Jack Linchuan Qiu: Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (2009)

“The idea of the “digital divide,” the great social division between information haves and have-nots, has dominated policy debates and scholarly analysis since the 1990s. In Working-Class Network Society, Jack Linchuan Qiu describes a more complex social and technological reality in a newly mobile, urbanizing China. Qiu argues that as inexpensive Internet and mobile phone services become available and are closely integrated with the everyday work and life of low-income communities, they provide a critical seedbed for the emergence of a new working class of “network labor” crucial to China’s economic boom. Between the haves and have-nots, writes Qiu, are the information “have-less”: migrants, laid-off workers, micro-entrepreneurs, retirees, youth, and others, increasingly connected by cybercafés, prepaid service, and used mobile phones. A process of class formation has begun that has important implications for working-class network society in China and beyond.

Qiu brings class back into the scholarly discussion, not as a secondary factor but as an essential dimension in our understanding of communication technology as it is shaped in the vast, industrializing society of China. Basing his analysis on his more than five years of empirical research conducted in twenty cities, Qiu examines technology and class, networked connectivity and public policy, in the context of massive urban reforms that affect the new working class disproportionately. The transformation of Chinese society, writes Qiu, is emblematic of the new technosocial reality emerging in much of the Global South.”

Foreword by Manuel Castells
Afterword by Carolyn Cartier
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Information Revolution and Global Politics series
ISBN 026217006X, 9780262170062
320 pages

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Aihwa Ong, Donald Nonini (eds.): Ungrounded Empires. The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (1996)

In the last two decades, Chinese transnationalism has become a distinctive domain within the new “flexible” capitalism emerging in the Asia-Pacific region. Ungrounded Empires maps this domain as the intersection of cultural politics and global capitalism, drawing on recent ethnographic research to critique the impact of late capitalism’s institutions–flexibility, travel, subcontracting, multiculturalism, and mass media–upon transnational Chinese subjectives. Interweaving anthropology and cultural studies with interpretive political economy, these essays offer a wide range of perspectives on “overseas Chinese” and their unique location in the global arena.

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The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society

The Internet in China examines the cultural and political ramifications of the Internet for Chinese society. The rapid growth of the Internet has been enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese government, but the government has also rushed to seize control of the virtual environment. Individuals have responded with impassioned campaigns against official control of information. The emergence of a civil society via cyberspace has had profound effects upon China–for example, in 2003, based on an Internet campaign, the Chinese Supreme People’s Court overturned the ruling of a local court for the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.
The important question this book asks is not whether the Internet will democratize China, but rather in what ways the Internet is democratizing communication in China. How is the Internet empowering individuals by fostering new types of social spaces and redefining existing social relations?

The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society
By Zixue Tai
Edition: illustrated
Published by CRC Press, 2006
ISBN 0415976553, 9780415976558
365 pages
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