Repression and Policing
| April 25, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
The article “Policing Protest in the United States: 1960–1995” by Clark McPhail, David Schweingruber and John McCathy laid out two types of policing: the escalated force and negotiated management tactics. Then they proposed five dimensions to describe these policing styles: 1) respect First Amendment rights 2) tolerance for community disruption 3) nature of communication 4) extent and manner of arrests 5) the extent and manner of using force. To demonstrate such theoretical framework, they introduced the policing practices from 1960s to 1990s. Their conclusion is that the current public order management systems are not uniform across the United States.
I am interested in their perspective of looking at the evolvement of the policing practices. For them their analysis is not only limited to identifying two types of policing, but rather they systematically examined the dynamic process of the transition from the escalated force style to negotiated management style. This approach fascinates me because their research object is no longer static but in fact dynamic. The shift of perspective can inform us that the role of the state or the police should not be treated as a fixed entity, and the mechanisms, styles and practices of repression/response from the authority also evolve as the landscape of the conflicts and activism changes. I think this co-evolvement process is exactly what researchers often neglect when they try to dig into specific concepts.
I am also thinking about how to integrate this perspective into my own research agenda. When I read their analysis of the transition from the escalated force style to negotiated management style, I thought about the radicalization of activists such as Ai Weiwei and a more negotiated style from Chinese authority. Ai Weiwei was only known as an artist before 2008 when he designed the Bird Nest Olympic Stadium, but as he became more public he began to criticize the state supported this architecture design. Then this radicalization process has begun and has a series of movements such as investigating the names of dead students during Sichuan earthquake, and advocates for release of human rights lawyers. I think the role of media is the key in the process and during the interaction with the media, he portrays himself as the human rights fighter and the effect of publicity from media further help him establish as an icon against the regime. For the authority side, their response I think is growing to the direction of a more negotiated position (not for actions like Ai Weiwei) for the domestic protests targeting practical issues, such as the case in Wukan. These types of protests are rapidly increasing as this society has been facing social issues caused by economic development, escalated force policing cost too much and higher authority positions as a more benevolent power is reasonable for protests against local authority. In my future research, the radicalization process as well as the evolvement of policing practices might be great interests to me.
Lastly, I want to raise a question: How do the mass media shape the practices of policing and the public perception of policing? I think this article neglects the discussion of the media, which is very important for the radical protest, because in many cases, the violent scenes by participants are made to attract media attention. In such situation, how does the authority respond? It becomes interesting: when both the authority and the movement organizers are aware of each other’s actions beforehand, as indicated in the negotiated management style, the media is actually the viewer of a performance. Is that truly what the public want?
Anti-CNN as Tactical Media?
| April 16, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
When I tried to search “tactical media in China” in academic databases, I found the term of tactical media is rarely used in Chinese context, but there are several other articles describing online disobedience that draws from cultural materials, such as slang and symbols, to challenge existing powers. As said in Molly’s article, many words are given new meaning by netizens as a tactic to escape the censorship. Except for these practices and innovations of cultural symbols which could be understood as tactical media, I am also thinking about other more formal interventions. In Boler’s introduction, she mentioned the rise of Al Jazeera is the intervention that participates in the first tier of media structure. In this respect I guess in China there is no such tactical media that makes the intervention at this level. However, I do observe some groups which are temporarily self-formulated as a respond to the reporting of dominant media. The question I have for these groups is about how they can transform into more stable forms instead of just as temporary existence.
I am going to introduce a case to illustrate this form of tactical media in China, and through examining their rise and decline, I particularly ask why they can survive after the news cycle dies down. Anti-CNN was an forum founded by a group of college students who discovered that the media reports from CNN and other western media did not objectively portray 2008 Tibetan Protest. For example, some media used older footage of Nepal police beating monks to show the suppression from Chinese authority. It aroused huge anger among Chinese netizens against the fact that the discourse of the event was dominated by these western media. Often this case was thought as a manifestation of the growing neo-nationalism in China by several scholars (eg. Yang and MacKinnon). Western media first accused them of being supported by the Chinese government, but in fact they were completely self-initiated by several college students. However, they rightly pointed out this single event was not independent to other social factors. In the year of 2008, the Beijing Olympic was no longer just a sports event, but in fact for many Chinese people it was a presentation of the national identity. The disturbance of the torch relay in Paris led to another anger within domestic public sphere. These events kept the patriotic emotions of the public at a high level, and when the reports from CNN were found biased, these messages from Anti-CNN were quickly and widely circulated. For the media ecology within China, Anti-CNN might not be a typical tactical media, because in fact they reinforced the existing dominant ideology. If our perspective changes to the international ecology this type of media might be counted as one, because the dominant discourse still belongs to the mainstream western media.
