Dissecting Chinese bloggers’ anger towards the western media.
Date
2009
Authors
Jiang, Ying
Editors
Advisors
Wilmore, Michael Joseph
Griffiths, Mary
Griffiths, Mary
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Thesis
Citation
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
Abstract
By distinguishing “liberalization” and “democratization”, this thesis argues that liberalization of freedom of speech does not necessarily engender the democratization of Chinese political sphere. Rather its seemingly autonomous speech space tends to eventually produce indirectly and effectively controlled “self-managing consumers” without essentially changing the nature of politics under Chinese Communist government. Chinese cyberspace tends to work in a way to minimize the need for direct political and/or policing intervention by the government. This self-regulating “free” space has been regulated by the subtle censorship of Chinese government but, it will be argued, it is even more effectively engendered by Western media critique on Chinese un-democracy. Through a close field research in China, this thesis will elucidate an emerging mode of governmentality in Chinese cyberspace, in which the self-managing subjectivities of internet speakers have been produced by the interaction between the creation of private space by digital communication
technologies, the dominance of Western media report, Chinese people’s nationalistic reaction to it and Chinese government’s control over the both.
Chinese cyberspace moves between liberalization/control, market/state, and political/economic drivers. This complexity is not well-understood in Western media reportage. Western representations of the development of internet in China have in turn created a dramatic response in China. This phenomenon, as well as other factors such as the fast growing number of Chinese students educated abroad; the rapid embrace of western culture in China; and the flourishing of blogging in China are all
predicted to have the potential of posing a threat to governance of the Chinese Internet, and political censorship, and ultimately to be productive of more democratization. However, the kinds of Western attention to this fundamental question of how China is to develop its own political future and its own version of cyberspace, have caused an outburst of anger from Chinese bloggers towards the Western media. This phenomenon emerged in 2005, and rose to a peak in 2008. The research project undertaken is thus timely, and is vital to an understanding of online Chinese response to Western commentary. This thesis examines the fundamental question as it is presented by Western commentators and Chinese bloggers. It employs Foucault’s
governmentality as the theoretical foundation for an analysis of blogger concerns about nation in Chinese cyberspace.
The thesis is divided into three main parts. Part One (Chapter One and Two) identifies the context of the “problem” this thesis is dealing with; Part Two (Chapter Three, Four and Five) deconstructs the “problem” by evaluating possible explanations to it, which include the theorization and localization of “censorship”, “nationalism”, and “governmentality” in the Chinese context; Part Three (Chapter Six, Seven) provides
evidences from particular case studies of Chinese cyberspace, based on empirical research.
While drawing a clear distinction between “liberalization” and “political democratization” in Chinese cyberspace, this thesis also proposes that the many contradictory discourses in and about China will begin to make sense once the politics and governmentality of the “liberalized” spaces in Chinese cyberspace are understood.
School/Discipline
School of Humanities
Dissertation Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2009
Provenance
Copyright material removed from digital thesis. See print copy in University of Adelaide Library for full text.