But what is China’s digital infrastructure? How do networks overlap and intersect, producing new infrastructural effects or reinforcing existing inequalities?
Gabriele de Seta, Call for Papers: “China’s Digital Infrastructure: Networks, Systems, Standards”, April 2022.
Executive Summary
A 2022 call for papers on China’s digital infrastructure raised an important question: who gets to frame New Type Infrastructure for international academic audiences? The proposed special issue of Global Media and China, a SAGE journal sponsored by the Communication University of China, promised overdue scholarly attention to a central component of Digital China. My concern was not that Chinese institutional sponsorship necessarily compromised the research. Rather, it was whether the political, ideological, and strategic implications of New Type Infrastructure would receive sufficiently independent and critical examination. The issue illustrates why transparency about research sponsorship matters, especially when studying China’s national strategies.
Author’s Update: The special issue discussed below was published in September 2023. Particularly noteworthy is Yichen Rao’s “Discourse as Infrastructure: How ‘New Infrastructure’ Policies Re-infrastructure China,” published on September 22, 2023.
Rao argues that New Type Infrastructure should not be understood simply as a collection of advanced technologies or construction projects. The policy concepts, classifications, and narratives through which Beijing defines infrastructure also influence how it is understood, financed, governed, and developed.
As Rao explains: “the policies that redefine and recategorize infrastructure themselves serve as a form of infrastructure.”
Rao calls this discursive infrastructure. His analysis examines how policy language shapes material development, how political objectives influence infrastructure planning, and where official visions may diverge from actual outcomes.
This is precisely the kind of inquiry I hoped the special issue would encourage. Rao’s article offers a substantive examination of New Type Infrastructure’s political and conceptual dimensions, rather than treating it merely as a technical or economic undertaking.
The original commentary below is retained as a record of the questions I raised in May 2022. The subsequent publication demonstrates that meaningful critical analysis emerged from the project, although one article cannot establish the editorial independence of an entire journal. The broader question of how institutional sponsorship influences the international study of China’s national strategies remains important.
Who Gets to Define New Type Infrastructure?
Shouldn’t one of the first major academic studies 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, 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 a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by SAGE, but it is also the “official journal of the Communication University of China,” a Beijing-based institution directly administered by the PRC Ministry of Education. The special issue’s guest editor, Gabriele de Seta, is affiliated with the University of Bergen in Norway.
In other words, what appears to be one of the first major international academic treatments of New Type Infrastructure combined international scholarly participation with sponsorship by a Chinese state-administered university.
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 New Type Infrastructure 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 early academic treatments can help shape:
- How concepts are defined;
- What questions are considered legitimate; and
- Which political assumptions are normalized or excluded.
The call for papers explicitly welcomed critical inquiry, including questions about inequality and the geopolitical consequences of digital infrastructure. That is encouraging.
But it also raises a broader structural issue. Should the 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 the sensitivities surrounding Chinese national strategy, censorship, and self-censorship, it is reasonable to ask whether the research will examine the full political, ideological, and strategic context of New Type Infrastructure — including questions that might challenge official Chinese interpretations.
None of this means the forthcoming issue should be dismissed. It might produce valuable work. But the sponsorship structure deserves to be acknowledged, especially by readers and contributors who might otherwise overlook the institutional setting in which the scholarship is being produced.
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.
Feedback & Corrections: Your questions, comments, additions, or corrections are always welcome! Please contact me at digitalchinawinsthefuture@gmail.com
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