Media has its own agenda, and the audience has limited media attention. After the news cycle dies down, Anti-CNN has to reposition itself. In 2009, they changed their site name into April Media and its task was not just to find the biased reports in western media, but they produced and curated news from the perspective of neo-leftist. This strategy is effective because in fact the emotion of neo-nationalism and neo-leftism in society is inevitable as long as the frictions between communist and western ideologies still exist. Now this site is one of the main places where news and views from the left are collected. The tactical media is described as temporary interventions and I wonder if the emphasis of temporary intervention has an assumption that this strategy is more impactful than the stable form after its initial “tactical” period. I think at least long term intervention such as the April Media after its initial stage of Anti-CNN suggests the oppositional discourse can be the hidden force that let the tactical media exist more consistently in the mainstream media environment.
The Outcomes of the Movements: The Diffusion Network
| April 16, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
In Marco Giugni’s piece, he pointed out that the outcome of a movement should not only be understood as direct political outcome, but rather the long term cultural outcome should also be emphasized. I think this perspective is quite powerful as a response to comment on the success or failure of the movements. Beyond the judgement of the movement, I am particularly interested in some of the mechanisms of how the cultural outcome works as laid out by Giugni, and one of them is the “spillover” effect:
“Another cultural impact of the movement can be seen in the “spillover” effect on other movements and citizens across the globe. Surely, the upheavals in the Middle East have encouraged citizens in other part of the world, including the U.S., to take to the streets to show their discontent. But such connections among movements can also be seen in the longer run. In this sense, in fact, the Occupy Movement itself could well be seen as a long-term product of the global justice movement, which laid the seeds for what would occur more than a decade later when the circumstances became favorable for the emergence of this new wave of contention. More to the point, we can expect the Occupy Movement to leave a legacy that will bear its fruits in the future, opening up the democratic space for new waves of contention and citizens’ political participation.”
As this paragraph above is only from his blog post, in which he did not provide more analysis about why the Occupy Movement could be seen as the product of the global justice movement. Even though they both target at the inequalities of distribution, I think some aspects, such as their organizational linkage, their specific appeals, and their tactical diffusion, should also be examined before claims that link a later movement to a former movement are made. I remember in a lecture about Wukan Incident a question was asked to an investigative journalist about whether the activists in Wukan learnt their tactics of protest from their experiences as migrant workers in the cities and the strikes happen more in cities. Her answer was that she did not think there was enough evidence of linking these protests together. I think her opinion insists that “spillover” effect is convincing only when established mechanisms are found, for example, the same group of people striking or protesting in different episodes.
When I read this article, I cannot help thinking about how to make the “political vs cultural” outcome framework fit into my own “adversarial vs supportive” media strategy perspective. In the non-adversarial case, Wukan Incident, the activists have their specific practical appeals including replacing the corrupt village leaders, and transparent village leaders election. These practical claims are easier for them and the government to reach agreement, and thus achieve the political outcome in this respect. In fact, the success of Wukan inspired other villages having similar problems of land disputes to organize their own protests. I think Wukan strategy is non-adversarial also because their way of dealing with the diffusion of the actions. They consciously alienate the visitors from other villages because one of the sensitive boundary for the party to judge the movement to see if they formulate a network (串联). The other case in my work is Ai Weiwei’s human rights movement, which I frame as adversarial. Although the information of his movement is banned in domestic media, discursively his movement is quite successful. He cleverly draws from cultural symbols, artistic forms and languages to generate a discourse of democracy and himself is thought as an icon of human rights fighters. I wonder to what extent his actions and his admirers can be thought as “spillover” effect of previous democratic movement such as 1989 Tiananmen Movement. In fact activists striving for Tibetan freedom, exiles of 1989 movement students, Falun Gong practitioners, alienated by Chinese authority, automatically connect to each other. Therefore, in this respect I think in authoritarian countries, the non-adversarial strategy might include the control to limit the “spillover” effect, and in contrast with the adversarial movement, the compromise is the lessened possibility of long term democratic discourse.
