Digital China’s Hyperlink Networks

Chapter 4 continues the analysis of China’s web by discussing what the social and political meanings of hyperlinks might be, how power works in networked structures, and what ‘issue networks’ on the web can tell us about digital ecologies. It also discusses how linking practices work in China’s web spaces, showing how the websites that deal with the two cases of the Nanjing Massacre and the Diaoyu Islands make only limited use of the web’s interactive affordances. An analysis of link-structures and site-maps reveals that issue websites on Sino-Japanese relations resemble traditional archives more than they resemble interactive information hubs. Following this, the chapter provides an analysis of how these issue sites tie into wider digital networks. The main players in these networks are large corporations, state agencies, and Party institutions, which together form a national web space that reflects many of the governance mechanisms that are at work ‘offline’.

Affordance · China · Hyperlink · Political science · Politics · Social media · Social network analysis · State (computer science) · The Internet · Web page · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics