DACHS collects and preserves website resources relevant for Chinese Studies, with special focus on social and political discourse. The main aim is to make the collected data available for researchers and scholars in the future.

The World Wide Web is an everyday reality for all of us. Not only do we access information on the internet but we also create our own online presence on social media platforms or blogs. It has simply become a mirror of the society. The web allows us to follow public discourse on certain subjects or analyze contents of websites regarding political, social and cultural significance
As one of the world’s largest online community and despite the tight control on website contents by the Chinese government, the new media technology allows the netizens in China to express themselves more freely and circulate information fast and widely. Therefore, preserving websites of valuable content is obviously of high interest to researchers in the field of Chinese Studies. However, in general the average lifetime of a website is actually very short. The information or resources on the web constantly change, are replaced or even disappear, especially in China. In order to prevent all those valuable material from being permanently lost, our purpose is to identify, archive and provide accessibility to websites relevant for Chinese Studies. The DACHS project wants to contribute to maintain the content of websites for research in the future.

Generally speaking, everything about and around China could be of interest for future research in the field of Chinese studies. However, since it is beyond our possibilities to preserve all of this without distinction, we have developed certain strategies to create a meaningful web archive. Furthermore, our selection choices are based on human judgment which admittedly is always subjective. But given our so-called “information network” consisting of scholars with different expertise on China, we believe that the selection is consciously made at a broad range of issues.