Networked China: Global Dynamics of Digital Media and Civic Engagement

New Agendas in Communication

Wenhong Chen, Stephen D. Reese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317556879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Internet and digital media have become conduits and locales where millions of Chinese share information and engage in creative expression and social participation. This book takes a cutting-edge look at the impacts and implications of an increasingly networked China. Eleven chapters cover the terrain of a complex social and political environment, revealing how modern China deals with digital media and issues of censorship, online activism, civic life, and global networks. The authors in this collection come from diverse geographical backgrounds and employ methods including ethnography, interview, survey, and digital trace data to reveal the networks that provide the critical components for civic engagement in Chinese society.

The Chinese state is a changing, multi-faceted entity, as is the Chinese public that interacts with the new landscape of digital media in adaptive and novel ways. Networked China: Global Dynamics of Digital Media and Civic Engagement situates Chinese internet in its complex, generational context to provide a full and dynamic understanding of contemporary digital media use in China. This volume gives readers new agendas for this study and creates vital new signposts on the way for future research.

.

Part I
Digital Media Technologies and Civic Engagement

Implications, Conditions, and Contradictions

1
Internet Use, Socio-Geographic Context, and Citizenship Engagement

A Multilevel Model on the Democratizing Effects of the Internet in China¹

Baohua Zhou

Whether or not digital media, especially the Internet, have the potential to facilitate citizenship engagement has been argued as one of the most contested topics in Chinese communication research (Rosen, 2010) and has attracted many academic efforts (e.g., Chan & Zhou, 2011; Lei, 2011; Yang, 2009; Zheng, 2008). This chapter aims to further advance this line of research in two ways. First, it assesses the associations between Internet use and two dimensions of engagement (civic participation and opinion expression) in China with a nationwide random sample survey data set. Second, and more importantly, it will analyze how these associations vary by contextual factors besides individual characteristics. Unlike prior empirical studies in which China was treated as a singular entity, this study takes into account the heterogeneity across various socio-geographic units and examines the contextual effects of the influence of the Internet in China. In particular, I will focus on two factors—Internet penetration and the aggregate level of political interest—and explore whether or not either of them independently influences citizenship engagement and moderates the relationship between individual Internet use with individuals’ engagement in public life.

Literature Review

Internet and Engagement: General Arguments and Chinese Context

The Internet’s 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 “slacktivism” or “clicktivism” in front of one’s 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 Boulianne’s 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 individuals’ 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 “alternative media” 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 [H1–1] and opinion expression [H1–2]) in China.

Political Interest as an Individual-Level Moderator

Although optimists argue that Internet use can facilitate citizenship engagement and the existing majority of empirical studies seem to support this, a less studied question is whether or not the effects of Internet use are universal or conditional. A line of theoretical discussion related to this issue is the debate of the “instrumental approach” versus the “psychological approach” introduced by Xenos and Moy (2007). The models following the instrumental approach tend to see the Internet as an easygoing and low-cost “instrument” for all people to get information to facilitate engagement. That means the effects of the Internet are direct and universal. Alternatively, the psychological approach argues that the impact of the Internet is not evenly distributed but contingent upon several individual factors such as psychological characteristics (Bimber, 2003; Xenos & Moy, 2007). New media technologies themselves are not the sole source producing effects but always interact with individual characteristics shaping the power of effects. This kind of view is also echoed in the debates between “mobilization” and “activation” arguments (Boulianne, 2009). The mobilization view emphasizes that the Internet could mobilize politically inactive populations; the activation view posits that the Internet serves to activate those citizens who are already interested in politics.

Among various psychological factors, Xenos and Moy (2007) argue that political interest should be a significant contingent factor, given that whether or not people have an interest in public affairs is not only one of the most important influential factors for participation (Verba, Schlozman & Brady, 1995) or political discussion (McLeod et al., 1999), but also it drives people toward more active use of the Internet and engagement in online activities. By analyzing the 2004 American National Election Studies data, they find that although Internet use has direct effects on information acquisition and use, its effects on civic or political engagement do depend on levels of political interest, which supports the psychological approach.

In the Chinese context, political interest has also been proven to be an important psychological factor to encourage citizenship engagement (Lei, 2011; Pan et al., 2012). In the past, even Chinese people have had interest in engaging in public affairs, but they feel it is difficult to find a convenient way to do this. The Internet has for the first time provided a platform for ordinary people to express themselves and participate in politics (Hao & Li, 2001; Zhou, 2008). Even though the Internet has given every user an opportunity to engage, those who have greater interest in political and public affairs will be more motivated and able to make use of Internet resources, especially for political information and opinions (rather than other types of content such as entertainment), further improving the likelihood to engage in citizenship activities. So I posit that the higher level of political interest will interact with Internet use to produce more robust effects on citizenship engagement.

• H2: The positive relationship between Internet use and civic participation (H2–1) and opinion expression (H2–2) will be contingent on individuals’ levels of political interest.

Socio-Geographic Context: Cross-Level Interactions

As communication scholars have argued, citizenship engagement is a multilevel phenomenon that needs to be examined not only by individual-level but also contextual-level factors (Friedland & McLeod, 1999; Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006a). On the one hand, the contextual variables could impact individuals’ engagement; on the other hand, the importance of individual-level factors on engagement is dependent on contextual factors. Unsatisfied with the long-standing characteristics of overly narrow individualism in communication research, scholars have called for creating multilevel or cross-level research by paying more attention to the influence of various types of social systems, including families, communities, organizations, and countries (e.g., Price, Ritchie, & Eulau, 1991; Slater, Snyder, & Hayes, 2006). With increased access to multilevel data and the development of multilevel modeling and analytical techniques, scholars have conducted cross-level analysis on the influence of media on engagement, theoretically and empirically, nationally and internationally.

For example, Kang and Kwak (2003) examine the interaction effects of residential stability (as a contextual factor) and local media use (as an individual-level factor) on the variations in individuals’ civic participation. They find that the use of local TV news is more likely to lead to community participation among those living in a neighborhood with lower residential mobility, while time spent watching TV tends to be negatively related to civic engagement among those whose residence in a community is shorter. From a communication infrastructure theory perspective, which tre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Introduction A New Agenda: Digital Media and Civic Engagement in Networked China
• Digital Media Technologies and Civic Engagement Implications, Conditions, and Contradictions
• 1 Internet Use, Socio-Geographic Context, and Citizenship Engagement A Multilevel Model on the Democratizing Effects of the Internet in China1
• 2 Networked Anti-corruption Actors, Styles, and Mechanisms
• 3 Memetic Engagement as Middle Path Resistance Contesting Mainland Chinese Immigration and Social Cohesion
• 4 Engaging Government for Environmental Collective Action Political Implications of ICTs in Rural China
• 5 Mobile Activism and Contentious Politics in Contemporary China
• 6 Campaigning on Weibo Independent Candidates' Use of Social Media in Local People's Congress Elections in China
• 7 The Unintended Consequences of Deliberative Discourse A Democratic Attempt for HIV NGOs in China
• Glocalized Media Space Emergence, Composition, and Function
• 8 The Importance of “Bridges” in the Global News Arena A Network Study of Bridge Blogs About China
• 9 Online Political Discussion in English and Chinese The Case of Bo Xilai
• 10 Fandom of Foreign Reality TV Shows in the Chinese Cyber Sphere
• 11 The New Political of Mediated Activism in China A Critical Review
• Index