In the current historiography of the Internet, the years 1994 and 1987 are marked as two competing temporal nodes regarding the origin of Chinese Internet. As early as 1986,Chinese overseas students had begun to disseminate information and form communities through computer networks, resulting in the launch of the world’s first English electronic journal established by Chinese, the first Chinese electronic journal and the first Chinese online forum. This article examines the “prehistory” of Chinese Internet from 1986 to 1994 and finds that intellectual elites at the forefront of information technology as well as on the national borders were full of anxiety about China’s technological and cultural modernization, and were prompted to actively explore computer input method for Chinese characters and seek community-based public expression. Despite the gradual decline of these Chinese online communities, they still had inextricable intersections with China, bringing talent and technical enlightenment to domestic Internet construction, shaping foreign and domestic political imagination on China’s Internet in the post-Cold War context and providing a reference for exploring alternative Internet culture and understanding the global Internet histories.

Imaginary serves as a crucial tool for understanding the early internet, reflecting the intertwined relationship between the internet and society. It provides a valuable pathway for exploring the early stages of internet development. Adopting a “long duration” analytical perspective and drawing upon the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries, this study integrates language, rhetoric, and action to investigate public and memory discourses about early Chinese internet imaginaries (1984–1999). The findings reveal that early internet imaginaries, as assemblages of materiality, meaning, and normativity, unfold across technological, value, and social dimensions, centering on connecting the world, realizing national revival, and reconfiguring daily life. These imaginaries exhibit characteristics of macro-level comprehensiveness, strong technological optimism, and pronounced pragmatism. Within the narratives of “catching up” and “revival,” the internet, as embedded in Chinese society, was envisioned as a means for underdeveloped regions to leapfrog in development, reflecting its unique socio-cultural significance in modern China. Significantly, 1995 emerges as a pivotal exploratory node in this “long duration,” marking the transition of the internet from an abstract concept to practical implementation. This period witnessed profound changes across technical infrastructure, policy support, commercialization, and social applications, with imaginaries shifting from elite-driven narratives to broader public participation, and themes extending from macro-level visions to everyday experiences. Internet imaginaries serve as an analytical lens, offering insights into the evolving perceptions of the internet in Chinese society and presenting a promising avenue for studying the social history of the internet in China.

Websites that have disappeared are crucial objects of study in web history. This article examines the life span of an online BBS (Bulletin Board System) called “Journalists’ Home” and explores its interactions with Chinese journalism. At its peak, the website attracted a large number of journalists who integrated it into their daily work, engaging in various stages of news production and fostering a professional community. It served as a key intermediary for journalists in China’s commercial media, facilitating informal socialization beyond the formal workplace. This study finds that “Journalists’ Home” emerged at the intersection of web history and China’s journalism reform. It illustrates how professional socialization in journalism occurs within informal settings, such as online social networks. Informal socialization contributed positively to community cohesion by shaping work practices and fostering collective interpretation.

In the mobile Internet era, Internet cafes are disappearing in both rural and urban areas. While a minority of urban Internet cafes have been transitioned into eSports arenas, rural Internet cafes have not undergone such a transformation and are thus closing down. The rise of the platform society in the mobile Internet era has led to a triple disembedding of rural Internet cafes, fundamentally undermining their operational foundation. Therefore, the prevailing wave of closures in the Internet cafes industry cannot be merely attributed to the widespread adoption of smartphones. Instead, it reflects a broader social transformation driven by the iteration of ICTs. In this major transformation, emerging platform technology systems have exerted a profound impact on the outdated infrastructure of Internet cafes, leading to their gradual disembedding from rural society and eventual decline. This also reflects the progress of China’s Internet over the past 30 years, as rural society moves beyond the era of underdeveloped network infrastructure characterized by the use of Internet cafes, and gradually integrates into the platform systems of the mobile Internet era.

Over three decades ago, the internet entered China as a new medium inherently equipped with international communication attributes. Today, international communication has risen to the level of a national strategic priority—an outcome not only of China’s own developmental trajectory but also of the global proliferation of the internet. To fully grasp China’s strategic position and contemporary mission in international communication, it is imperative to re-examine the internet’s essential role and historical evolution as foundational infrastructure for cross-border communication. It also calls for a critical reflection on the long-standing cognitive separation between international and domestic communication. Revisiting this trajectory and re-centering the internet’s transformation from an “inward-facing” to an “outward-facing” infrastructure is key to achieving breakthroughs in China’s international communication. Looking ahead to the next thirty years of the internet, the challenges of China’s international communication will not only be limited to the traditional levels of technology, application, market and policy, but will also go deeper into the “deep-water zone” of how China can truly go global and deeply integrate with the rest of the world.

The findings regarding the relationship between information attributes and communication effects on social media have predominantly been derived from textual information in previous research, while video information in the form of audiovisual symbols remains an area in need of further exploration. Questions such as: What is the relationship between its information attributes and communication effects? How do its formal and content characteristics intertwine to influence communication outcomes? —have yet to be fully addressed. This study conducts a full-sample analysis of short video content related to the 2017 NPC & CPPCC released by the official accounts of three central mainstream media outlets on Weibo. Employing computer-assisted and manual coding for content analysis, combined with participatory observation, the study examines the relationships between the communication effects and three dimensions of short video information, including the textual features of video titles, content characteristics, and audiovisual format attributes. Findings reveal that short videos with better communication effects tend to convey positive, equitable, and stable informational attributes. Compared to previous studies based on textual information, video information aligns more closely with the social attributes of social media, such as information communication and emotional management. However, the positive impact of formal features remains limited.

Public health crises pose acute challenges to the aging population in rural China. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, this study analyzes 321 valid questionnaires to verify the integration of social support theory and coping appraisal framework. Through in-depth interviews with 24 villagers in southern Anhui, it reveals how grassroots strengths and new media technologies synergistically enhance health-protective behaviors among elderly residents by providing instrumental, emotional and informational support, demonstrating the core role of grassroots forces in crisis communication and public health protection. Based on social support theory, findings demonstrate that these three dimensions of support significantly strengthen self-efficacy and response efficacy of the residents, highlighting grassroots governance’s irreplaceable role in bridging the “last mile” of health communication and emphasizing social environments as key drivers of rural health behavior patterns.

With the rise of online videos, the dissemination of emerging technologies and technological achievements in the country has become more vivid. The younger generation, who have grown up amid the national rejuvenation, has also demonstrated stronger confidence and identification in the nation’s science and technology in the comment area. This paper takes the comment text of science and technology videos on Bilibili as the research object, and applies sentiment analysis, semantic network analysis, BTM topic model and other techniques to examine youth audience’ attitudes towards national identity after watching science and technology videos through the cognition-affect-conation model. The results show that after watching science and technology videos, youth audience always take the country as the core subject in cognition process; they also show strong positive emotions in terms of affect and mainly express their emotions through four ways: comparing China to other countries, endorsing local brands, honoring researchers, and forming collective memories; in terms of conation, they mainly show positive behavior intentions such as support, expect and tribute. This paper aims to explore cognation, affect and conation towards national identity among youth audience which shown in comments on science and technology videos, and to provide a new research perspective for the research on the effect of science and technology video communication.