Minjie Guo

PhD thesis title: China is Loading: A Co-production History of China’s Internet Technology, Society, and Government (1980s–2000s)

My research examines the early history of the Internet in China from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century. This was a crucial period in modern Chinese history. A changing global order and reform and opening up were profoundly reshaping China. These conditions created a distinctive context for the emergence of the Internet in China. In this process, the Internet became an important instrument of national development, while Internet technologies also reshaped state capacity and relations between government, enterprises, and society.

To understand this history of technology and the state, I draw on approaches from the history of science and technology (HST), Science and Technology Studies (STS), and political economy. At the same time, I use co-production as a central concept to analyse the mutual shaping of technology and the state. I treat it as a conceptual bridge between micro-level processes of technological construction and macro-level structures of state policy, capital, and institutions.

Therefore, this study will explore how the institutional and technological foundations of China’s Internet shaped its later economic, social, and political significance. More broadly, by taking China as a method, the project tries to ask how technologies were actively adopted and reshaped in the Global South, offering a perspective beyond the historical experience of developed countries.

Supervisors: David Edgerton,