Peter Marolt is a Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

David Kurt Herold is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Part 1: Deliberating Online Spaces 1. Grounding Online Spaces 2. Users, not Netizens: Spaces and Practices on the Chinese Internet Part 2: Defining Online Spaces 3. "The Corpses were Emotionally Stable": Agency and Passivity on the Chinese Internet 4. Regarding Subjectivities and Social Life on the Screen: The Ambivalences of Spectatorship in the People's Republic of China Part 3: Claiming Online Spaces 5. A Framing Analysis of Chinese Independent Candidates' Strategic Use of Microblogging for Online Campaign and Political Expression 6. China's Dream of High-speed Growth Gets Rear-ended: The "Wenzhou 723" Microblogging Incident and the Erosion of Public Confidence Part 4: Enjoying Online Spaces 7. Gold Farmers and Water Army: Digital Playbor with Chinese Characteristics 8. Chinese Fansub Groups as Communities of Practice: An Ethnography of Online Language Learning Part 5: Shaping Online Spaces 9. Balancing Market and Politics: The Logic of Organizing Cyber Communities in China 10. The Role of Chinese Internet Industry Workers in Creating Alternative Online Spaces

The Chinese internet is driving change across all facets of social life, and scholars have grown mindful that online and offline spaces have become interdependent and inseparable dimensions of social, political, economic, and cultural activity. This book showcases the richness and diversity of Chinese cyberspaces, conceptualizing online and offline China as separate but inter-connected spaces in which a wide array of people and groups act and interact under the gaze of a seemingly monolithic authoritarian state. The cyberspaces comprising "online China" are understood as spaces for interaction and negotiation that influence "offline China". The book argues that these spaces allow their users greater "freedoms" despite ubiquitous control and surveillance by the state authorities. The book is a sequel to the editors' earlier work, Online Society in China: Creating, Celebrating and Instrumentalising the Online Carnival (Routledge, 2011).