Internet Activism and Trans-national Public Sphere:
Internet as State Activation Apparatus in the Anti-Japanese Protests
Paper Presented to the 47
th
Annual ICA Convention, San Diego, USA, March 22-25 2006
(Draft: Please do not quote or cite without author’s permission)
Chow Pui Ha (Ph.D student)
School of Journalism &Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
## email not listed ##
Impacts of the Internet on political communication in Mainland China have
received wide scholastic concerns since its first introduction into the territory at the
end of 1995, amongst which two themes are most frequently addressed: the forging of
nationalism in the presupposed boundary-less Internet world (e.g Gries 2005, Qiu
2001) and the contribution of Internet to the formation of civil society (e.g. Yang
2003, 2003b), whereas the latter includes sideline but essential discussions on state’s
regulations and control of the Internet usage (e.g Hachigian 2001; Harwit & Duncan
2001; Lachrite 2002; Qiu 1999/2000; Sohmen 2001) as well as implementations of e-
government (e.g. Holiday I & Yep R. 2005; Zhang 2002) that variably influence the
effectiveness of the Internet as a public sphere mediating the state and the people.
Examining the course of on-line and off-line anti-Japanese protests purported to
oppose Japan’s ascension into the United Nation Security Council (hereinafter UNSC)
occurred in China in 2005, this paper brings the themes of nationalism and civil
society together, and attempts to interrogate the role Internet played in the domestic
civil society yet goes beyond it to the mobilization of what Olesen (2005) calls
“transnational publics”– a “temporal phenomenon compared with global civil society,
the transnational public sphere and national public sphere”(424).
This paper argues,
the Internet has forged a transnational public sphere without contributing to the
growth of domestic civil society in Mainland China in the case of anti-Japanese
demonstrations occurred in 2005. The result implicates that the a scalar analysis
which help unfolding the complex interplay between new media, politics, people and
the state as well as the dynamism between the national and the global is needed for
the study of online political communication in the neo-authoritarian regime of China.
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Briefly speaking, Olesen opposes the idea of a global civil society as the notion downplays the roles
played by the states in its attainment. Therefore, he proposes the idea of “transnational public sphere”
to refer to the arena containing all the contentious and political activities concerning the national but
nevertheless beyond this level within the global civil society. He further explains that the transnational
public sphere consists of national public spheres and structured around national and international
institutions and medias.
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