Summary: Current headlines about how authoritarian regimes have come to harness the internet may obscure how this technology, at one time, was more typically understood to be democratizing. In the early days of Chinese cyberspace, popular expression on internet forums seemed to herald a new stage in political activism, that was pressing the boundaries of state control. In this episode, UPenn Prof. Guobin Yang discusses the evolution of social media on the Chinese internet, and its changing political implications.
