Environmental Talk in the Chinese Green Public Sphere: A Comparative Analysis of Daily Green-Speak Across Three Chinese Online Forums

This chapter investigates online talk about environmental issues by average Chinese citizens in what has been labeled the “green public sphere” (Yang and Calhoun, China Inf 21, 2007, p. 212). It compares online everyday talk on three different platforms to explore if this effectively involves the general public in Chinese environmental politics. By analyzing forums ranging from an explicitly political, a mixed (overlapping between political and nonpolitical realms) to a nonpolitical forum, we found that such talk in Chinese digital spaces does not necessarily lead to the formation of public debate in the Habermasian sense. Rather, it gives rise to new forms of civic engagement to change and cope with the deteriorating environmental situation. It expands the green public sphere to the very grassroots level, in which average citizens are the main actors to produce green discourses, instead of the authorities, elites, corporations, and social organizations. A range of non-deliberative acts help to make personal issues into public issues, transform ordinary citizens into engaged publics, and fostering a sense of community among participants, as a new way of being political.