Abstract
Although Chinese Internet sphere is under the strict censorship and control by the authority, it is certainly not difficult to observe the cases that Chinese individuals utilize the Internet and mobilize, develop influential power and exercise it against the dominant elites and deliver their opinion. This paper aims to analyze how the Internet promotes to crack down one of the strictest censorship and raise social mobilization in China by observing three different online social movements against the authority power and elites. And in order to discourse the power mobilization process and method, the theory of collective intelligence is applied.
The results illustrate that the Internet sphere and the features of the Internet promote the mobilization and development of collective intelligence in significant level. By the individuals’ active online collective intelligence, the individuals could obtain and deliver the influential power more easily and effectively to the authority. The Internet sphere has higher capacity to democratize the information access and liberalize the action of the participation. By that, the Internet sphere shows high potentiality to raise the public’s position to negotiable level against the authority in China.