Jiang, Y. (2012). "Cyber-nationalism in China: Challenging Western media portrayals of internet censorship in China". University of Adelaide Press.

Abstract

Ying Jiang’s Cyber-Nationalism in China: Challenging Western Media Portrayals Of Internet Censorship in China discusses the utilisation of the internet in China by individuals whose blog posts can be understood as oppositional to the relative dominance of Western media representations of China. In the book, various strategies used by bloggers on the Chinese blogosphere to express their political convictions are objectively portrayed, allowing the reader to draw their own normative conclusions. The book contains three parts, with seven chapters in total. Part I is entitled “Democratic Differences between China and the West.” It consists of Chapter One: “Introduction” and Chapter Two: “Consumer Liberalism.” Chapter One presents a fundamental problematic of the author’s text: the dichotomy of the “tense binary opposition of control versus liberalization” (Jiang, 2012, p. 8) with regards to the question of internet regulation and agency in China. Ying Jiang holds that “although the Internet has been a democratic tool in other political settings, it can also be a tool for the containment of democracy” (p. 8). Hence, Ying Jiang partly negotiates this binary opposition with the notion of “governmentality.” The notion of governmentality implies self-government or self-management on the part of individuals within a population, as distinguished from “control” in a more simplistically linear and top-down sense. Ying Jiang suggests that “desires for political change, such as they are, are implicitly embedded in the relationship between China’s online communities and state apparatus” (p.4), but that in addition, “the latter claims total governance over the Internet in