Digital Politics in China: Mapping the Chinese Internet using Remote-Sensing

The mass adoption of the digital technologies is raising the relevance of the Internet as a central infrastructure for political analysis worldwide. The increasing emergence of China as one of the central global powers introduces the need to better understand the digital component of this country’s politics. However, the information available about the Chinese Internet is scarce. In this paper we apply Internet remote-sensing, a novel technique recently featured in Science, to improve the capacity of scholars to study digital politics in China by better understanding the spatial distribution of the Internet infrastructure in the country.