; Liu, 2005; Peng, 2005; Qiu, 2009; Yang, 2009; Zheng, 2008; Zhou, 2006). Yet, the study of the Internet as history is a relatively recent academic endeavor, arguably marked by the launching of the journal Internet Histories in 2017 and the publication around the same time of important works on web historiography and Internet histories (Balbi & Magaudda, 2018; Brügger et al., 2017; Brügger & Schroeder, 2017; Goggin & McLelland, 2017; Lingel, 2020).

When The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories was published in 2017, its editors observed that “available internet histories in the anglophone world have predominately focused on North American or European experiences” (Goggin & McLelland, 2017: 1). Since then, however, there has been a notable rise of interest in the study of Internet histories in China (Hu & Chen, 2019; S. Wu, 2018, 2022) and the 30th anniversary has been marked by new publications (X. Fang et al., 2024; Yu & Liu, 2024) as well as conferences in and outside of China. Despite such growing interest, the study of the Chinese Internet as history is at an early stage and no Chinese Internet history as such has been written. Indeed, there is hardly any scholarship about how to write such histories. There are no systematic studies of theories, methods, or useable archives for the writing of Chinese Internet histories. Presumably, Chinese Internet histories will be written from multiple angles—technological, economic, political, social, cultural, linguistic, and more. There will be histories of Internet cafes, websites, BBS forums, social media platforms, video and livestreaming platforms, and so forth. There will also be histories of the wide range of Internet practices and cultural products, such as Internet literatures, digital folklore, memes, jokes, protests, and perhaps even fake news. In fact, the contributors to this special issue cover diverse topics and issues. Some focus on Internet politics and political participation, others on economy and commerce, still others on culture and cultural production. Many examine various social and cultural manifestations and entanglements. Several authors explore conceptual, methodological, and epistemological issues in the study of the Chinese Internet. Often one essay threads together several issues.

In this introduction, we will group the 24 essays roughly on the basis of their analytical approaches and how they help us envision the writing of Chinese Internet histories. At the risk of over-simplification, we will highlight five themes: (1) periodization and panoramic views, (2) texture and scale, (3) the digital everyday, (4) unsettling and recentering scholarship, and (5) methodologies and archives. These are not mutually exclusive, and indeed most essays easily fall into two or more of these categories. As a matter of convenience, however, we will briefly discuss each essay under only one of these five thematic clusters.

Before we go on, we would like to note that the 24 essays in this special issue will be published in two parts. Part I includes the contributions by K. Chen (2024), DeButts and Pan (2024), Guo (2024), Han (2024), Negro (2024), Qiu (2024), Schneider (2024), Song et al (2024), Wallis (2024), and W. Zhang (2024). Part II will include de Seta (2024), Gu (2024), Hockx (2024), Jiang (2024), Li (2024), Liao (2024), Liu (2024), Lv (2024), Wang and Guan (2024), A. X. Wu (2024), Xu (2024), Yuan (2024), G. Zhang (2024), and L. Zhang (2024).

Periodization and panoramic views

The practice of periodization has been criticized for its assumption of the linear nature of temporalities (Jordheim, 2012; Tanaka, 2019). Following the work of historical sociologist Jessop (2004), however, we recognize that periodization is still a useful heuristic device for understanding change in historical processes. It is used to “interpret an otherwise undifferentiated ‘flow’ of historical time by classifying events and/or processes in terms of their internal affinities and external differences” (Jessop, 2004: 40). As such, periodization is important for scholars attentive to time and temporality in the analysis of media and communication processes (Karpf, 2019; Stanyer & Mihelj, 2016). For the study of the Internet in China, where there is often a tendency to neglect temporality and treat the Internet as one unified and homogeneous flow, periodization becomes a particularly useful strategy to conceptualize historical change.

Two of our contributors use periodization as an analytical device in their essays, thus providing a broad temporal framework for understanding China’s Internet histories. Han (2024) argues that cyber politics in China has undergone three stages in the past three decades. In the first stage (1994–2003), the Internet empowered citizens while the state tried to learn and adapt to the new technologies. The second stage (2004–2012) was a period of authoritarian resilience, when grassroots digital participation was active while the state maintained sufficient control. The third phase (2013–now) is characterized by “authoritarian dominance” when state control of the Internet has become dominant and social participation is significantly curtailed.