Change as the exogenous cause or endogenous origin?
| April 16, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
Review on “The New Social Movements: A theoretical approach”
Melucci first identified two camps on social movement theories, Marxism and functionalist sociology. The primary concern of marxist analysis is that it overemphasizes the importance of the structural capitalist system, underestimating the internal articulation (mobilization, organization, leadership, ideology) and the transformation of the movements. The functionalist approach finds the key explanation of the behaviors of collective actions is in the magnitude of the actors’ beliefs that mobilize the actions, and the beliefs come from the the disturbance of the equilibrium of the social movement. I think his critique against functionalist analysis is from the perspective of class relations, mode of production and appropriation of resources, and in later parts when he develops theories on new social movements he primarily uses this perspective. (Is it also Marxism I think?)
Then he defines different types of collective actions through the dimensions of deviance, conflict-based action. As can be seen from the figure in his article: As the level of conflict and deviance of movements increase, the organizational movement and political movements transform into class movements. In the transformation, there are an increase in the symbolic content and a decrease in divisibility of the stakes. Specifically he refers to the class movement as a high level of identity movement and low possibility of negotiation between stakes.
Then his analysis on the origins of the class movement turns very philosophical and abstract. He defines “A class movement is a movement involved in a conflict over the mode of production and over the appropriation and orientation of social resources.” The conflicts exist in the essence of the man’s works and the production of one’s work implies a social relationship. Classes are born out of the unbalanced production between the dominant and the dominated groups.
Melucci criticized theories that treat change or factors that activate collective actions as given factors without explanation, but he also denied change as endogenous factor in some other theories. He claims the central difficulty lies in the failure of distinguishing between synchrony and diachrony, between structure and change. For him the synchronic approach explains the structural conflict within the system, and he introduces the concept of contradiction to explain how a structural conflict turns to diachronic forms of behavior. As he stated, “the contradiction functions like a catalyst on the latent antagonism.” From this perspective, he further set up the mechanisms of conflicts between the classes in motion and detailed the interactions (appeal, repress, adjust, etc.) in the process.
In his last part, after setting up all the framework, he finally answers the question of what aspects of changes in the production system have led to new class conflicts. The new class conflicts are no longer the unfair exploitation of labor force, but “rather by the manipulation of complex organizational systems, by control over information and over the processes and institutions of symbol-formation, and by intervention in interpersonal relations.” The production here is no longer the material products but “rather the production of the individual’s biological and interpersonal identity.” The new social movement is the “defense of the identity, continuity, and predictability of personal existence.” In this process, the deprivation from the dominant group makes the dominated speak up their identities, and the originally thought private spheres are now become public. Their focus is not on political system but rather in the process “solidarity as an objective is the characteristic of the new movements. They reject representation but embrace direct participation. He also identified two other characteristics of the new social movements: the centrality of the body and the strong component of religion.
This article spent most of its pages on the layout of his framework of production and social relations, and his analysis is very theoretical. I still think his framework is largely based on classic Marxist analysis on social production and maybe he could have made this part more concise and spent more pages on his creation of the definition of new social movements. Another critic from me is that listed many characteristics of the new social movements, and I agree with him that actors of new social movements are identity mobilized, but I cannot see how centrality of body and religion are particular to this type of action, and how they relate to the theories of production and social relations. My final critic for his article is that perhaps he did not specify where the contradiction comes from. Since one of his most important tasks is explanation of the source of change, he just brought up the concept of contradiction as the internal factor, and for me I wonder if the contradiction needs other factors to trigger.
Book Review: Shaping Abortion Discourse
| February 28, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
Ferree, Myra M., William A. Gamson, Jürgen Gerhards, and Dieter Rucht. 2002. Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States. Cambridge, UK & New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
The body of literature on framing has been growing since 1970s (Goffman, 1975; Bennett, 1975; Gitlin, 1980; Gamson 1980, 1992; Snow and Benford, 1988, 1992; Gernards 1995; Oliver and Johnston 1999) , but few of them like Shaping Abortion Discourse offered us grounded comparative empirical research. This book is an outstanding empirical study on how actors frame abortion discourse in the public spheres across two countries. The authors provides us with an exemplar model of frame analysis for future similar work. As can be seen from their online notes of coding, they successfully operationalized the procedures of analyzing the explicit and implicit frames in news articles. The nuances in human language require researchers to carefully investigate the hidden meanings of various claims. In this specific study on newspapers, these researchers pay special attention to distinguish between the frame of journalists and frames of quoted actors in the same articles. The amount of work they have committed to this study is impressive and the end result is an influential work for future frame analysis studies.
