This book explores China’s digital discourse and how the Internet influences social and ideological changes to the country’s political economy, within China’s historical context and through a variety of social and political actors.
Analysing discourses as diverse as policy papers, addresses from the Xi-Li Administration, and speeches from CEOs of the dominant Internet companies in China, as well as those of Chinese Internet Users, this book illuminates the dynamics, complexity, and structural contradictions in China’s current network technology-enabled developmental path through the lens of ideology and discourse. The book proposes a multi-dimensional model to understand Marxist ideologies under capitalism, emphasizing the relevance of alienation, commodity fetishism, and reification in contemporary discussions of ideology and discourse.
This insightful study offers fresh insights into Chinese digital discourse and will be of interest to upper-level students and scholars of communication studies, digital media, sociology, political science, and Internet and technology studies.
Introduction
PART I
1. Ideology, Digital Discourse and Capitalism
2. Capitalism and Digital Revolution in China
PART II
3. Government Digital Discourse
4. Digital Discourse and BAT
5. Negotiating Digital Discourse
PART III
6. The Digital Ideologies
7. Conclusion
Biography
Yuqi Na is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lingnan University, HK.
While social media and Internet research are dominated by analyses of the Global North, Chinese digital media studies are often not available for the anglophone world or tend to be laid out in a rather uncritical manner. In contrast, Yuqi Na provides a critical political economy approach of Chinese digital state capitalism. A book we all have been waiting for.
Thomas Allmer, Paderborn University, GermanyThe Chinese Internet: Political Economy and Digital Discourse is a pathbreaking major contribution to the Political Economy of Communication.
Christian Fuchs, Professor, Paderborn University, Germany
An indispensable vignette to one of the most important - yet mostly opaque and impenetrable - power houses of contemporary and future global digital capitalism: the Chinese high-tech business elite. A meticulous survey of the digital discourse in this ever-increasing global player, and an important addition to the study of digital ideology.
Eran Fisher, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication, The Open University of Israel.
