Scholarship on China's internet governance has focused largely on China's strict regulatory environment and pervasive content censorship.1 Yet, despite these restrictions, various internet sectors in China have taken off spectacularly. Luzhou Li's Zoning China examines this puzzling and seemingly contradictory phenomenon, particularly in the realm of online video in China. Through an investigation of the infrastructural, regulatory, political-economic, and sociocultural histories of the television and the online video sectors from the late 1990s to 2014, Li argues that the two sectors have been regulated differently according to market principles. Li creatively terms this regulatory differentiation “cultural zoning” (p. 2), whereby the Chinese state strategically carves out multiple cultural zones for different media sectors. Cultural zoning, Li demonstrates, allows the state to leave highly marketized sectors such as online video more leniently managed than television, creating a dual cultural sphere that is both economically beneficial and politically manageable in China's...

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