Search Results

This chapter introduces the post-2008 historical context of crisis and restructuring, where communications have become a new epicenter of political-economy transformation and a crosscutting tool for economic recovery and industrial upgrades. It also introduces the themes of this book, that is, the centrality of communications to Chinese-style capitalism, the state’s constitutive role in the evolving networked economy, and, lastly, the relationship between the state-dominated communications system and the global digital economy.

This chapter critically explores a common perspective that insists we have moved towards a qualitatively distinctive form of global capitalism based in new media and financial networks. While containing many positive insights, this perspective nevertheless constructs an untenable division between what is seen to be older ‘industrial’ forms of capital and contemporary digital and financial forms of capital. By drawing on Marxism, the chapter outlines problems on this perspective and shows that in reality capitalism is still driven by the need to exploit labour through a financial and neoliberal agenda.

This book explores the notion of digital capitalism and its crash in 2007–2008, which it attributes to the uneven character of information and communications technology (ICT). It advances two main arguments: that the economic contributions made by ICT to digital capitalism rendered digital technology a fundamental pole of growth; and that, when it arrived, the economic crisis could be traced not only to financial speculation but to capital's multifaceted integration of digital systems into the political economy. In this account, the contradictory matrix of technological revolution and stagnation that constitutes capitalism today is highlighted. The book also elucidates the role of information and communications in the political economy's chief developmental processes, including capital's reorganization of the system of production, through fresh cycles of labor restructuring and spiking foreign direct investment; capital's concurrent ingress into finance; escalating military procurement spending; and the wide-ranging changes in the ICT sector. Finally, it considers how commodity chains bring together diverse labor systems to effect globally distributed production processes.

This chapter examines some of the larger forces that propelled digital capitalism into what was evidently a fraught future. It first considers how the historical movement of the political economy is shaped both within and beyond a top-down, state-oriented geopolitics before discussing how the onset of the digital depression brought changes to the interstate system, indicative of altering political–economic relations. It then describes attempts by numerous states to multilateralize control of U.S.-centric internet in relation to structural changes in the interstate system and to competing efforts to regenerate the political economy in ways that might capture an outsized share of overall profits for specific units of capital and particular fractions of the capitalist class. It also explains the concept of accumulation by dispossession and concludes with suggestions for resolving the digital depression on terms favorable to capital.

This chapter examines how networked financialization exacerbated capitalism's crisis tendencies. Financialization, a formative aspect of the rise of digital capitalism in response to the crisis of the 1970s, evolved out of multiple impulses. One spur came as millions of workers who experienced wage repression were brought to depend on debt for immediate consumption as well as for housing and automobiles, education, and medical care. Another came from the fact that finance grew ever larger in the strategies of transnational manufacturers, retail chains, agribusinesses, and service suppliers. The chapter also discusses the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) on financialization as well as the role of networks in the emergence of a high-tech financial system. It concludes by looking at three major trends, including the possibility that the financial crisis was unlikely to end without a profoundly conflicted restructuring of the global political economy.

The concluding chapter of China’s Digital Nationalism retraces the central findings and arguments of the book. It first summarizes how digital discourses are managed in China today, and it then asks what implications digital nationalism has for the PRC and its regional relations. Following this discussion on East Asia, the chapter turns to more general findings about imagined communities and networked societies, and it summarizes how nationalism changes in a time of ubiquitous digital media use. Finally, the chapter concludes with a personal, normative assessment, which is that without serious rethinking on the part of policy-makers, information gate-keepers, tech innovators, and information and communication technology users, the twenty-first century is bound to again be a century of nations and nationalism, now filtered through the networks of neoliberal digital capitalism. Without intervention, this will be a parochial world, ultimately ill-equipped to handle the daunting challenges humanity faces today.

This chapter examines the rise of networked militarization in the United States. It considers how increased spending for U.S. military procurement sparked a shift into networks in capitalist development, casting digital capitalism as a permanent, pervasively militarized social formation. It shows that, throughout every presidency from the Truman administration to Ronald Reagan and beyond, the United States did its best to capture and to reorganize the frontiers of the world political economy to serve capital's short- and/or long-term designs. It argues that a militarized digital capitalism carried forward capital's longstanding structural reliance on government spending, extending and reorienting it. Finally, it describes how massive and compounding investments in computer networks became a marked feature across the length and breadth of the political economy.

This chapter examines whether the metamorphosis of communications around internet commodity chains contributed to economic growth or led to a further episode of crisis. More specifically, it considers whether the U.S. information and communications industry, which invested more in information and communications technology (ICT) and software than any other sector including banking and manufacturing, signified that a basis was being laid for market expansion and economic growth. It also discusses whether investment in Web communications commodity chains siphoned revenue and profit mostly from old to new media, so that growth overall remained flat. Finally, it highlights shifts in the territorial profile of communications markets that reflected the ongoing and unfinished historical mutation into digital capitalism.

This chapter examines recent historical trends to better understand how the massive restructuring of the information and communications technology (ICT) sector sparked a shift into networks in capitalist development. Profound technical and institutional changes in the ICT industry, which lies at the epicenter of an emerging digital capitalism, caused commodity chains that had seemed stable to buckle and recompose. The result was not uniform growth but ragged unevenness: expansionary dynamism alongside devastation. This chapter discusses how communications and information processing became the largest sectoral source of demand for ICTs and whether this major axis of change around computer networks revived the growth prospects of the wider political economy. It also considers a series of developments that radically enlarged the interoperable internet during the late 1980s and 1990s.

Chapter 6 examines the East China Sea dispute on China’s web. This includes an analysis of the official Chinese Diaoyu Islands website, but also of various military news portals and the web presence of non-governmental advocacy groups. While the issue is more dynamic, and notably involves more commercial actors, than the Nanjing Massacre case of the previous chapter, Chinese sites nevertheless fall back on traditional mass-media scripts. The analysis also reveals how this nationalist topic ‘sells’ in digital China: the prominent web resources make heavy use of advertising pop-ups and click-bait, and they juxtapose nationalist imagery with violence, pornography, and gambling offers. The chapter argues that, on China’s web, the issue of the East China Sea dispute is governed by a tacit consensus between political and commercial actors to commodify nationalist symbols for consumption by a specific target demographic, and that this practice shifts Sino–Japan discourses into chauvinistic directions.