Xiao Qiang, Adjunct Professor, University of California at Berkeley. “The Rise of Online Public Opinion and Its Political Impact”

Xiao Qiang is looking at the South Tiger Photos incident and Yilishen incident. Looking at the Chinese internet from the perspective of Habermas’ “public sphere”. But, China’s internet space is heavily censored, controlled. With respect to ’sudden-breaking events’ and politically sensitive topics, there is only censorship.

The defining atmosphere on the CHinese internet is one of political ideology. Not to the degree of the Mao era. This is the capitalist information age. The problem, though, is that everything that you do see on the Chinese internet is ideologically correct.

The structure of the internet, however, allows vulnerable groups to spread information. And it is the structure of the internet that allows these groups to get around internet controls. Those facing the biggest threat from the internet at present are officials at all levels.

Ashley Esraey, Assistant Professor, Middlebury College. “Political Discourse in Chinese Blogs”

His approach to analyzing blogs is quite different from Xiao Qiang’s. Not looking exactly at what they say, but the significance of what is being said in a more quantitative way.

Questions he asks:

Do blogs threaten the state’s ability to control access to political information in China?
How different is political discourse in blogs compared to that of official media?
To what extent does propaganda exist in the blogosphere?
How popular are political bloggers? How interlinked are popular bloggers?

Looking at his methodoligcal approach to analysis of these questions. He uses Google Blogsearch, for the year of 2006, sampling 6,000 blogs. Later the took a smaller number of these blogs, eliminitating those that focus on hard news, politics, environment politics, and those not written by Chinese or about China. Today he’s looking at linking this research with earlier research he’s done looking at Chinese newspapers since the 80s, American and Vietnamese print media as well.

Huge jumps in pluralism and criticism on blogs, he’s found, than on newspapers. Criticism of Mao Zedong, even! At the same time, you do find national propaganda, but barely, on blogs, compared to newspapers. Local propaganda, is not to be found on blogs.

Compared to Vietnam, Chinese blogs have a disproportionately high level of criticism. Breaking that pluralism down,he finds 39% of it is not critical per se of the government. Highly critical of corporations, however.

Principal findings?

Political discourse and debate much more frequent online, and propaganda not that apparent. Frequent criticism of corporations. Often grip about national affairs. Occasional criticism of top leaders. Much criticism is cautious, and provide government sources “righful resistance”. Lots of information dissemination. Moderately- to highly-read bloggers comprise 25% of bloggers (250 hits or more per posting). Many blogs have far higher hit rates, but this is still relevant.

Small numbers of bloggers are highly interlinked via blogrolls. Five percent of blogs linked to 100 other blogs.

Once information is sent out, it’s hard for that information to be erased, because it gets passed on.

Will the revolution be blogged?

Where there is great repression, there is also great resistance. What’s happening on the blogsphere, people are taking their “hidden transcripts” and pushing those out into the public spheres in new ways.

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