ARI Working Paper Series

There has been intense scholars’ concern in the social impact of new information communication technologies (ICTs) from the early 1990s. Foremost among these is the idea of the Internet’s democratizing potential, which is supposed to revitalize the public sphere and improve participatory democracy. Many proponents of this idea are western democracy enthusiasts who believe that the Internet will begin a new era of democracy in authoritarian regimes such as China. This consensus is based on the belief that information previously unavailable to ordinary Chinese citizens is now accessible through the Internet and that the Internet provides a free forum which serves as a public sphere for discourse and political mobilization.

Using Habermas’s theory of the public sphere as the theoretical framework, this paper aims to explore whether the Internet provides a public sphere in China which is an issue central to democracy. Four specific research questions reflecting different dimensions of the public sphere are raised in this paper and are explored by a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Based on the results from a survey on about 500 university students and individual in-depth interviews to 20 respondents from diverse backgrounds in China, the paper is trying to provide an answer to the question of whether the Internet provides a public sphere in China. This research is significant in that it is based on empirical research from a user-centered perspective which is different from most previous work.