The rise of a digital community in the People's Republic of China

Abstract

What is the role of geography under globalization? How do the rise of digital communities and the Internet relate to economic and urban geography? On the one hand, the rise of digital communities has posed important questions to the theoretical foundations of geography. On the other hand, the Internet generated its own distinctive geographies of production and consumption. Since the 1990s, many research works have examined the rise of the new geography either at the global or national level. Most research works, however, have focused on North American and European countries only. This emphasis was understandable, as Internet development in Asia did not begin to grow rapidly until the mid-1990s. In the geographical analysis of world Internet users by NUA (one of the most often cited sources about online statistics), Asia was not even listed separately from the "rest of the world" in 1995 and 1996.