The Weak Link: Diagnosing Political and Social Factors in China’s Environmental Issue

Li, Xiaofan

doi:10.4236/chnstd.2013.24029

Cited by 3 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…In the perceptions of most citizens, environmental protection was more of a political issue that should be left for the government to deal with and the daily efforts of preserving energy and reducing carbon footprints were a luxury only assigned to those urban elites and the middle class (Li, 2013). Even though hundreds of environmental protests occasionally broke out over the years, most of them were local-focusing on an environmental issue at a local scale.…”

Section: Many People Are Condemning Firework and Crackers! But I Havmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Li (2013) pessimistically argues that, subject to political coercion from the state, China's poorly developed civil society adds more obstacles to the cause of environmental protection by blocking free avenues of public advocacy, civic engagement, and the development of non-governmental organisations. Regardless of how promising the environmental organisations may appear in recent years, they are commonly still constrained in their efforts to influence policy-making and most of them are confronted with insufficient funding and staffing, a lack of public support, limited local resources, antagonism from the relevant industries, and restrictions and surveillance imposed by the state and local governments.…”

Section: Many People Are Condemning Firework and Crackers! But I Havmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some local governments even ask the environmental bureaus to cover up for polluting companies by tampering with environmental monitoring reports provided to the higher-ups. For the same reason, local governments usually ignore companies that have foreign investment and are ostracized by their home countries due to their environmental infractions (Li, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Digital Environmentalism: A Case Study of PM2.5 Pollution Issue in Chinese Social Media

Zhang¹

2017

JMS

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Section: Many People Are Condemning Firework and Crackers! But I Havmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Many People Are Condemning Firework and Crackers! But I Havmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Digital Environmentalism: A Case Study of PM2.5 Pollution Issue in Chinese Social Media

Zhang¹

2017

JMS

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“…In the perceptions of most citizens, environmental protection was more of a political issue that should be left for the government to deal with and the daily efforts of preserving energy and reducing carbon footprints were a luxury only assigned to those urban elites and the middle class (X. Li, 2013). Even though hundreds of environmental protests occasionally broke out over the years, most of them were local-focusing on an environmental issue at a local scale.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the same reason, local governments usually ignore companies that have foreign investment and are ostracized by their home countries due to their environmental infractions (X. Li, 2013).…”

Section: China's Economy and Environmentalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Microblogging and its implications to Chinese civil society and the urban public sphere: A case study of Sina Weibo

Zhang¹

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Inside mainland China, some Anglophone social media such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked; as a result, savvy Chinese enterprises have invented alternative versions of these microblogging services-the best known being Weibo. Scholars have suggested that applications such as Weibo have created greater openness, transparency and engagement in the urban public sphere, and have contributed to a much deeper social change, in synergy with reforms in many social areas of contemporary China.This thesis aims to examine the role of microblogging in the following dimensions: (i) the public engagement in civil discourse about particular issues; (ii) the status quo and development of the public sphere within the context; and (iii) the interaction, synergy and reciprocity among the state, the urban public sphere, and civil society. To this end, the issue of how microblogging is involved in every aspect of ordinary Chinese people's lives is empirically investigated. Microblogging plays an important role in facilitating people making sense of what is happening in China through engaging in civil discourse about various social issues, and this civil engagement in return may exert profound impact on the country's concurrent reforms and democratisation process.Current new-media studies address only some aspects of the new-media use in some parts of the world, due to the strong historical association of the new technology with libertarian discourse, linguistic estrangement, and the reluctance of some Western researchers to learn from developments in other parts of the world. This thesis uses de-Westernised approaches and adopts a non-Western eye to examine the production, distribution and use of new media in a developing country, in an effort to boost intercultural collaboration in this field.The theoretical framework applied in this thesis originates from civil society and Habermas's conception of the public sphere, but emphatically focuses on its extrapolation to, and innovation in a Chinese context. A wide range of political, cultural and societal perspectives are employed to explain the uniqueness and non-replicability of microblogging's impact on the process of constructing an online civil society in contemporary China.This thesis uses two sets of methods: (i) case studies, all three of which involve Sina Weibo-one of the many Weibo services as the main platform and (ii) mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative approaches that combines content analysis and media discourse analysis to analyse the data collected in this research. 3Drawing from the civil discourse practices in the three case studies, the thesis conceptualises three nuanced interactional modes of the Chinese state-society relations: confrontation, positive interaction and negotiation, and thereby concludes that the state-society relations should not be confined to a simple, static dichotomy, but rather be looked at in a more dynamic and diversified way. The "plasticity" of Weibo in facilitating an online public sphere provides many explanatory possi...

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Digital Environmentalism: A Case Study of Pm2.5 Pollution Issue in Chinese Social Media

Zhang

2016

SSRN Journal

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The emergence of social media over the last decade has substantially altered not only the means people communicate with each other but also the whole online ecosystems. For the common public in particular, social media enables and broadens the social conversation that anyone interested can engage in on urgent social problems such as environmental pollution. In China, the ever-thickening air pollution smothering most urban cities in recent years has provoked a nationwide discussion, and popular social media like Weibo has been fully utilised by various social actors to participate in this "green speak". This paper examines the civil discourse about the deteriorating air pollution on China's largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to understand how different social actors respond to and reconstruct the reality. Through a discourse analysis aided by a text analytics/ visualisation software-Leximancer, this paper investigates the civil discourse from three angles: the demographics, the discursive strategies and the potential social effect. The result suggests that proactive civil engagement in this issue has produced an environmental discourse with a wide range of topics involved, and that the benign interactions between social actors could give rise to a proactive interactional mode between Chinese state and civil society which would definitely be beneficial to the democratisation process in contemporary China.

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The Weak Link: Diagnosing Political and Social Factors in China’s Environmental Issue

Cited by 3 publications

References 36 publications

Digital Environmentalism: A Case Study of PM2.5 Pollution Issue in Chinese Social Media

Digital Environmentalism: A Case Study of PM2.5 Pollution Issue in Chinese Social Media

Microblogging and its implications to Chinese civil society and the urban public sphere: A case study of Sina Weibo

Digital Environmentalism: A Case Study of Pm2.5 Pollution Issue in Chinese Social Media

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