The Effects of Internet Activism on Protest Policing in China

Friday, February 10, 2012
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Guobin Yang
Associate Professor, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures and Department of Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University

East Asia Seminar Series
Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place, 108N, North House
 
Register Online at: http://www.munk.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=10787
 
Since the early 1990s, popular protest in China has incorporated digital technologies, leading to the rise of digital or internet activism. The policing of protest is similarly undergoing digitization, with law enforcement authorities relying increasingly on digital technologies for policing activism and protest. Amidst the many studies of digital activism, however, the question of whether and how the digitization of protest has affected the policing of protest is overlooked. This study addresses this question and concludes by exploring the changing forms and practices of state power in the digital age.
 
Guobin Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures and the Department of Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has published widely on the internet and civil society, environmental NGOs, the 1989 student movement, and the history and memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009. Winner of best book award, Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association, 2010) and editor (with Ching Kwan Lee) of Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (2007).
 
Co-Sponsored by the Critical China Studies Group