Social Transformation and Digital Cultures in the Post-Reform Era

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of digital cultures in the Chinese context, where both political censorship and neoliberal capitalism weave a tangled web. The chapter identifies a wide range of socio-political issues in post-reform China and discusses how these issues feed into Chinese Internet users’ communicative practices on popular participatory social media platforms. In this way, the chapter foregrounds the socio-political grounding for the establishment of a gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere. This chapter addresses the socio-political contexts in which the present research is situated.