Universalist-Relativist Cultural Ethics, China's On-Line Communities, and the Global Internet

Recent literature describes the rise of Chinese internet cultures with norms of political discourse different from ones typically associated with Chinese state and society. These studies of Chinese on-line communities pose challenges for prevailing internet scholarship in international relations. This paper follows literature that argues such incongruity is due to a theoretical framework employed by the existing international relations scholarship that uses conceptions of unitary states and societies, and that the behavior of Chinese netizens may be better addressed by an alternative theoretical approach that describes on-line communities as cultures. The paper is an epistemological argument for the relevancy of the universalist-relativist ethics discourse as a culture-based approach to study the internet. [China Media Research. 2013; 9(2): 1-10]