From Cold War Geopolitics to the Crisis of Global Capitalism: The History of Chinese Wireless Network Infrastructures (1987-2020)

Abstract

This paper explores the genesis and growth of the current Chinese wireless network infrastructures by pulling together the historical threads of two telecommunications infrastructures: first, the development of the first-tier inter-provincial optical backbone, the Eight Vertical and Eight Horizontal Fibre-optic Grid, in the late 1980s and 1990s; and second, the deployment of two broadband-access cellular networks, the third-generation (3G) cellular networks in 2008 and the fourth-generation (4G) networks from 2013 to now, which constitute the wireless network's edges. I insert the development of Chinese wireless networks since the 1980s into the interconnected global technological environment, contextualizing the infrastructure deployment in the history of Sino-American technological cooperation and competition, traversing the final decade of the Cold War era (the 1980s), the dual global expansion of economic neoliberalism and informational technology since the 1990s and the crisis of global capitalism since 2008. This historical inquiry reconciles two historical (meta-)narratives that are not always compatible with each other-the Chinese narratives grounded on the overarching concept of Chinese post-socialism, and the narratives in Western discourses that often evoke Cold War/post-Cold War dialectics. This paper examines the global distribution of wireless network infrastructures on the basis of commercialization, technology transfers and trades of techno-commodities across borders, challenging the reduced depiction of the Chinese wireless network as an extension, or an exception, to the West-centred techno-capitalist system.