Research On China 's Network Environmental Action In The New Social Movement

This paper analyses the Xiamen PX Event (the inception of China’s environmental protection movement) and relevant internet activities based on New Social Movements Theories. The paper holds that internet is the inevitable choice of China’s environmental protection movement. Though widely utilized in western countries’ environmental movement, community and NGO are inapplicable in China. Traditional media often keeps silence, insinuates, and even appears ambivalent when facing institutional barriers. However, online media facilitates the movements’outset and evolution outside the system.The theory of Structuration, proposed by Anthony Giddens most significantly in The Constitution of Society forms the theoretical fundamentals of this paper. Structuration is the combination of structure and action. A country’s political system and political structure are structures while new social movements are actions. Within this theoretical framework, this paper discusses China’s internet activities and concludes: China’s social movements such as environmental protection movement have pointed to the structure of China’s politics, yet they are unable to break through the borders of structure. That is equivalent to an attempt to improve local politics through loosing micro-structures in local political operations, without changing the macro-structures such as political systems.This paper researches how internet affects the construction of environment movement’s subject on basis of the Xiamen PX Event. Through a text analysis of Yi Zhongtian and Lian Yue’s blog, the paper refines that the intellectual as Yi Zhongtian, the traditional leader of social movements, has not assumed the key role and even keep silent before the public. On the contrary, freelance as Lian Yue actively pushes the movement forward. On the premise, the paper analyses how internet construct the subject of movement with defined political tendencies.Moreover, the paper examines how netizen’s environmental protection words evolve into environmental protection movement As a social identity discordant with new authoritarian state beliefs, environmental protection movements have gradually developed an instinctive confrontation with local politics. When touching the institutional barrier, the public have united with central government rather than altering the macro-structure, to rationalize and legalize the movement and affect local government’s public decision making.Accordingly, the paper holds that China’s internet activities are life politics with emancipatory distinct. Whether this kind of internet activities will become a supplement to state politics to effectively propel the democratic politics constructions needs further discussions.