The 'Mobile' face of contemporary China

The adoption and diffusion of the mobile phone has been exceptionally rapid in mainland China, especially in its capital Beijing and the coastal industrialized towns. With almost half a billion mobile phones, China has rapidly become the biggest market for this technology and one of the world’s leading nations in the production of information and communication technologies. In the last years also the amount of qualitative research devoted to ICTs in China is increased, while that of quantitative studies is still limited. This chapter describes a quantitative research study, specifically focused on the appropriation and domestication of the mobile phone in China. On the basis of questionnaires that were personally administered to a convenience sample of 487 respondents, the design of this research attempts to answer the following research question: How the relational sphere in China is reshaped by the massive use of the mobile phone? And then are there striking differences between the attitudes, behaviours, and practices associated with mobile phone use in China and in the West? This is a very broad research topic, but in this chapter we confine our examination to the social implications of the mobile phone use on some aspects of the relational sphere. A sample of 487 respondents can hardly provide a basis for generalizations about the Chinese population as a whole. However, the results of this study will serve to indicate the most important patterns of mobile phone use, which would be a fruitful subject for future research. Thus, the data presented here will provide direction for further inquiries into various aspects of mobile phone use in China.