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In this introductory essay, the editors consider the current challenges in understanding a networked China. We consider how the digital media landscape has changed just since an earlier collection of research in 2015, subtitled ‘global dynamics of digital media and civic engagement.’ We take up this orienting concept of civic engagement to explore emerging mediated spaces for cultural production through global connectivities. Beyond an area studies contribution, we focus on China more broadly as a complex global assemblage: an intersection of technology, norms, and socio-cultural structures. Our contributors were invited to consider ‘what’ and ‘where’ is China, and ‘how do we know China?’ Along with logistical challenges of fieldwork involving constraints of geopolitics and pandemic, we encouraged an epistemic reflexivity around reliance on certain paradigms, concepts and kinds of data. This research is further complicated by sensitivities around by the very vocabulary often involved, including public, civil society, and civic engagement itself. In the search for digital China, contributors consider how to think about China and how to locate a digital China. In exploring digital production and performance of and in China, we include analyses of fandom, idols, and the curation of collective pandemic memories. Together, this collection provides a rich set of deeply researched cases and imaginative new strategies to understand how the contradictions of digital China – between connectivity and control – are playing out, with important implications for the changing nature of public life.

Revisiting networked China: challenges for the study of digital media and civic engagement