Book Review: After the Internet, Before Democracy: Competing Norms in Chinese Media and Society

Abstract

After the Internet, Before Democracy: Competing Norms in Chinese Media and Society. Johan Lagerkvist. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 325 pp. $87 pbk.Lagerkvist's book is a thorough and sometimes overwhelming review of Internet practices and policies in China. His eight chapters and fifty-seven subchapters or sections attempt to organize and analyze a mass of data and relate them to the future of democracy in China. Thirty pages of bibliographic references plus numerous notes within the chapters testify to a careful gathering of the facts of Internet growth in China over the past thirty or so years. Still, it will be heavy going for anyone attempting to grasp the themes. Graduate students and those with a focus on the Internet in China are the likely readers.There are two main arguments about the Internet and democracy in China. One is that Internet growth is inevitably going to lead to the triumph of political democracy. The other is that there is no such inevitability. As the Internet grows along with Facebook, Twitter, or their Chinese equivalents, the Communist Party will learn to use them for greater control and censorship.Lagerkvist, a senior fellow at Stockholm's Swedish Institute of International Affairs, seems conflicted, and at times embraces both arguments. He says that in China there is a peculiar relationship between state power and people power in the Internet age. Very early he admonishes Western scholars for wishful thinking when they directly connect growth of individual electronic communication with the growth of democracy or even the public sphere. But toward the end of the book he says freer speech is expanding on the Internet and a public sphere is appearing. He says that the public sphere and the media system can under the right circumstances become a platform for political change and democratization in China.In short, Lagerkvist says the media, especially the Internet, are bringing political change in China, but how and when are unclear. He sees an ongoing erosion of party-state power over civil society, but he is still very impressed with how resilient the regime has proved in upholding the political status quo.For example, social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, which are outside China, are difficult to monitor, and even blocking access is not always successful. So the government has allowed privately owned search engines within China to set up their own versions (Tudou, Fanfou, Houku), knowing that they will be carefully monitored and controlled by companies that do not want to be shut down. As the author points out, in this way the party has shifted the burden of control and negotiating which messages are acceptable in the media to the private sphere. Lagerkvist says the state wants to disguise its control over the media as much as possible, fearing outright repression will damage the successful Chinese economy on which the legitimacy of the regime is firmly planted.The book grew out of Lagerkvist's PhD thesis. Its thoroughness, at times spending time on minor online curiosities (e.g., the flesh search engines and the grass mud horse video), and its caution are typical of a young scholar who is having difficulty separating important themes from aberrations. …