Towards A Harmonious Information Society in China? Technology, Tensions and Observations
A symposium held at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, on Friday January 25, 2008.
The symposium is graciously hosted and supported with the help of the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School.
Neoliberal Reforms, Class Polarization, and Discursive Contestationin China
Post-1992 economic reforms in China have been implemented under
the “no debate” curse in media and public communication. This policy
prohibited media debates on the political and social implications of the
economic reforms and opened the way for the implementation of a wide range
of neo-liberal oriented economic and social policies that have led to a
drastic process of social stratification and class polarization. However, as
China’s marginalized intellectual forces and disenfranchised social groups
escalated their struggles against the negative consequences of these reforms
since the early 2000s, they threatened to break the “no debate” curse,
turning China’s media and cyberspace into key sites of contestation over
the directions of the country’s social transformation. In examining the
structures and dynamics of discursive contestation among elite and popular
social forces over a number of key social economic issues, this talk
highlights the highly stratified and fragmented nature of China’s media and
Internet discourses, and discusses their possibilities and limits in
challenging China’s dominant political economic power relations and
foregrounding the social justice agenda in the country’s future political
economic and social development.
Yuezhi Zhao is associate professor and Canada Research Chair in the
Political Economy of Global Communication at the School of Communication,
Simon Fraser University, Canada. She is the author of Media, Market, and
Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line (1998),
coauthor of Sustaining Democracy? Journalism and the Politics of Objectivity
(1998; Chinese edition, 2005), and coeditor of Democratizing Global Media:
One World, Many Struggles (2005) and Global Communications: Toward a
Transcultural Political Economy (2008). Her new book, Communication in
China: Political Economy, Power, and Conflict, will be released in March
2008 by Rowman & Littlefield.
Working-Class Information Society? Open Questions about China and ICTs
This paper is a preliminary attempt to synthesize evidence in urban China under the conceptualization of working-class information society. It starts from an introduction of China’s contemporary urban conditions and their connections with the upsurge in low-end Internet and wireless technologies collectively termed working-class ICTs. What are the patterns of ICT diffusion, appropriation, networked connectivity, and concomitant place-making processes in working-class communities? Does this recent development suggest a more inclusive, harmonious information society characterized by the co-existence of grassroots horizontal communication with ties across class and strata, or a continuation of elite domination? Findings from existing research are discussed and issues for future research identified in this paper.
Jack Qiu Linchuan is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, ChineseUniversity of Hong Kong. His academic interests include Internet and society, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and public sphere, late capitalism, globalization, grassroots media, China, and the Asian Pacific. Currently, Dr. Qiu is conducting research on the spatial and class formations of ICTs in China's key city-regions and the social practices of wireless technologies in Asia.
His publications include many research articles, book chapters, and review essays in Communication Research, the International Journal of Communications Law & Policy, the Journal of Communication Inquiry, China Information, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, Information Communication & Society, Online Journalism Review, Japan Media Review, Global Civil Society Yearbook, Twenty-First Century (in Chinese) and Journalism and Communication Studies (in Chinese). He co-authors the book Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (MIT Press, 2006) with Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, and Araba Sey.
Investigative Journalism, Citizen Journalism and Social Justice
As the Internet, mobile phones and other types of information technologies allow non-journalists to expose social problems and disseminate views on social inequalities and injustices, increasing academic attention is drawn on the rise of ‘citizen journalism’ (CJ) as opposed to professional journalism (PJ). However, most academic discussion about CJ is focusing either on the impact of ‘citizen journalism’ itself upon society or on the challenge that it might pose to traditional media and professional journalists. None of the existing studies focuses primarily on the interactions between CJ and PJ, particularly contemporary investigative journalism (IJ). In many cases CJ and IJ support each other in their attempt to investigate social issues, and open public debate about. On the one hand, blogs and individuals’ websites attempt to gain media attention and recognition in order to attract more readers and advertisers. On the other hand, professional investigative journalists search news sources from bloggers and individual websites. Under increasing external and internal pressures, professional journalists as a whole, and investigative journalists in particular, tend to rely more on CJ for news sources.
Against this background, this paper will discuss the positive effect of CJ on professional journalists’ investigations of social conflicts and problems, which characterize the fast changing Chinese society. In a tightly controlled media environment like China, IJ tends to work together with CJ in order to make investigations into social issues less politically risky, less costly, but more effective. The examination of the interactions between IJ and CJ is important to understand the evolution of Chinese journalism and the role of traditional and new media in addressing social inequalities and injustices in a transitional society.
Xin Xin took up the RCUK Fellowship at the University of Westminster in October 2006. She received her BA in Russian in Beijing, her MA in Broadcasting Journalism and PhD about the development of Xinhua News Agency and globalization at Westminster. Before moving to London, Dr. Xin worked as a journalist at Xinhua for seven years and spent a year in Moscow as a visiting fellow studying Russian language and mass media. She is currently researching Chinese journalism and its relationship to the wider world while teaching postgraduates and undergraduates in media studies. Xin’s work has been published in journals, such as Media, Culture & Society (2006), Journalism Studies (forthcoming), Javnost/The Public (forthcoming), and the book Communications Media, Globalization and Empire, edited by Oliver Boyd-Barrett (2006). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (WPCC) and the editor of the issue Media in China ( Xin’s research interests include Chinese media and society, globalization, news organizations, international communication and comparative media studies.
