Social science scholars writing on contemporary China have toiled over implications of mobile and internet technology on governance, social stability and freedom of speech. These studies are important and worthwhile, but overriding teleological concerns can impede proper understanding of communications technology in its fuller sense. The kind of economic development that China is pursuing is not radically different to that of the West. Developed, globalised societies, against the backdrop of a secular humanist project with teleological ends, lifted the limits for human activity and practice; this set forth the pursuit of technological practice as a universalising progressive aesthetic. Communications technology per se neither causes nor implies one normative type of social change over another, but, using the manifold model, social development is understood to result from the uneasy tension between social context and social change. The greater the incongruencies between an individual’s experience and the expectations of society, the greater the pull for such experiential incongruencies to be resolved.