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Reviewed by:
  • China and the Internet: Politics of the Digital Leap Forward
  • Jack Linchuan Qiu (bio)
Christopher R. Hughes and Gudrun Wacker, editors. China and the Internet: Politics of the Digital Leap Forward. New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003. 178 pp. Hardcover $115.00, ISBN 041-527772-8.

This edited volume by Christopher Hughes and Gudrun Wacker begins to fill a gap in academic research on the development of the Internet in China, a subject of key importance that so far has been dealt with mostly in journal articles and book chapters. David Sheff's China Dawn is no exception; that work is intended for the general public, more specifically for business people and policy makers who are curious about the emergence of China as a high-tech power.1 The latter group is also the target audience of the popular press, with its increasingly routine stories about the country's "Great Firewall" and the latest corporate mergers in the Information Technology sector. Yet Hughes and Wacker design their work in a more strictly academic sense for the international community of China specialists and scholarship on Internet studies. This strategic decision allows the volume to go beyond most stand-alone pieces on the subject, although the full potential for in-depth and systematic analysis is yet to be realized.

As indicated by its subtitle, the book emphasizes the political dimension of Internet development. This comes as no surprise because the most commonly shared interests among China Internet researchers have to do with the role of the state, the Party, and related processes of power transformation.2 Under this overarching theme, a variety of perspectives are taken in this volume, including the impact of the Internet (chapter 1 by Dai Xiudian and chapter 7 by Christopher Hughes), the social shaping of technology (chapter 3 by Gudrun Wacker and chapter 4 by Zhang Junhua), the regional and global processes of China's ICT buildup (chapter 5 by Sum Ngai-ling and chapter 6 by Monika Ermert and Christopher Hughes), and structural inequality within the country (chapter 2 by Karsten Giese).

But what is not political? Given the omnipresence of Internet regulation and the state's deep penetration into the ICT industry via its regulatory measures, mass media organs, and control over the flow of capital, one may argue that China's Internet is so saturated with power relations that everything and anything goes while examining the politics of the Internet in China. Consider, for example, the formation of nationalism among Internet users, the online exposure of corruption scandals, issues of gender and sexuality, local ICT development projects, migrant workers and the Internet, and, for that matter, the utilization of the new technology for Party propaganda. The list goes on, and the questions remain: why does the book take on these issues but not others, and what is the particular significance of the individual chapters here and their connection with each other, [End Page 455] from which readers can learn something more general that relates to the Internet in China or to Chinese politics as a whole?

In order to move beyond the two workshops on which this book was based and to bring out its value more effectively, it could have benefited from an introduction with more theoretical rigor and, more important, a conclusion that ties the chapters together. This would have been especially worthwhile because materials about the Internet are highly time sensitive, considering China's rapidly changing political and economic environment. It is precisely such contributions that one may expect from a book-length treatment; this would allow the volume to better stand the test of time.

It would be unfair, however, to criticize the book for being merely a random collection of essays. An effective way to connect studies about various aspects of China and the Internet is to put them in a historical context, which the editors have tried to articulate in the introductory chapter. It is intriguing that they compare the high-tech "leapfrog" strategy with the Great Leap Forward (pp. 1-2), a thought-provoking analogy that, unfortunately, is not carried through the rest of the volume. Members of the China studies community would perhaps appreciate a...

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