Sensitivity of the Chinese Web: A Techno- Semiotic Perspective into the Scriptural Economy of Chinese Computerised Media Allan Bahroun his article intends to create a dialogue between ongoing discussions in French techno-semiotics and the contemporary debates about the ‘Chinese Internet’. Resorting to Yves Jeanneret’s interpretation of Michel de Certeau’s scriptural economy, the author demonstrates that a techno-semiotic approach to computerised writing yields conceptual resources to disentangle the research on the Chinese Web from its ideological polarisation. he text articulates three explanatory matrices to address the profound semiotic mutations characteristic of the development of computerised media. he first matrix discusses the applicability of the scriptural economy to the domain of computerised writing; the second produces a critical definition of the popular notion ‘sensitive words’ and more generally elaborates on the construction of ‘web sensitivity’; the third offers a series of documented observations into the political economy of China’s Internet-Service Providers and presents hypotheses on the dynamics of technological surveillance. hese three matrices, interwoven around the specific case of China’s computerised media industries, allow the author to make a tentative contribution toward a broader reflection on the semiotics of the Web. KEYWORDS scriptural economy; techno-semiotics; web sensitivity; computerised devices; Chinese web Introduction here is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context [...] Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. (Bakhtin 1986) … this is the last fragment written by Bakhtin in 1974 (Todorov 1981) he story is written in the form of a diary, and the last entry, from 2025, ends with the announcement: Comrades, in all online language there is only one term let: ‘sensitive word!’ (同志 们，现在所有网上的汉字只剩下‘敏感词’啦!). (GFW Story — GFW历史) (Li 2012) A satire posted by a netizen on a social media site (Ash 2014) On June 25, 2012, an Internet blogger published a short story about an augmented version of the ‘Great Firewall’. he ‘GFW Turbo’ escapes the power of the authorities and starts censoring keywords automatically. he agents of the ‘Anti-GFW Ministry’ are unable to regain control over the machine, which forbids the use of the entire Chinese language, except for this very last phrase: ‘sensitive word’. Set against Bakhtin’s pithy last word, the fictionally anticipated suppression of a whole language highlights the governmental hubris of trying to block the dialogic character of language itself. he utopia implied in the former is the dread of the latter, and this tension between infinite semiosis and the coercive management of meaning through technology, sets the tone for our discussion. Punctum, 1(1): 124-139, 2015 DOI: 10.18680/hss.2015.0009 Copyright  © 2015 Allan Bahroun. Licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/