ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the notion that Chinese netizens are apolitical, because they are primarily interested in pursuing personal lives and seldom use the internet to engage with party politics. It draws on Beck's concept of subpolitics and Alfred Schutz's work on social types and demonstrates various ways in which debates about personal issues not just become politicized but create an arena for emergent publics around shared concerns. Subpolitics began to emerge in China in the early 1980s and became normalized with the deepening of market transformations. The chapter focuses on the features of online subpolitics. It presents the Tan Street participants' apparently mundane online conversations in order to analyse the processes and framings through which personal conversation turns into political 'talk' and engagements. Based on detailed reading and coding of everyday political threads from Tan Street and analyses the mechanisms that make personal talk political. The chapter also focuses on relation between internet censorship and online subpolitics in China.
