China’s digital infrastructure: Networks, systems, standards

Abstract

In the People’s Republic of China, the development of information infrastructures has been a cardinal component of the national modernization project for more than four decades. While most discussions of digital infrastructure in the country focus on the ‘Chinese internet,' framed by architectures of control like the Great Firewall and governmental initiatives like Internet Plus, this special issue contends that China’s digital infrastructure extends from the physical cables laid under urban streets to the ideological capture of surveillance systems, and from the smart home devices domesticated by elderly citizens to the QR codes plastered on everyday life surfaces. Through their interdisciplinary and innovative studies, this issue’s contributors push discussions of China’s digital infrastructure beyond the reduction to authoritarian control and the triumphal rhetorics of governmental imaginaries. Given the breadth of analytical scale and the variety of research methods featured in this collection, the nine contributions to this special issue are organized in three clusters, each centered around one of three key terms from infrastructure studies: networks, systems, and standards. By accounting for heterogeneous scales and relationships through which China’s digital infrastructure emerges, consolidates, and falls apart, these articles produce original knowledge about complex sociotechnical processes and develop productive concepts for future scholarship.