ABSTRACT
Despite the rich insights provided by current research on Chinese social media, studies tend to conceptualise China's cyberspace as placeless, where the political implication and cultural imagination are geographically indifferent. Studying the Chinese internet can act as a productive line of enquiry that explores the processes of the structural transformations and power relations in Chinese society. The field of Chinese internet research has, over time, received considerable criticisms for its conceptual and analytic approaches. In responding to the above criticism, some scholars have attempted to re-think the Chinese Internet through a cultural historical lens. The notion of place is historically significant in shaping the diverse and rich humanistic culture, political system and economic orientation in China. As folk ritual and local ways of life continue to define people's sense of self and being, place as a spatial unit continues to reconfigure social networks and power relations in the greater world.