Weiyu Zhang (2024) examines the continuities and shifts of online fandom practices at the intersections of local cultural industry, technological advancement, and transcultural flows. She identifies three historical periods. Phase 1, covering 1994 to 2005, concludes with the first major fandom event, Super Voice Girl 2. Phase 2, from 2005 to 2014, sees the mainstreaming of online idols. Phase 3 culminates in 2021, which was marked by governmental crackdown on Internet fandom. Zhang argues that as of 2024, online fandom in China is moving into a new phase with the appearance of virtual idols and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Even without making explicit use of periodization, some authors may still subscribe to an implicit understanding of historical change as they provide panoramic views of the history of the Chinese Internet. Cognizant that earlier choices set the conditions for media’s later development, Negro (2024) examines the first decade of the Chinese Internet (1994–2003) as a critical moment. He identifies three groups of metaphors, which he argues capture the earlier “choices” that emerged out of the interactions of government entities, the private sector, and China’s nascent civil society. The first set of metaphors has to do with “fire and walls,” as represented by the subject line in the first email sent out of China: “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner of the world.” Ironically, as Negro points out, the symbolic Great Wall evolved into firewalls that function to block and filter Internet communication. The second group of metaphors, such as “information superhighway,” conveys the Chinese aspiration for high-speed technological progress. The third group consists of spatial metaphors, such as “public square,” “home,” “Jianghu” (江湖), and community, which China’s early netizens used to describe their experiences and visions of the Internet.

Three is the charm. Guo (2024) and Qiu (2024) also each use three concepts to capture the most prominent features of the Chinese Internet. Emphasizing the vibrancy of digital culture, Guo (2024) argues that in a historical process of dynamic interplay, state media, commercial entities, and Internet users all competed for attention and an authoritative voice. The competition for visibility and legitimacy among these actors drove the production of creative digital content. Her three keywords are attention, authority, and cultural production.

Qiu (2024) surveys China’s Internet history from the appearance of the first nationwide Internet service provider in 1995 to the time of COVID-19. While alert to the abrupt changes caused by technology or government policy, he shows that three constants have persisted in studies of Chinese Internet and society. Statism refers to the dominant and enduring influences of the Chinese party-state in shaping the agendas of Chinese Internet economy, policy, and culture. Cacophony refers to the multiple and often “chaotic” voices in Chinese Internet spaces, including voices of the “information have-less.” The proliferation of these voices may seem to contradict the dominance of statism, but that is an empirical reality that Internet historians must carefully map and analyze. Overlapping with statism and cacophony are liminal social movements with long-term goals of social and environmental change and justice. Happening in the interstices of the other two tendencies, liminal social movements maintain complex relationships with them. Liminality implies both creativity and uncertainty, and Qiu is careful to note that liminal social movements may have positive impact on social change or no impact, depending on how the complex interactions among the three “constants” are played out.

Schneider (2024) delineates the rise of multiple forms of nationalisms in China. While this seems to coincide with the fragmentation of Chinese society and the diversification of social media platforms, Schneider emphasizes the interrelated impact of state, market, and platform affordances in shaping the specific forms of online nationalism. Showing how nationalism works as both an ideological and an emotional framework, Schneider argues that over time, nationalism is becoming the shared language among different social groups to negotiate their diverse politics in the digital publics.

Song et al (2024) find that the gender gap in Internet access in China has significantly narrowed over the past 30 years. At the same time, they note that despite this progress, nuanced disparities in Internet usage patterns, practices, and economic and psychological outcomes persist between men and women. They caution against the binary view of empowerment and disempowerment of women in Chinese digital spaces and stress the need to study the extent of substantive equality achieved by women in China’s digital landscape.

