Online Activism and Counter-Public Spheres

Abstract

China’s state-controlled and commercialised media and Internet ecology has inherent limitations in representing the interests of workers as industrial citizens. Drawing upon Western scholars’ theoretical critiques of “the public sphere” and historical literature on workers’ struggle for autonomous communication in post-revolutionary China, this paper uses an extended case study to establish a two-pronged analysis that demonstrates the progressively exclusionary and pro-capitalist nature of China’s existing public sphere on the one hand and workers’ appropriation of available technological means for autonomous communicative practice on the other. It points to the potential constitution of Chinese labour as counter-publics in China’s deeply divided class society.

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