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IMBACH, Jessica (ed.). 2024. Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

Hui Wu
p. 87-88
Bibliographical reference

IMBACH, Jessica (ed.). 2024. Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Full text

1The past decade has witnessed a fundamental transformation of China’s cultural landscape, driven by digital technologies. They have not only prompted fundamental reconsiderations of print-based assumptions about authorship, textuality, and creativity, but also stimulated the development of new scholarly approaches such as digital ethnography. As Jessica Imbach and the contributors to Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere demonstrate, these transformations extend well beyond the adoption of new media platforms: they have altered the very conditions under which cultural meanings are produced, circulated, and contested. By centring the everyday practices of users, fan communities, and digital creators, the volume illuminates how the Sinocybersphere has become a dynamic arena where creativity, authenticity, and political sensibilities are continually renegotiated. Moving away from state-centric and top-down perspectives, the book foregrounds bottom-up modes of cultural production that together constitute the plural and generative digital ecology often referred to as the Sinocybersphere.

2In the Introduction, “Locating Digital China,” Jessica Imbach sets out the conceptual foundation of the book, clarifying how the Sinophone framework underpins the theorisation of the Sinocybersphere. Drawing on Shu-Mei Shih’s articulation of the Sinophone as a critical method that highlights linguistic and cultural heterogeneity while decentring the nation-state, Imbach argues that this lens remains salient online. Rather than serving as a fixed category, the Sinophone functions as a methodological approach to analysing digital practices as expressions of specific localities, histories, and power relations. Extending this logic, the Sinocybersphere denotes a digital formation that is socially embedded, materially grounded, and internally diverse, decisively rejecting the notion of cyberspace as a homogenous virtual realm. Instead of seeking to define what makes digital culture “Chinese,” the book examines how cultural practices and technologies become entangled within specific contexts. Through this lens, the Sinocybersphere emerges as a site where broader social dynamics in the Chinese-speaking world can be illuminated.

3The book comprises 11 chapters that collectively highlight the remarkable breadth of digital creativity and community-making in contemporary Chinese-speaking worlds. It begins with an exploration of internet literature. Chapter One, by Qian Cui, examines xuanhuan 玄幻 (Eastern fantasy) fiction, while Chapter Two, by Sujie Jin, analyses danmei 耽美 (Boys’ Love) fiction; both demonstrate how digital worldbuilding has emerged as a form of grassroots political expression intricately linked to current social debates. Chapter Three, authored by Helena Wu, shifts the focus to the largely overlooked domain of Hong Kong internet literature, tracing its evolution from the mid-1990s to its rapid growth after 2010.

4Poetry represents another significant arena of digital cultural production within the Sinocybersphere. In Chapter Four, Joanna Krenz situates Chinese AI poetry within the global landscape of technologically mediated verse, examining its literary history, theoretical foundations, and algorithmic practices across cultures, culminating in a reflection on the distinctions between human- and machine-generated poetry. Chapter Five, by Paula Teodorescu, investigates the meme-inflected experimental poetics of the Xiangpi 橡皮 (Eraser) poetry group and their adaptation to shifting digital environments.

5The next two chapters focus on authenticity in digital media. Chapter Six, by Kunze Rui, analyses influencer Li Ziqi’s 李子柒 aesthetics of rural authenticity, while Chapter Seven, by Mengyun He, offers an ethnographic examination of Sister Zhao 趙姐 on Kuaishou 快手, a Chinese short-video and live-streaming platform. Chapters Eight and Nine explore digital imaginaries in contemporary Chinese science fiction. Imbach’s contribution in Chapter Eight reads post-Tiananmen cyberpunk – exemplified by Liu Cixin and Han Song – as envisioning futures that are at once politically constrained and imaginatively expansive. In Chapter Nine, Zoe Goldstein analyses Chen Qiufan’s cyberpunk-inspired novel Waste Tide (Huangchao 荒潮) to illuminate the ethical and material stakes of e-waste, foregrounding possibilities for cross-cultural solidarity in digital-industrial contexts, the interconnected systems where digital technologies (like electronics and data networks) are produced, circulated, consumed, and discarded through industrial processes.

