China Internet
Online Society in China
Creating, celebrating, and instrumentalising the online carnival
Edited by David Kurt Herold and Peter Marolt
Introduction
Noise, spectacle, politics: carnival in Chinese cyberspace
David Kurt Herold
The Internet in China was developed at about the same time as the Internet in Europe and America, but its structures and set-up were quite different. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, academic institutions in China began to set up intranets on their campuses that were later connected to each other, with help from European and North American universities. The networks were continuously expanded and updated, and in 1994 they were linked to the emerging World Wide Web through a dedicated line between China and the USA. Over the next two years, additional connections to the Internet were created, linking China with Japan, Southeast Asia and Russia, and the central government issued regulations to structure the Chinese Internet (China Internet Network Information Centre [CNNIC], 2010 – also below). Four organizations were created by the central government to provide Internet access in China, and although initially these networks only provided access to the Internet for academic institutions, this was soon changed to allow commercial access to the Internet. In early 1997, private access was granted to ordinary citizens for the first time, but only through the existing networks. The central government decided to keep ownership and control over the access routes to the Internet, and to allow private enterprises and individuals only the rental of bandwidth from government-owned entities, which set the stage for the development of online China as a very different space from the non-Chinese Internet.
Internet with Chinese characteristics
State or state-controlled entities own the physical backbone of the Internet in China and privately held companies can rent bandwidth only from them, which is a marked difference to the situation in
Creating, celebrating, and instrumentalising the online carnival
Edited by David Kurt Herold and Peter Marolt
Introduction
Noise, spectacle, politics: carnival in Chinese cyberspace
David Kurt Herold
The Internet in China was developed at about the same time as the Internet in Europe and America, but its structures and set-up were quite different. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, academic institutions in China began to set up intranets on their campuses that were later connected to each other, with help from European and North American universities. The networks were continuously expanded and updated, and in 1994 they were linked to the emerging World Wide Web through a dedicated line between China and the USA. Over the next two years, additional connections to the Internet were created, linking China with Japan, Southeast Asia and Russia, and the central government issued regulations to structure the Chinese Internet (China Internet Network Information Centre [CNNIC], 2010 – also below). Four organizations were created by the central government to provide Internet access in China, and although initially these networks only provided access to the Internet for academic institutions, this was soon changed to allow commercial access to the Internet. In early 1997, private access was granted to ordinary citizens for the first time, but only through the existing networks. The central government decided to keep ownership and control over the access routes to the Internet, and to allow private enterprises and individuals only the rental of bandwidth from government-owned entities, which set the stage for the development of online China as a very different space from the non-Chinese Internet.
Internet with Chinese characteristics
State or state-controlled entities own the physical backbone of the Internet in China and privately held companies can rent bandwidth only from them, which is a marked difference to the situation in
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