Special Issue: Shaping the Chinese Internet. Political, Institutional, Technological Design in Internet Governance

The exponential increase of Internet connectivity in China has generated a great deal of journalistic and scholarly work that has essentially documented the emergence of the Internet as an unprecedented, though censored, platform for public expression, and has assessed its political significance. Much attention has been paid to information control exercised by the Chinese government, notably in the form of the filtering system known as the Great Firewall, and of regulations forcing social network platforms to censor contents, as well as to the determinants of self-censorship on the users’ side. Much less is known, however, about the more diversified forms of power that are embedded in Internet governance, broadly conceived as the incremental conception, implementation, regulation, management, and uses of Internet networks and services. This issue focuses on a) the reliance of the Chinese government’s information control and propaganda on institutional arrangements and on the design of web platforms, b) analysis of the impact of Internet technical infrastructures and standards on the definition of a “Chinese” Internet and its implications for the strategic interests of the Chinese government.