On the 30th anniversary of China’s internet, this article is written in response to students’ concerns about the tangibility of public spheres in authoritarian contexts. Using texture as a conceptual linchpin, I propose to shift focus from spatiality to temporality of China’s digital green public cultures to foreground the lived experiences of ordinary people in a time of precarity. I start with empirical observations on recent contributions to Chinese online green public culture: kepu (科普 popularizing science) vloggers, coal miners as content creators, and local communities’ actions and everyday conversations. I then elaborate on texture as materiality over time in dialogues with previous studies. The article hopes to provoke more studies on the complex of publics/public spheres other than their spatial forms.

Observers of the Chinese political landscape have noted significant changes with the widespread adoption of the internet. Existing studies on the internet and contentious politics in China often fall into same old tunes like “authoritarianism vs. liberal democracy” and “liberation vs. control.” This reflection reviews selected work on the internet and politics in China and beyond, proposing a more sophisticated and critical examination through (a) a temporal dimension to pinpoint changes introduced by the internet’s adoption, (b) a mundane dimension that recognizes (contentious) politics in broader life contexts, and (c) a cross-demographical dimension that acknowledges the internet’s role as diverse and complex. The three proposals serve as a crucial first step toward achieving more sophisticated explanations and a deeper understanding of the internet in China for Chinese internet scholars in the coming decade.

As China’s internet has matured, from its initial web-based origins through innovative ‘2.0’ and ‘3.0’ innovations, so too have the community sentiments that criss-cross the People’s Republic of China’s networked society. A perennial issue has been the question of how Chinese nationhood has been constructed and reproduced through digital technologies and how the evolving affordances of internet technology have contributed to China’s many nationalisms. This short essay reflects on this history. It discusses how early internet forums and blogs allowed users to coordinate their sense of Chineseness, how these processes later changed when communication moved to widely adopted microblogging platforms and what we can expect of the future, as China’s media environments shift their focus towards short-messaging applications and video-sharing platforms. What will happen to Chinese nationalisms as China’s platformisation enters its next phases?

This essay provides an overview of China’s online fandom spanning three decades, primarily focusing on the practices embraced by fans. The fan communities in China have undergone several generational shifts, progressing from the era of 1.0 websites dedicated to Hong Kong and Taiwan idols to the contemporary landscape involving data manipulation and traffic management. The narrative commences with a historical account of significant fandom events over the past 30 years, emphasizing the evolving digital, localized, industrialized, and financialized nature of fan culture. The essay advocates for two key actions: initiating discussions among the various analytical perspectives to reconcile conflicting assessments of fan practices and encouraging a critical reflection on how China’s online fandom contributes to a broader understanding of the global landscape.

Emerging in the mid-1990s as an alternative space, internet culture in China has transitioned from an era of youthful idealism, egalitarianism, and communal spirit to an era of intensive commerce. This essay delves into the intricacies that define the vibrancy of digital culture, including the intense competition for user attention and the interplay between digital and traditional media. Amid contemporary challenges, such as geopolitical tensions, digital inequality, and socio-economic instability, it highlights the imperative of comprehending the strategies employed by different stakeholders to wield influence. Moreover, the essay underscores the significance of investigating how the digital sphere has emerged as a pivotal space for examining the convergence of contested ideologies and diverse generations of internet users.

The history of the internet, whether in China or elsewhere in the world, is often told through the stories of successful and often publicly listed companies, state policy initiatives and chronology, or prominent individuals and groups such as tech company founders and influential social and political activists. This short essay tells a different story of the Chinese internet history in the past 30 years from a social reproductive perspective, centering on rural e-commerce and families caught in between the rural-urban divide, against the wider currents of the state’s rural informatization campaign, Chinese Big Techs’ expansion into the countryside, and ongoing transformation in urbanization and rural-urban conversion. The goal is to move beyond a techno-determinist, individualized, and male-centric framework of analyzing digital media and the internet to adopt a materialist, feminist, and substantivist approach.

This article explores coronavirus-related internet memes in the Nigerian WhatsApp space, to examine how multimodal elements are used for evaluation and intersubjective positioning. The theory utilises Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and Martin and White’s appraisal theory. The data, which comprise 147 purposively selected internet memes, were analysed qualitatively. The findings indicate that the meme producers employ verbal and non-verbal elements that show negative affect, judgement and appreciation of things. Using multimodal concepts, the represented participants are able to engage with the public through resources of disclaimers, entertainment, pronouncement and attribution. The study concludes that meme producers engage their addressees through appraisal resources to achieve their communicative goals of complaining about the negative effects of the pandemic on the people, evaluating the behaviour of different agents during the pandemic as well as providing support for people.

For thirty years, the Chinese internet has been characterized by engagement between citizens and the government, and between the Chinese internet and the global internet. In this commentary, we formalize the concept of disengagement: the unwillingness to participate in digital activity. We review the origins of disengagement, its association with other social trends, and evaluate the possibility of its emergence. We argue that disengagement may have profound social, political, and economic consequences for the country. Finally, we call for future scholarship with renewed focus on disengagement and its consequences.

In this essay, I discuss feminist activism and gender politics in the #MeToo movement and post-MeToo environment in China. I situate feminism in the country’s increasingly digitalized, commercialized, and controlled media ecosystem, where unpopular feminism reflects the intentional control of feminist visibility and, therefore, the difficulty to access feminist content and the disidentification of the feminist label. Also evident is the grip of the state-market complex on the discursive rights for women’s emancipation and the struggle over meanings of feminism as only visibility or also as a form of politics that divides us while simultaneously reimagining and rebuilding various forms of communities. Feminism today is both a popular genre to be consumed and a minority political pursuit. I also document the interweaving of feminist politics in contemporary China through gendered, classed, racialized, and ethno-national discourses in transnational encounters.

This essay critically reviews the existing research on wanghong studies in China. It advocates that wanghong studies should go beyond its dominant disciplines in ‘platform studies’ and ‘(digital) labour studies’ to embrace ‘celebrity studies’ and ‘China studies’. It proposes the innovative concept of ‘wanghong thinking ’, which refers to the mindset that guides the experiments of the Chinese Communist Party in incorporating the popular wanghong culture, logic and economic model to achieve various social, political and economic objectives. Finally, the essay offers critical reflection on the ‘online-traffic-enabled’ social governance and economic development in China’s wanghong era.