Chinese Internet: A Cultural Sphere, National Sphere,...

Chinese Internet: A Cultural Sphere,

National Sphere, orTransnational Public Sphere

by Han-Teng Liao

For City University of Hong Kong

Expertise

Webometrics; User-generated content; Wikipedia

research; Information Science in China and Taiwan;

Chinese Internet; Chinese Web data;

Open Data; Open Source; Open Knowledge; Software,

Website and content internationalization-localization

(i18n/L10n); Digital Chinese characters

Geo-linguistic regions and analysis

Research agenda:

How can (Chinese) Internet conceptualized as a (Chinese) cultural sphere,

national sphere, ortransnational public sphere?

Guobin Yang’s (2003) notion of a Chinese cultural sphere e.g. National web studies, including “Mapping Iran

Online” and “Big UK Domain Data“ Transnational public sphere: “A growing body of media

studies literature is documenting the existence of discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of both nations and states. ”(Fraser, 2007)

A survey: http://goo.gl/vcyngX delineating and defining Chinese Web

Tentative hypothesis:

Beijing’s authoritarian persistence is positively validated by the “boundary work” of national sphere within mainland China

The diversity of (transnational) Chinese cultural sphere, especially elements contributed by Hong Kong and Taiwan remains essential for the possibility of a (transnational) public sphere.

What's gonna bring down the totalitarian government in China? Is it gonna be guns? Is it gonna be tanks? Is it gonnabe missiles? No it's gonna be KJ. KJ is a 25-year-old girl who lives in Taiwan, ... She is talking to the mainland Wikipedians, and she's helping them to get through the firewalls. .... Every day with something she is doing, and every day she is bringing in a bit of democracy and information of freedom to China. … This is going on all the time in hundreds and thousands of ways all over the world. All of these censorship regimes are porous. They are becoming more porous and they will be more porous [sic].

Four Major Chinese-speaking Regions

Country Code (Name)

Political Internet

Filteringa

Networked Readiness Index

Rankingb

Democracy World

Rankingc

Free Speech World

Rankingd

M ajor H uman Rights

Violatione

Pervasive 59 138 163 Yes

None 22 78 61 No

None 5 84 141 No

None 13 32 32 No

a

b

c

d

e

Data f rom the Economist Intelligence Unit's index of democracy 2006, with 167 countries are ranked f rom the top democracies to authoritarian regimes.Data f rom the Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007 made by the Reporters without Borders, with 169 countries ranked.Whether a state is mentioned in the Human Rights Watch World Report 2007.

Data f rom the Networked Readiness Index 2006-2007 Ranking, by World Economic Forum, among 122 countries surveyed.

CN (Mainland China)

HK (Hong Kong)

SG (Singapore)

TW (Taiwan)

Data f rom the OpenNet Initiative about Internet f iltering of political contents.

Ranna Mitter’s“Modern China: A Very Short Introduction”

China itself is neither fully free nor democratic. Taiwan, since the 1990s, has been both free and democratic. Singapore, a largely Chinese society, is democratic, in that it has regular elections which are nominally open to opposition candidates (but at high cost to themselves), but is not free (the media and political activism are both heavily regulated). Most intriguing is Hong Kong, which is little more democratic than it was under the British. Yet it is a very free society: although there is political pressure and a certain level of self-censorship, it has a lively press, it is easy to publish books attacking the Chinese government, and it supports a variety of political parties (although the legislature is arranged to prevent any such party ever coming to power). There are few, if any, other such free, undemocratic societies.

CULTURAL POLITICS OF

USER-GENERATED ENCYCLOPAEDIAS:

Comparing Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike

by Han-Teng Liao

How have the two major Chinese-written user-generated

encyclopaedias, Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia,

overcome, reinforced or shifted

the existing cultural-political boundaries among mainland

China, Hong Kong and Taiwan?

How has the Webovercome, reinforced or shifted

the existing cultural-political boundaries?

General Question

How have Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia overcome, reinforced or shifted

the existing cultural-political boundaries among China, Hong Kong and Taiwan?

Research Question

Findings: some highlights

Chinese Wikipedia:

integration patterns and designs (with ongoing tensions) boundary-

overcoming patterns

Baidu Baike:

culturally-and-politically sanitized domestic market boundary-

reinforcing patterns

Web spheres, Processability Cultural

thickening

Definitions Findings ConclusionsImplications

• Editorial• Content/

Citation• Reception/U

se

• The impact of the Great Firewall

• Boundaries online

Structuring the web

Noortje Marres (2009): “web services incorporate social science methods like textual analysis, social network analysis, and geospatial analysis, arguably ordering data for … research.”

