Estudio tensional del terreno durante la excavación y revestimiento

To date, the analyses and discussions concentrate mainly on what a Chinese-based public sphere and network society are different from the Habermasian and Castells’s notions. In other words, this thesis concentrates upon the development of public opinion (individual discourses) within an informal public sphere (the Chinese blogosphere), and the impact of such opinion upon authoritarian discourses. The discussion of the three blog types will enable me to undertake critical evaluations of the blogosphere, to what extent it can: (a) facilitate the Habermasian public sphere, and (b) foster ‘networked individualism’to make the public.

32 _{Publicness is in relation to the Chinese meaning Gongzhong Xing and Gongong Xing. In this thesis, the} selected blogs are of Gongzhong Xing – they are impressive and influential (‘making public talk’), but they also represent a kind of Gonggong Xing – a group of radical intellectuals who use the blog for free expression as their common goal.

In regard with the first point, the Chinese blogosphere and its blogging culture that interact with and shape each other within the context of cyber society show that the blogosphere is “both a media space and a culture space”, to borrow from Robert Hassan’s view (2004, p.47). As a media space, the State, netizens and the degree of civil society, along with the access to new media technologies affect and influence each other, playing a unique ‘push and pull’ game under a ‘benign’ interactive rule. As a cultural space, blogging merges other cultural phenomena such as historical change, literature forms of civic culture etc.

It is within these two sides that the socio-political value of the blog, and its relationship to the Habermasian public sphere (its reflections on ‘public opinion’, ‘bourgeois’ and ‘democracy’33_{) can be discussed and understood in this thesis.}

The second point is based on the existing research literatures; many analyses focus on journalists or females and see them as well-read or popular blogs (see Chen Jia 2003; Esarey and Xiao, 2008; Shen et al., 2009; Yu, 2011; Zhao Qidi, 2009). Some centre on special events (e.g., Muzi Mei and Sun Zhigang in 2003, Chen Liangyu in 2006; and Lian Yue in 2007, see Chen Jia 2003; Esarey and Xiao, 2008; Zhou, 2009) and mark the discussion as important, all of which yield the formation of specific blogging groups in the Chinese blogosphere.

My argument is that, the increasingly personalized nature of blogging contents and blogger events (e.g., Muzi Mei in 2003, Lian Yue in 2007) present a number of independent discourses of individuals (see Tang and Huhe, 2013; Yu, 2007; Zhou, 2009) – here, the discourse is not only a form of expression, it also contains argument, dissidence and conflict with the establishment. To what extent they

33 _{I have mentioned in this thesis, that the precondition of democracy in China is based on the commitment of} the leadership of the CCP – meaning the strategy of expanding public participation in political process does not include allowing critiques and actions (protestation, campaign or election) directly against the Party.

attract more opinions which mayexpand, if borrowing from James Leibold’s term, “intellectual horizons” (2011, p.9), as Hanno Hardt argues:

…in a social and political environment that insists on the primacy of the individual, communication research has been concerned principally with understanding those whose economic conditions or social status produces aggregates of individual as audience or readers. These individuals’ taste, attitudes, and behavior are measures of success for political and commercial interests and their need to know. (1998, p.51)

These are the focuses of my research and, following a discussion of methodology, I will explore these foci through three selected cases in the following chapters. The first is Muzi Mei’s sexual blog Yiqingshu (Love Letters Left) in 2003.

Chapter Three

Research Methodology

1 Introduction

I have argued in the previous chapter that the Habermasian concept of the public sphererepresents a set of criteria to which most liberal democratic societies aspire but which an authoritarian State such as China would like to attain. Yet I have also argued the potential impact of the blogosphere in China that supports the notion of the Habermasian public sphere: (1) the freedom (though limited) that individuals have found when they communicate on this space, (2) the quality of the blogosphere is embedded in it produces not only public discussion but also rational- critical debates, and (3) the quality of the discourse (‘nongovernmental discursive opinion) is given to diverse political-related views that are successfully expressed and disseminated.

The arguments explain the relationship between the blogosphere and politics (as the research title writes) in China, and will be examined via exploring Chinese bloggers, how they employ the blogosphere for their political demands (see Chapter 4, 5 and 6).

As such, it is important to touch on the question of who partake in the Chinese blogosphere in the Introduction. The question is raised to argue with the general perception among Chinese domestic scholars who admit that the blogosphere has expanded a democratic space for personal expression (see Deng Hao, 2008; Wang Lusheng 2006; Zhao Qidi, 2009), but who have not probed deeper into who the bloggers and what their expressions are – as the number of Internet users is 10% of

the total population in China. Bloggers cannot represent all classes – most of them are educated and urban netizens (see discussions in Chapter 1).

This study is also differentiated from other scholars (see Esarey and Xiao, 2008; Yu, 2011) who narrow their focus on one group of blogs (i.e., Yu Haiqing focuses on journalists blogs, categorising three types of bloggers among journalists to analyse how their blogs are different from their daily job); in my thesis, however, I argue that the stories about issues that have been raised and published on blogs by individuals34 are various (e.g., women, journalists, lawyer, scholars, artists). Thus, my focus is given to bloggers who write their life experiences on their own blogs, but who become the (representative) public in the blogosphere (see discussions in Chapter 1 and 2).

Since personal blogs in China is diverse and numerous, it is quite impossible to present a statistical number of bloggers who discuss public/social issues in the blogosphere. Thus, I restrict my examination to three blogs35 in this study: a sexual blog in 2003, a journalist’s blog in 2007, and a satirical blog from 2006 to 2011. I consider the specific theme of each blog represents three aspects of the public sphere conception. In other words, the three blogging themes theorise my thesis within an understanding of an intellectual group, their blogs help to illuminate the possibility of the public sphere being extended through the blogosphere under China’s present political conditions. On this basis, this chapter aims to outline how these evaluations are to be actually undertaken. With this in mind, I will express concerns in the following sections that I have not adequately explained here:

1. Why the three specific blogs are chosen, or what the criteria are for selecting these three?

34 _{By this I mean, bloggers don’t identify them as women, journalists, artists, etc. but bloggers in the Chinese} blogosphere. However, the occupation of the three blogs is mentioned in this thesis (see Chapter 4, 5 and 6). The aim is to examine whether these individual bloggers are from a particular group in cyber society.

35 _{I have mentioned earlier (see the Introduction) that the timeframe of this study is eight years (from 2003 to} 2011), so the minimum number of choosing blogs is three.

2. Why the three themes (sex, ecology journalism, satire) are the ‘right’ themes to beexploring in terms of blog content?

In addition, content analysis and discourse analysis are used in this thesis, as they can ‘measure’ and ‘interpret’ (see Hesmondhalgh, 2009, p.120) the possibility of the blogosphere acting as an emerging public sphere in China, the question remains – how?