ABSTRACT
Although not a pioneer in information communication technologies (ICT) innovations, China now has the world’s largest mobile phone population of 547 million, plus 365 million landline households1 and 162 million netizens.2 One in every three Chinese has a handset, and this number is larger than the whole population of the United States. It is important to note that China leaped from a pre-industrial stage of minimum landline penetration to this top position in the information age in less than two decades. This is different from the Western course of ICT development where mobile communication started a century later after telephony. China’s diffusion of mobile telephony, the Internet, digital video and wireless networks occurred when the country was impoverished with basic landline telephones. This expansion also resonates with the country’s unprecedented economic growth, rapid industrialization, sprawling urbanization, gigantic migration, mass consumerism and information overload. What China has experienced is so unparalleled in the world history that the social bearings of this mobile-telephony-centered “media-volution” remain virtually unfathomed.
