The Prosperity Of Chinese Internet Public Sphere And The Change Of Citizen Consciousness

With the occurrence of several internet public events during recent years, a momentum of vigorous development has emerged in internet public sphere, by which the impact caused on construction of democracy and rule of law has also aroused the academic concern. The focal point of this paper is thus the impact of the growth in internet public sphere upon citizen consciousness. As the history proved, the development of technology is always like a rapier, and hence so is the impact of internet public sphere upon citizen consciousness, which relies on internet technology. Based on this point, this paper is divided into three parts:Part I:Basic concept of citizen consciousness and public sphereIt is generally recognized that nationality, right and duty are the core components of concept of citizen. In this part, the citizen consciousness is defined on the basis of concept of citizen and abstracted as independent consciousness, political participation consciousness and legality consciousness. The internet public sphere, which features openness, interactivity, criticalness, public interest directness, etc, is defined by adopting Jiirgen Habermas's theory of public sphere in this paper.Part II:Internet public sphere and the growth of citizen consciousnessThis paper analyzes the positive effects of internet public sphere upon citizen independent consciousness and sense of participation against the background and on the basis of their historical variation in China, and illustrates the positive role of internet public sphere in promoting citizen's freedom of thought, fostering public spirit, accomplishing the transition from private independent consciousness towards public independent consciousness, developing citizen's sense of political efficacy and accelerating the evolution of resistance consciousness to negotiation consciousness.PartⅢ:Legality Consciousness under attack of internet public sphere There is a widespread resentment against society because of the rising wealth gap and unjustness generated by power corruption, and with a tendency of social cleavage, the antagonism between common people and elite class starts to spread through the internet and is group polarized in this cyber space. When the internet populism is shaped due to the aggravation of antagonism, judicial authority will inextricably be outraged since its entanglement with legal professionals such as scholars, lawyers and judges. Under this circumstance people's attitude towards judicial justness is no more based on law but the "elite class" or "underclass" status of litigant parties, which apparently gives the legality consciousness a destructive attack.ConclusionThrough the analysis of the social classes of participators in internet public sphere, it can be concluded that middle class are the major internet participators, which indicates the self-insufficiency of internet public sphere on one hand, on the other hand, the complexity of political attitude of middle class and the tendency of its partiality to under class may impair the positive effects of internet public sphere while accentuate the negative effects and internet populism. For average citizens, internet public sphere nevertheless provides the strength and means of carrying forward democracy and rule of law to some extent, which is also the important motivation for our persistent effort.