The Geopolitics of Chinese Internets

Jack Linchuan Qiu is Shaw Foundation Professor in Media Technology at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has published more than 120 research articles and chapters, and 10 books in English and Chinese including Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (2016). He is a co-founder of the Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC) and an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association. Peter K. Yu is Regents Professor of Law and Communication and Director of the Center for Law and Intellectual Property at Texas A&M University, USA. He is a co-founder of CIRC and Vice-President and Co-Director of Studies of the American Branch of the International Law Association. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he previously held the Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law at Drake University Law School, Des Moines, USA, and was Wenlan Scholar Chair Professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China. Elisa Oreglia is a Reader in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK. She is the principal investigator for the European Research Council-funded project DIGISILK, which looks at Chinese digital investments and technological influence in neighbouring countries.

Introduction: A new approach to the geopolitics of Chinese internets 1. Digital sovereignty and internet standards: Normative implications of public-private relations among Chinese stakeholders in the Internet Engineering Task Force 2. The geopolitics of infrastructuralized platforms: The case of Alibaba 3. Zoom in and zoom out the glocalized network: When transnationalism meets geopolitics and technopolitics 4. The challenge of the cloud: Between transnational capitalism and data sovereignty 5. Storing data on the margins: Making state and infrastructure in Southwest China 6. The interactive field of open government data: Inter-administrative dynamics, trans-local networks, and local geopolitics of environmental data activism in China 7. Embedded symbiosis: An institutional approach to government-business relationships in the Chinese internet industry