Session 9.1: Blogging and online discourse
SESSION 9: Blogging and online discourse
(Part 1) Moderator: Rebecca MacKinnon, Assistant Professor, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong.
- Jiang Min, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies, UNC-Charlotte. “Authoritarian Deliberation: Public Deliberation in China”
- Xiao Qiang, Adjunct Professor, University of California at Berkeley. “The Rise of Online Public Opinion and Its Political Impact”
- Ashley Esraey, Assistant Professor, Middlebury College. “Political Discourse in Chinese Blogs”
Where the threat of censorship is very real, how do we start talking about authoritarian deliberation? There are windows for positive changes. Looking at a poll in Zeguo township, allowing residents to voice their opinions in a deliverative poll. The outcome from that showed strong concern for environmental problems.
Do countries have to be democratized first in order to achieve public deliberation?
->How can experiences elssewhere, the West,be applied to China?
Defining the Western approach to deliberation as: when people examine a problem and arrive at a well-reaseoned solution after a period of inclusive, respectiful consideration of diverse points of view.
Critics respond with ‘lower’ interests, such as the right to speak in the first place.
What are the possibilities to make positive changes?
In government, this can take the form of juries, decision-making process, elections, multilateral deliberation. In civil society, from informal political discussions, communities, media and public opinion as well as multilateral deliberation. Multilateral deliberation overlaps with those two interests and Media & Business as well. The divisions between the three can be blurred.
Looking at definitions of Authoritarian Deliberation. The type of deliberation in China could be different. What types of public deliberation are there in China? On the screen now are 华夏知情Net and 西词胡同Net were informal conversations happen, wherepeople gather and talk about issues important to them.
Then there are things like 强国论坛 where the discussions occure but with more assumption of controlled discussion and 湖南红网 where many discussions are of people defending theirlegal and consumer rights from corporations, and lawyers working through that community.
豆瓣九点: the opposite of CCTV. CCTV has CCTV1-? Douban has channels 1-9, counteracts CCTV/mainstream media. Antiwave, two podcasters (see Danwei.org for English-language interview) who are declaredly anti-mainstream media, an attitude of parody of MSM. 不许联想, aka Wang Xiaofeng (see Danwei and ESWN).
‘Govenrment decision-making also happens on blogs, members of the NPC and CPPCC, from politicians to real estate developers, who express their ideas, and allow for some insight into the decisio-making process, for decisions made for us, not by us.’
Wrapping up the series of slides which compare deliberative platform websites in the US with highly-related Chinese counterparts, we see that America has AMerica Speaks, and China has Beijing Legislative Bill Comments page on Sina.com, which invites comments from general public before bills are passed.
There are many online and offline deliberative platforms which need to be better understood.