Page 66 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 3. Contextual Background

3.1 Introduction

This chapter provides the historical context for internet development in China and

situates the case studies against the development of the internet in China as a commer-
cial operation. Part one describes the historical development of the internet in China
and part two discusses the era of Web 2.0. In the third section, I categorise the develop-
ment of blog era into three stages, and discuss three common Chinese blog platforms:

Sina, NetEase and Q-zone. The final section examines the development of social net-
working sites in China including the Renren Network, which is similar to Facebook. I
also consider the development and current situation of microblogging in China on two
representative microblog platforms: Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo.

3.2 Internet development in China

In the late 1980s, with funding support from World Bank and help from German
experts, China began to explore the use of the internet. Like other countries, early ef-

forts at creating internet networks focused on academic information exchange. Initiated
as the earliest high-tech information infrastructure project among the ‘key discipline
development projects’ in China, the first networks developed were supported by the
State Development Planning Commission, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Na-
tional Natural Science Foundation of China and the State Education Commission, with

the cooperation from Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy
of Sciences. In 1994 China realised the full function of the global internet and became
the 71st country to register on the global computer network and completed the setting

of CN as a top-level domain name.
Initially, only a few state-owned websites had permission to publish news, includ-
ing people.com.cn, Xinhua.net, china.com.cn, CCTV.com, China Radio International

50
50