The symposium is convened on occasion of the public defence of the dissertation of Samuel Lengen, Binary Dreams: An Ethnography of the Digital Economy in China. 
5 February 2018; 10.00-12.30, Janskerkhof 13, Stijlkamer, Utrecht

CHINA’S DIGITAL REVOLUTION

In recent years, the Chinese Internet has given rise to unprecedented examples of entrepreneurial success. Most prominently, the Alibaba Group’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014 claimed the highest initial public offering in history, raising a stunning $25 billion (Noble and Bullock 2014). As the Chinese e-commerce giant’s IPO outperformed companies like Google and Amazon, China suddenly appeared to stand at the forefront of the world’s digital revolution. As evidenced by a recent New York Times headline reading “China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech” (Mozur 2016), news media accounts suggest that China has not only “caught up” with its Western counterparts but might have exceeded them. However, while the success of Chinese Internet companies highlights the growing significance of the Chinese Internet in the global economy, both domestic digital media and the digital economy remain under the strict supervision of the Chinese Communist Party.

THE RISE OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

The rise of the digital economy in China points to the Chinese government’s politics of limiting the freedom of expression online while striving to create a more “open” and “creative” economic environment. Since the late 1970s, the Chinese government has sought to incorporate developments in Silicon Valley’s technology entrepreneurship into its socialist system of government. Most recently, China has been swept up in a project to emulate the Californian model and produce a startup culture capable of fostering a popular form of Internet entrepreneurship and thus innovating the national economy from the bottom up. Here, the creative potential of digital media—one heavily regulated as the government tries to ban memes, censor social media, and blacklist keywords—reappears as a source of economic developmen. Despite the apparent success of China’s digital economy, this vision of popular creativity highlights the government’s balancing act of encouraging innovation through digital media while censoring expression online.

CHINESE INTERNET

Simultaneously used to support and challenge official visions of Chinese modernity, digital media are central to understanding contemporary Chinese aspirations. To investigate this tension, this symposium explores how digital media sustain and challenge aspirational hopes in China and beyond. As the Chinese digital economy gains world-wide recognition, how can it guide a critical examination of the global promise of informatization? While the event focuses on the significance of the Internet in China, it explores digital aspirations as they take shape within global circulatory regimes of ideas, technologies, and imaginaries. What technological visions from China and beyond inspire digital aspirations? What happens when such ideas are appropriated by a socialist party-state? Ultimately, what are the limits of economic innovation in the context of pervasive censorship? And, how are we to make sense of the unique politics of the Chinese Internet within global capitalism?

These and related issues will be addressed by a panel consisting of:

Jeroen de Kloet, Professor in Globalisation Studies and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies at the University of Amsterdam

Manya Koetse, PhD candidate at Leiden University and editor-in-chief of What’s on Weibo

Samuel Lengen, PhD candidate at Utrecht University

Nie Yuxi, PhD candidate at Leiden University

Peter van der Veer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and University Professor at Utrecht University.
Yang Guobin, Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania

References:
Mozur, Paul. 2016. “China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech.” The New York Times, Last Modified August 2, 2016, accessed August 19, 2016. link.
Noble, Josh, and Nicole Bullock. 2014. “Alibaba IPO Hits Record $25bn.” Financial Times, Last Modified September 22, 2014, accessed July 20, 2016. link.