Abstract
Since the emergence of the environmental crisis in China in the early 1990s, environmental activism has emerged as a key type of digital activism as well as a major challenge to urban governance. While scholars have studied issues arising from digital activism in general and environmental activism in particular, most have failed to scrutinize possible interconnections among different instances of digitally mediated political contention. To advance such an understanding, this chapter employs the concept of “cycles of contention” – a concept helpful for investigating recurrent mechanism of protest in contemporary society. The study takes seven anti-petrochemical (anti-PX) environmental protests in China between 2007 and 2014 as cases. During the time, 54 in-depth interviews were conducted. The study finds that coverage in the traditional media, on the one hand, served to legitimize and to modularize these anti-PX protests, thereby facilitating the adoption of digital media as part of the repertoire of contention and helping to make political contention sustainable over the long run. The use of digital media, on the other hand, enabled protestors to diffuse contention widely and quickly and to learn from past experiences. The chapter concludes that, as a new challenge to urban governance, digitally mediated environmental activism is shaped by the specific communication ecology in China.
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Notes
- 1.
Paraxylene is a petrochemical feedstock used in plastics, polyester, and other synthetic manufacturing. A key part of the message read: “…Pollution: Xiamen residents do not want it! Kunming residents do not want it! Shifang residents do not want it!…We Maoming residents do not want it either!”
- 2.
The message read: “A PX project that has been forbidden in Xiamen and discarded in Dalian will be moved to Zhenhai, Ningbo, which is only 20 km away from the old city of Ningbo and 10 km away from the new city…PX is paraxylene, which easily leads to cancer and pathological changes of the reproductive system; please forward this message if you live in Ningbo!”
- 3.
The 54 interviewees had an average age of 35.7 years. Eighty-three percent (45 out of 54) had a bachelor’s degree or higher. All were Internet users who were familiar with digital media in various forms. Professions among the interviewees encompassed a considerable range: journalist, editor, graduate student, high school student, lawyer, sales representative, consultant, university lecturer, taxi driver, IT professional, mobile phone salesperson, barber, and owner of a small clothing store.
- 4.
The interview framework includes (1) basic demographic information, (2) the availability of different types of media during activisms, (3) the information exchanged via digital media in protests, (4) the interpretation of both communication practices and information via digital media (e.g. how interviewees perceive the mobilizing message on digital devices, whether they follow it or not and why), and (5) how interviewees deal with messages (e.g. do they disseminate the message or respond to it, to whom do they forward the message, via which channels, and why).
- 5.
For detailed information on the text message, see Xie and Zhao 2007.
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Acknowledgements
The author deeply appreciates comments from Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Jørgen Delman, Mattias Burell, Oscar Almén, and Ran Wei. This study has been funded by grants from the Carlsberg Foundation (CF14–0385), S. C. Van Fonden (reference numbers 1267, 1503), and Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy & Social Science Research Base (15JDCB05YB).
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Liu, J. (2019). Digital Media, Cycles of Contention, and Urban Governance in China: Anti-PX Protests as an Example of the Sustainability of Environmental Activism. In: Delman, J., Ren, Y., Luova, O., Burell, M., Almén, O. (eds) Greening China’s Urban Governance. ARI - Springer Asia Series, vol 7. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0740-9_9
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