E-representation: the case of blogging people’s Congress deputies in China

Abstract

In this exploratory study I join the ongoing research on digitalization of political representation. In the literature on the use of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) by the parliamentary and congress members in the Western countries, it is often argued that online engagement has the potential to improve the quality of political representation by means of more direct and individualized communication between representatives and represented. Following the scholarly research on digitalization of political representation in the Western countries, I ask how people’s congress deputies in China appropriate social media for representative communication. I first define political representation in terms of interest expression. I then apply Michael Saward’s representative claim-making perspective and analyse the content of interactions between people’s congress deputies and netizens in the Weibo microblogging sphere in the period between 2013 and 2018. To identify, analyse and categorize online claims, I propose the concept of e-representation, operationalized in terms of individualization, everydayness, interactivity and connectivity. The analysis of online blogging is further complemented by semi-structured interviews with acting and former PC deputies of national and provincial congresses, popular Weibo bloggers (so-called Big V) and academic experts conducted in China throughout 2018–2019. The presented analysis provides empirical evidence from China that also has several theoretical implications. First, it tests Saward’s model by revealing the predominance of incomplete claims. Second, it also shows that claims on representation and misrepresentation are in abundance compared to claims of representation, which are rare. The Chinese case may thus contribute to a more refined typology of representative claims.