Towards future politics of the cybersphere: China’s temporal-spatial governance of digital transition

Abstract

Digital transition, or the shifting assemblage of the cybersphere, is a primary dimension of global transition. And China is a key driver therein, rendering the party-state's stance the starting place to trace transitions. This paper begins an effort to follow unfolding transitions. It highlights the governance of transition with a focus on the emergent cybersphere. By interpreting the 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP), the planning instrument that expresses the party state's decree for direction and strategy and, just as important, analyzing the framing contexts, processes, and projects, we probe the ordering of the present and the future, the national and the transnational, and, ultimately, the power geometrics of the cybersphere, as externalized through policy words and deeds.