The history of the internet, whether in China or elsewhere in the world, is often told through the stories of successful and often publicly listed companies, state policy initiatives and chronology, or prominent individuals and groups such as tech company founders and influential social and political activists. This short essay tells a different story of the Chinese internet history in the past 30 years from a social reproductive perspective, centering on rural e-commerce and families caught in between the rural-urban divide, against the wider currents of the state’s rural informatization campaign, Chinese Big Techs’ expansion into the countryside, and ongoing transformation in urbanization and rural-urban conversion. The goal is to move beyond a techno-determinist, individualized, and male-centric framework of analyzing digital media and the internet to adopt a materialist, feminist, and substantivist approach.
