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Catherine Sampson writing for the UK’s The Independent, opines that “what is clear is that in China, where free speech is suppressed so vigorously, blogging has become a cyber civil society.” She goes on to quote John Kennedy, the Chinese language editor at Global Voices Online, as saying the phenomenon of activist blogging is “unstoppable. In the absence of a normally functioning legal system, the internet is where the engaged public is coming to consensus on what the future of China is going to look like.”

I’ve argued before that public sphere is that panoply of independent non-profits, NGOs, advocacy organizations, mutual benefit associations that exists in the critical space between local communities and government. It’s here that the everyday work of reducing social conflict and managing change really takes place. But future of China’s public sphere is uncertain at best. It’s highly vulnerable and tenuous with organizations trying to see their way clear through some very treacherous political minefields, and tragically taking casualties as they go.

Blogs glue these organizations, — their ideas, their successes and failures, their sympathetic supporters — together in a way that has never been possible in the past. They are, as I’ve noted before, a deep breath of fresh air that has saved the official Chinese media from total and utter irrelevance and a delicate thread of Chinese democratic practice — messy, argumentative, emotional, troublesome, illusive — upon which China’s future is being woven.