The Disadvantages of Citizen E-Participation in China and Its Strategies

Citizen e-participation supplies powerful drive and rare opportunity for democracy development, meanwhile, it also confronts with large challenges and risks, which is mainly embodied at: first, “digital gap” problem is obvious, the subject, capability and wish of citizen network political participation are featured by unbalance and may be dissimilated to be “network noble democracy”, due to unbalanced development of China´s economy and society and dual-division of rural and urban areas. Second, individualism, liberalism and citizen globalization concept prevail in network era, which makes the state traditional political authorization lowered and citizen e-participation may confront with the situation of being out of control. Third, the phenomena of information explosion, information crowd and “group polarization” lead to irrationalism, extremeness of citizen´s political participation on Internet, which will do harm to democratization course of Chinese e-participation. Aimed at these problems, first, China´s government should devote itself to eliminating “digital gap” and accelerating construction of information infrastructure and prevalence of computer network knowledge to supply opportunity of equal network political participation to citizens. Second, China´s government should rule Internet with law and strengthen control and management for network information node, purify information network space, perfect the systems of issuance of government information on Internet, direct communication between government officials and public on Internet to strive to form good “appeal-response” mechanism of interaction between officials and citizens. Third, government should further improve citizens´ political quality and network ethic quality to cultivate citizens´ political participation in culture, and perfect network ethic criterion system.