The Internet with Chinese Characteristics: Democratizing Discourse But Not Politics

This paper seeks to contextualize the internet as a tool for democratization in China. Scholars have argued both for and against the prospect of the internet serving as a vehicle for political change in China, and authoritarian regimes more broadly, without reaching a consensus. We argue that part of the reason for the lack of consensus is that the internet’s potential should be seen in more nuanced terms. The internet has served to open up the Chinese public sphere and democratize discussion. For reasons of demographics, history, and state control, however, the internet has not been the center of political mobilization against the regime. We begin by reviewing the literature on democratization and the internet in China. We find that much of the discussion focuses on the overly general and binary question of whether the internet leads to democratization, which is often too broadly defined. Instead, we suggest that the term democratization generally encompasses two concepts that should be analytically separate. The first aspect of democratization is the democratization of public discourse and the development of a Habermasian public sphere, through which the state loses its agenda setting ability. This is distinct from explicitly political democratization, in which the internet serves as a tool to achieve specific policy outcomes. We argue that the history of the internet in China has strongly influenced disparate outcomes in these separate spheres. Early on, China’s history of dissent emerging from universities and its legacy of state controlled media led leaders to be suspicious of the mobilization potential of the internet. At the same time, the marketization of China coupled with the limitations of state media, has allowed for relatively more open discussion online.Next, we review more recent evidence of how the internet contributes to a public discourse in China but how it has not had a similar impact on political mobilization. We find that, outside of certain sensitive topics, the internet has allowed netizens to set the agenda for public discussion. This is innovative relative to the previous status quo: the state set the framework for public discourse via state media vehicles, with citizens maintaining little power to change the direction of conversation. Yet, at the same time, we also show that a number of factors and tactics mean the state has been able to limit and channel the internet’s potential for political mobilization. As previous research has found, any attempt to use the internet for policy advocacy elicited swift and decisive action by the authorities. Overall, the Chinese experience suggests that the term democratization, when used in relation to the potentiality of the internet, has been used in an overly broad way. We thus end with a call for more attention to be paid to the specific mechanisms and circumstances through which the internet can lead to (limited) democratization in specific contexts. Research in this direction is more likely to lead to productive advances in our understanding of how technology shapes and is utilized by authoritarian societies.