The Contentious Public Sphere

Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China

Ya-Wen Lei

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400887941
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

Since the mid-2000s, public opinion and debate in China have become increasingly common and consequential, despite the ongoing censorship of speech and regulation of civil society. How did this happen? In The Contentious Public Sphere, Ya-Wen Lei shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China—one the state must now endeavor to control. Lei examines the influence this unruly sphere has had on Chinese politics and the ways that the state has responded.Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to influence the public agenda, demand accountability from the government, and organize around the concepts of law and rights. She demonstrates how citizens came to understand themselves as legal subjects, how legal and media professionals began to collaborate in unexpected ways, and how existing conditions of political and economic fragmentation created unintended opportunities for political critique, particularly with the rise of the Internet. The emergence of this public sphere—and its uncertain future—is a pressing issue with important implications for the political prospects of the Chinese people.Investigating how individuals learn to use public discourse to influence politics, The Contentious Public Sphere offers new possibilities for thinking about the transformation of state-society relations.

1

Introduction

In the early to mid-2000s, something new began to happen in online forums in China. Increasingly, contentious events were capturing widespread public attention, sparking heated discussion and even protests and other forms of collective action. Chinese citizens were coming together not only to converse and debate with one another, but also to challenge a government infamous for censorship and political control. One after another, these contentious events, or what Chinese people began to call “public opinion incidents,” came and went, like waves hitting the rocks.

In 2003, for example, Sun Zhigang, a twenty-seven-year-old man in Guangzhou, died in police custody after being wrongly detained and beaten by officers. His death triggered strong criticism, online and off, of the Chinese government. The synergy between media and legal professionals and Chinese netizens (wangmin), or Internet users,¹ eventually led to the overhaul of unconstitutional detention regulations.

In 2008, the Chinese government ordered that all new computers be sold with preinstalled content-control software to prevent the viewing of pornography. Chinese netizens accused the state of infringing on their right to free communication, and the Chinese state decided to abandon the policy.

In 2012, the Propaganda Department of Guangdong Province interfered in the publication of Southern Weekly’s New Year special editorial. Published by the Southern Media Group based in Guangzhou, Southern Weekly is considered one of the most outspoken newspapers in China, despite being affiliated with the Guangdong provincial government. The original editorial, titled “Dream of China and Dream of Constitutionalism,” promoted notions of freedom, liberal democracy, and constitutionalism. Guangdong propaganda officers bypassed ordinary editorial practices to impose significant revisions. After journalists disclosed this intervention, intellectuals, lawyers, media professionals, students, entrepreneurs, celebrities, and ordinary citizens protested vigorously against the censorship and voiced support for Southern Weekly. The original editorial publicly circulated online, as protesters, explicitly identifying themselves as citizens (gongmin), demonstrated outside Southern Weekly’s headquarters. Their protest banners and signs unequivocally demanded democracy, constitutionalism, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.

I give these examples not to suggest the complete victory of public opinion in China. Indeed, the Southern Weekly protests ultimately led to the government tightening its control of the Southern Media Group in 2013. My point, rather, is to highlight the novelty and vibrancy of political communication, contention, and participation in and beyond China’s public sphere that emerged during this period. I am far from a naïve observer of China’s politics; nonetheless, the emergence of a contentious public sphere in China was a revelation to me because it defied the conventional image of political and civic life in an authoritarian country. China is arguably one of the more “politically closed” authoritarian regimes today, as it is one of the few without multiple political parties or national elections (Diamond 2002). Furthermore, international organizations that monitor and rank political freedom, such as Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders, consistently rate China as one of the countries with the least freedom of press and freedom of speech² and one of the top “enemies of the Internet.”³

Authoritarian states, by definition, undermine civil society—the basis on which the public sphere is built—thus conventional wisdom tells us that the conditions for political life and a public sphere in such contexts are likely to be quite bleak and suffocating (Habermas 1996, 369). Yet, when I looked at what was going on in China, I saw lively political discussion, contention, and engagement—in short, the emergence of a vibrant public sphere, against all apparent odds. Moreover, this public sphere did not look much different from the one I’d grown up with in Taiwan, a young liberal democracy, or the one in the United States, where I have been living for more than a decade—an ostensibly advanced liberal democracy. These seeming similarities deeply perplexed me. Common indices used by social scientists to measure levels of freedom and to classify political regimes, such as Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Index, suggest that civil and political liberties have remained static in China since the 1989 Tiananmen incident, but such indices fail to capture a profound political, social, and cultural transformation that has occurred in the absence of regime change.