Richard Rogers (2013, p.207): May the web deliver structured data after all?

In this way of thinking, web services -search engines, collaboratively authored wikis, and social networking platforms- become the data filterers, leaning and ordering the data for end use as well as perhaps for research.

Web spheres

Language only

Region only

Platform only Language and platform

Region and platform

‧Encyclopedia of Taiwan

‧The Encyclopedia of Hong Kong Virtual Communities

‧Baidu Search ‧Baidu Japan

‧Yandex ‧Yandex Russia

‧Google Search ‧Google Hong Kong

‧Google News ‧Google News China

‧Google Books

‧Chinese Weibo ‧Hong Kong Weibo

‧Twitter universe ‧Arabic Twitter

‧Facebook nation

‧Craigslist ‧Craigslist Hong Kong

‧Chinese Wikipedia‧Spanish Wikipedia‧Arabic Wikipedia

‧Arabic online world

‧Chinese-language Internet

‧Wikipedia‧U.S. cyber domain

‧Spanish-speaking web-sphere

‧China's cyberspace

Web spheres:

specify the research object

Major Chinese geolinguistic regions

Virtual methods (Schneider & Foot, 2005)Digital methods (Rogers, 2013)


Web spheres(Rogers, 2013)

“Web sphere” analysis, initially, did not refer to search engine space, but rather a meticulous collection of thematically related sites for further analysis (Rogers, 2013, p52).

As scholars continue to disaggregate the online (as search engines already have done in providing separate subengines by sphere), the concerns shift away from the study of Internet and politics in general to the politics of separate spaces (Rogers, 2013, p59).

Web spheres

processability

World Wide Web

shapes

is filtered by

Users' experience

shapes

Figure 3-1. Processability shapes web spheres


Processability: combined human- and computer-manipulation

East Asians are accustomed to dealing with a multibyte system, in contrast to Western monobyte reductionist culture. It may be that in the future our multibyte culture will prove advantageous for dealing with complex systems.

East Asian Science Technology and Society (STS) scholar, Nakayama Shigeru

B A

Figure 3-2. Cultural thickening patterns that overcome or reinforce boundaries


Cultural thickening:

intensified patterns of ties(Couldry &Hepp, 2012)

Cultural thickening (Couldry & Hepp, 2012)

The rise of national cultures is related to the diffusion of the so-called mass media (p.12-13 )

In this sense, media cultures are thickenings of translocal processes of meaning articulation that themselves are more (or less) locally specific (p.254).

This means that the borders of the “cultural thickenings” to which we belong do not necessarily correspond with territorial borders, even though territories continue to be highly relevant for constructing national community (p.254).

Geo-linguistic structuring the (Chinese-language) web

[B]oth researchers and designers can construct varied notions of web spheres as research objects (and, for designers, objects to be constructed).

[F]actors of language and region are central in the construction of web spheres because they often serve as the baselines for sorting users into identifiable groups.

Expectation A: mainland China isolated

GFW: filtering/censorship regime

Baidu BaikeBaidu Baike Chinese WikipediaChinese Wikipedia

Bremmer, 2006Economist , 2013

Expectation B: a single culturally defined market

Baidu Baike?Baidu Baike?

Chinese Wikipedia?Chinese Wikipedia?

Chinese ‘culturally defined market’ (Taneja & Wu, 2013)

Chinese ‘culturally defined market’ (Taneja & Wu, 2013)

Expectation C: Hong Kong 1997 Handover

People’s Republic of China

People’s Republic of China

Republic of China

Republic of China

None of the above


Baidu BaikeBaidu Baike

Chinese WikipediaChinese Wikipedia

Main chapters and sections

Chapter 4Editorial processes,

Internet control, and Internet diffusion

Chapter 5Citation and content

analysis

Chapter 6Reception and use

1) Filtering user contribution2) Gatekeeping mainland Chinese users

1) Geolinguistic patterns and preferences2) Size and institutional consideration3) Defining/negotiating Chineseness

1) Search engine result pages2) Microblog posts


Editorial: filtering user contribution


Baidu BaikeBaidu Baike

Chinese WikipediaChinese Wikipedia

Editorial: gatekeeping mainland Chinese users


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Figure 4-11. Chinese regions and East Asian regions: Category II average

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BB launched

Editorial processes, Internet control, and Internet diffusion

Baidu Baike effectively excluded users of traditional Chinese characters and censored politically sensitive content.

