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The Closed Community of Local Knowledge
Although the practice of self-government at village level was started by the state, we can also find more and more intense spontaneity.Thus the problem of discursive field in rural area is the fact that public discussions are contained within a local community and that the balance between university and plurality of values required by the public sphere of a civil society is not realized in the Chinese public sphere of peasantry society.Actually most village pacts have strictly limited the membership of the community, and the rights/duties of members are also decided by fixed status relations.The “outsiders” who live in a village without permanent residence registration are not able to enjoy villager treatments such as the distribution of interests, the right to vote, and the right of debate, and must undertake only the burdens and duties.
Therefore, what has been built up in the peasant society is a discursive field that is composed different local problems and local knowledge, that is, a realm of popular opinion that overlaps with the private sphere and its particularities and irrationality.To suit the needs of modern state building and keeping abreast of the times, it is necessary to make the speech situation open to a universal audience and structurally compounded.In China today, seeking an audience with higher authority in government departments and legal resistance are basic arrangements for peasants to express their voices in the universal institutional framework.From the viewpoints of making laws and guaranteeing rights, however, they are not enough.
Emergence of the Opened Digital Marketplace of Opinions
On the other hand, a new tendency toward public sphere building by digital information technology has become stronger in urban area recently.Certainly the Internet also began to permeate the rural world.It was even reported that at least one “digitized villages” appeared in Henan Province.But because the digital divide among different regions, especially between the urban area and the rural area is still large and cannot be changed soon, we should pay attention here to the situation in cities.According to incomplete statistics, the registered population of Internet users in China was more than fifty million in the autumn of 2002.Considering the e-People who willfully enter in and out of Cyberspace to communicate, the population of “Netizens” may be much larger.At the present, the public sphere based on digital networking has opened up in two directions.
One is the development of mass “electronic commons” that is composed of a large number of net-cafes (wangba), manifold websites, academic net-forum as well as BBS on which opinions on public topics are exchanged speedily and extensively.Despite the fact that the Chinese government has promulgated several regulations for controlling Internet access, and communicative activities in cyberspace are thus not thoroughly free at the present, we may still say that the electronic commons is a marketplace for exchange of information and opinions.
The other is the development of the so-called “network state” that has already manifested itself in the experiments of “China electronic governance” in Shenzhen City
of Guangdong Province, Qingdao City of Shandong Province and Mianyang City of
Sichuan Province, the introduction of “national internet tax system”, the reform program of the People’s Supreme Court to “digitize the administration of justice” and so on. Discussions in the digital public sphere are not face-to-face but through the medium of computers and the Internet.Nevertheless, this discursive field is open to anyone at any time, and there the communicative actions are characterized by anonymous authors and audience and is thus a kind of a liberated area. Given the shortage of institutional guarantee for free speech, this anonymity of speakers promotes free discussions and political criticism to a certain extent.At the same time, however, it may also lead to negative consequences where the sense moral responsibility will get blunted, the communication will become irrational, and the quality of discourse will come down.
The Uncertainty of the Public Sphere and Its Effects
The net-forum and BBS based on IT are different from any other kind of existing mass media, and they help promote the multiplicity and complications of public spheres.As a result, the uncertainty of communication and decision-making may be enhanced, the social order of public pledge based on consensus by traditional and substantive values may be shaken, and the discourse of public indignation as a device of social mobilization may lose its direct influence to a great extent.In other words, the complex public sphere in the information age will have to face a dichotomous choice of whether to put the social division of labor and compulsory supply of public goods (considered as the non-contractual basis for contractual relations to the decentralized relational network), or allow the programming of the technocrat group as the center of decision-making in the form of absolute teleological rationality.Therefore, the Chinese public sphere, characterized as emphasizing cooperation and consensus, must now seek the basis for its consensus in the venues of spontaneous and free communication to maintain its mechanism.In this course, the concepts of social theory such as the ideal speech situation, ethical rules for reasoning dialogue, procedural due process, repeated games, irrational decisionism, etc. may become helpful clues and route signs.
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