When I say that a nationwide contentious public sphere has emerged in China, I am referring to an unruly sphere capable of generating issues and agendas not set by the Chinese state, as opposed to a sphere mostly orchestrated and constrained by said state. Over time, China’s contentious public sphere has been increasingly recognized by the Chinese state as a force to be reckoned and negotiated with. Starting around 2010, official media of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as the People’s Daily, began to warn of a threatening public sphere mediated by cell phones, the Internet, and even some unruly voices within state-controlled media.⁴ The state’s awareness of these developments is precisely why I am careful not to overstate the stability or permanence of the newly emerged contentious public sphere. Indeed, this provocative public arena has encountered serious opposition and setbacks, particularly since 2013. Seeing the rise of such a sphere as a threat to national security and an indication of ideological struggle between the West and China, the Chinese state has taken comprehensive and combative measures to contain it. These measures include enhancing censorship and surveillance, attacking key actors, upgrading propaganda, and asserting China’s cyber-sovereignty. The scale and intensity of crackdowns on public opinion leaders, lawyers, journalists, activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and media are immense.

The Book’s Central Questions and Arguments

In this book I aim to demonstrate as well as understand these political, social, and cultural transformations. How can we explain the formation and development of China’s contentious public sphere, particularly in light of ongoing state control and repression? How did a political culture of contention emerge and extend to various social groups? And how durable is China’s emergent and contested public sphere? I argue that the rise of China’s contentious public sphere was an unintended consequence of the Chinese state’s campaign of authoritarian modernization. The government desperately needed to modernize in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. To do so, the state institutionalized the double-edged instruments of modern law, marketized media, and the Internet. It sought to utilize but also contain these instruments, recognizing the potential risk each posed of empowering professionals and citizens and destabilizing political control. Nonetheless, the state’s choices set in motion complex and interconnected processes beyond its control. Building legal and media institutions and adopting information technologies, paired with political fragmentation and marketization, increased the capabilities of citizens and professionals, encouraged the formation of multiple overlapping social networks of collaboration, engendered widespread legal and rights consciousness, and created a space for contentious politics. Through everyday practices and the production of so-called public opinion incidents (yulun shijian), media and legal professionals, public opinion leaders, activists, NGOs, and netizens translated individual grievances into collective contention—and in so doing, facilitated the rise of a contentious public sphere.

The future of this sphere remains unclear. Inadequate institutional protection means the state can still use the law, media, and information technologies for punishment, surveillance, and propaganda. How different political and social forces will work together—in creative, possibly even unexpected ways—over the years to come, in a changing global context, will shape the adversarial public space and determine its future.

My perspective departs from that of most research on the public sphere in that I accentuate and trace the connection between multiple institutional processes—the building of legal and media institutions and the adoption of information technologies—as well as the relationship between these processes and a broader historical and global context of modernization. Studies of the public sphere in different contexts tend to focus on the role of the media—mostly a specific type of media, such as television and, increasingly, the Internet—in mediating the public experience (e.g., Calhoun and Yang 2007; Dahlgren 1995; Papacharissi 2002; Shirky 2011). Few studies consider institutional processes in the legal field or the connections between different institutional processes. After studying this issue for more than a decade, however, I have become convinced that to understand China’s contentious public sphere, one has to weave together analytical strands usually kept separate by scholars in different disciplines, and then situate them in relation to China’s modernization in a global context. I argue that the oft-neglected connections between different institutional processes—namely, the development of a legal system, the marketization of media, and the adoption of information technologies—are key to understanding China’s contentious public sphere. These connections explain how contentious culture and practices emerged and spread across social groups and boundaries. Understanding the broader historical and global context of China’s modernization is also crucial to understanding how various actors—from the Chinese state to political elites and ordinary citizens—participated in these institutional processes.

Briefly, there are four major components to my argument. The first two concern China’s modernization project and its constituent institutional processes, as well as their effects on the contentious public sphere. The final two components concern the mechanisms and conditions that have mediated boundary transgressions and the connections between institutional processes.

CHINA’S MODERNIZATION PROJECT AND THE AUTHORITARIAN DILEMMA OF MODERNIZATION

Situating the development of China’s contentious public sphere in relation to the Chinese state’s post–Cultural Revolution project of modernization is critical. Although Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, analyzing the development of the classical bourgeois public sphere in Europe, offers little discussion of the state, several scholars have since pointed out the need to examine the state’s role in the development of the public sphere, especially the role of the state beyond suppression (Eley 1992; Schudson 1994). In Paul Starr’s book on the creation of media communications in the United States, he argues that the developmental path of the American media and public sphere was shaped by cumulative and branching “constitutive choices,” by which Starr means “choices that create the material and institutional framework of fields of human activity” (Starr 2004, 1–2). His narrative shows that the state was a key player in making these constitutive choices—an argument highly relevant to the Chinese context.

