Does Participation = Change?
I think Julian Bleeker's netpublics: participation + change paradigm aptly reflects the transition China is experiencing with how the public participates in politics.
In China, it is estimated 52% of white collar workers have a blog, with already 30million blogs already registered and over 100 blog providers, and this # is expected to grow to 90million in 2008 (1/3 of america's population).
According to this paradigm, web 2.0 allows for mass networked participation and change. The question for China is will participation = change? And how sustainable is this method in light of China's new regime of censorship policies and alliances with Google, Microsoft, Cisoc and Yahoo and how will it affect the netpublic feedback loops? Will surveillance of the overwhelming # of internet bloggers in China mirror how it currently handle's it's overflowing human population? The next year in China's blogosphere will be interesting to monitor, but one thing is for sure, there's never enough political fires to put out and voices to squash in the real world and digital world - it's all the same now.