Public Discourse and "Virtual" Political Participation in the PRC: The Impact of the Internet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What impact has the Internet had on authoritarian regimes? This paper addresses the issue of the changing nature of public opinion as well as ”virtual” political participation in China via an empirical analysis of messages posted on the on-line forum of Qiangguo luntan (Strong Country Forum). The discussions center on four separate yet intertwined categories of issues: (1) the ”san-nong” issue: nongye (agriculture), nongcun (village), and nongmin (farmers); (2) employment and social security; (3) the role and reform of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC); and (4) the rule of law. By contrasting the official coverage of the themes that appear in Renmin ribao (People's Daily), an exploration of Qiangguo luntan has the potential to reveal political meanings that demonstrate changing public discourse in the PRC after a quarter century of reform and opening up. The paper concludes that a nascent public space for ”virtual” civic engagement, albeit with Chinese characteristics, can be found in on-line forums in China.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".