Chinese Wikipedia integrates users across regions with

adequate policy and design.

blocked between 2005-2008, when Baidu Baike launched in 2006, catching the windfall of Chinese Internet users.

Beijing used the power to *gatekeep* mainland Chinese users for user-generated websites.

4.1 Editorial policies and processes

4.2 Gatekeeping mainland Chinese users from 2005–2008

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Figure 4-11. Chinese regions and East Asian regions: Category II average


Chapter 4


Citation and content analysis

Linking or citing:

Baidu Baike cites mostly mainland Chinese sources.

Chinese Wikipedia’s geolinguistic extent was more extensive

Implications for showing the connections (or lack thereof) between websites and the world

Chapter 5

5.1 Geolinguistic patterns and preferences

5.2 Size and institutional considerations

5.3 Defining and negotiating Chineseness

Table 5-9Top-15 most-linked U.S.-hosted websites

x x xx Website N N(CW ) x Website N N(BB) x

1 wikipedia.org 10588 > 0 nih.gov 7965 > 25

2 souezu.cn 2281 > 1 doi.org 6857 > 4

3 5d6d.com 2209 > 15 si l .org 6809 > 0

4 nba.com 1569 > 1411 google.com 6034 > 417

5 hao565.cn 1395 > 0 imdb.com 4751 > 1046

6 chinaexpertsweb.net 1379 > 0 youtube.com 4359 > 2

7 asian-chinese-african.org 1346 > 0 nasa.gov 2654 > 97

8 qdgqtv.cn 1276 > 0 harvard.edu 2570 > 3

9 xikao.com 1063 > 22 caltech.edu 2458 > 6

10 imdb.com 1046 < 4751 seds.org 2308 > 3

11 ey800.cn 998 > 0 uefa.com 1835 > 26

12 world-culture-research.org 979 > 1 wikia.com 1806 > 25

13 eb.com 910 > 71 nytimes.com 1805 > 66

14 doudouditu.cn 876 > 0 blogspot.com 1721 > 732

15 google.cn 867 > 105 skysports.com 1711 > 0x

Chinese Wikipedia(CW)

Uni

ted

Stat

es (U

S)

Baidu Baike (BB)Rank-ing

Chinese Wikipedia

types ᵇ

ᶜ Hyperlinks: w (with), and wo (without),

Baidu Baike

ᵇ Types: fn (footnotes with citations), ref (references), and ext (external links),

ᵃ Country codes: CN (China), TW (Taiwan), HK (Hong Kong), JP (Japan), US (United States), KR (Korea), and NZ (New Zealand); also Chinese historical: classic (classic Chinese), and pre1949 (modern Chinese content published before 1949)

hyper-links ᶜ

geo-linguistic regions ᵃ

extref

wow woextreffn

CN

wCNCN

NZ

KRHKclassic

USJPTWCN

classic pre1949

CN

Figure 5-3. A treemap comparison of citations and external sources for “Hanzi”, “Hanzu” and “Tianxia”

Comparing distribution of links across selected regions

U

nite

d St

ates

C

hina

H

ong

Kon

g

Mac

ao

Taiw

an

Japa

n

Sout

h K

orea

Sing

apor

e M

alay

sia

Viet

nam

A

ustr

alia

Indi

a Br

azil

R

ussi

a

Net

herl

ands

C

zech

Rep

ublic

Po

land

Iran

Is

rael

U

nite

d A

rab

Emir

ates

Sout

h A

fric

a

cc TLD

geo-IP

cc TLD

geo-IP

cc TLD

geo-IP

Pre-normalized

(N)

BB

CW

Normalized by GDP

BB

Pre-normalized and normalized

comparisons of Baidu Baike (BB)

and Chinese Wikipedia (CW)

Comparing distribution of links across selected regions

cc TLD

geo-IP

cc TLD

geo-IP

cc TLD

geo-IP

cc TLD

geo-IP

Normalized by GDP (N/ GDP)

BB

CW

Normalized by Internet population

(N/ pop_internet)

BB

CW


Reception and use

Search engine result pages (SERPs) Baidu and Baidu Baike: mainland China.

Chinese Wikipedia: visible across regions

Microblog posts Both Verbification: c.f. Google(v) sth.