Jiang (2024) provides an overview of the evolution of Chinese Internet policy-making. She notes that Chinese Internet policy research focuses on three aspects: issue (what issues should fall under regulatory oversight), agency (who should carry out the regulation), and mechanism (how a specific Internet issue is regulated). Different answers to these questions point to different types of Internet governance models and practices. She argues that under Jiang Zemin’s presidency (1993–2003), China started to build Internet infrastructures and popularized Internet usage among early adopters. Oriented to maintaining domestic social stability, China’s earlier Internet policies focused on infrastructure security, network safety, and information control. Over time, China’s Internet policy-making has evolved from an emphasis on resources and infrastructure to information services and Internet economy. In a time of global geopolitical and tech rivalry, both the Chinese state and Chinese Internet firms have sought to enhance their global influences through policy and practice. After 30 years, China has developed a unique modern digital communication system that is highly advanced yet closely monitored and filtered. It is the only one in the world that can rival Silicon Valley in both sophistication and scale.

Texture and scale

A challenge for any historical writing concerns how to balance the richness of details and texture with broader trends at the structural and institutional levels. The same challenge faces writers of China’s Internet histories. Is it possible at all to produce histories of the Chinese Internet as such? Or does it make more sense to start with concrete aspects of the Chinese Internets, such as the histories of emojis, memes, BBS forums, blogging, and livestreaming? These questions concern matters of texture and scale.

Although Gu and Lv use scale and texture, respectively, to conceptualize their own specific areas of inquiry, the two concepts have broader resonance for the writing of Internet histories. Gu (2024) studies intimate practices enabled by network technologies, ranging from instant messaging services to online dating apps and livestreaming platforms. She finds that all three parties to these complex relationships—individual livestreamers, livestreaming platforms, and government entities—have to negotiate the tensions between personalized intimate interactions and public spectacle; all have to manage the boundaries of intimacy and morality in order to attain scalability and profit. Gu stresses how the pursuit of “scale” dominates the design, the economy, and the governance of network technologies while shaping the everyday practices of exploring intimate possibilities. The critical aspect of “scalable intimacy” calls for attending to the conflicted experiences and the labor of those who participate in these mediated social venues and their digital economy. For scholars of Chinese Internet history, the concept of scalable intimacy points to the significance of examining the emergence of digital social forms in a contextualized framework.

Lv (2024) uses “texture” as a linchpin to study China’s digital green public culture.

Texture has a materiality, and it generates feelings. Thus, the texture of different woven fabrics feels differently. Importantly, Lv writes that “the formation of texture’s materiality takes time.” She argues that the study of green public cultures ought to pay more attention to the texture of culture as opposed to a focus on public spaces and spheres. She offers examples of three textured practices of online green culture—video bloggers creating content to popularize science, coal miners becoming content creators and showing their working and living conditions, and local communities using social media to call for material and emotional support after being hit by heavy floods. Studying texture is to center ordinary people’s emotions, daily struggles, and their lived experiences, which are increasingly entangled with digital media. It is to prioritize practice and agency over structure.

On a broader level, the conceptual language of texture and scale points to the importance of multi-layered and nuanced approaches to Internet histories. To borrow Jian Xu’s language of “wanghong thinking,” attention to texture and scale in digital culture represents a much-needed way of critical “thinking.” Xu (2024) develops his concept of “wanghong thinking” based on his long-time study of online celebrities. Informed by a historical perspective, he finds that wanghong, or Internet celebrities or influencers, is not peculiar to the digital age, but has a historical lineage. Wanghong are like traditional celebrities (such as labor heroes), because both are expected to serve as positive role models for the public. Xu writes,

wanghong exist in the same “celebrity ecology” as traditional celebrities in China and that they have constituted an important part of it. The legacy of socialist role models and state-media-celebrity-public relations also casts a long shadow on wanghong and has greatly influenced their performance, culture, regulation and governance.

By putting wanghong thinking in a longer historical perspective, Xu takes the study of wanghong practice beyond the dominant models of platform studies or digital labor studies.

Liao’s (2024) study of “unpopular feminism” also adds texture to existing scholarship. Interweaving perspectives on activism, visibility, gender politics, and techno-nationalism, she introduces a nuanced way of understanding feminism in digital China. Liao highlights the plurality of Chinese feminisms and draws attention to the state-market complex that mediates the popularity and visibility of particular feminist discourses and practices. Liao also urges for a non-reductionist framework to further interrogate the shaping of gender politics in China by transnational encounters, digital technologies, and neoliberal and postsocialist ideologies.