6The final two chapters detail how the Covid-19 pandemic further amplified the complex interplay between visual art, digital experimentation, and censorship. In Chapter Ten, Helen Hess and Diyi Mergenthaler show that digital public art projects in Guangzhou and Kuala Lumpur during the Covid-19 pandemic functioned less as technological experiments than as intersectional, space-making practices that highlighted social inequalities, engaged marginalised communities, and fostered solidarity amid new urban vulnerabilities. Chapter 11, by Elvin Meng, examines the censored interview “The Whistle-Giver” (fa shaozi de ren 發哨子的人), originally published by the Chinese magazine Renwu 人物 and featuring Dr Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded by local authorities after warning about the early Covid outbreak. After it was removed from platforms such as WeChat, the text spread online through screenshots and multilingual adaptations to evade censorship. Meng argues that this phenomenon exemplifies a new “viral text” textuality that subverts censorship algorithms, revealing both the Chinese language and the language of the mainland Sinophone as fluid and negotiable under conditions of digital surveillance.

7One of the volume’s greatest strengths lies in its insistence on contextualising digital practices historically and socially. Each chapter embeds its case studies within relevant discourses, from state power and censorship to global media flows and grassroots creativity, thus avoiding both technological determinism and the reduction of digital phenomena to isolated curiosities. Studies of online literature platforms, for instance, are read not only through the lens of digital storytelling but also through longer literary traditions, contemporary governance structures, and transnational fan economies. Similarly, analyses of short-video cultures are linked to deeper histories of visuality, performance, and socio-economic mobility in China. This methodological attentiveness ensures that “the digital” is never abstract but always entwined with enduring cultural and political forces.

8However, the volume is not without limitations. As with many edited collections, the breadth of themes occasionally comes at the expense of theoretical coherence; at times, the juxtaposition of topics (from danmei fiction to AI poetry to e-waste cyberpunk) feels more thematic than integrative. Additionally, while the chapters excel in analysing cultural production, the economic and corporate infrastructures that shape the Sinocybersphere – particularly major tech conglomerates such as Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance – receive comparatively less sustained attention, despite their significant influence on digital creativity, monetisation, and governance. Finally, although the Sinocybersphere is positioned as a global, script-based community, the case studies remain primarily PRC-focused. This emphasis is justifiable but leaves room for further exploration of diasporic and transnational Chinese-language digital networks beyond Mainland China and Hong Kong.

9In sum, Digital China is a timely and compelling contribution to the study of Chinese digital culture. Through richly textured case studies and consistently contextualised analyses, it offers a nuanced portrait of how Chinese-language communities across the Sinocybersphere have created, circulated, and contested meanings in the digital age. For anyone seeking to understand the lived experience of the digital world in China beyond headlines about censorship and the Great Firewall, this book is an essential read. It can also be a good reference for academic research on media, literature, and AI in contemporary China.

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Bibliography

SHIH, Shu-Mei. 2011. “The Concept of the Sinophone.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 126(3): 709–18.

SHIH, Shu-Mei. 2013. “Introduction: What Is Sinophone Studies?” In Shu-Mei SHIH, Chien-hsin TSAI, and Brian BERNARDS (eds.), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. 1–16.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Hui Wu, IMBACH, Jessica (ed.). 2024. Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University PressChina Perspectives, 144 | 2026, 87-88.

Electronic reference

Hui Wu, IMBACH, Jessica (ed.). 2024. Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University PressChina Perspectives [Online], 144 | 2026, Online since 01 March 2026, connection on 16 May 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/20437; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15zus

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About the author

Hui Wu

Hui Wu is Research Assistant Professor at the Shanghai Academy of Publishing, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China (hui.wu1230@outlook.com).

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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