Informing the government or fostering public debate?
How Chinese discussion forums open up spaces for deliberation
This article focuses on a popular form of civic practice in China: casual political talk that occurs in online
spaces that are not ostensibly political. We investigate how Chinese citizens engage in politics through a comparative analysis of
everyday talk on health issues across three popular online discussion forums: a government-orientated forum (Qiangguo
Luntan), a commercial-lifestyle forum (Tieba), and a commercial-topical forum focused on parental
advice (Yaolan). Our findings show that conventional deliberation directly involving conflictual and resistant
attitude against state authorities is not prominently embraced by Chinese citizens in everyday online settings. However, communal
and less confrontational forms of discourse are important for the proto-political talk to turn political, thus serving as
prerequisite conditions for the emergence of an online public sphere. We argue that to explain how the public sphere emerges in
everyday (non-political) spaces in China, it is essential to take communal discursive forms into account.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The position of the public in healthcare governance
- 3.The Chinese internet and the public sphere
- 4.Online spaces and everyday political talk in China
- 5.Research focus and method
- 5.1Three cases
- 5.2Sampling
- 5.3Content analysis
- 6.Findings
- 6.1Normative conditions of deliberation
- 6.2Social-civic communicative practices
- 7.Discussion
- 8.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
Bibliography
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Sun, Yu, Todd Graham & Marcel Broersma
2021.
Complaining and sharing personal concerns as political acts: how everyday talk about childcare and parenting on online forums increases public deliberation and civic engagement in China.
Journal of Information Technology & Politics ► pp. 1 ff.
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