ABSTRACT
Here we consider two paradoxes of modern global media. First, in an age when all online communication is accessible to international audiences even if produced for local consumption, how do we “read” across borders, cultures, and symbol systems? Second, how can a local communicator produce oppositional communication within a restrictive society that, in theory and legal fact, controls the information its citizens can gather, disseminate, and exhibit? The polity at issue is the People’s Republic of China, a nation that is accelerating its development of the infrastructure of the Internet and other modern telecommunications technology. At the same time, the Middle Kingdom has, within the last decade, widely expanded the types and degrees of its restrictions on the political content of new media, especially on the booming native online blog community.
