ABSTRACT
When I started researching this chapter, I hoped to explore the emergence of new media directed at, and in part produced by, Chinese people in Britain. My aim was to assess whether technologies such as satellite television and the Internet might become sites of communal elaboration and political mobilisation. At the close of my study in the spring of 2001, I found myself marching through the heart of London with several hundred Chinese protesting against the government; in part due to the efforts of a British Chinese website. Did this unprecedented public demonstration, cutting across class and generational differences, mark, as the organisers claimed, ‘a turning point’ in the history of the Chinese in Britain? Does the use of the Internet and the growth of other pan-European Chinese news media provide a new Chinese public sphere for the airing of debates, perspectives and sentiments? Do these emergent media forms help to constitute a British Chinese public-an audible, legible and visible community deliberating its past, present and future?