Wang and Guan (2024) tackle the question of scale by turning attention from national media to county-level, local media. They argue that “locality” is reimagined and reinvented with Internet-based local media. Thus, for example, the official accounts of some counties (县) tend to mold a similar set of locality. On their part, digital platforms such as WeChat and Douyin reinvent and materialize geographical scales through look-alike interfaces and locality-based organization of contents. The reinvention of locality also happens in a socioeconomic sense. They argue that digital platforms that monetize on local businesses, such as Meituan and Eleme, are a specific type of Internet-based local media. These platforms make a business out of locality by offering local service applications, which weave local social networks into their infrastructures. They also enable grassroots local media to develop their own local market niches by commodifying local Internet users. Finally, locality is reinvented in a social-political sense, such as when Internet-based local media allow local government to broaden their surveillance infrastructure networks and digitalize their governance.

The digital everyday

Lv’s essay on texture already shows the importance of studying everyday digital experiences, or the digital everyday. The digital everyday also lies at the center of several other contributions, raising the question of how future Internet histories might engage with the mundane and the everyday. As Liu (2024) notes in his contribution, the politics of mundanity is always entangled with the more attention-grabbing contentious politics. And as digital media increasingly penetrate everyday life, it is imperative to study people’s everyday digital experiences. Liu studies the digital everyday in the context of his work on contentious politics. In this context, Liu’s essay also addresses the questions of disaggregating and historicizing the Internet. He argues that a historical perspective is crucial for understanding longer-term political processes. Everyday experiences are precisely the texture of these long-term processes. The need to disaggregate the Internet is in part also based on an understanding of the growing importance of the everyday. Whereas earlier Internet users in China were mostly educated urbanites, the majority of today’s users are migrants, laid-off workers, self-employed micro-entrepreneurs, retirees, and both rural and urban youth. Thus, Liu calls attention to the experiences of different social and demographic groups as well as specific challenges facing these groups in their political engagement.

de Seta (2024) engages the digital everyday from the angle of digital folklore. He argues that in contrast to analytical frameworks which foreground government policies, corporate decisions, and large-scale public debates, the vernacular forms of creativity in people’s everyday digital encounters have not attracted adequate attention. Studying one particular form of everyday vernacular practice—the digital folklore, he traces its origin to the very early days of the Internet in China. Thus, for example, the above-mentioned first email sent from China “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner of the world” has become part of China’s digital folklore. The everyday interactions on the numerous digital spaces, from the early BBS communities to today’s livestreaming platforms, are the hotbed of digital folklore. These creative everyday practices have become the inexhaustible sources of Internet spoofs, viral memes, jokes, emojis, and memorable online jargon such as 躺平 tangping (“lying flat”) or 内卷 neijuan (“involution”). All these are part of China’s digital folklore, which represents what de Seta thinks of as the “continuities and peculiarities of vernacular creativity throughout the country’s internet history.”

Like de Seta, Wallis (2024) downplays the overly deterministic overtones of current scholarship on the platform society. Instead, she draws on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) notion of ordinary affect to center the voices and ordinary practices of marginalized creative and domestic workers. Specifically, she examines how they mobilize social media to engage in mundane pursuits, feelings, and struggles for voice. In her long-term interactions with both young creative and domestic workers, Wallis saw how they were engaged in various forms of self-cultivation as they carefully crafted their social media posts to show their self-growth, learning, and mutual support. In doing so, Wallis shies away from what she calls the “daunting forces” of big data, algorithmic control, surveillance, and platformization. By focusing on these ordinary pursuits and emotions, Wallis sees hope and agency against the backdrop of an overwhelmingly platformized society.

Unsettling and recentering scholarship

Many contributions in this special issue point out gaps in current scholarship and opportunities for future research. In doing so, they unsettle existing theories and concepts and re-center previously under-studied topics and issues. This section highlights several such contributions.

