In the early 2000s a contentious public sphere began to emerge in China. Online forums became the platforms for vigorous discussions of matters of public interest, and in some cases these discussions compelled the state to change existing policies or back down from unpopular initiatives. In this book, sociologist Ya-Wen Lei documents the rise of this public sphere, showing how it went beyond the more constrained contentious politics typical of offline China and presenting a theory for how it emerged, as well as exploring how and why it has been suppressed in recent years.
Lei argues that this public sphere differed from public discourse in previous periods of the People's Republic in a number of ways. In particular, with the introduction of the internet this discourse enjoyed freedom never experienced by the Party-controlled traditional media outlets, even the commercialized ones. Expressions of opinion could no longer be turned off as soon as the Party had determined its preferred course, as the “mass line” strategy implies. Contention in this new public sphere also differed from other forms of contention and nascent civil society that were documented in the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike the (mostly) constrained, rules-conscious protests of laid-off SOE workers or overtaxed villagers of the late 1990s, the internet-based “public opinion incidents” involved Chinese from around the country, inspired by their own sense of justice to agitate over issues in which they did not necessarily have a personal stake. Also, unlike the typically localized offline protests, national public opinion incidents in cyberspace were too dangerous for the Party to view as potentially tolerable for their information value.
Lei identifies three interrelated developments as crucial in leading to the emergence of the new contentious public sphere. First, the Party's increasing reliance on law and legal procedures to implement and justify state policies had unintended spillover effects. Chinese citizens gained a new set of rhetorical tools with which to push back against state actors: loyalist “rightful resistance” used the state's own commitments against it. Some of them also went further, coming to believe in rights to which they felt entitled even when the state did not signal that they were acceptable, and a small group of public-interest-minded rights lawyers emerged that promoted this new rights consciousness and helped citizens use it to advocate for themselves. The second development was the creation of the market-oriented news media. Incentivized by public demand and further motivated by their own changing conceptions of their professional role, journalists engaged in much more critical reporting of social issues. The third development, of course, was the new technology of the internet, which made the Party's control over information and discourse much less precise and effective, at least for a time.
No single element of this process will be unfamiliar to readers of The China Quarterly, but Lei's book deftly ties them together into an integrated picture. Rights lawyers raised awareness of the new conception of rights through journalists and the online media. Publicity then proved to be a powerful weapon in getting favourable treatment for their clients. Online media made it possible to drum up and sustain interest in a topic even if Party authorities cut off journalistic coverage. However, Lei argues convincingly that this is not simply a liberation technology story. Without journalists and lawyers whose incentives and professional values led them to call attention to these social issues, netizens would not have learned about or paid much attention to them.
Of course, Lei does not miss the crucial fourth element – the Party-state. She makes clear that none of this could have taken place outside of the context of a fragmented authoritarianism. This fragmentation, long noted in China studies, increased in the context of rapid social and technological change, as no single arm of the Party-state had control over all of the online and traditional media channels that together comprised the new public sphere. Because of this, the Party was unable to fully rein in this development despite the threat it posed. Under Xi, of course, this changed. By centralizing control over all media and rounding up the leading rights lawyers and other activists he has, for now, reversed the direction of the liberalizing trend. Indeed, one might retell the story as the Party's successful fight against a temporary aberration. In this telling, a relatively small number of idealists wilfully mistook granted rights for inalienable rights and took advantage of the state's momentary disarray as it built new institutions and technologies to deal with the internet. While these activists were briefly successful, the Party's adaptive Leninism soon kicked into gear and reasserted the status quo of the 1990s, when even the most crusading journalist, netizen, or lawyer would stay well clear of the red lines surrounding a constrained public sphere.
While the chief contribution of the book is in its theory, this theory is underpinned by a great depth and breadth of original empirical research. Lei interviewed over 160 people, read a wide variety of government documents, local and national newspapers, and online discussions, and analysed specific bodies of text with computer-aided quantitative methods in order to validate her sense of trends and patterns. Lei also drew from a wide reading of the secondary literature on these topics and used data from existing national surveys as a further check.
This work should be widely read among academics of any discipline interested in the development of Chinese politics, media or society. It is also suitable for the advanced undergraduate level, wearing its theory and quantitative methods fairly lightly in the interests of being accessible to a broader readership, and illustrating its ideas with numerous case studies. Policymakers and activists engaged with these issues in China or elsewhere may also find it useful for a deeper dive into the emergence and suppression of a public sphere.
