Conference Announcement and Call for Papers

CHINA AND THE INTERNET Technology, Economy, and Society in Transition

During the past decade, the Internet community in China has grown exponentially. What was once foreign to the Beijing literati has now become home to 46 million Chinese. While worldwide Internet development has slowed down due to the dot-com clash, the Internet community in China continues to expand.

To explore this interesting phenomenon, the conference brings together scholars, researchers, policy analysts, industry leaders, journalists, and legal practitioners around the world. Among the issues addressed are: Why can China sustain the Internet boom despite the current adverse conditions? What is the social, economic, and cultural impact of the Internet on China? What roles do government authorities, information technology firms, individual users, and foreign businesses play in shaping the new technology in China? How can China develop its information society under a socialist market economy?

The conference will be held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles on May 30-31, 2003. It will be jointly sponsored by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford, and the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University.

Papers presented at the conference will be selected for publication in a journal or as a conference volume (or both). We welcome submissions from all disciplines. Partial or full travel grants will be available to graduate students and international attendants whose papers have been accepted for presentation.

If you are interested in submitting a proposal for presentations or panels on any of the following topics:

- China's Internet policy and regulation - usage patterns and social change - regional network developments - China's e-government initiatives - e-commerce and the Internet market - online journalism in China - network security - discourse of online citizen

or if you have any further questions or suggestions about the conference, please contact Prof. Peter Yu at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law peter_yu@msn.com or Jack Qiu at the Annenberg School for Communication (lqiu@usc.edu).

All proposals will be peer reviewed and should consist of at least 2 pages of single-lined text. To facilitate the process, authorship and contact information should be included on a separate sheet. The deadline for submission is December 15, 2002.