Hardening National Boundaries in a Globally-Connected World: Technology, Development and Nationalism in China

ABSTRACT

How do information and communication technologies (ICTs), which seemingly bring people to a boundless world, contribute to the reproduction of the imagined community of a nation? Challenging the conventional approach that sees ICTs as merely the channel through which nationalism or activism is expressed or mobilised, this article draws on anthropological and historical studies of technology to develop a conceptual mapping of the important factors that configure specific nation-bounded, ICT-centric socio-technical imaginaries. Taking as the entry point technological nationalism in the context of the Sino-American trade war in recent years and based on long-term fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta region, this ethnographic study explores how ICTs have become the lens through which educated professionals imagine China’s transition from sweat-shop modernity toward techno-modernity. This socio-technical imaginary is shaped by larger forces including the state discourse, political economy, material culture, and the platformised lifestyle, and mediated through work experience and consumer choices. Nationalism driven by this ICT-centric imaginary is subjected to state manipulation for the reproduction of political legitimacy. This study sheds light on larger conceptual questions on how ordinary citizens experience and make sense of ICTs and how such meaning-making processes sustain, challenge and reconfigure political processes.

KEY WORDS:

• socio-technical imaginaries
• technology
• development
• nationalism
• material culture
• China

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Toby Carroll, Yi Kang, Minhua Ling, Yu Luo and Gonçalo Santos for their careful reading of and comments on various drafts and to the participants in the workshop organised by the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2019 for their feedback on the earliest draft. Many thanks to the journal’s editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See https://wap.peopleapp.com/living/4188901?from=groupmessage, accessed June 22, 2020.

2. In line with many scholars’ discussion of “nationalism” from a bottom-up perspective this article uses “nationalism” to refer to a nationalist sentiment that some may prefer to call “patriotism” (see, for example, Ohnuki-Tierney 2002; Fong 2004; Guo 2004; Zhou 2005a).

3. For an alternative, critical analysis of the democratising potential of ICTs that takes into account legal control, corporate interests and infrastructural arrangements, see Rodan (1998).

4. For more detailed elaboration on how technoscience had been incorporated into the nation-building project from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, see Andreas (2009); Greenhalgh and Zhang (2019).

5. For the details about these official narratives, see Guo (2004); Callahan (2010); Leibold (2010); Hung (2011).

6. Scholars have documented that Internet cafes provided the online experience for many lower-income youth in the 2000s, leaving the impression that Internet access was a middle-class privilege (see, for example, Qiu 2009; Wallis 2013). Yet limited access to the Internet was in fact quite common even among middle-class families.

7. Tencent’s competitor, Alibaba, has a similar strategy built around its online shopping platform Taobao and its payment system Alipay. But the lack of the socialising functions makes it a less “sticky” platform than WeChat.

8. It is beyond the scope of this article to determine which force is more decisive than others, or how each of the forces counter or reinforce each other in shaping technological nationalism. But they are important issues for future research.

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork mentioned in this article was supported by grants from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project no. 17636016 and 17612719).