Networking China by Yu Hong is an ambitious study of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in China, including their evolution, impact on social institutions, policies, and issues of equality and inequality from the 1980s to now. Its chapters loosely follow a chronological order, as does each category of ICTs in the economic development plan of the Chinese government.
The first chapter situates the important role that the nuts and bolts of manufacturing communication equipment has played in the dramatic shift of the Chinese government from a communist planning to a capitalist marketing economy. It was in the western provinces, an economic backwater, that the government sought to build its manufacturing base and to do so by extending an open arm to cross-national corporations such as Intel and Foxconn. Such a policy, which was intended to counter regional inequality, ended up hollowing out local industry and heightening tensions between capital and labor.
The second chapter follows the same general narrative pattern, with a focus on telephone use and, more broadly, the development of the telecommunications industry. Despite investment and policy intervention by the central government, local expansion of the telecommunications industry followed a profit-driven pattern in which coastal urban areas were the first to be connected while interior and rural areas fell behind.
The third chapter discusses the emergence of the Internet and how the Chinese government incorporates it in its economic plan. Rather than follow its previous plan to sustain export-dependent manufacturing, the government chose to promote Internet-related industries. It appears to have learned a lesson from other Asian countries’ excessive dependence on export manufacturing, which resulted in the Asian economic crisis of 1997. The Chinese government has thus demonstrated a certain flexibility in its ability to shift away from a manufacturing-heavy economy to one based on the promotion of information technology. Moreover, such a shift allows the government to take advantage of the expertise of cross-national companies.
The fourth chapter focuses on the development of 3G and 4G communication networks, including licensing, adoption of technological standards, and the transformation of major Chinese telecommunications companies. Surprisingly, in the late 1990s, the Chinese government, in its bid to join the World Trade Organization, adopted policies and economic plans that gave preference to American and European companies. As for major domestic companies such as Huawei and ZTE, they were “forced” to sell their network equipment to developing countries other than China. And when the Chinese government developed its own communications standard (TD-SCDMA) in a bid to foster its ICTs industry, Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE, which had already gained success outside of China, put only minor effort into improving the Chinese communications standard.
The last two chapters turn to the television and media industry, digital television, and more broadly new media and Internet companies. In the last fifteen years or so, ICTs development has become the outstanding state priority for nation building. The Chinese government has always had economic ambitions, but when that ambition is focused on the high-tech of the ICTs industry, economic ambition is hard to separate from geopolitical ambition, raising tensions between great powers in the world.
What is most intriguing and gripping about this book is its ICTs narrative, one that incorporates technical, economic, and political information from the past three decades. It is a refreshing departure from the over-specialized literature that focuses on authoritarian information control or netizen activism ungrounded in the manifold impacts of the ICTs revolution. Networking China shows that the Chinese government itself has not been negligent. Far from it. A one-party regime has again and again adjusted its policies regarding ICTs with both economic growth and global competition in mind. Policy cannot, of course, anticipate all major economic shifts. Another reward of the book is its detailing of the unplanned, such as the shift of the business priority of Chinese ICTs companies from non-Chinese to Chinese markets and from export-oriented manufacturing to the provisioning of services.
I have only two quibbles. First, data. Throughout the book, much of the data seems to come from official or commercial sources and these, as Hong well knows, need independent validation not only in data that is numerical, but also in certain words, in language in all its intended and unintended imprecision. And this leads me to the second quibble, which is Hong's use of the word “neoliberalism.” It is much tossed about by academics in their own value-laden discourses, but is it really an illuminating concept, necessary to the narrative of ICTs—engines of economic growth and, potentially, of geopolitical competition and conflict—that I find so rewardingly told in Networking China?