Their comparative approach is the counter-argument to the sweeping globalization theories in the beginning of the century. They select the topic of abortion because it is highly contested in both countries, but transnational network on the same issue has not influenced their discourses in fundamental ways. By establishing the differences of the forces that are shaping the abortion discourse in these two mature democracies, the authors naturally lead our attention to the culture and history of specific countries. They describe how some absolute terms can be differentiated from a comparative approach, “By adopting a comparative perspective, we use each country as a lens through which we can make visible the assumptions of the other. The comparative perspective also provides a valuable standard against which we can measure the discourse in each country – not, for example, as ‘inclusive’ or ‘civil’ in absolute terms, but as relatively inclusive or civil compared to the other country.” The results of the frame analysis have supported the importance of the nation state in highly contested universal issues even in the age of globalization.
The authors accomplished two tasks in this book. The first one is that they bring up and test a theoretical model of the cultural contest in the abortion discourse. The second one is to discuss the quality of the discussions on the abortion issue according to four theories on democracy. I find the second part is less compelling than the first part or maybe they could split this one book into two if they intend to give more comprehensive analysis on how the reality of politics connects with theoretical conceptions. I will describe their questions, approaches, and findings of their two parts in the following paragraphs and come back to discuss their limitations at the end.
In the first part, they ask how key actors frame the abortion discourse in these countries and they come up with the concept of “discursive opportunity structure” to encompass the larger cultural or social structural reasons for the differences of the framing strategies.
In this theoretical framework provided by these authors, many concepts such as public discourse can be applied as other politically contentious issues in other settings. They describes “a forum includes an arena in which individual or collective actors engage in public speech acts; an active audience or gallery observing what is going on in the arena; and a backstage, where the would-be players in the arena work out their ideas and strategize over how they are to be presented, make alliances, and do the everyday work of cultural production.” The public sphere refers to the set of all forums in a society in their work. For them, the mass media forum is the main site where political forces that shaping the discourse take place. It also partially justify their use of influential newspapers as their data source to test their theories.
The most challenging part of their study is to measure how the frames are used in the public spheres. They randomly sampled over 2500 news articles from four quality newspapers in US and Germany in a period of three decades. They develop concepts of standing and framing as the measurements of actors’ success in the discourse competition. Standing refers to whether the actors have a voice in the public sphere, and framing is to examine how dominant the voice is in comparison with other rival voices. Linking these concepts with concrete coding process, they examine the standing and framing at two levels: the article and the utterance. At the article level, we can see to what extent certain types of actors have their presence in the media. At the utterance level, we would know specifically what statement is made by any single speakers. They also measure the idea elements in the utterances into eight large categories in which many sub ideas exist. For example, in the abortion discourse, many claims contain the idea element of “the fetus has a right to life”. By looking at how often a certain type of idea appears on the utterances by particular speakers, we will understand how strong a discourse is in this debate by which actors. Except for their large set of data from analyzing newspaper articles, they also conducted the survey with various institutions and organizations and interviews with journalists and participants in these organizations to reconstruct the backstage of the media forum.
Then they discuss their findings in the framework of “discursive opportunity structure” that the different cultural and political contexts have played a role in the difference of the outcomes of the framing by the players in the public spheres. For instance, the authors find the state, political parties and churches have higher standing in Germany, while civil society actors and individuals are more prominent in the United States. For the framing contest, the “fetal life” frame is more obvious in Germany than in the US. They also find “German discourse has generally moved toward a more anti-abortion framing of what the issues are and the American debate has moved in a more pro-abortion-rights direction from the beginning of the period.” From chapter seven to chapter nine they analyze the representation of the women’s movements, religious institutions and the tradition of the left in the public abortion discourses. I am not going to discuss more on these findings because the results are more useful for the researchers specialized in abortion discourse, but our focus is their frame analysis that can be used for other issues that involve the participation of these key players.
The second part of the book is about the evaluation of the debates to see how the democracy functions in these two countries. They layout four theoretical models of democracy in chapter ten: Representative Liberal, Participatory Liberal, Discursive, and Constructionist/Feminist. These models are the normative criteria about the desirable qualities in a democratic public sphere. In chapter eleven, they use their data to measure these criteria and compare German and the United States to see how well they met the standards. Their result of analysis is that Germany does relatively better on those emphasized by the representative liberal tradition, while the United States does better on those emphasized by the participatory liberal and constructionist/feminist traditions.
I find this part is less compelling than the first part. The models of democracy come from the abstraction of the political systems in different countries, and using one case(abortion discourse) to generalize the democratic model of a particular country is less convincing because another discourse analysis probably will attest the US as another model. The logic of the second part is to use one case for generalization, while the logic of the first part is to create a generalized analytical model for other examples to test, and they have already successfully tested one.
