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Contesting Legality in Authoritarian Contexts: Food Safety, Rule of Law and China's Networked Public Sphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Ya-Wen Lei  and
Daniel Xiaodan Zhou
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Abstract

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top-down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 557 - 593
Copyright
© 2015 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

We gratefully thank Greta Krippner, Kim Greenwell, Adam Mestyan, and three anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Law and Society Review for their insightful and constructive comments. We thank participants in the “New Media, The Internet, and a Changing China” Conference at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, University of Pennsylvania, for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this article. Of course, all mistakes in the paper are our own.

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