The report first summarizes the key findings from the following three studies in three provinces (Guizhou, Jilin, Shandong): (a) a demand survey to assess rural ICT access and attitudes; (b) a library study including scoping the status of ICT use in rural libraries; and (c) a limited impact evaluation to examine how ICT interventions have affected rural uers. Then the report addresses the challenges and policy recommendations of ICT use in the Chinese Countryside.

Describes recent market dynamics and trends in industries supplying IT goods and services and offers an overview of the globalisation of the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and the rise of ICT-enabled international sourcing.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of “going to the countryside” a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of “down to the villages” movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special significance of “going to the countryside” before that era? Going to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys to Yan’an, the revolutionary “going down to the people” as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, “going to the countryside” entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, generated new forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape. As a critical response to the “urban turn” in the past few decades, this book brings the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The process of “crossing” two distinct geographical spaces was often presented as continuous explorations of various ways of establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.

China’s distinctive social media platforms have gained notable popularity among the nation’s vast number of internet users, but has China’s countryside been ‘left behind’ in this communication revolution? Tom McDonald spent 15 months living in a small rural Chinese community researching how the residents use social media in their daily lives. His ethnographic findings suggest that, far from being left behind, many rural Chinese people have already integrated social media into their everyday experience.Throughout his ground-breaking study, McDonald argues that social media allows rural people to extend and transform their social relationships by deepening already existing connections with friends known through their school, work or village, while also experimenting with completely new forms of relationships through online interactions with strangers, particularly when looking for love and romance. By juxtaposing these seemingly opposed relations, rural social media users are able to use these technologies to understand, capitalise on and challenge the notions of morality that underlie rural life.

Asian populations are among some of the fastest growing cultural groups in the US. While books on serving other target groups in libraries have been published (e.g., disabled, Latino, seniors, etc.), few books on serving library users of Asian heritage have been written. Thus the timely need for this book. Rather than a generalized overview of Asians as a whole, this book has 24 separate chapters—each on 24 specific Asian countries/cultures of East, Southeast, and South Asia—with a wealth of resources for understanding, interacting with, outreaching to, and serving library users of each culture. Resources include cultural guides (both print and online), language helps (with sample library vocabulary), Asian booksellers, nationwide cultural groups, professional literature, and more. Resources and suggestions are given for all three types of libraries—public, school, and academic—making this book valuable for all librarians. The demographics of each Asian culture (numbers and distribution)—plus history of immigration and international student enrollment—is also featured. As a bonus, each chapter spotlights a US public, school, and academic library providing model outreach to Asian library users. Additionally, this book provides a detailed description and analysis of libraries in each of the 24 Asian countries. The history, development, facilities, conditions, technology, classification systems, and more—of public, school, and academic libraries—are all discussed, with detailed documentation. Country conditions influencing libraries and library use are also described: literacy levels, reading cultures, languages and writing systems, educational systems, and more. Based on the author’s 15 years of research and travels to Asia, this work is a must-have for all librarians.

In the last decade, the Chinese media have imposed themselves in the global arena and have started to become a reference point, in business and cultural terms, for other national media systems. This book explores how the global media landscape was changed by this revolutionary trend, and why and how China is now playing a key role in guiding it. It is, on the one hand, a book on how the Chinese media system continues to take inspiration and to be shaped (or remapped) by American, European and Asian media companies, and, on the other, a volume on the ways in which recent Chinese media’s “going out” strategy is remapping the global media landscape. Organised into two sections, this book has eight chapters written by American, Chinese and European scholars. Focusing on different markets (such as the movie industry, the press, broadcasting, and the Internet), different regions and different actors (from Donald Trump to the Tanzania-Zambia Railway to journalists), this book provides a fresh interpretation on the main changes China has brought to the global media landscape.

This report presents the findings of an assessment on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to improve food production and distribution in the People's Republic of China. The analysis focuses on e-commerce in rural areas of the country and provides policy recommendations to promote the use of ICT in the agricultural supply chain. The report documents the trends in ICT application by farmers and its impact on income and livelihood. It also identifies the major constraints to and enabling factors for such ICT applications.