Baidu Baike: censored and of low quality

Chinese Wikipedia: free and reliable Implications for information

engagement

Chapter 6

6.1 Search engine result pages (SERPs)

6.2 Microblog posts

Websites (Aggregated)

Baidu CN

Yahoo CN

Google CN

Google SG

Yahoo SG

Google H K

Google TW

Yahoo H K

Yahoo TW

1 wikipedia.org 67.76 0.99 318.95 344.78 325.16 702.52 678.75 1005.58 958.464 yahoo.com 1.95 1.54 6.35 6.67 35.76 25.88 33.98 185.31 216.688 youtube.com 0.29 0.00 13.72 14.82 3.69 82.43 85.12 62.39 13.419 edu.tw 1.88 0.58 5.62 6.48 16.24 15.80 66.77 33.78 82.5313 facebook.com 0.29 0.00 3.57 3.75 10.02 12.45 29.03 94.65 39.6518 epochtimes.com 0.00 0.00 2.10 2.68 2.61 25.42 31.23 38.28 29.4221 gov.tw 0.19 0.25 6.83 6.55 5.30 10.07 35.11 11.19 35.77…and other 28 websites (The total number for this category of websites is 35)6 mbalib.com 15.64 21.98 53.89 54.57 39.31 72.43 72.19 54.17 64.7410 people.com.cn 13.58 37.05 26.66 27.35 12.42 23.15 27.82 17.43 21.2812 ifeng.com 23.62 31.41 36.02 36.94 15.38 21.93 23.36 7.10 5.89…and other 13 websites (The total number for this category of websites is 16)2 baidu.com 1156.63 552.07 528.29 540.60 658.81 170.50 124.03 48.38 7.743 hudong.com 14.15 95.90 102.50 107.28 252.70 68.80 62.70 3.84 0.025 sina.com.cn 49.75 79.62 91.45 91.90 76.43 48.82 44.25 6.31 3.047 qq.com 46.50 86.54 46.66 45.84 24.62 14.44 12.33 2.21 1.4211 youku.com 44.15 75.23 23.77 16.23 25.17 8.37 7.36 1.66 1.0214 soso.com 17.73 23.85 9.30 8.28 123.12 1.02 1.33 0.89 0.0615 xinhuanet.com 16.97 17.38 28.01 27.63 12.22 37.14 38.89 1.79 0.3916 sohu.com 21.02 40.94 34.44 30.22 21.92 10.35 6.84 3.23 1.1817 163.com 19.65 38.44 37.56 35.58 14.74 10.59 8.29 2.30 1.0919 douban.com 19.22 24.33 21.81 21.29 10.25 9.82 8.10 1.00 0.97…and other 39 websites (The total number for this category of websites is 49)

Percentage of visibility scores: encyclopedia sites among the top-10

Categories Baidu CN

Yahoo CN

Google CN

Google SG

Yahoo SG

Google H K

Google TW

Yahoo H K

Yahoo TW

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of China

Top 10 Search Terms (Google and Baidu)

Best Fi lm/ Popular Music (China, H ong Kong, Taiwan)

Modern Concepts ( h d ith

wikipedia.org

baidu.com

0%

50%

100%

0%

50%

100%

0%

50%

100%

50%

100%

Percentage of visibility scores: encyclopedia sites among the top-10

Potential ly sensitive terms

Fortune500

Modern Concepts (shared with modern Japanese)

Notable People

0%

50%

100%

0%

50%

100%

0%

50%

100%

0%

50%

100%

baidu.com wikipedia.org hudong.com mbalib.com

Patterns Found

Baidu Baike Chinese Wikipediais (relatively more) open to

copyright-dubious, self -promoting, or advertisement-based content

reliable information sources across Chinese-speaking regions

is (relatively more) defensive against

topics poltically senstive to Beijing and information sources outside mainland China

copyright-dubious, self -promoting, or advertisement-based content

and thus produces cultural thickening patterns of …

commercially and politically correct mainland China-focused Chinese information order

culturally and politically diverse Chinese information order across various Chinese societies

Table 7-1Different gatekeeping lead to different cultural thickening patterns


Isolation:strong GFW isolates mainland China from the world

Indigenization:GFW does not prevent the formation of a single Chinese cluster

‘Protection’ of mainland China from the rest of the (Chinese-speaking) world

Hong Kong and Taiwan as in-between nodes

Beijing creates comparative advantage in providing access to mainland Chinese users commercially, culturally and politically

GFW lowers the intensity of exchange between the majority of mainland Chinese users and the rest


Views on the impact of GFW (See Table 7-2)

