Page 109 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 5. The Sun Zhigang incident

Information about Sun’s death was blocked. Though Sun’s parents made great

efforts to find out the truth of their son’s death, the information they obtained was far
from adequate. Lawyers refused to take their case out of fear of challenging the local
authority (Guan and Si, 2003), and so Sun’s family posted their story on the internet,
along with a petition letter, and turned to the media for help.

5.2.2 Interactions between traditional media and new media
The significance of the case lies in that for the first time, the positive reinforcing

power of social media as a new agency was seen. Traditional media had existed primar-
ily as a government organ for public information and propaganda.
Chen Feng, one of the journalists who edited a Sun Zhigang report for the South-
ern Metropolis Daily, recalled that the In-depth Reporting Team had just been founded

in 2003. In March 2003, when he was trying to find new information, Chen joined in
the discussions with other journalists and media professionals on the Xici Forum. Co-
incidentally, a friend of Sun Zhigang posted the story of what happened to Sun on the
discussion board, and Chen saw the story and reported it to the editor of the Southern

Metropolis Daily. The editor authorised following the story, and Chen began to inves-
tigate. This was the origin of the coverage of the incident in the traditional media, but
collected from the internet.
On the tenth anniversary of the Sun Zhigang incident, Chen Feng was interviewed

by the law channel of People.cn, an official website of the People’s Daily, which had
10
reported the Sun Zhigang incident on both its web portal and newspaper in 2003. As he
said in the interview:
‘From the perspective of communication and media study, the rapid development

of ICTs and internet in China fostered a new era for communication and the media
industry. Major web portals reposted the related reports at the time, which pushed
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the incident to a climax and gained the state’s attention’ (Chen, 2013, N.P.) .
Chen also emphasised that Sun’s status as a recent graduate from university was a

key point in the development of the case. ‘First of all, it is obvious that Sun has no his-
10 People’s Daily is the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.
11 Translation provided by the author.

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