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Working-Class Network Society
Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China
Jack Linchuan Qiu
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
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© 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about special quantity discounts, please e-mail special_sales@mitpress
.mit.edu
This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd.,
Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Qiu, Jack Linchuan, 1973–
Working-class network society : communication technology and the information
have-less in urban China / Jack Linchuan Qiu.
p. cm.—(Information revolution and global politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-17006-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Information technology—China. 2. Telecommunication—China.
3. Diffusion of innovations—China. I. Title.
HC430.I55Q28 2009
303.48
330951—dc22
2008034818
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Foreword by Manuel Castells ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xv
1 Introduction 1
I Networks Materialized 19
2 Internet Cafés 21
3 Going Wireless 51
II The People of Have-Less 83
4 Migrants 85
5 Young and Old 125
III A New Working Class in the Making 155
6 Places and Community 157
7 Life and Death 197
8 Refl ections 231
Afterword by Carolyn Cartier 249
Methodological Appendix 253
Internet Resources 261
Notes 263
References 273
Index 297
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Foreword
This truly original book investigates the cultural, social, and institutional
specifi city of the network society in China while having broader theoretical
implications. The network society is the social structure that characterizes
the information age, as the industrial society characterized the industrial
age. It is a social structure based on networks of communication, business,
work, culture, sociability, science and technology, social movements, and
politics. The networking form of organization is as old as the history
of humankind but only recently became the predominant form of
social organization because it harnesses the power of the revolution in
microelectronics-based information and communication technologies that
constituted a new technological paradigm in the 1970s and expanded in
the twenty-fi rst century into the global network of communication around
the Internet (1.3 billion users in 2008) and wireless communication net-
works (3.4 billions subscribers in 2008).
Networks have no boundaries, so the network society is a global network
society. Globalization is organized around a network of global networks.
Globalization is the network society in its concrete manifestation. Net-
works are operated by the programs social actors inscript in their structures,
always through confl ict and always open to challenges from other social
actors whose interests are ill represented in the network’s program. In the
current global network society, everything that has value according to the
network’s program is included in the network, wherever it is on the planet.
Anything or anyone who has no value or becomes devalued is excluded
from the network in a variable geometry of global dynamism and local
despair. So the architecture of our world is composed of networks that
include and exclude territories and people to form the uneven profi le of
globalization. Thus, all societies to some extent are network societies
because their dominant sectors and functions everywhere are connected
to the global network of networks from where they obtain access to wealth,
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x
Manuel Castells
information, and power. Furthermore, those who are not included in the
networks are nonetheless defi ned in their existence by their exclusion and
their drive to survive by creating alternative networks, be it the global
criminal economy or networks of resistance to the dominant order.
The fact that the network society is global, bypassing in its dynamics the
boundaries defi ned by the nation-state, is not tantamount to global social
homogeneity. The world is not fl at. The market is, but societies, cultures,
and institutions that have been produced differentially by their historical
and geographical specifi city, by their identifi cation in time and space, are
not. Therefore, every society is at the same time a network society in its
social structure and a specifi c network society in terms of its culture, insti-
tutions, and specifi c location in the international division of labor and in
the world structure of power relationships. This is what a number of
researchers from a variety of countries documented in the book I edited
and coauthored in 2004, examining the network society in a cross-cultural
perspective (Castells 2004). Jack Qiu takes this analysis one step further.
He analyzes the specifi city of the network society in China and proposes
the concept of working-class network society. It may sound odd at fi rst, as
all innovative concepts do. But it becomes almost evident if we relate it to
the usual vision that we have of China today. Most analysts agree that
China is the manufacturing powerhouse of the planet in this early part of
the century. What Western Europe was in the nineteenth century and the
United States and Japan were in the twentieth century is China today: the
industrial factory of the world. But this factory is networked to the entire
global economy and is organized around the informational mode of devel-
opment. It manufactures goods by incorporating information and knowl-
edge into the labor process.
Thus, class divisions appear on the basis of differential access to and
control of information processing tasks, ultimately embodied in differen-
tial access to information and communication technologies, at work and
in life. The irony of history has located the largest exploited working class
of the global information age in the last communist state inherited from
the industrial era.
This book provides a systematic analytical framework to study both the
differential dynamics of the global network society and the processes of
new inequality and class formation in the context of informationalism. It
relies on fi rsthand fi eldwork research in China, documentary and statistical
analysis, and a deep knowledge of the scholarly literature on global tech-
nological transformations. It opens a new path of inquiry that researchers
and students around the world will follow. It also challenges us to think
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