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Does Internet Matter in China?
李华芳 @ 2009-10-16 22:00
Does Internet Matter in China?
Li Huafang
Hu Yong, 2008,?The Rising Cacophony: Personal expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age, Guangxi Normal University Press. （胡泳，2008，《众声喧哗：网络时代的个人表达与公共讨论》，广西师范大学出版社。）
The paper,?The Internet and Civil Society in China: a preliminary assessment, is Guobin Yang’s pioneering study on the relationship between Internet and politics, which came up with a question that whether Internet has boosted the development of civil society.[1] In another word, what is the relationship between Internet and civil society?
There are two explanations on this issue. At first, Yang employed a contentious politics framework, which is the most prevailing theory in Internet politics in China. According to this theory, Internet has been used as a “tool” against political authorities in China. Internet, as Yang claimed, provided a new way of protesting. It offers opportunities to people to group together. These groups have been deemed as micro-political powers that may bring up democratic public sphere in the future, because people on the Internet will be able to share information more convenient than ever before. Besides, Internet makes it easier for the public to get access to information which may increase the public’s interests and enhance their capabilities to participate in political movements.
James C. Mulvenon supported Yang’s arguments. In his testimony,?Breaching the Great Firewall on “China’s State Control Mechanisms and Methods” 2005,?[2] James believed that Internet in China would be able to reduce the control power of CCP, which has suggested a path that might lead China to democracy. Although it is possible, it won’t be an easy mission. To those who want to use Internet to promote democracy in China, they have to break up not only the information censorship but also the technical barrier that the GFW has set up.
However, the second explanation, refuting Yang’s first theory, treated Internet as a tool of propagandizing rather than a tool of protesting. This explanation may overstate the control power of CCP, although CCP does play the role of “big brother” in watching other traditional media.
The second explanation has been challenged by the facts that information censorship and GFW are the main issues discussed by those Chinese Internet users who are able to get through the GFW, or those who can know other languages, in addition to Chinese. So, Yang upgraded his theory from a co-evolution perspective towards the relationship between the protesters and the controllers.
In fact, the above two analyses share a common theoretical basis that Internet is only a tool. The major difference between them is that who controls the tool: the protesters or the controllers. Hu Yong is not satisfied of these extreme explanations. Although Hu Yong’s research is mainly about communication theory which has made him focus more on the relationship between individual expression and the public discussion or public sphere in the Internet Age, he has analyzed the role of Internet in China from the perspective of Internet politics.
Hu made two aspects of contribution to Internet politics theories. First, Hu’s book was a challenge to those who have held dichotomy in political theories. Newsgroups, BBS, and online chatting through various IM tools such as QQ, MSN, Gtalk and Skype have facilitated citizen activities. However, the progresses of E-government programs, launched in 1991, have also enhanced the propaganda. “Is it the best framework for observing and analysing the real situation,” Hu Yong questioned. He emphasized the public discussion or the public sphere, and wanted to find out the relationships behind individuals, public sphere (which refers to civil society), and the government authorities. This refuted two popular theories in political research in China: the “individual vs. state” dichotomy, and “civil society vs. state” dichotomy. Hu stressed that the real world of Internet is so complicated that a simple dichotomy theory fails to work out.
Second, Hu introduced an “individual-civil society” approach to examine Internet development. Internet with techniques of hypertext, multimedia, and interactivity, has become a “common media” (GongYou MeiTi, which is a core idea of Hu Yong’s work) that enable individual voices to form a public sphere. The development of Internet has spontaneously generated public sphere. And the public sphere cannot be simply treated as a protesting tool or a controlling tool. Hu, by using the term “common media”, demonstrated that there were protesters and controllers in this particular public sphere. Both individuals and state authorities contributed to the public sphere by using the “common media”. So, it may be not a good idea, as Hu Yong pointed out, to insist on use of contentious political approach in the area.
However, Hu didn’t pay much attention to Internet politics, perhaps because his main concern was communication rather than politics. There were plenty of discussions about how “common media” had shaped the public sphere and how it had changed the relationship between private and public sphere, which were presented in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. These three chapters, which Hu might not realize, had actually demonstrated a vivid picture of Internet politics by analysing the complexity of the relationships among “individuals”, “public sphere”, and “state authorities ”. In this case, Internet does matter in China.
[1] Guobin Yang, 2003, The Internet and Civil Society in China: A Preliminary Assessment,?Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 12, No. 36, pp. 453-475.
[2]http://www.uscc.gov/hearings/2005hearings/written_testimonies/05_04_14wrts/mulvenon_james_wrts.pdf
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