Abstract
When Jürgen Habermas visited China in 2001, one observer compared the excitement generated to the tours of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey at the height of the May Fourth Movement in the early twentieth century. The German social theorist was a major source of theoretical edification, especially among Chinese liberal intellectuals, in the 1980s and 1990s and, to some extent, today. Questions such as “Does China have a public sphere?” and “How to create a public sphere in China?” captivated generations of Chinese scholars and public intellectuals. In The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China, Ya-Wen Lei takes up the challenge and offers her answer to the questions. She leaves us with no doubt that despite the persistent perception of China as an authoritarian country, there is a vibrant public sphere that exhibits many of the traits that Habermas identifies—lively political discussion, contention, and engagement.
What contributes to the emergence of the public sphere in China? Lei’s account encompasses a few decades. In the aftermath of the June 4 incident in 1989, the party state did a few things to bolster its legitimacy. It pushed its economic reforms further. It also turned to modern law, marketized media, and, eventually, the Internet to create a more open and rules-based environment for a market economy. But the party state, like a sorcerer’s apprentice, was unable to wield the magic.
According to Lei, the public sphere was created out of several opportunities and resources afforded to ordinary citizens by the powerful party state. The first such resource was law. Facing growing number of grassroots protests from peasants and laid-off workers in the 1990s, the state decided to promote the law to maintain stability. Law was seen as a safety valve by the party state for maintaining social order. But the promotion of law nurtured a more acute sense of rights consciousness. It also provided a state-sanctioned language for citizens, particularly when fighting for the rights of women and youth, labor, consumers, and peasants.
Similarly, Chinese media organizations are owned by the party state. Yet reduced state funding around the same period forced many newspapers to explore new ways to support themselves. Journalists began to produce stories that sold copies. In the unique context of China, the commercial turn instigated the creation of critical news reports that uncovered social problems, government officials’ failings, and even policy recommendations. In the mid-2000s, critical media reporting set the public agenda by identifying social issues for people to discuss. New yardsticks were created to pose tougher questions about unconstitutionality, the state’s infringement of rights, judicial independence, civil society and political participation, the rights of disadvantaged groups, and crony capitalism. This in turn prompted a wholesale rethinking of the relationship between individuals and the state.
The hotbed for this new breed of reporting was Guangzhou. The highly competitive market for newspapers there fostered a more readership-centered style of advocacy journalism. Advocacy journalism grew also because of fragmented bureaucratic structures that loosely connected different levels of government in the southern city. But critical media reporting was an urban phenomenon, and a highly uneven one even within urban China. It has thus been easier for the party state to identify the leading papers and muffle their voices. The taming of the liberal and influential Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekly) in 2013 is a case in point.
Yet, the new Chinese public is incorrigible. Though the party state tightened its grip on a few liberal newspapers, the center of activity has quickly migrated to the Internet, a medium that is at once more powerful and elusive. Online news reporting in China is dominated by four internal portal companies that are privately owned and publicly traded: Sina, Sohu, NetEase, and Tencent. The four also developed widely popular social media such as Weibo and WeChat. These companies produce the most popular sites that Internet users, or netizens, visit for news and information. Their clamors against the party state led to several high-profile public opinion incidents. Lei’s discussion about the public online ends with an in-depth analysis of the most famous public opinion incident in the last decade—the Sanlu Milk Scandal that involved the local government’s cover-up of melamine-tainted milk.
Why does China aggressively pursue Internet technology? More than a billion Chinese today own a cell phone. China’s high-speed fiber-optic network has broader coverage than that of the United States. This is, Lei argues, yet another expression of neo-technonationalism by the Chinese party state. In its incessant quest to modernize, the party state keenly developed the Internet. Chinese leaders believed online public opinion could be dominated in the same way that the state dominated public opinion through traditional media. But many of these privately owned portals were created on the eve of China’s WTO accession. These companies are allowed to produce and disseminate news outside state-controlled bureaucratic institutions. They have quickly become the most powerful disseminators of news in China. Lei’s analysis shows that Chinese netizens are more critical of the party state and generally share a more liberal political outlook.
