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...
