Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T09:45:03.548Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Digital Divide and Social Cleavage: Case Studies of ICT Usage among Peasants in Contemporary China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2011

Yuhua Guo  and
Peng Chen
Yuhua Guo
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University. Email: guo-yh@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn (corresponding author)
Peng Chen
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

During its structural transformation, rural China witnessed the emergence of four types of village: traditional, industrialized, commercial and villages in cities. Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), including fixed phones, cell phones, television sets and the internet (with personal computers), are now commonly used in Chinese villages but in ways that differentiate villagers according to variables such as occupation, villager membership and social status. The adoption of ICTs by peasants not only represents but also accelerates growing peasant differentiation; in other words, the function of ICTs could not penetrate the barrier of social structure. Meanwhile, structural transformation in China has been an activator to shaping peasants' diversified ideas about information, and the demand for and usage of ICTs. An analysis of peasants' ICT adoption thus enables us to identify the basic trends and characteristics of social transformation in contemporary China.

Type
Special Section on the Internet in China
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 207 , September 2011 , pp. 580 - 599
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Sassen, Saskia, “Towards a sociology of information technology,” Current Sociology, Vol. 50 (2002), pp. 365–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Harwit, Eric, “Spreading telecommunications to developing areas in China,” The China Quarterly, No. 80 (2004), pp. 1010–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Xiaowei Gao, “Zhongguo chenxiang shuzi honggou wenti yanjiu” (“The research of Chinese urban–rural digital divide”), master's thesis, Nanjing Agricultural University, 2006, pp. 8–26.

4 R. Murphy, “Overcoming the digital divide? ICTs and informationalism in rural China,” presented at “Rethinking Urban–Rural Cleavage in Contemporary China,” Fairbank Centre, Harvard University, 6–8 October 2006.

5 Guorong Xiong, “Xiaofei zhuyi shijiao: shouji kuosan yanjiu” (“The research of diffusion of mobile phones: a consumerism perspective”), master's thesis, Jinan University, Guangzhou, 2006, p. 3.

6 Yang, Shanhua and zhu, Weizhi, “Shouji: quanqiuhua beijingxia de zhudong xuanze” (“Mobile phone: the active choice in the age of globalization”), Guangdong shehui kexue (Guangdong Social Science), No. 2 (2006), pp. 71–75Google Scholar.

7 Hahn, H.P. and Kibora, L., “The domestication of the mobile phone: oral society and new ICT in Burkina Faso,” Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 46 (2008), pp. 87–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The former type was mainly composed of a series of administrative institutional arrangements, such as the household registration system, food supply system, employment system, education system and social security system; the latter type concentrated more on the market forces which led to less connection between the urban and the rural. See Sun, Liping, Zhuanxing yu duanlie: gaige yilai Zhongguo shehui jiegou de bianqian (Transition and Cleavage: Changes in Chinese Social Structure since the Reform) (Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2004), pp. 318–22Google Scholar.

9 In our fieldwork we selected two traditional villages, but for reasons of article length just one is described here.

10 The information came from the village committee's official documents.

11 This type of cell phone doesn't have its own brand name and always imitates a brand cell phone's function and style.

12 Sun, Liping, Duanlie: ershi shiji jiushi niandai yilai de Zhongguo shehui (Cleavage: Chinese society since the 1990s) (Beijing: Social Science Academic Press, 2003), pp. 1–5Google Scholar.

13 Yao, Wanlu, “Dangdai Zhongguo nongmin fenhua xingtai fenxi” (“Analysis of peasants' differentiation in contemporary China”), Gansu lilun xuekan (Gansu Theory Journal), No. 4 (2003), pp. 43–45Google Scholar.

14 For more information on work-units, see Feng, Lu, “Danwei: yizhong teshu de shehui zuzhi xingshi” (“Work-unit: a particular form of social organization”), Zhongguo shehui kexue (Social Science in China), No. 1 (1989), p.70Google Scholar; and Lu, Xiaobo and Perry, Elizabeth (eds.), Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997)Google Scholar.

15 Fei, Xiaotong, Xiangtu Zhongguo (Earthbound China) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1985), pp. 1–3Google Scholar.