Becoming Digital Citizens opens with a question from a Chinese question-and-answer site: “Why don’t we see disabled people on the streets?” A disabled user replies, “You can’t imagine how hard it is” (p. 1). Yuanyuan Qu uses this exchange to set up the puzzle of the book. Disabled people in contemporary China are formally entitled, under the 1990 Law on the Protection of Persons with Disabilities, to “an ‘equal but special/vulnerable’ position” (p. 174), yet they remain largely absent from public life, isolated in the domestic sphere rather than segregated in dedicated institutions as in much of the West. Qu argues that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have, over the past decade, begun to alter this condition. Where offline disability institutions are weak, she suggests, the digital sphere becomes not a supplement to citizenship but its primary arena. It is an ambitious argument, and the evidence assembled here makes it largely convincing.
The book’s central theoretical move is its twin concept of “digital institution” and “disability self-institution.” Building on Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert’s Being Digital Citizens (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), Qu treats citizenship as enacted through “acts” rather than reproduced as status. Digital citizenship, she argues, is “not only about access/entry, participation, and inclusion but also about visibility, competition, resource distribution, and power relations” (p. 6). The “digital institution” describes digital arenas as recognized sites of citizenship in China; the “disability self-institution” captures the disability-led spheres and organizations built within them. The two concepts do the central analytical work in the book: they explain how the “blocked” condition operates (entitlement promised but obstructed) and how digital action partly loosens it. This produces a sharp contrast with Western patterns: in China, disability organizations are generated by digital activity, not amplified by it.
The empirical foundation is unusually substantial for a single-authored monograph. Drawing on a decade (2013–2023) of grounded-theory research, Qu combines digital ethnography on two anchor field sites, the Baidu Disabled People Post-bar and the Self-Strengthen BBS, with content analysis of forum posts and 67 in-depth interviews across nine cities. The longitudinal depth is rare in this literature, and the mixed-methods approach is well-matched to the questions. The book is organized in two parts: chapters one and two reconstruct the historical and policy formation of disability citizenship in China, via Confucian body ideology, Fei Xiaotong’s account of rural homogeneity and the post-1990 legislative framework; chapters three to six examine digital citizenship acts across civil, economic, political and cultural realms. Although it draws on Qu’s earlier articles, the synthesis is substantively new, and the book is the first sustained English-language treatment of Chinese disability through that frame, complementing Sarah Dauncey’s Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Chapter four, on disability and the digital economy, is where the book is most original. Qu shows that the much-promoted “barrier-free” digital economy delivers entry to work but on uneven terms. Most striking is her analysis of the “water army” (qingshuijun), the paid online-commenting industry where workers post fake reviews and inhabit fabricated personae. What is being purchased, Qu argues, is the worker’s identity itself: the credible, ordinary online persona on which a post’s value depends. For disabled workers, the labour often requires producing a non-disabled persona who can plausibly endorse the product. One wheelchair-using worker advertising silk garments tells Qu: “I use wheelchairs; I don’t even go out; silk is too fragile for me” (p. 109). The paradox is sharp: digital labour offers economic access while requiring some disabled workers to disappear into a performed normalcy to be marketable. Such work, she notes, is barrier-free precisely because it ignores disability identity, but it offers no protection (p. 117), and it often comes “without dignity” (p. 109). ICTs, in her reading, let disabled people enter the labour market and gain economic resources, but not unsettle the underlying ableist assumption that workers must perform as able-bodied and productive individuals.
Two observations are worth raising. The first concerns the empirical scope of “disabled people” in the analysis. Qu’s interviewees were recruited from the same forums the book theorizes, so her sample consists of disabled people who have already entered the digital institution she analyses. She engages the access question directly (pp. 39–41), showing that basic ICT access is widespread and that the divide concerns quality rather than presence, and she flags the limits of representativeness in her closing pages. From the standpoint of research on disability and employment in China, with a particular interest in neurodivergent young people, what remains outside the frame matters: people with learning disabilities, autistic and other neurodivergent users, and young people whose digital agency is mediated by parents, teachers and special schools. This is not a flaw of the book, but a limit of the qualitative recruitment used. Even so, it raises a real question. The framework’s claims about “becoming digital citizens” apply most confidently to those who already use mainstream Chinese platforms independently, and there is a risk that the book describes digital citizenship for a digitally enabled tier of disabled people while leaving a still-blocked tier outside the analytic frame. The deeper concern, which Qu’s closing chapter touches on briefly, is that digital citizenship may transpose, rather than dissolve, existing hierarchies of capacity. As she puts it herself, digital action has “notable emancipatory effects at the individual level” but “limitations in challenging the overall marginality of disabled people” (pp. 22–23).
The second observation concerns platform period. The Post-bar and Self-Strengthen BBS are early-2010s text-forum architectures and remain the empirical heart of the book. Qu engages WeChat at points and mentions Douyin, BiliBili and Xiaohongshu, but the analysis stays anchored in those older sites. She acknowledges that “the book falls short of space to cover” newer architectures, including livestreaming and influencer work (p. 115; see also p. 187). Even so, given how rapidly Chinese platform power has reorganized since 2018, toward livestreaming, short video, algorithmic curation and tighter content moderation, the next analytical question this opens is how the dynamics Qu identifies translate into these very different attention economies, a question made more acute by the tightening of ICT and civil-society space since 2020 (p. 188).
These observations notwithstanding, Becoming Digital Citizens makes a substantial contribution. For Chinese studies, it offers the first sustained citizenship-theoretical analysis of Chinese disability in English, engaging the China Disabled Persons’ Federation, the quota employment scheme and welfare-governance debates. For disability studies, it extends the field beyond its Western centre of gravity with a Chinese case in which formal disability institutions are weak and the digital arena correspondingly weighty. For digital-citizenship theory, it sharpens Isin and Ruppert’s framework by showing what happens to “visibility” and “resource distribution” once a marginalized population becomes the analytic centre. Clearly organized and accessibly written, the book will be useful for readers in Chinese studies, sociology of citizenship, disability studies and Chinese internet studies. Its case studies and interviews suit it well to graduate courses on Chinese society and disability rights, and it is approachable for non-specialists interested in digital inequality.
