Contemporary New Development, Political Participation In China

Network politics first appeared in the United States of America in 2000. Network politics refers to the political activities that people are engaged in by the network, or the reflection of real politics in the network. Network political participation is that a netizen participates in the political life through the network and expresses his or her personal or collective wills and therefore influences the activities of national political power system, especially the processes of political decisions. The characteristics of network political participation is the equality of participants in corpus, the directness of participation form, the freedom of participation space, the low expanses of participation cost and the virtuality of participation identity. Therefore, it has many functions, such as to help the reform and innovation of government management system, to push the change and innovation of democracy principles and mechanism, to make democracy get more precise and perfect, to speed up political acculturation process, to influence political decisions and key figures'thinking, to compensate the "poor" status of realistic political expressions, to push political acculturation, to strengthen the netizen's sense of responsibility as masters, and so on. Network public opinions coming from the network political participation can be the "barometer" of social orders. But network political participation also has a negative function to social orders. For example, holders of different political views, terrorist organizations even the treason groups put on a large platform on the Internet, computer hackers, etc.. Along with the swift development of modern information technique and the deepening of reform and opening up, our country has also got into a network era. The participation in political life through the network has become an important form for citizens to care for national important events and exercise the democratic rights day by day. At the initial stage of network political participation, the netizens just take computers as tools to carry on political participation through an Internet and the purpose of participation is only limited in economic benefits and to announce comments to some objective political affairs. The participation form is also limited to network public opinions, political forums, political blogs, network signatures and network public sacrifices. With the development of the network techniques, the enhancement of democratic consciousness from the mass, and the development of the socialism democratic systems, the new forms of network political participation appears continuously, such as the network in politics, elections by network and petition by network, supervision by network, make use of a cellular phone Internet participation by way of using mobile phones, and so on, The number of network political participation surges, and the enthusiasm upsurges day by day and the participation scope continuously extends. But current network political participation in our country is still in lower level and some problems also exist, such as the extension of irrational network political participation, increment of illegal political participation, the appearance of "information gaps", rank barracks and the phenomenon of "group polarization". The process of network political participation still exists the problems of unbalance in benefits expression, ec.. The government should build up a sound and open policy, mobilize the enthusiasm of political participation from the netizens, extend the scale of political participation and promote the netizen's political acculturation. The government should also smooth channels of network political participation, such as speeding up the development of e-government to strengthen its on-line working talents, standardize the norm of network political participation to promote the effective realization, construct network publicity troops to actively guide network public opinions, strengthen ethics construction to build up a sound ethic system in network to help develop cultures of network political participation in a healthy way, expand a platform for governmental affairs to establish a secure and effective channel of network communication, to speed up network lawmaking to normalize the order of network political participation, to actively guide network political groups to guard against negative effects from group polarization, speed up network technique research to purify information space, improve the leadership from Communist Party of China for network political participation to hold the direction of network political participation. In a word, the government should take active measures, adopt their good points and avoid their shortcomings, actively push and guide the rapid, healthy development of network political participation, thus making network political participation become an important form of promoting socialist political civilization with Chinese characteristics.