Shouldn’t the first major academic study of New Type Infrastructure (outside China) be sponsored by an independent academic institution or think tank (also outside China)?

I was initially pleased to see that the Sage journal Global Media and China plans to publish a special issue on “China’s Digital Infrastructure: Networks, Systems, Standards.” The call for papers, now closed, explicitly highlighted New Type Infrastructure (NTI), an overdue and important topic for serious scholarly attention outside China.

With a bit more digging, however, an uncomfortable question emerged.

Global Media and China is the official journal of the Communication University of China, a Beijing-based institution directly administered by the PRC Ministry of Education. The university also sponsors the journal. In other words, what appears to be the first major academic treatment of New Type Infrastructure outside China is being organized under Chinese state institutional auspices.

That fact alone does not invalidate the scholarship. A quick review of past issues did not reveal overt propaganda or obvious editorial red lines. My concern may ultimately prove unwarranted. But NTI is not a neutral technical subject. It is a central mission of China’s national digital strategy, Digital China, and it carries explicit ideological, governance, and geopolitical implications.

That context matters especially because first academic treatments tend to shape:

  • How concepts are defined;
  • What questions are considered legitimate; and
  • Which political assumptions are normalized or excluded.

This raises a broader structural issue. Should the first major academic framing of New Type Infrastructure outside China be sponsored by a Chinese state institution rather than by an independent university, research center, or think tank elsewhere? Given what we know about the pervasiveness of PRC censorship and self-censorship, particularly on topics tied to national strategy, it is reasonable to ask whether the full political and strategic context of NTI will be addressed.

None of this means the forthcoming issue should be dismissed. It may produce valuable work. But the sponsorship structure deserves to be acknowledged, especially by readers and contributors who assume they are engaging with a neutral, field-defining academic moment.

If New Type Infrastructure is going to be studied seriously outside China, as it should be, then the conditions under which that knowledge is first produced matter almost as much as the content itself.