ABSTRACT
Acutely aware of the fraught nature of the debate surrounding the concept of the public sphere both outside and inside the Chinese context, Yang and Calhoun are careful to point out that they adopt a more “relaxed” notion of the public sphere, taking the term to refer loosely to “social space” or “public space”. With this proviso in place, the authors simply define their use of the public sphere to mean a social space that consists of “discourses, publics engaged in communication, and the media of communication” (Yang and Calhoun 2007, p. 214). The authors pointed to a “fledging green public sphere” in China, which they see as including the active participation of state-controlled media as well as commercial media. This is because, they suggest, the Chinese government supported media coverage of environmental issues in the first place; commercial media had gained more freedom as a result of reforms; and many media professionals themselves were active environmentalists. Yang and Calhoun’s view is somewhat reinforced in an analysis of 10 Chinese newspapers’ coverage of environmental issues from 2008 to 2011 (Tong 2014). Adopting a quantitative framing method, the study finds that Chinese journalists, enjoying more autonomy in covering environmental problems than other issues, demonstrate a critical reflective outlook in their coverage of environmental risks.
