global voices, one world

Authors are from Peiking U.

backgrounds: bbs forums allow for political discussions in china. two year long observation shows that bbs content is sensitive to online ideological gorups (many labels to attach to others such as shit left, cynical right). in addition, reflections on historiacal events are found online.

RQ: does the left-right combat still influence or dominate current online political discussion?

LR: what is ideology? what is political ideology?

Evolution of chinese left-right: late Qing – marxism vs. american progressism; civil war – socialism vs. capitalis;now – old left, new left, confusianism, and nationalism.

debates between the ideological camps – nationalism vs. minority ethnicity for example.

Classification of online political groups – Yuan presents a comprehensive map. Strong opposition against gov is considered as radical.

is there any political forum dominated by left or right rhetorics? do they have different agenda?

method – content analysis of 2 bbs forums (qiangguo forum and maoyan kanren forum), qiangguo is sponsored by renming daily and maoyan is more commercial. multi-stage cluster sampling with 394 threads and 1243 replieds. intercoder reliability was obtained.

Political orientation variable – radical left, moderate left, middle, moderate right, radical right.

results – left voices dominate qiangguo forum whereas right voices dominate maoyan. there do exist the left-right distinctions. different agendas are found in two dif forums. national policy ranked high in qiangguo, moayan prefers individual freedom and democracy issues.

polorization of online political groups exists in chinese internetl. the ideological debate has to relate to current social change.

conclusion – does the division reflect individual and group differences in interests? they are important issues when transforming online public space to online public sphere.