Another weakness of their theoretical framework is about the role of media shaping the larger culture. They expressed in their introduction that having the voices in the mass media is not only an indicator of success in framing, but also having the function to influence in the larger cultural change. However, their theoretical framework seems to have neglected this part, and judging from their empirical data, I find how much this change can be measured is still unknown. If including the analysis of the media’s influence, the study might turn into a massive work, but this direction is useful for future works.
When I look at their methods, the first questions come to my mind is why they select these newspapers rather than other newspapers, and why they do not include televisions which are also the most important players in mass media. Although I am not so sure about the hidden ideologies that the New York Times (liberal but a bit left?) has, my guess is that the selections are not strictly representative of the American mass media.
There are also some other criticisms I find in some reviews. For example, Staggenborg (2004) mentioned some sociologists are not satisfied with their broad use of “discursive opportunity structure” where all kinds of social and cultural factors are put. She also pointed out that “the book is less successful in offering potentially generalizable theoretical propositions, as those listed in the book are really findings specific to the comparison between Germany and the United States rather than more general hypotheses or arguments.” Chang (2005) also digs into their arguments on the abortion discourse itself, and challenges their analysis from a view of religious studies, “the researchers fail to mention U.S. Catholicism’s historically tenuous position as a minority religion.”.
Despite the existence of the criticisms, this book is still a great example of frame analysis and comparative studies. Also they provide us with the exceptional methodological model that inspires future studies to work on other issues of contentious politics.
References
Staggenborg, Suzanne. “Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States [book review].” American Journal Of Sociology 110, no. 3 (2004): 818-820.
Chang, Perry. “Abortion, Religious Conflict, and Political Culture.” Journal For The Scientific Study Of Religion 44, no. 2 (June 2005): 225-230.
Pfetsch, Barbara, and Silke Adam. 2005. “Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States.” Political Communication 22, no. 2: 250-252.
A website has brief introductions to frame analysis:
http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/methods/publications/frameanalysis/software.html
Resource Mobilization Theory
| February 21, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
Looking at the three articles we could clearly see the shift of perspectives on understanding the social movements. Le Bon’s approach of social psychology to define the rise of collective actions was replaced by the theories of resource mobilization, political processes and political opportunity structures in the 1970s. In the article by McCarthy and Zald, we are directed to the area of social movement sector, where individuals, organizations and structures are carefully defined. For them the rise and fall of movements are no longer simply determined by the shared grievances and generalized beliefs, but rather largely influenced by the social resources of organizations, interactions among different players and structured opportunities. Then in Sampedro’s work, he presents us a mixed model using a case of anti-military draft campaigns in Spain to frame the social movement between models of the elite dominated media and media with plural voices.
The three studies reside in different level of studies and they are not necessarily in conflict with each other. If we think of movements generated by social emotions we could always find cases such as riots in which ordinary people turn into evils ignited by hatred. At the same time the institutionalized movements in democratic western countries are good examples of the resource mobilization theory. Then if we set the model of resource mobilization in motion, which means to examine the movements across a long period of time, we could come up with new insights to challenge the hypotheses made by the resource mobilization model. However, actually I only appreciate Sampedro’s approach to counter the static model by introducing historical perspective, and it is still doubtful to what extent his mixed model could apply to more various societies that are not experiencing a larger social change such as democratic transition or with the media environment where mass media is not practiced based on the rules of sensation.
In McCarthy and Zald’s article, they pointed out their limitations of their hypotheses, “The propositions are heavily based upon the American case, so that the impact of societal differences in development and political structure on social movements is unexplored, as are differences in levels and types of mass communication.”(p.1213). As a student from China, I often bear the assumption that the political context is a strong counter-argument to respond to any theories developed based on western societies. But this assumption could be also problematic that I might be blind to the shared factors.
If I break the assumption for a moment, I find the resource mobilization theory could be powerful to explain the emerging nonprofit sector in China. The area of charity and voluntary sector have a higher level of institutionalization than some social movements that directly challenge the official ideologies in this authoritarian country. Their practices such as providing social services to the underprivileged groups are mostly routinized, and within this field large number of professionals work for registered organizations and rightfully resist structured inequalities. If we take a closer look, the rules to succeed in the nonprofit sector are as competitive as other commercial industries such as seeking resources and promoting themselves in media.
Too many times when we think of democracy in China, the first impression always falls to the spontaneous events of conflicts repetitively reported in the media and it is mixed with people’s ideal expectation of a radical transition. What is neglected here is to share part of our attention to the routinized actions that might enable social movement industries to emerge and eventually challenge the society where only dominant values could reproduce.
