Understanding China through Digital Anthropology questions our understanding of digital technologies by demonstrating fundamental differences in the meaning of both technology and the digital between China and the West. This follows from a longstanding historical divergence in the meaning of and attitude to the relationship between technology and humanity.
The book also challenges our understanding of China through a series of case studies that range from the creation of algorithms, the normative basis of social media and the impact of digital communication on diverse fields including economic practices, gender, media and healthcare. These further demonstrate the value of long-term ethnographic studies that situate people’s online activities in their everyday offline lives. These case studies are testimony to the continued heterogeneity of China in covering sophisticated urban IT professionals, Tibetan villagers and grassroots women struggling to make a living. All of this contributes to a new understanding of a contemporary China that has been transformed by the sheer scale and dynamism manifested in the deployment of digital technologies. The book also includes an extensive summary of work undertaken by scholars inside China on digital anthropology and previously only available in Chinese.