It is a struggle to “centre” the chinese-language web sphere by promoting certain directions, intensities and normative values via cultural thickening processes among new internet users


Research Implications More research on

geolinguistic factors and/or processability is needed:

The Web is ‘increasingly grounded with geographic and linguistic specificity by platform and space’ (R. Rogers, 2013, p.58)

Practical Implications Website designers

need to understand the geolinguistic profile of their users Users need to be

aware of the limits imposed

Policy Implications Improve the cultural

politics of web spaces


Beyond PhD

Special Issue on “Social Data Science and the Chinese Web” for Policy and Internet

Visualizing interlanguage links of all Wikipedia Leonardo: Art, Science and Technology: http://goo.gl/N9zIAd

More: http://goo.gl/6ZI7tz

Visualizing geolinguistic traffic of Wikipedia

Intensity of cyber crimes and attacks: How geographic normalization facilitates cross-country comparison IEEE Security & Privacy

Internet diffusion in Chinese-speaking regions, Asia, and the world

Figure 1. The trendlines

020406080

100120140160

CNKIScholar

GoogleScholar CN

GoogleScholar HK

GoogleScholar TW

growth: 2002-2011decline?

a growing number of publications

Figure 1 Growth since 2002

a two- to three-year window where major academic

databases index fresh research.

The Hong Kong results are identical to the Taiwanese ones.

020406080

100120140160

CNKIScholar

GoogleScholar CN

GoogleScholar HK

GoogleScholar TW

Major (archive) platforms

12/17/2014Chinese SERPs#CIRC11

CNKI Scholar

Google Scholar China

Google Scholar Taiwan

Grand Total

CNKI platfrom 464 219 0 683

Education Taiwan 0 2 605 607

M iscellaneous 0 346 248 594

CQVIP platform 0 378 0 378

Airitilibrary platform 0 0 147 147

Wanfang Data platform 0 55 0 55

Grand Total 464 1000 1000 2464

Table 3. Most frequently appearing source platforms

Cross tab analysis: Major publication institutions

Table 2. Most frequently appearing source institutions

12/17/2014Chinese SERPs#CIRC11

Institutions (in Chinese) Institutions

CNKI Scholar

Google Scholar China

Google Scholar Taiwan

Grand Total

情报学报 Journal of the China Society for Scientif ic and Technical Information

0 65 0 65

国家图书馆学刊 Journal of the National Library of China 1 41 0 42臺灣大學企業管理碩

士專班學位論文

MBA dissertations, National Taiwan University 0 0 29 29

臺灣師範大學工業科

技教育學系學位論文

Department of Industrial Technology Education Dissertations, Taiwan Normal University

0 0 28 28

圖文傳播藝術學報 NTUA Department of Graphic Communication Arts

0 0 23 23

现代图书情报技术 ModernTechnology ofLibraryand Information 5 12 0 17互联网周刊 China Internet Weekly 6 10 0 16

图书情报工作 Libraryand Information Service 5 9 0 14青年记者 "Youth Reporter" magazine 3 11 0 14

中文信息学报 Journal of Chinese Information Processing 6 7 0 13互联网天地 China Internet Magazine 7 6 0 13

上海交通大学 Shanghai Jiao Tong University 13 0 0 13

Cross tab analysis: Major publication institutions

(continued)

Between CNKI Scholar and Google Scholar China, substantial overlapping results exists for journals and magazines. Google Scholar China does not seem to include as many degree dissertations as CNKI Scholar.

上海交通大学 Shanghai Jiao Tong University 13 0 0 13情报资料工作 Information and Documentation Services 3 9 0 12

PAR表演藝術雜誌 Performance Arts Review 0 0 12 12图书馆理论与实践 Library Theory and Practice 5 6 0 11

情报理论与实践 Information Studies: Theory & Application 5 6 0 11哈尔滨工业大学 Harbin Institute of Technology 10 0 0 10

情报杂志 Journalof Intelligence 7 3 0 10现代情报 ModernInformation 2 8 0 10

何舟:新闻与传播研究发表机制

台湾的发表机制与美国的近似。由于有一定数量的研究人才和一定规模的学术社区，台湾形成了一个自成体系的、以中文为主的发表机制。岛内的学者绝大部分除偶尔在国际期刊上发表外，一般都在本土的学术期刊和出版机构发表自己的研究成果。香港的学者由于社区很小，没有自己的刊物，再加上各大学一般只承认以英文在国际期刊上发表的文章，所以绝大部分的研究成果都在美国或欧洲的学术刊物上发表。中国大陆的发表机制在相当长的时间里并没有采取专家匿名评审的方式，只是在近年来逐渐开始实行这种方式。由于大陆有广大的市场和学术社区，大陆的研究成果绝大部分以中文在本土发表，绝少在国际刊物上以英文或其他文字发表。