New Media as Power-laden Space
| February 14, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
I am particularly intrigued by Manuel Castells’s analysis on the media as the space where powers are contested. As stated in his article, shaping the minds of the people is critical to the state as well as other power institutions, and “the battle of the human mind in largely played out in the process of communication.” With the rise of new ICTs the battle field has shifted to the “mass self-communication network”, which has created new opportunities for social movement actors to challenge the existing institutions of power. Although I agree with his general claim that directs our attention to the new space enabled by digital media, we should also be conscious that battle in the new field does not naturally favors rebellious individuals. Extant power holders in traditional media system still have its own voices in the new space, and empowered social movements still have to fight for their interests and values to be addressed.
I find his argument that frames the media as the power laden context is illuminating when I think of my own thesis. The topic I intend to pursue is to examine the media strategy of Chinese activists in this “self-communication network” society. Admittedly, the rising of the network society has included voices of activists that were rarely to be found in party controlled newspapers and televisions, but this process has also invited a diversity of voices with distinctive agendas into the field. In Chinese media ecosystem, state controlled media represent the extended power from the government, and also at the same time the media has its own commercial identities which tend to seek eye-catching news. Since the administrative system of China is built on a design of restrained power between the central government and local governments, the media accountable to these different levels of government are distinctive when their interests are in conflict with each other. Also the popularity of blogging and micro-blogging services has brought many opinion leaders into the public space, and in fact their opinions are quite fragmented by their own ideologies. Another source of media in Chinese context is the international news agencies, whose editorial strategies are not completely objective either. In this complicated media ecosystem, a battle of powers to shape the minds of people is on.
For Chinese social movements actors, identifying the powers in the media environment is decisively important. One of the features of the contentious politics in rural China is coined as “rightful resistance” by Kevin O’Brien, which refers to the strategies adopted by activists that align themselves with the official rhetoric to avoid serious crackdown from the authority. This tactic channels the power from the higher government to restrain the local government whom they have direct conflict with. In the space of media, the powers are contested in a similar model that activists position themselves as pro communist party in their own media platforms as well as through the interactions with other media. For example, they would call for foreign journalists not to use words like revolt to describe their movement to justify their legitimacy. This form of contention effectively places them into a safe zone, while maintaining its nature of resistance.
What makes the media space complicated is perhaps the noises directly brought by netizens who participate in the discussion of these movements. Once the movements are brought into posts in online forums, micro-blogs, and social networking sites, we can often find opinion leaders impose much of their own ideologies to interpret the movements, no matter it is pro-democracy or not. But not much study has been done to analyze the political bias in newer media such as Weibo and see how it differentiates from newspapers. It will be very helpful for us to find the evidence to support the theory of the powers in battle to shape minds of people.
Is Knowledge Power
| February 12, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
Langdon Winner questioned the metaphor of revolution which leads to the belief that the new technology itself will automatically bring about significant social change. Especially he challenged the common premises: (1) people are bereft of information; (2) information is knowledge; (3) knowledge is power; (4) the increasing access to information enhances democracy and equalizes social power. His article was published in 1986 and actually the debate of whether increased availability of information on the Internet could strengthen democracy was still prevalent in the past ten years or so. I think one of the reasons for the ambiguities of this kind of debate is that questions asked are not in clear categories. Admittedly, he made some convincing arguments to emphasize the importance of social inequalities to restrain the possibilities of people to process the amount of information. But looking back at his questions asked in the beginning of his article, I find he actually did not clearly define what aspects of better human life/social justice/human freedom he would focus on, and in fact his argument against the causal relationship between information and democratic forces sometimes shifted to critics of the Internet as a whole. For example, in the later part of the article, he mentioned the potentialities of declined human sociability on the Internet, which makes me think of the general pessimistic side of this new technology instead of enlightening me to examine the nuances between knowledge and power. I guess my critic might not be fair enough for an article written in the beginning stage of a new technology and his voice at his time could be really astonishing and impressive. But reading more recent articles on the discussion of this democratic potential of new ICTs I find that reviewing literature divided into two arguments (pessimistic and optimistic) is far from sufficient, and sub-sets of questions in clear categories should be asked. For example, studies on information flow across platforms should not be mixed with studies on social interactions of users. Therefore these studies can be in direct dialogue instead of arguing for a general question with distinctive answers.
