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Selling speed, suspending citizenship: data throttling, instantaneous downgrading, and the politics of connectivity in China
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DOI：10.1080/1369118X.2026.2699255.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
This article theorizes ‘data throttling’ in China as infrastructural governance of digital citizenship via allocative control of speed. In ‘unlimited’ / ‘high-volume’ plans, connections are slowed after usage thresholds are exceeded. Based on interviews with high-data users across multiple provinces and a small corpus of social-media discourse, we find: (1) throttling is normalized through a strategically vague regime that grants operators definitional authority over ‘normal’ speed and acceptable latency; (2) throttling produces instantaneous downgrading – engineered suspensions of immediacy in payment, mobility, and work – extending speed politics to programmable latency and micro-temporal rationing; and (3) attribution of responsibility shifts from self-blame toward claims on infrastructure for minimum availability. Conceptually, we redefine digital inequality as a schedulable scarcity of usable speed. We advance the lowest speed and latency at which core civic functions remain actionable as a more precise target of governance than access per se.
Keywords:
Data throttling
digital citizenship
infrastructural governance
speed politics
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