Coal and the Internet in China Digital governance and politics of markets

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the Internet in institutional change by means of an explorative case study of Chinese coal sector governance. Coal is a resource of unquestioned importance for the Chinese political economy and was as such a zealously defended stronghold of the planned economy. A bastion that fell to market forces in 2007 in no small extent due to the technological affordances of the Internet, which enabled an abolishment of large annual coal summits in favour of Internet mediated online markets. This paper questions the official account that tends to after rationalize the event as a linear and centrally controlled reform and instead brings out a more complex picture of interplay between ideas, institutions, and technologies in shaping the institutional change.

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