With Dr. Ya-wen Lei
Location: SFU Burnaby Campus AQ 6229
Despite ongoing censorship and repression, public opinion and debate in China has become increasingly common and consequential. How did this happen? Professor Ya-Wen Lei, drawing on her new book The Contentious Public Sphere, will discuss how the Chinese state mobilized law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China-one the state must now endeavor to control. She will examine how this unruly sphere has influenced Chinese politics and the ways that the state has responded.