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Mobile Communication, Popular Protests and Citizenship in China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2012

JUN LIU
JUN LIU*
Affiliation:
Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen Email: liujun@hum.ku.dk
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Abstract

Digital telecommunication technology has expanded the potential of the mobile phone to be used increasingly as a weapon against authoritarian rule and censorship. Since the content of mobile communication is unpredictable and unregulated, mobile phones have the capability to breach state-sponsored blockage of information. This in turn helps the Chinese people to maintain contact with each other, receive information from outside the country, and make political waves in an aggressive battle for control over information. This paper examines spontaneous mobilization via mobile phones, with a focus on two concrete popular protests in rural and urban areas, demonstrating how Chinese citizens have expanded the political uses of mobile phones in their struggle for freedom of information flow, social justice, and the rule of law, while seeking to build an inexpensive counter-public sphere. These processes destabilize China's conventional national public sphere by shaping political identities on an individual level as well as the notion of citizenship within the evolving counter-public sphere. The political significance of mobile phones in the context of contemporary China's political environment can be observed by various social forces that communicate their struggles with the aid of this technology, pose challenges in governance, and force the authorities to engage in new kinds of media practices.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , May 2013 , pp. 995 - 1018
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

The author is extremely grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and to Professor Klaus Bruhn Jensen, University of Copenhagen, for his insightful comments on this paper. The author also wishes to thank Dr Poul Erik Nielsen and Associate Professor Jørgen B. Bang, University of Aarhus, for their invaluable suggestions on an earlier proposal for this paper. A previous version of this paper was invited to be presented at ‘Media in Transition 6’, MIT Communication Forum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States, 24–26 April 2009.

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39 Interview, residents in Xiamen, 2007. Also see Zhu, H. (2007). ‘Baiyi Huagong Xiangmu Yinfa Judu Chuanwen, Xiamen Guoduan Jiaoting Yingdui Gonggong Weiji (Xiamen Calls an Abrupt Halt to the PX Project to Deal with the Public Crisis)’, Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend), 28 May, p. A1.

40 Interviews, residents in Xiamen, 2007.

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46 Interviews, residents in Xiamen, 2007.

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50 For instance, local schools told students they would be expelled if they took to the streets. Interviews, student, journalist, civil servant, and local residents, Xiamen, 2007 and 2008.

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