Contention in Chinese Cyberspace
Popular protests linked to the negative social and environmental consequences of China’s economic reform have been on the rise in recent years. With the diffusion of the internet, protest has taken on some new forms. An important new development is the rise of online activism. The internet is increasingly integrated with conventional forms of locality-specific protest. It is used to mobilize offline protest events. In many cases, however, popular contention takes place in cyberspace. It may spill offline, but its central stage of action is the internet. It is a type of radical, claims-making communicative action. I will refer to this type of online activism as internet contention. My paper will focus on internet contention. The paper first describes the main features of internet contention. Then it outlines an integrated cultural approach to the analysis of internet contention. My central argument is that internet contention reflects the influences of broader social conditions as well as features specific to Chinese internet culture and political culture.
Guobin Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at BarnardCollege. He is also a faculty in the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and an affiliated faculty in the Department of Sociology of ColumbiaUniversity. He has published over twenty refereed journal articles and book chapters on social issues in contemporary China, including the internet and civil society, environmental NGOs, the 1989 student movement, and the Red Guard Movement. He is the editor (with Ching Kwan Lee) of Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (Woodrow Wilson Press and Stanford University Press, 2007). He is completing a book on The Power of the Internet: Chinese Society in the Information Age (Columbia University Press, under contract). Yang received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Writing and Research Grant” (2003), was a fellow at the WoodrowWilsonInternationalCenter for Scholars (2003-2004), and taught as an assistant of sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (2000-2005). He has a Ph.D. in Sociology from New YorkUniversity (2000).
Creation, Participation and Sharing: BuildingCreativeCommons in the Chinese context
Founded by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons (CC) is a copyright licensing scheme that enables copyright holders to grant partial rights to the public while retaining the others. CC was developed based on two major concerns that are interrelated with each other. First, the uniqueness of cultural production predicates that all creations are built upon previous ones in one way or another, thus it is crucial to ensure a diverse and viable public domain, from which everybody could draw intellectual “raw materials” for generating new content. Second, the current trend of copyright expansion has exacerbated the imbalanced power relationship between established content providers and the new ones. As a result, what is at dominance today is a restrictive “permission culture”, in which “creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past”.
CC was first introduced to mainland China by a group of bloggers in 2003, but it was not until 2006 that China was officially recognized by CC as one of the jurisdictions. Some argue that since CC was initially a reaction against the expansion of copyright regulation in the U.S. and since copyright has never been strictly enforced in China, CC loses its significance as an alternative copyright management mechanism in the Chinese context. On the other hand, however, with the development of web 2.0 and the proliferation of user-generated content in China, CC does address the concern of many people when it comes to publicizing their creations online. This paper intends to examine the development of CC in China through the lens of constructing a participatory and free culture. With a combined methodology of survey and interviews, I will address three main questions: first, what are the motivations for people to adopt CC license and what does that indicate about popular perception of copyright law? To what extent is CC in China cultivating a participatory culture and to what extent it failed to live up to the expectation? Lastly, what are some further implications that CC could have on copyright governance in China in the digital age, and maybe more importantly on better realizing the participatory potentials of new communication technology?
Bingchun Meng is a Lecturer in the department of Media and Communications. She has a BA in Chinese Language and Literature (1997) and an MA in Comparative Literature (2000) from Nanjing University, China. She obtained her PhD in Mass Communication (2006) from the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Before joining the LSE, she was a post-doc fellow at AnnenbergSchool for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where she also taught classes on Chinese media.Her major research interests include, first, political economy of Chinese media and information industries in a globalising era; second, the implications of copyright regulation on communication networks and creative activities; third, contextualised analysis of new media and communication technology in the complex of political, economic and cultural developments.
Information and Commercialization: Transitions of Political Communication in China.
This paper aims to discuss the relationship between increasing information and media commercialization and its effects on the social stability in China. In the last three decades, China experienced increased media autonomy and strengthened state control of information, which challenged the conventional modernization theory since the theory argues that the commercialized media will weaken the state control on information by facilitating dissemination of more information. This paper indeed proposes an alternate differentiation mechanism of how commercialization has affected state control of media. The market differentiates media grievances on three dimensions: state-centered; non-state-centered, and ideological. This three-dimensional state-media regime creates a cross-cutting conflict structure, which pushed the state to change its control measures but also offered the state the capacity to maintain the media’s compliance.
Fen Lin, is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She received her M.S. in Statistics in University of Chicago and B.A in Economics in Peking University. Her research focuses on media and political communication, political sociology, economic sociology, poverty and inequality, organizational analysis, and statistical methods.