咱们工人有力量 Power of Workers
| February 5, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
转载：「我在中国」（Co-China）论坛第二十三期——「解剖」乌坎
| January 14, 2012 | Posted by admin under Uncategorized |
在网上看到这个活动：
乌坎村在抗争中获得了与公权力博弈的筹码，足以成为一个可供研究和讨论的范本。乌坎的抗争能否持续？这种抗争模式对其他的村庄维权是否有借鉴意义？本期论坛我们邀请了一直关注乌坎事件并多次进行深入报道的记者张洁平，关注大陆基层民主和乡村自治的学者叶荫聪和大家一起讨论乌坎的抗争模式。
讲者：
张洁平：《阳光时务》主笔，乌坎事件后三次到乌坎，发表《乌坎起事》、《呼啸村庄——乌坎的死亡与反抗》、《乌坎村：社会运动的乡村范本》、《乌坎热血青年团》 、《薛健婉口述》等文章。
叶荫聪：岭南大学文化研究系讲师，关注中国基层民主和乡村自治，乌坎事件之后发表文章《传统复兴？——对乌坎村的一些观察》。
时间：1月14日（周六）15：00——17：00
地点：湾仔轩尼诗道365号富德楼9F香港独立媒体
视频直播： https://cochina.org/视频直播
音频直播： https://cochina.org/音频直播
twitter直播账号：CoChinaOnline
以下是我一边听一遍做的笔记，与原意不符之处都是我的责任！
张洁平：
张建兴等伙伴都是从就是九十年代末开始上网，他们看到９１１事件说他们都比较反美，他们到现在也是这么觉得，张建兴高一辍学，因为他爸不给买手机，但是他想要一个能上网的，能拍照的，他们都不明白这个东西对我有多重要，他们从小通过互联网联系。
对中国学者，乌坎一发生觉得左派右派讨论都没用了，乌坎事件都是自发的，宗族的力量都是用原来的棋子，捐款也是和以前修庙一样
游行自发的和以前祭祀都一样的，也没有来自外界的指导。
他们不喜欢汪洋，更喜欢薄熙来，他们觉得有青天的话，乌坎就不会出事儿了
主动抗争的意识但是拜托不了一个天花板，皇恩型的政府
主持人：乌坎事件听政府的声音没有表现出来？
张：薛锦波的死亡最坏的事儿，当时村里出现了恐惧情绪，薛是大姓，人很多，一千多人，总人口一万人，死亡是凝聚村的大力量，恐惧的人觉得一定要站到一起
网络问题：乌坎１１７名代表是如何推选的？
张：乌坎有４７个主要的姓，每个姓出１-５名代表，１１７个村民代表有投票权，从中选出３８个人，每个人一个姓，有被投票权，然后选１３个人当代表
林祖鸾从经济诉求到政治诉求，一开始要求重新选举村委会，要推翻以前村委会，要承认我们选出的理事会，以后要从新选举村委会
提问：乌坎的人等清官，香港的人也是希望选一个好议员带领我们，但是要反对
网络评论：未来在年轻人，但是体制内的人不讲正义。
张：村民对薄熙来的想象在想象中，他们也知道在世界上找到好官也不容易，linzuluan觉得村里的事情一定要村自己争取，他们草根领袖他们很在意上级讲话，他们很明了政策的潜意识，他们分析这个是什么意思，汪洋“做人官不做狗官”，linzulan倒是觉得汪洋是袒护自己官的信号，zhengyanxiong不会下台了，其实他们的直觉很准，汪洋的动作连村里的人都知道，汪洋的表态可能只是讲给十八大，可能不是真应对这件事。
主持人：村民土地矛盾，香港的和乌坎有什么不一样？
caiyuancun很特别，是政府的项目，村民和政府的矛盾，但是新界是原居民和非原居民，原居民有点像中国的富农，而非是佃农，而中国的矛盾都是直接国家和村民对抗，香港的原居民其实是既得利益者，而中国宗族的力量比较弱，而宗族还不能吸纳到利益体系当中，农村里面党员的比例比我想象的要低，所以不一定能掌控住这个力量，在香港宗族反而是和政府同一个鼻孔呼吸的。
提问：乌坎更相信个人而不是政府，他们自己很期待领导人，他们另一方面确实相信自己的组织，他们不知道法制和人治，他们可不能发展出一个制度上的可能性呢？