A. X. Wu’s (2024) essay takes on an important area of digital cultural studies—the politics of platforms and shows how taking an indigenous perspective may reveal a different kind of platform politics at work. Through an analysis of the Chinese notion of pingtai, which can be literally translated as “platform,” Wu argues that the Chinese context has given rise to a politics of platforms that is different from the US-centered platform politics. One key difference is that US-based digital media became “platforms” in the mid-2000s to deflect public responsibilities driven by the logic of market liberalism, while Chinese digital media became “pingtai” in the late 2010s to shoulder public missions. This argument unsettles the neoliberal logic of US-centered platformization and re-envisions the possibilities of a different model of platform politics.

DeButts and Pan (2024) center the study of digital disengagement. Scholarship on various aspects of the Internet in China has overwhelming focused on digital engagement (Reese et al., 2023). DeButts and Pan note, however, that alongside engagement, there has been a tendency of disengagement, as when previously active users begin to withdraw from digital participation and others are unwilling or unable to engage. While DeButts and Pan (2024) agree that engagement has predominated over disengagement in the past, they posit that more people are disengaging today than in the past, raising important questions about why they are disengaging and whether and how this trend will shape the longer-term prospect of civic participation, digital culture, and Internet politics in China.

Challenging the techno-determinist, individualized, and male-centric framework of digital media studies, Lin Zhang (2024) offers a materialist and feminist account of rural Internet development in the past 30 years from a social reproductive perspective. While the stories of the rise of China’s big techs (such as Alibaba, Bytedance, and Kuaishou) are well known, the contributions of the rural population to the growth of these tech companies have received much less attention. Zhang argues that the global capitalist crisis of 2008 triggered reverse migration in China. Migrants who had previously left their villages in search of job opportunities in urban areas began to return to their villages with the closure of export-oriented factories along the eastern coast. Back in their home villages, the migrant returnees found new forms of employment in family-based e-commerce. To improve educational opportunities for their children, however, migrant returnees often purchase apartments in nearby townships and cities, and grandparents may find themselves shuffling between home villages and cities to look after their grandchildren as well as their village e-commerce businesses. Zhang’s study shows the importance of incorporating rural e-commerce into the broader historical framework of Internet and technological development in China.

Similarly, Yuan (2024) rejects the systematic framing of state-market relations in China. She argues that a state-centered approach must be complemented by specific industrial conditions and local institutional environments. Yuan offers three theoretical approaches for the explanation of Alibaba’s growth—the neoliberal model, the developmental state, and the market transition model—and suggests the plausibility of a hybrid explanation. The broader lesson that Yuan’s case study offers for the writing of Chinese Internet histories is the need to consider complex interactions rather than single-factor explanations.

Ge Zhang (2024) offers a critical reflection on the state of digital game studies in the past 30 years, especially concerning the interactions (or lack thereof) between Chinese-language and English-language game studies. To characterize the permeability and gatekeeping of scholarship on game studies in and outside China, Zhang calls these zones of interactions “membranes.” He notes that inside China, consistent with China’s larger project of “telling China’s story well” to the world, there are persistent efforts to “export” academic knowledge produced in China. He applauds Chinese scholars’ effort to go beyond rehearsing Western scholarship and to speak in their own terms, but laments the lack of any acknowledgment of postcolonial theory. At the same time, he points out that despite the rhetoric of “speaking in one’s own terms,” scholarly works translated from English into Chinese still mainly import “the latest theoretical turns and nouveau debates” for a domestic audience perceived to suffer from an information gap. Zhang is also dissatisfied with the state of game research outside of China, whose role is often “relegated to explaining China and its very ‘alien’ games industry and culture (exoticized or otherwise).” For the writing of Chinese Internet histories, Zhang’s critical reflections offer sobering lessons, especially concerning the urgency of incorporating postcolonial and decolonial perspectives into Chinese Internet studies.

