A Democratic China?

Disincentives for Democratic Change in China

Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion?

Drawing on recent survey data, digital ethnography and comparative analysis, this article presents a critical re-appraisal of the interactive blogosphere in China and its effects on Chinese social and political life. Focused on the discursive and behaviorist trends of Chinese netizens rather than the ubiquitous information control/resistance paradigm, it argues that the Sinophone blogosphere is...

China and the Fifth Estate: Net Delusion or Democratic Potential?*

Arguably, liberal democratic societies are seeing the emergence of a ‘Fifth Estate’ that is being enabled by the Internet. This new organizational form is comparable to, but potentially more powerful than, the Fourth Estate, which developed as a significant force in an earlier period with an independent press and other mass media. While the significance of the press and the Internet to democrat...

Towards a Democratic Liberatory

In this article, I will try, first, to critically assess the approaches to liberatory ethics particularly those developed in early modernity, which aimed at deriving an “objectively” grounded liberatory ethics, second, to explore the reasons why today’s liberatory ethics should avoid both the Scylla of “objective” ethics as well as the Charybdis of irrationalist ethics or unbounded moral relati...

Democratic and Anti-Democratic Regulators of the Internet: A Framework

We employ Lessig’s framework of regulation to conceptualize the relationship between the Internet and democracy. Lessig defines four classes of regulators, forces that control and define systems such as the Internet. They are markets, architectures, norms, and laws. We propose that a “democratic regulator” is a force that serves to enhance civil or political liberties. And we argue by example t...