Big Data and Karl Wolfgang Deutsch

1. Methodology and Research Strategy“The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control”

2. Digital methods: … reintroducing quantitative methods and formal system analysis into the field of political/social sciences

3. Big state, Big data industry and research interventions: …researchers must reflect on the methods, data and, arguably most important of all, possible interventions in the daily routine of online interactions, social association, and offline people movements.

Big Data as Data centralism

Such work will encourage the reflections on the existing

political principle of “democratic centralism” (minzhu

jizhongzhi民主集中制) in relation to governing

techniques and technologies.

The relationship between “democratic centralism” and

“data centralism”

Big Data

Herrenhausen Conference on Big Data, on March 25-27 2015 in Hannover, Germany.

Q: in what ways have the big data industry of online

expressions … make their respective information and

communication spaces towards or away from the

desired values of democratic public sphere?

My arguments

(1) Big data analysis is often large-scale data analysis searching for meaningful reductions.

(2) Big data industry of online expressions often scale up and then reduce online expressions to construct information and communication spaces for both social and personal meanings.

(3) According to Lewis Mumford, the tensions “between small-scale association and large-scale organization, …, between remote control and diffused local interventions” have been major challenges for democratic association to scale up from small communities and groups. (3a) Democratic technics are thus “small scale method of

production, … even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman. They are man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful

My arguments

(3b) Authoritarian technics are often “system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable”

(4) Social scientists and theorists must render big data technics of online expressions more democratic than authoritarian.

(5) They also must develop distributive methods that can intervene in the ways in which the big data industry manage online expressions

WHY IT MATTERS:INTERNATIONALIZATION OF INTERNET RESEARCH

Major five world languages: potentials for scaling up online expressions processability

Mandarin: Simplified Chinese (zh-Hans), official in China (zh-CN) and Singapore

(zh-SG); Traditional Chinese (zh-Hant), official in Taiwan (zh-TW), Hong Kong (zh-HK) and Macau (zh-MO)

Spanish Official in Mexico (es-MX), Spain (es-ES), Argentina (es-AR), Colombia

(es-CO), etc. English:

Official in US (en-US), India (en-IN), Nigeria (en-NG), Pakistan (en-PK), Philippines (en-PH), UK (en-UK), etc.

Hindi: Official in India (hi-IN) Bengali: Official in Bangladesh (bn-BD) and India (bn-IN) Arabic:

Official in Egypt (ar-EG), Algeria (ar-DZ), Saudi Arabia (ar-SA), Iraq (ar-IQ) , Sudan (ar-SD), Yemen (ar-YE)

Russian: Official in Russia (ru-RU), Ukraine (ru-UA), Kazakhstan (ru-KZ), Kyrgyzstan (ru-KG),

Belarus (ru-BY)

Major five world languages: consider the polities and internet companies involved

Mandarin: the most intriguing case (BAT in zh-CN) Simplified Chinese (zh-Hans), official in China (zh-CN) and Singapore

(zh-SG); Traditional Chinese (zh-Hant), official in Taiwan (zh-TW), Hong Kong (zh-HK) and Macau (zh-MO)

Spanish Official in Mexico (es-MX), Spain (es-ES), Argentina (es-AR), Colombia

(es-CO), etc. English:

Official in US (en-US), India (en-IN), Nigeria (en-NG), Pakistan (en-PK), Philippines (en-PH), UK (en-UK), etc.

Hindi: Official in India (hi-IN) Bengali: Official in Bangladesh (bn-BD) and India (bn-IN) Arabic:

Official in Egypt (ar-EG), Algeria (ar-DZ), Saudi Arabia (ar-SA), Iraq (ar-IQ) , Sudan (ar-SD), Yemen (ar-YE)

Russian: (Yandex in ru-RU) Official in Russia (ru-RU), Ukraine (ru-UA), Kazakhstan (ru-KZ), Kyrgyzstan (ru-KG),

Belarus (ru-BY)

All digitally advanced with different free/unfree and/or democratic/authoritarian polities

Research Agenda:

We need more research on web spheres in relation to the concepts of a

(Chinese) cultural sphere,national sphere, andtransnational public sphere.

Thank you

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