The Crowd’s Political Participation:a Deep Perspective Of China’s Political Participation Online

Chinese citizens’ using of the Internet to gather around and comment on political affairs began in the late nineties of the last century. In the past ten years, this phenomenon has been developed and evolved, increasing its impact on China’s political development and government’s decision-making. Currently, academic research on this phenomenon is mainly confined to paradigms of "group incidents online","network public opinion","Virtual social movements" and "seek/post political advice online". Although some scholars has undertaken their study in the context of "network’s political participation ", but on the aspects of basic theory, research view and method, they failed to break through the traditional logic of analysis on political participation which is characterized by "physical behavior"; This failure leads to a result that the internal mechanism and the operating laws of this Internet-based political participation have not been fully revealed. This paper argues that the Internet-based political participation is a new form of political participation of the Chinese citizens, namely "The crowd’s political participation online". On the aspects of the connotation, origin and basic element, this new form possesses different new attributes and new characteristics comparing with other forms political participation.The crowd’s political participation online is a new form of political participation, in which citizens, making use of the Internet and other relative technologies, gather around virtually to develop, mainly through discourse, virtual collective political activities about a certain political event or issue, in order to influence the political decision-making and achieve their own interests and values in political activities. Firstly,"The crowd’s Political Participation" is different from the general "surfing the web" of Internet users, instead it is a political activity based on some particular political motivations and purposes. Secondly, it is also different from the "physical behavior based" form of political participation in reality; instead, it happens mainly in the virtual space of Internet and bases mainly on "discourse behavior". Thirdly, The crowd’s Political Participation online, unlike the numbness and indifferent "spectators phenomenon ", is an Internet-based collective political activities.The rise of the crowd’s Political Participation has its own logic. First, the anonymity of the network and the network spread’s interactivity, immediacy, cheapness, shareability across time and space make it both a new communication tool and a "grass-root media". The role of a new communication tool enables the virtual aggregation of Internet users, and the grassroots media’s agenda-setting function makes the internet-based collective political action possible, because by setting up the agenda, network media can refine "collective identity" from the collective actions of the Internet users, propelling their collaborative action. Second, the development of China’s democratic politics, on the one hand, legalizes the citizens’ equal political participation rights, and increases citizens’ political participation capability by providing them with increasing opportunities for political participation; But on the other hand, citizens’ political participation equality, in reality, faces many constraints, manifesting as inequality in the exertion of the right, which enables citizens’ using of the legalized right to perform political protest. The anonymity of the network facilitate precisely this protest.Compared with traditional political participation, crowd-political participation’s particularity is reflected in five aspects:First, the main body shows the dialectical unity of the reality and virtuality; second, the non-interest type of political participation motivation becomes more and more important; third,"discourse" is the main political participation behavior; fourthly, the content of political participation is based on "citizen"; fifthly, the basic form of activity is collective. Among the five aspects above, network sightseeing, the internet-based virtual collective activity is the most essential characteristic of crowd-political participation. A complete internet-based collective political action can generally be divided into five steps:situational sharing and the crowd mobilization, the game of political issues, the construction of collective identity, multi-body interaction with political input, an extension of the political issues and tiller. In this process, the network media and the news media, by using its agenda setting function, plays the role of the organizers and mobilizer of the crowd-political participation. Of course, whatever the form of the "crowd’ action" is, the ultimate goal of netizen’s action is to input their own interests and values into the political system, thus influence government decisions. This relates to how the Government will respond to the problem. Currently, Government’s response is still in the exploration, often exhibiting non-standardized and non-procedural characteristics. Dialogue or suppress, divert or plugging, different levels of government and leadership tend to have different options. These different options not only provide crowd-political participation with political opportunity, but also leave potential troubles for the ongoing conflict between the Government and the People.Overall, crowd’s political participation online is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it avails the expansion of democratic participation, promotes anti-corruption and clean government, advances process of decision-making democratization, harmonizes relations between the party and the masses, and improves the party’s ability to govern; On the other hand, it may easily fall into the trap of extreme liberalism, hinder the stability of the state and society, increases the government’s administration costs, and disturb the normal operation of representative democracy. Therefore, in order to make the crowd of political participation useful for us, it is necessary to develop scientific grooming policies.