Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. xvii, 284 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures.) US$39.50, cloth. ISBN 978-0-691-16686-5.
Ya-Wen Lei’s The Contentious Public Sphere stands to make both theoretical and empirical contributions in three areas that have drawn recent academic attention for their potential in showing how state and society evolve in tandem in contemporary China: law, media (to include the Internet), and the public sphere. Drawn on qualitative and quantitative data and political/legal analysis, the book offers a much-needed interpretation of the structural transformation of politics, law, culture, and society in China as well as of the different actors involved in the transformation processes. The book’s theoretical sophistication and empirical richness tell us a great deal about the trajectories and interconnections among these different institutional processes.
On the one hand, the book’s eight chapters, utilizing the philosophical ideas of Jürgen Habermas, offer a thought-provoking and probing overview of the historical developments of key actors and elements of Chinese political space, such as public opinion, the legal system, the state-controlled mass media, and diversified online voices. On the other hand, the interconnections among these elements and actors are reviewed and synthesized. The author presents her larger ambition and argument in three ways.
First, the book expands upon the on-going debate over the public sphere in China (chapter 1), by critically engaging with a broad array of conceptual and theoretical enterprises. The book lays out its conceptual and theoretical foundations by addressing the complaint that cross-institutional interrogation has not been forthcoming, noting “…the oft-neglected connections between different institutional processes—namely, the development of a legal system, the marketization of the media, and the adoption of the information technologies” (4). In chapter 2, an empirical study of the coverage of public opinion in the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of China’s ruling Communist Party, advances the argument of an emerging, contested public sphere nationwide that forces the state to operate within and endeavor to control it.
Next, the author draws on the multidisciplinary fields of sociology, legal studies, and communication studies to untangle different aspects of “the complexity and contingency” (67) of China’s authoritarian modernization, including the ascent of law and rights (chapter 3), uneven legal-media collaborations (chapter 4), and the shifting online political discourse shaped by legal and media professionals (chapter 5).
Finally, Lei’s argument returns to the political relevance of everydayness that cultivates Chinese internet users into a critical, politically active public (chapter 6). Further, she helpfully summarizes the on-going and repressive initiatives by the state to contain the contentious public sphere (chapter 7), while in the concluding chapter examining the implications of such initiatives and unintended consequences of the rise and decline of a contentious public sphere as a legal, social, technological, and political phenomenon in contemporary China.
The book’s strengths include (1) its theoretical ambition that combines legal and media perspectives to uncover the overlooked, intermediary role of law and rights in facilitating antagonism and social integration in Chinese society; (2) its long-term perspective that maps out structural changes in different social domains beyond short-lived contentious events or moments; and (3) its variety and, most importantly, triangulation of data that assures the validity of the argument. Despite the theoretical and empirical complexity, the book is written in a highly accessible fashion for readers with or without background knowledge of China, legal systems, or (digital) media systems.
While the author has done an admirable job with a rather complicated topic, opportunities remain for elaboration. Treating contested public discourses in the Habermasian public sphere is rarely new, but highly debated in the literature. Although the author acknowledges the criticism toward the public sphere, it remains unclear how the advancement in Lei’s argument resolves one of the key critiques, i.e. Habermas’s ideal of a singular public sphere. In other words, as scholars have already argued—and the author briefly recognizes—there are a multiplicity of publics rather than a singular public (Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992; Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). A revision of Habermasian public sphere hence leads to the introduction of “counter-public[s]” that incorporates “a plurality of competing publics” (Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 [1990]). This has been especially illustrated by Yuezhi Zhao (Communication in China: Political economy, power, and conflict, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), which takes a historical and political-economic analysis of communication and power in contemporary China. Zhao’s employment of the term “counterpublics” to describe those marginal “popular nationalist, socialist, workers’, farmers’, women’s, and religious and quasireligious discourses” (2009, 341) uncovers much more complicated communication struggles in Chinese society. As Zhao (2009, 329) stresses, “…a complete asymmetrical balance of media power among different social groups and different intellectual positions” results in the absence of voices, particularly those of the vast majority of Chinese (migrant) workers and farmers who have neither representation in media nor are subjects of the media’s attention. Given the above contestation regarding the concept of public sphere and its application, the question remains of whether we have only one contentious public sphere between the state and the (homogeneous) society. Or, how would the perspective of “multiple publics” offer a theoretical leverage for better understanding the development of political discourses in contemporary China? These remain intellectually challenging questions still to be empirically examined.
Jun Liu
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen