Page 27 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 2. Literature review

Chapter 2. Literature review

2.1 Introduction

This chapter reviews the previous studies relating to my research area – the role
of the internet in social development in China. It consists of four substantive parts. The
first considers the notion of the ‘public sphere’ in the western world and discusses the

possibility of ‘civil society’ in China. The second evaluates whether the Chinese inter-
net environment forms an online, quasi-public sphere. The third part presents the con-
ceptual framework for the book in terms of the information regime theory and the role
of the internet in China’s current social economic and political development. Finally,

the fourth part provides an analytical and theoretical framework for the research – the
triangular structure of the internet in China. This is followed by a summary.

2.2 The notion of the public sphere and the development of
civil society in China

In the 1980s, Habermas’s public sphere theory attracted much interest worldwide,
especially when his work was translated into English in 1989. American scholars of

Chinese studies introduced the concept of the public sphere to investigate Chinese
society from a historical and a modern perspective (Wakeman, 1993; Huang, 1993).
Researchers in China began to study the public space and civic society (Xu, 2003),

and with the development of the global economy and information technology, the idea
of the media as one of the manifestations of the public sphere was also brought to the
forefront. To explore the role of the media in relationship to the claim for a public space
in China, the first step is to trace the origin of the concept of the public sphere.

2.2.1 The origin and definition of the ‘public sphere’

German theorist Hannah Arendt (1958) first proposed the notion of the public

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