Public Talk by Prof. Zhongdang Pan,
a Scholar in Political Communication and Chinese Media

Political communication and Chinese media scholar Prof. Zhongdang Pan was invited by the School’s Centre for Chinese Media and Comparative Communication Research (C-Centre) to deliver a public talk titled “Digital Divide and Internet Use in China: Can the Internet Facilitate Citizenship Engagement?” on 14 June 2012.

Prof. Pan is Professor of Communication Science in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has conducted research in political communication, China’s media reforms and journalistic work.

The research that Prof. Pan presented partly grew out of his research involvement in the School of Journalism at Fudan University where he served as the Changjiang Scholar Chair Professor between 2008 and 2011. In this public talk, Prof. Pan addressed the question of democratic implications of the Internet in China from the vantage point of how individuals use the Internet and how such usage may be related to several key indications of their engagement in the public life as citizens: levels of knowledge about current affairs, levels of expressive engagement, levels of civic participation, and likelihood of voting in local elections. Overall, Prof. Pan has depicted a broad contour of Internet usage and manifestations of civic potentials in the Chinese society as a whole and interrogated the ways in which general inferences can be drawn about democratizing implications of the Internet in the country as a whole.

Prof. Pan explained the democratizing implications of the Internet in China.

Many teachers and students of the School attended Prof. Pan’s talk.