ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 depicts the historical context within which Tencent emerged. It first traces the history of how Internet infrastructure and services have been constructed in China. While early efforts came primarily from the government and academic groups, which focused on connecting the country to the world for information exchange, subsequent development of China’s Internet was embedded in the country’s capitalist pursuit to reassert itself into global capitalism through industrialization and informatization. Tencent, with many other Chinese Internet companies, came along under this wave of “gold rush” between mid-1990s and early 2000s. At the same time, priorities were given to the information network development in coastal and urban regions that shifted the country’s spatial and population structures. This chapter argues that Tencent’s birth and growth reflected these broad political-economic transformations that took place in China.
