Internet usage in China has recently grown exponentially, rising from 59 million users in 2002 to 710 million by mid-2016. One in every two Chinese has currently been exposed to the Internet. This upsurge has made political communication among citizens and between the government and citizens less costly and almost instantaneous in China. Despite these advances, scholars are only beginning to understand and systematically explain the ways in which increased Internet exposure may affect behavior and values of Chinese netizens. Can the Internet help liberalize Chinese society due to its innate pluralism? Has the Internet become an efficient tool assisting the ruling elite to remain in power given the tendency of Internet service providers and users to be easily manipulated by the Chinese state? This book addresses these questions by focusing on the most digitally embedded segment of Chinese population – university students. Using survey evidence from more than 1200 observations, data confirm that Internet exposure to information generated by fellow netizens promotes democratic orientation, enhances political resistance to indoctrination, and boosts popular nationalism. However, exposure to government-managed websites encourages regime support and, at a less significance level, decreases democratic orientation, and elevates official patriotism. People who perceive the Internet as a tool enhancing the vertical communication between the Chinese government and netizens tend to become patriotic and supportive of the regime. Building upon quantitative evidence, this book draws a nuanced picture of Internet exposure and its political implications.

Internet usage in China has recently grown exponentially, rising from 59 million users in 2002 to 710 million by mid-2016. One in every two Chinese has currently been exposed to the Internet. This upsurge has made political communication among citizens and between the government and citizens less costly and almost instantaneous in China. Despite these advances, scholars are only beginning to understand and systematically explain the ways in which increased Internet exposure may affect behavior and values of Chinese netizens. Can the Internet help liberalize Chinese society due to its innate pluralism? Has the Internet become an efficient tool assisting the ruling elite to remain in power given the tendency of Internet service providers and users to be easily manipulated by the Chinese state? This book addresses these questions by focusing on the most digitally embedded segment of Chinese population – university students. Using survey evidence from more than 1200 observations, data confirm that Internet exposure to information generated by fellow netizens promotes democratic orientation, enhances political resistance to indoctrination, and boosts popular nationalism. However, exposure to government-managed websites encourages regime support and, at a less significance level, decreases democratic orientation, and elevates official patriotism. People who perceive the Internet as a tool enhancing the vertical communication between the Chinese government and netizens tend to become patriotic and supportive of the regime. Building upon quantitative evidence, this book draws a nuanced picture of Internet exposure and its political implications.

Since the Chinese were officially plugged into the virtual community in 1994, the usage of the internet in the country has developed at an incredible rate. By the end of 2008, there were approximately 298 million netizens in China, a number which surpasses that of the U.S. and ranks China the highest user in the world. The rapid development of the online Chinese community has not only boosted the information flow among citizens across the territory, but has also created a new form of social interaction between the state, the media, various professionals and intellectuals, as well as China's ordinary citizens. Although the subject of this book is online Chinese nationalism, which to a certain extent is seen as a pro-regime phenomenon, the emergence of an online civil society in China intrinsically provides some form of supervision of state power-perhaps even a check on it. The fact that the party-state has made use of this social interaction, while at the same time remaining worried about the negative impact of the same netizens, is a fundamental characteristic of the nature of the relationship between the state and the internet community. Many questions arise when considering the internet and Chinese nationalism. Which are the most important internet sites carrying online discussion of nationalism related to the author's particular area of study? What are the differences between online nationalism and the conventional form of nationalism, and why do these differences exist? Has nationalist online expression influenced actual foreign policy making? Has nationalist online expression influenced discourse in the mainstream mass media in China? Have there been any counter reactions towards online nationalism? Where do they come from? Online Chinese Nationalism and China's Bilateral Relations seeks to address these questions.

The Internet and social media are pervasive and transformative forces in contemporary China. Nearly half of China's 1.3 billion citizens use the Internet, and tens of millions use Sina Weibo, a platform similar to Twitter or Facebook. Recently, Weixin/Wechat has become another major form of social media. While these services have allowed regular people to share information and opinions as never before, they also have changed the ways in which the Chinese authorities communicate with the people they rule. China's party-state now invests heavily in speaking to Chinese citizens through the Internet and social media, as well as controlling the speech that occurs in that space. At the same time, those authorities are wary of the Internet's ability to undermine the ruling party's power, organize dissent, or foment disorder. Nevertheless, policy debates and public discourse in China now regularly occur online, to an extent unimaginable a decade or two ago, profoundly altering the fabric of China's civil society, legal affairs, internal politics, and foreign relations. The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China explores the changing relationship between China's cyberspace and its society, politics, legal system, and foreign relations. The chapters focus on three major policy areas—civil society, the roles of law, and the nationalist turn in Chinese foreign policy—and cover topics such as the Internet and authoritarianism, "uncivil society" online, empowerment through new media, civic engagement and digital activism, regulating speech in the age of the Internet, how the Internet affects public opinion, legal cases, and foreign policy, and how new media affects the relationship between Beijing and Chinese people abroad. Contributors: Anne S. Y. Cheung, Rogier Creemers, Jacques deLisle, Avery Goldstein, Peter Gries, Min Jiang, Dalei Jie, Ya-Wen Lei, James Reilly, Zengzhi Shi, Derek Steiger, Marina Svensson, Wang Tao, Guobin Yang, Chuanjie Zhang, Daniel Xiaodan Zhou.

As China rises as an economic and an international power, new relationships are being forged with all areas of the world including Central and Eastern Europe. This book explores how this relationship is developing. It considers how China’s links with Central and Eastern Europe fit in to China’s overall international relations strategies. It looks at economic and trade ties, diplomatic initiatives and the role of the European Union, and examines China’s bilateral relations with the different states of the region. These relationships are particularly interesting because before the end of communism in Eastern Europe China had many direct links with the countries of the region.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction - Judging the state: emerging publics and the quest for justice in contemporary China -- 1 'Battles over green space': land disputes, rights activism, and emerging publics in urban China -- 2 Making personal life political: political trajectories of everyday conversations in China's online communities -- 3 Marginalizing the law: corporate social responsibility, worker hotlines and the shifting grounds of rights consciousness in contemporary China -- 4 Judging publics and contested exclusion: the moral economy of citizenship in China -- 5 Policy documents: imaginations of the state and the struggle for justice in a Chinese land-losing village -- 6 Fighting for one's life: the making and unmaking of public goods in the Yunnanese countryside -- 7 Public Buddhist philosophy: civic engagement and discursive space among a religious group in Shanghai -- 8 Concealing and revealing senses of justice in rural China -- A brief afterword -- Index.