Crossing the River by Groping for Stones: From Free Expression to Shared Meanings to Collective Political Action in China’s Blogosphere

Based on empirical dissertation research in Beijing, this paper is about the power of the marginal in the struggle for space. It is based on the notion that, in the contemporary urban China of the Information Age, the “Internet of thoughts and ideas” allows for a proliferation of value systems based on an emerging polyphony of voices that are different from the official view.
Since society is unthinkable without spaces in which individuals can develop shared meanings, this paper zooms in on the possibility that the diversity contemporary urban China is experiencing through the Internet liberates minds and ideas and helps people to reclaim society as a lived project. In particular, it examines under what conditions this increased informational diversity facilitates thoughts and ideas that could produce resistance to ideological manipulations and could eventually turn into creative and deliberative institutionalized attacks on the political order.
Adapting Castells’s ideas around the Network Society as well as the work of other preeminent spatial thinkers and social theorists to the case of the Chinese blogosphere, this paper focuses on individual agency and on space/place as interpretive categories for understanding, conceptualizing cyberspace and China’s physical (urban) space as interdependent dimensions and the blogosphere as a new type of social space in which thriving free thought has the capacity to form conduits for dynamic dissent. To comprehend the shape of these ‘spaces of dissent’ and linkages between discourse and action, I ask people involved to articulate their own politics and discuss these in relation to their experiences and how they express them in their blogs.
Based on empirical research findings, I argue that emancipatory “spaces of dissent” come into being – and can thus be perceived – before deliberative action emanates from them. Mapping out the specifics of such “spaces of dissent” and whether/how they can lead to new institutions is a daring task deserving of rigorous scholarly attention.