On Harmonious Socialist Society And Online Political Participation

With information science and technology developing rapidly since1990s, the Internet has been approaching us and applied to our daily political life more and more deeply. Harmonious society, which has been the ideal of Chinese from time immemorial, is the essential attributes of Chinese characteristics socialism and important guarantee of national prosperity, rejuvenation, and the happiness of Chinese people. The basic features of the socialist harmonious society are democracy and the rule of the law, fairness and justice, honesty and fraternity, vitality, stability and order as well as the harmonious coexistence between the man and nature, all of which embody the goals for the building of harmonious socialist society.Building harmonious socialist society cannot be separated from the widespread civil participation. With internet characteristic of convenience, inexpensiveness, equality, anonymity, interactivity and substantivity, citizens can participate in the political life directly or indirectly through internet on one hand, which remedies their insufficient political involvement in real life. On the other hand, the internet provides the government with an effective access to social conditions and public opinions. In this way, the government can interact with netizens and avoid the transformation of virtual contradictions into real ones, which may exert positive effect on the building of a harmonious socialist society. At present, there are some problems lying in the online political participation such as the absence of government supervision, the relative inability of the government in handling the internet population incidents, the enormous digital divide between different regions in the online political participation as a result of their uneven economic development levels and netizens’irrational participation from time to time, all of which may affect the building of a harmonious socialist society negatively.Therefore, the online political participation is a must for building harmonious socialist society. Firstly, the subject scope of online political participation should be enlarged, the internet infrastructure construction should be reinforced and the citizens’ ability in using the online resources should be improved. Secondly, the system and mechanism of online political involvement is required to be completed, a safe and effective living environment for the network should be built to enable the online political participation to be conducted in an orderly and reasonable way under the framework of building a harmonious society; thirdly, citizens’ online participation consciousness is supposed to be enhanced and their enthusiasm in political participation should be stimulated to improve their sense of responsibility for building harmonious socialist society; Fourthly, the government’s informatization program should be sped up to develop a platform for administrative affairs and open e-government participation channels; fifthly, effective supervision of online political participation is supposed to be strengthened to produce a good environment of public opinion for building harmonious socialist society. Only in this way, can the online political participation create a vast prospect for building a harmonious socialist society.