Lei draws from a rich variety of data, including content analysis of newspapers, yearbooks, laws, and regulations; interviews of ordinary Chinese people, media and legal professionals, local and central government officials, scholars, and activists; and textual data analysis of Internet forums and social media data; as well as data from several underutilized nationally representative surveys. Most studies look at how one or two domains mold the public sphere. Lei’s book distinguishes itself by emphasizing the interactions among different transformations. The book develops an ambitious argument threading through the different constituents of the public sphere. It is the conjunction of the institutionalization of law and market-oriented media together with the rise of the Internet that accounts for the emergence of the contentious public sphere, with a dynamism unforeseen by the party state and a reach within the country that becomes threatening.
Does the presence of the public sphere portend the arrival of democracy in China? Lei is noncommittal. She is reluctant to treat the rise of a more critical political culture as a step in the march toward democracy. The penultimate chapter of the book discusses some of the latest changes under Chinese President Xi Jinping. It reads, however, more like an epilogue than an integral part of her account. She describes how the powerful party state strengthens its surveillance and censorship, arresting prominent activists, rights-defense lawyers, and journalists. The state also ratchets up its pressure on several active social networks, to the point of dismantling some of them. Lei acknowledges that the crackdown has demoralized the contentious social forces that took the lead in previous public opinion incidents. But she also maintains that the Chinese state’s effort has yielded “mixed and uncertain consequences.” It is, however, a point made more in hope than in conviction. Compared to what it was in the first decade of the 2000s, the contentious public sphere has become less contentious, and probably less public, as some continue to make critical comments, only now furtively.
Any work that offers an assured answer to a big and complex question is likely to draw some disagreements. Lei has gone to some length to compare her viewpoints with scholars who arrive at more pessimistic conclusions about China, as seen in her discussion of the critical assessment of Chinese market-oriented newspapers by Daniela Stockmann and Mary Gallagher. On the promotion and dissemination of legal consciousness, Lei sees the dissemination of law by the central government from the top down to ordinary people as a rather frictionless process. My own research suggests there are more regional variations, particularly along the urban-rural divide. Her assertion of the reach of the central government also does not comport with the thesis of fragmented authoritarianism she borrowed from Kenneth Lieberthal to explain other phenomena, such as the growth of advocacy journalism in urban cities.
Then there is the concept of the public sphere. During the heyday of “Habermas fever,” scholars in China debated about the public sphere as a political and philosophical ideal. They sparred over how the public sphere could foster democracy. Lei looks at what is out there and concludes that there is already a contentious public sphere in China. Citing Habermas, she defines it as a network for communicating points of view. It is the capability of the network to create public opinion that matters. There is much to be commended with her more empirical approach. Yet, the emphasis on outcome to the neglect of process means that her concept of the public sphere is inevitably one-sided. Habermas, in his writings, discusses the normative character of the public sphere—publicity, transparency, and openness. The bourgeois public sphere in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries embodied rational-critical discussions that happened in coffee houses, salons, and table talks. In Lei’s interpretation, the value of tolerance is replaced by the form of plurality found in social media. It is interesting to note that while Habermas sees the rise of mass media leading to the demise of the public sphere, Lei sees it as a crucial component of the contentious public sphere.
Furthermore, if Habermas’s is an eclectic Marxian argument influenced by Weber and others, Lei’s account has drained what remains of the class component from her discussion of the public sphere. Lei asserts that there is a nationwide public sphere that cuts across class boundaries. She makes this argument based on the growing population of the online public at a time when the average education of netizens has been declining. But her analysis also indicates that active Chinese netizens, especially those who read and write about politics, tend to be highly educated and young. At times, she seems to elide the difference between passive Internet consumers and active netizens. The latter are clearly more educated, younger, and hungrier.
Perhaps what is unfolding can be read as yet another unintentional consequence of the policies of the party state. China now produces more than 7 million college graduates a year—that is, one Hong Kong per year. This college-educated young generation will continue to replenish the public sphere as long as there remains an opening for the public sphere to survive in China.
There is a rigor and a courage in Lei’s scholarship not in any way diminished by the questions I raised. The Contentious Public Sphere offers compelling insight into the ramifications of China’s relentless pursuit of modernity a la carte. The combination of an ambitious theoretical argument with the judicious use of empirical data makes this an important study to learn from and debate.