The Chinese state likewise made constitutive choices, which must be understood in relation to the Chinese state’s pursuit of modernization in a global context. In J. P. Nettl and Roland Robertson’s work on globalization, they argue that societies engaged in modernization often compare themselves with other societies. Using Meiji Japan as an example, Nettl and Robertson show that “latecomers” to the project of modernization tend to encounter difficulties deciding which images of modernity should guide them and where they should look for inspiration. These difficulties are further intertwined with issues related to national identity (Nettl and Robertson 1966; Robertson 1992). In the case of China, globalization provides a critical context that has influenced the state’s understanding of modernity and how it has acted to achieve that end—especially the state’s adoption of and engagement with ideas, institutions, and cultures from elsewhere. Modernization in China was a defensive reaction to imperialism, initiated by nationalist elites to preserve the Qing dynasty state. Following a series of military defeats by the West and Japan, intellectuals and officials within China began to see their country as a latecomer to development, and they started looking to the West and Japan as major reference points. At first, modernization focused on learning Western science, technology, and education, but it eventually extended to include the adoption of Western legal and political institutions (Zarrow 2016).

China’s pursuit of modernization, despite being interrupted by revolutions, regime changes, wars, and other upheavals, has continued in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) era. Pursuit of socialist industrialization and elimination of exploitation and poverty were written into the preamble of the PRC’s first constitution, enacted in 1954. China amended its constitution in 1982. The amended preamble makes clear the nation’s most critical task: to “concentrate its effort on socialist modernization along the road of Chinese-style socialism”; in addition, the Chinese people are enlisted to “develop socialist democracy, improve the socialist legal system, and work hard and self-reliantly to modernize industry, agriculture, national defense, and science and technology step by step to turn China into a socialist country with a high level of culture and democracy.” Like China’s modernization projects in the late Qing and republican periods, the PRC’s modernization project has also involved interacting with and even partially adopting ideas and institutions from other parts of the world, particularly the Soviet Union and increasingly the West, such as modern law that acknowledges the concept of rights. In addition, in the PRC state’s pursuit of political and economic goals, it has had to open itself to certain transnational institutions. For instance, to profit from international trade, the Chinese state subjected itself to the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) when building domestic institutions (Bhattasali, Li, and Martin 2004; DeWoskin 2001; Lee 2003; Lin 2004; Pangestu and Mrongowius 2004; Wang 2001; Zhao 2008).

Despite influence from the West and transnational institutions, however, PRC’s modernization project is clearly still very much an authoritarian one (Atabaki and Zürcher 2004; Gel’man 2016). The project’s goals include a high level of socioeconomic development through rapid economic growth, as well as improved efficacy of governance through legal and political institution building—but all under the political monopoly of the CCP. And the ultimate goal of pursuing modernization and developing what leaders have termed “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is to strengthen the CCP’s legitimacy and secure its authoritarian rule.

Yet the Chinese state’s authoritarian modernization project has encountered what I call an “authoritarian dilemma of modernization.” On the one hand, the state has to build economic, legal, and political institutions to pursue socioeconomic development. The state also needs capable professionals and citizens to make institutions work, produce economic growth, and ultimately achieve the goal of modernization. These capable agents need to be educated and have knowledge, information, and even some autonomy to participate in the tasks designated by the state. For instance, to have a functioning legal institution, the state needs capable legal professionals as well as citizens who have at least some basic legal knowledge. To collect information about governmental problems on the ground, the state must create institutions to inform citizens about what they should understand as “problems” as well as enable citizens to communicate with the state or media (Lorentzen 2014).

On the other hand, institution building and the creation of capable agents can be politically risky. When the state attempts to emulate successful examples of development, it tends to look to those found in liberal democracies. Adopting institutional designs associated with liberal democracies, even selectively, can have undesirable consequences for the maintenance of political monopoly. In addition, expansion of capability enlarges citizens’ freedom to choose among different ways of living (Sen 2008). When agents become more capable, the state has more difficulty controlling their thinking and actions. Capable agents can identify loopholes in institutions and use knowledge, information, technology, institutions, and other resources for their own ends. They can participate in and influence the state-initiated modernization project in ways that potentially contradict the state’s interests (Starr 2004). In addition, political elites, such as legal and media professionals, can promote their own versions of modernity that compete with the state’s version, often challenging the state’s ideal political and social order in the process. Of course, while expanding individual capability, the state can always seek to minimize such negative consequences, but the outcome remains uncertain. A vast literature debates the various political consequences of modernization, especially the relationship between modernization and democratization (Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Inglehart and Welzel 2010; Lipset 1959; Przeworski and Limongi 1997; Welzel 2006; Welzel and Inglehart 2008). I discuss my findings in relation to this literature in the concluding chapter.

MEDIA AND LAW AS DOUBLE-EDGED SWORDS

The Chinese state’s institution building in the media and legal fields demonstrates the state’s authoritarian dilemma of modernization. As part of the PRC state’s authoritarian modernization project, building media and legal institutions had profound consequences for the development of China’s contentious public sphere. The state wanted to use media and the law to achieve its goals, but it ...