Methodologies and archives

Finally, we turn to issues of methodologies and archives in Chinese Internet studies. Reflecting the diverse spectrum of Internet scholarship, researchers have employed a broad range of methodologies, ranging from archival research and document analysis to content analysis, discourse analysis, online ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to review this rich methodological literature. Yet, the two essays in our special issue which directly address questions of methods do raise questions of broader significance. Li (2024) addresses the challenges of doing ethnographic research in Chinese technology companies based on her own field experiences. Arguing that ethnography is “an art of the possible,” she emphasizes cultivating relationships with human subjects. This means treating them as friends and asking them questions aimed to build understanding, and not to instrumentally extract information from them. Li’s reflections touch on bigger questions of research ethics which merit the attention of all Internet researchers.

K. Chen (2024) provides an overview of the use of computational methods in Chinese Internet studies. More than 10 years ago, she developed an interest in computational methods out of her personal frustrations with the difficulty of handling large amounts of online data. She has since been deeply involved in developing new computational methods for collecting and analyzing social media data, both textual and video data. In her essay, Chen emphasizes the importance of cross-platform and transnational approaches and longitudinal research designs, as well as the need to combine computational methods with ethnographic and historical analysis.

The author of a pioneering book on Chinese Internet literature, here in his essay Hockx (2024) brings his historical analysis up to date. He argues that online literature in China has developed into a successful commercial industry, which provides jobs and serves extremely large interactive and fan communities. Continuing an argument he makes in his earlier book, Hockx notes that in contrast to online literature in other parts of the world which has produced highly experimental “electronic literature,” online literature in the PRC never quite broke away from the linear mode of presentation (Hockx, 2024: 1). This does not mean that online literature in China lacks creativity, however. Often produced in online forums, its creativity lies in the various forms of collective authorship, which challenge conventional understandings of the meaning of a literary text.

It might seem to be a leap to move from Chen’s discussion of computational methods to Hockx’s essay about online literature, but the two essays share a common interest in data collection and archiving. Indeed, one of the critical issues Hockx (2024) explicitly raises concerns the preservation and canonization of online literature. Like all historical studies, the writing of Chinese Internet histories will depend on the availability and richness of Internet archives (Brügger & Schroeder, 2017). Yet, as Hockx notes, many earlier works of Chinese online literature are no longer available online. In some sense, digital material is inherently ephemeral (Chun, 2008) and data in Chinese digital spaces often disappear suddenly (H. Fang & Wu, 2022; Yang & Wu, 2018). Because it is impossible to preserve and archive everything, scholars are faced with the challenge to selectively preserve, archive, and manage digital data. It takes hard work and many resources (de Kosnik, 2016). For Chinese Internet scholars, one way to meet this challenge is to channel computational methods into the collection, preservation, and analysis of digital data much as K. Chen (2024) has been doing. And because researchers in digital humanities have a long history of doing such work (J. Chen & Tsui, 2022; Vierthaler, 2020), their scholarship may provide additional insights and lessons for scholars interested in studying Chinese Internet histories.

Conclusion

“East of the river for thirty years, west of the river next thirty.” This folk saying originally was supposed to refer to the Yellow River, which may change its course so drastically that a village on its east side for 30 years may find itself on its west in another 30 years. More often, however, the saying is used to talk about the fortuitous and changing fortunes of families, communities, and nations. As we mark the 30th anniversary of the development of the Internet in China, this is also an occasion to think ahead. When researchers look back at the history of the Chinese Internet in another 30 years, what will they have to say? After all, we may not want to just stand watching the changing fortunes of the Internet as if they were the rolling waves of the Yellow River. The Yellow River is part of a larger ecological system, which it nourishes but can also cause damage to. Similarly, the Internet, or more precisely the Internets, are now also part of a much larger ecological system with which they have an entangled and interdependent relationship. Internet infrastructures such as server farms and data centers exert extraordinary pressures on the environment and the climate, and yet they are often viewed as prime drivers of global and national economies. The development of the so-called “artificial” intelligence (or “unintelligence” Broussard, 2019) has evolved into a new arms race (Haner & Garcia, 2019; Scharre, 2019). At the same time, as the COVID-19 pandemic shows, digital media have become indispensable to public responses of global public health crises. All this makes it nearly impossible to foresee what the Internets—or the world—will look like in another 30 years. We can only hope that the essays in this special issue will provide some reasons for hope, as well as abundant lessons for deep critical reflections and soul-searching.