Featuring leading scholars on ‘Chinese internets’ – in the plural – from around the world, this interdisciplinary book explores the changing digital landscape in China and provides insight into contemporary Chinese techno-geopolitics. Policymakers, commentators and the mass media have widely viewed ‘Chinese tech’ as a unitary and statist monolith. This predominant view, however, is not only incomplete but has become increasingly obsolete. Using a pluralist and multilayered approach to analysing Chinese techno-geopolitics, this volume addresses the following important questions: Who are the key players in ‘Chinese internets’ today? What role do government agencies, state-owned enterprises, private companies and individual netizens play? How do ‘Chinese internets’ operate at the global, regional, national or local levels? How are external world or regional events influencing or being influenced by geopolitical patterns within China? The Geopolitics of Chinese Internets will be a key resource for policymakers, scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in Chinese techno-geopolitics and the changing digital landscape in China. This book was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.

An in-depth exploration of the political economy of the Chinese technology company Baidu which, along with China’s other tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, has emerged as a leading global Internet company. Baidu – not Google – is the dominant search company in China, the largest Internet market in the world, whose impact on the political economy is no longer limited to China, but the broader global market, and in particular the US economy. This book outlines the intense competition within the search engine market and illustrates the inter-capitalist dynamic in the contemporary Chinese Internet sector, and highlights Baidu’s uniqueness on the global stage as it pivots to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and expands into other industrial sectors. ShinJoung Yeo offers a window into the intensifying geopolitical shaping of the global Internet industry, and the contention and collaboration among multinational firms and states to control the most dynamic capitalist economic sector – the Internet. An important and timely analysis for anyone interested in the political economy of the global media, communication, and information industries, and particularly those requiring a better understanding of the Internet industry in China.

The Geopolitics of Cyberspace explores how concepts of traditional and critical geopolitics can be applied to cyberspace, the extent to which they can help model the behaviour of key actors and the implications for diplomacy.

The Internet has become a staple of modern civilized life, now as vital a utility as electricity. But despite its growing influence, the Internet isn't as stable as it might seem; rather, it can be best thought of as a network of networks reliant on developing technical and social measures to function, including hardware, software, standards, and protocols. As millions of new internet users sign on each year, governing bodies need to balance evolving social ideas surrounding internet use against shifting political pressures on internet governance--or risk disconnection. Four Internets offers a revelatory new approach for conceptualizing the Internet and understanding the sometimes rival values that drive its governance and stability. Four Internets contends that the apparently monolithic "Internet" is in fact maintained by four distinct value systems--the Silicon Valley Open Internet, the Brussels Bourgeois Internet, the DC Commercial Internet, and the Beijing Paternal Internet--competing to determine the future directions of internet affordances for freedom, innovation, security, and human rights. Starting with an analysis of the original vision of an "Open Internet," the book outlines challenges facing this vision and the subsequent rise of other internets popularized through political and monetary machinations. It then unravels how tensions between these internets play out across politics, economics, and technology, and offers perspectives on potential new internets that might arise from emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and smart cities. The book closes with an evaluation of whether all these models can continue to co-exist--and what might happen if any fall away. Visionary and accessible, Four Internets lends readers the confidence to believe in a diverse yet resilient Internet through a deeper understanding of this everyday commodity.

Featuring leading scholars on ‘Chinese internets’ – in the plural – from around the world, this interdisciplinary book explores the changing digital landscape in China and provides insight into contemporary Chinese techno-geopolitics. Policymakers, commentators and the mass media have widely viewed ‘Chinese tech’ as a unitary and statist monolith. This predominant view, however, is not only incomplete but has become increasingly obsolete. Using a pluralist and multilayered approach to analysing Chinese techno-geopolitics, this volume addresses the following important questions: Who are the key players in ‘Chinese internets’ today? What role do government agencies, state-owned enterprises, private companies and individual netizens play? How do ‘Chinese internets’ operate at the global, regional, national or local levels? How are external world or regional events influencing or being influenced by geopolitical patterns within China? The Geopolitics of Chinese Internets will be a key resource for policymakers, scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in Chinese techno-geopolitics and the changing digital landscape in China. This book was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.

This book presents an essential non-western geopolitical landscape and draws on the conceptual framework of critical geopolitics to discuss the views on terrorism held by various groups of Chinese people, including the elite, middle class, and masses. After investigating these views, the book posits that these Chinese geopolitical imaginaries cannot be fully understood using the extant geopolitical theories, including communism, nationalism, and realism. Accordingly, it subsequently seeks to adapt the Confucian geopolitical idea in order to theorize Chinese geopolitics. By doing so, the book reintroduces the historically embedded but long-ignored traditional Chinese political geography philosophies (in particular Confucian thinking) into efforts to explain Chinese geopolitics. In this regard, it promotes a specific and importantly Confucianism-based understanding of international security politics. The geopolitical model provided can also help to explain Chinese views on other major geopolitical issues.

This book discusses the use of the internet in China, the complicated power relations in online political communications, and the interactions and struggles between the government and the public over the use of the internet. It argues that there is a "semi-structured" online public sphere, in which there is a certain amount of equal and liberal political communication, but that the online political debates are also limited by government control and censorship, as well as by inequality and exclusions, and moreover that the government rarely engages in the political debates. Based on extensive original research, and considering specific debates around particular issues, the book analyses how Chinese net-users debate about political issues, how they problematize the government’s actions and policies, what language they use, what online discourses are produced, and how the debates and online discourses are limited. Overall, the book provides a rich picture of the current state of online political communication in China.