How do people get engaged in civic participation? A case study of citizen activism in rebuilding Enning Road, Guangzhou

Abstract

This paper discusses how citizens become engaged in networks for civic engagement and what affects the initiation, continuity, and impact of an actual action. My case study of the citizens’ engagement in rebuilding Enning Road in Guangzhou found that virtual communities expanded people’s actual connections; Internet mobilization, owing to its broad connectedness, helped stimulate the initiation of public participation but the shared channel of this type of media lacked the power to start an actual action or maintain the momentum. The existing studies suggested that whether the public attention and discussion based on virtual communities could be transformed into sustainable and influential public participation in action depended upon whether the ‘issue’ had its own sustainability and also upon whether the mobilizing ‘agent’ was a rights-protecting group that shared similar interests. The case study reported in this paper, however, found that the off-line ‘liaison and mobilization mechanisms,’ as well as their closely related characteristics, were also significant factors. Connection and mobilization via interpersonal networks pushed virtual discussions into real actions and helped keep the actions going on, while the open space of the city expanded the actual social and policy influences for such actual civic engagement. The distinction of different liaisons from the mobilization mechanisms illustrated in this paper facilitates the explanation of the civic engagement in contemporary China from the ‘diachronic’ and ‘differentiated participation’ angles. The paper concludes that either interpersonal networking organizations being supplementary to the organization of social groups or the public space opened up by the city being supplementary to the closed nature of the structure of the political system itself is still quite limited in the civic engagement in China.