Internet and Engagement: General Arguments and Chinese Context
The Internetās political and social role in facilitating citizen engagement has been extensively discussed by scholars in Western democracies (e.g., Boulianne, 2009; Xenos & Moy, 2007). One set of scholars contend that the Internet has the potential to encourage people to participate in the political process and civic activities. The major logical thoughts behind this positive effect include the following: (1) owing to its technological advantages, the Internet has lowered the cost for engagement and eased the socioeconomic restrictions on participation among citizens, especially money, time, and effort (Delli Carpini, Cook, & Jacobs, 2004); (2) as an information-rich medium, the Internet effectively promotes the flow of information and exchanges of opinion, which constitute the basic resource for democratic citizenship based on the informed citizenry thesis (Shah, Cho, Eveland, & Kwak, 2005; Weber, Loumakis, & Bergman, 2003); and (3) as a horizontal communicative space, the Internet also facilitates the development of social networks and the growth of social capital, which help people to coordinate their actions and engage in collective activities (e.g., Shah, Schmierbach, Hawkins, Espino, & Donavan, 2002). At the same time, another set of scholars argue that the Internet has negative impacts on civic and political participation. Major reasons include using the Internet primarily for entertainment (Putnam, 2000) and the fragmentation and polarization of online deliberation (Sunstein, 2001), as well as āslacktivismā or āclicktivismā in front of oneās computer that results in defusing or escaping offline engagement and activism (Morozov, 2011).
Which story better reflects empirical facts? A meta-analysis examining 38 independent empirical studies conducted in the United States on the relationship between Internet use and engagement seems to support the camp of optimists (Boulianne, 2009). In all of the 166 Internet effects on engagement tested in Boulianneās study, 77% are positive.2 The author concludes that Internet use appears to have a positive, albeit small, effect on citizen engagement.
Different from established Western democratic societies, China has traditionally been a society with a low level of engagement because of the long-term authoritarian political culture and strict state control (Wang, 2008). Things have changed since the marketization-oriented economic reform and open policy introduced in 1978. Although due to the authoritarian political system, the meaningful and sustainable participation based on stable and autonomous institutions remains lacking (Lieberthal, 2004; Shi, 1997), various forms of engagement have actually been developed in the era of social transformation, especially when the state has begun to relax its total control over society and people have begun to form a greater consciousness of their citizenship. Those activities could be categorized into two main types to be focused on in this study: the first one is civic participation, which is defined as individualsā involvement in the formal and informal social organizations or groups that are not dictated by the state, such as community homeowner associations, voluntary groups, fan clubs, and so on; the other one is opinion expression, referring to those expressive behaviors on a specific personal or social issue or problem via various channels such as governmental sectors, traditional media, new media, and so on (e.g., Chan & Zhou, 2011; Yang, 2009). Compared with other activities such as taking part in protests or engaging in collective actions, these two types of engagement require fewer costs and thus have more opportunities to take place. So they represent more regularly prescribed criteria for democratic citizens and could complement earlier studies focused on only political participation under some extraordinary circumstances (e.g., Cai, 2004).
Besides the general advantages of facilitating citizenship engagement in Western democracies, the Internet has special political and social significance in the Chinese context. It has been treated as one typical āalternative mediaā for Chinese society. As scholars have argued (Lei, 2011; Zheng, 2008), the emergence of the Internet in China does not merely mean an increase in the quantity of information but also suggests the possibility of having qualitatively different information and communication in terms of diversity and alternatives. There is no question that the Chinese Internet is subject to tight regulations that bar negative references to the top leadership, the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and other politically sensitive issues (Sohmen, 2001). Nevertheless, it is fair to say that cyberspace is much more abundant, liberal, and diverse than the state-controlled mass media and has raised information flow and opinion expression to an unprecedented level (Goldman, 2005; Yang, 2009; Zheng, 2008). Some qualitative analyses have found that the Internet could reshape social organizations and facilitate civic engagement in China; these analyses conclude that the civil society and the Internet are energizing each other in their coevolutionary development (Yang, 2003, 2009; Zheng, 2008).
Although still scant in numbers in general, there are already several quantitative studies to show that the Internet is positively related to engagement in the Chinese context (e.g., Chan & Zhou, 2011; Lei, 2011; Pan, Jing, Liu, Yan, & Zheng, 2012). Based on the current theoretical arguments and empirical findings, I will test the first hypothesis in this study.
- H1: Even controlling for other individual and aggregate level factors, Internet use is positively related to both types of engagement (civic participation [H1ā1] and opinion expression [H1ā2]) in China.