张：他们主动有抗争意识，很有组织性，谁打头，妇女在旁边，组织很高级，但是另一方面又期待人治的出现，但是他们这个东西会慢慢变化的，所谓的启蒙还没有正式开始，我们不要一个皇恩的政府要一个问责政府，重庆的讨论不是很多人能理清楚所谓的薄个人的喜好，他们在三个月的磨练对人治没有以前那么大信心，比如政府给了承诺但是他们遵守吗，很无力，他们选村委会时候他们就想选个代表会，制衡，在运动中出现，旁观者比较容易陷入旁观者傲慢，他们完全是行动经验，所以他们制度设计的时候会吃一堑长一智。
叶：我们对反抗政治都西方中心的，这几年想象公民社会的概念对中国不是很有用，”被治理者的政治“，我们不会想象公民政治的角色，和其中权力和具体的政治当中，我不是说传统是好的，过程是要运动当中探索，其实宗族里面有很多黑暗面，研究农民工时候发现，宗族其实也是压迫当地农民工的，宗族团结是团结但也是暴力，在一个运动当中不是那么干净，要探索，乌坎很有意思，动力是什么需要进一步了解。
现场提问：我不觉得wukan是一个鼓励形成的运动，我们之前看到了很多工厂罢工的时候自己组织了纠察队，城市农村都有抗争，单靠一两个道德号召是很容易镇压的，运动是一次一次失败当中学习过来的，农民工回城可能从城市抗争的经验带回了村。我觉得可以关注城市和农村抗争结合后出现什么情况。
张：他们其实并不知道外面发生了什么罢工，他们乌坎村的人不是来自工厂，其实都是在外面做小生意。
叶：当地的工人和农民区别还是比较大，链接起来比较难。
提问２：他们怕秋后算账吗？
张：他们几个代表到现在为止都不敢出去，他们对上级政府的信心有限，他们的策略就是赶紧息事宁人，接受谈判。
叶：他们需要用隐形的抗争慢慢来，农村的领袖的风险比较高，一般的群众只要不是当头人群众风险不高。
张：秋后算账其实已经有了，１２.２１谈判后，打印店被罚款了二十万，积极的人都会收到危险，他们其实会找一些别的罪名。
提问：怎么看抗争经验的积累？
叶：抗争经验的累积应该从当时的环境经验去理解，而不是工农的想象。
张：问年轻人从哪里知道怎么组织的游行，他们说可能是因为打过游戏，红色境界，来自自己的经验。
乌坎成了上访的地方，海门的人都来见省里的调查组，乌坎人自己很怕惯以串联的罪名，工农联盟很难出现。
网友：八九民运和乌坎的区别？
叶：八九在城市发生，乌坎是地方性的，我们的想象有重要的改变，八九很重要，但是也会限制我们的想象，但是整个社会的改变，地方性的抗争在某个时刻没有特别改变，但是要放到一个过程当中，整个社会的改变是慢慢累积的，而不是一下子某个中央性的改变。
网友：乌坎事件是不是社会维稳手段的转折点？
张：广东和其他不一样的是，广东比较有弹性，薛锦波刚死风声很紧，杨色茂会收到陆风市委书记劝说的电话，但是其他省可能说抓就抓了，不会很激烈，当地组织力量的强大可能真的获得谈判的筹码，被迫从刚性到软性。
叶：维稳可能都有两方面，你和他力量对比的时候，有策略选择，村民的组织很重要，和时机也很重要。政府要看维稳也不能每天刚性维稳。
提问：抗争的可能不会马上改变，但是会累积，转到越来越激烈的过程吗？
张：他们对媒体的策略是多方位的传播渠道，他们有乡音传单，有乌坎电视台，他们还自己制作的了一个电影，一个半小时，在村里的戏台拨，年轻人自己制作的
问题：没有宗族的地方怎么办？
张：秦晖的研究认为中国小共同体的散架是从４９年开始的，但是从秦朝就开始衰落了，在中原一直都很弱，小共同体和公民联盟和大共同体抗衡是一条路
叶：小的宗族的单位在抗争里面很重要，相对自然村的抗争性很强，他们普选的制度比较重要，小的宗族单位扮演重要角色。我觉得宗族只是一种团结的方式，可能有其他的可能性，可能是民间宗教，所以党很害怕这个宗教，小共同体不一定从过去过来的。
张：台湾是靠农会，小共同体不是威胁问题，而是真的谈判机制
提问：领袖是男性，年长的，女村民什么作用？薛锦波的女儿也有发言
张：潮汕重男轻女，从年轻到年长的女性都很积极，上半夜女人守，这件事情之后村里的女人说女人的意见被重视了，他们成立的妇女会，但是被取缔了，他们觉得应该成立新的妇联。
张：联盟的事情，还是尊重事情比较重要，而不能靠想象，他们自己有做事的逻辑。
叶：运动都是学习的过程，选举监督的都是女性，我们一定要从社会当中看到改变，而不是成为虚无主义者。
主持人：女性在运动当中未必是领导者角色，但是很柔软，韧性，支撑男性，下次有机会再探讨。
