Uneven Coverage and Blank Spaces: Bringing the State Back In

What is it about?

Studies of digital Asia tend to cluster around certain interrelated core strands, including studies of power relationships, activism, resistance and oppression, disadvantaged groups and online tribes, and developments in discourse and culture. Yet clustering in some areas has led to other topics remaining largely deserted. One of these, this contribution will argue, has been the state. States are often treated as an exogenous or external, and largely mono-lithic actor mostly focused on maintaining control, exercising censorship and establishing authority in the digital realm. This article will argue that scholars neglect the state to their detriment. First, it will discuss how the state is not at all a monolith, but a venue where different concerns are contested and debated, where different interests collide and where different actors seek to gain influ-ence. Second, it will claim that the state can, to a significant degree, create and shape the landscape within which other actors conduct their various affairs. It does not do so in a vac-uum, but is often responsive to particular mobilised social and economic concerns. This con-tribution will mostly focus on China, but its findings – as the concluding section will discuss – also apply to other countries in Asia and worldwide.

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