Net Inclusion: New Media’s Impact on Deliberative Politics in China

Abstract

What is the role of new media in driving political change in China? How do we understand the interaction of rapid increases in connectivity, regime censorship and democratic outcomes? This article seeks to assess the democratic implications of new media in China through the lens of three key and nested criteria derived from general theories of deliberative democracy: information access, rational-critical deliberation and mechanisms of vertical accountability. The key finding is that connectivity expands political opportunity. How this opportunity is exploited is up to users, who often vary widely in their political preferences, values, and norms of behaviour. The results are multiple mechanisms of change taking place simultaneously and the development of a more interactive and pluralistic public sphere. While China obviously still has to develop far more formalised and institutionalised mechanisms for managing state-society relations, political pluralism in the form of online deliberation might be considered a foundational condition for a more interactive and liberalised political order rooted in greater public deliberation and societal feedback. Moderate forms of discourse and societal feedback are tenuous and increasingly exist in a chaotic and diversified online discourse defined equally as much by new methods of authoritarian propaganda and virulent nationalist ideas.

Key Words:

• New media
• political communication
• democratisation
• deliberative democracy
• social mobilisation
• information freedom

Notes

1. Based on the content analysis presented herein, a core political issue is one that has been identified by media experts as having direct implications for the legitimacy and durability of the PRC. Peripheral issues focused on economics and social and culture change are more easily discussed and debated, whereas the regime invests most of its attention, censorship and propaganda resources in controlling and influencing public debate on core issues.

2. 公告：无论怎么关闭屏蔽，乌有之乡都会一直支持薄熙来！！!, posted by Chinese journalist “Michael Anti,” April 12, 2012 (see also Higgins 2012).

3. Selecting on the “dependent variable” refers to selecting cases and empirical evidence based on outcomes rather than causes. Thus, those scholars who wish to make a pessimistic argument about the nature of information freedom in China would select only those cases that illustrate the worst of censorship in the country. The argument against selecting based on outcomes is that it biases the analysis. While the approach used herein is less ideal than say randomly sampling cases for analysis, it does seek to avoid this selection bias and present a balanced approach to evaluating the empirical record.

4. Habermas can be criticised for having an overly optimistic view of the possibility that there is such as a thing as a rational endpoint to discussion where relative agreement is achieved. While adopting the concept of rational-critical deliberation as a good measure of the quality of democratic discourse, I bracket this discussion of the teleology of public opinion formation.

5. Sensitive topics are operationalised as topics 1–7 (political) and 26–31 (international) in Table A1 in the Appendix, The operationalisation of these concepts in this study is based on consensus information provided by the more than 100 media professionals interviewed for this research. Both political and international news coverage is presented, so readers can make their own determinations about relative openness of coverage.

6. In terms of the coding framework in Table A2, this operational formula can be represented specifically as the following Boolean equation: shielded=(A or B > 0) AND (D or E > 0) AND (I > 0).