Page 121 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 5. The Sun Zhigang incident

working sites, user-generated media and online versions of encyclopaedias, has created

a breakthrough in government control. Citizens who used to be message receivers have
gradually switched to being sharers and producers of messages, generating a bottom-up
approach to form public opinion (Deuze, 2007). The internet fosters a new model that
supports freer and more effective interaction between government, media and the pub-
lic. As Tai indicated:

‘the internet marks a dramatic departure from all previous communication mod-
els: it not only enhances the conventional one-to-many communication but also
fosters brand-new types of communication in which users’ messages can be sent

by a heterogeneous user base to a heterogeneous audience’ (Tai, 2006, p.162).
It facilitates the construction of a relatively flexible communication space that is
shaped by large numbers of sufficiently motivated groups of people (Feenberg and Bak-
ardjieva, 2004). In this section, I discuss the key features of the bottom-up approach
and elaborate the new negotiation pattern initiated by the public.

Spontaneous participation in China’s cyberspace

In the Sun Zhigang incident, spontaneous netizen involvement triggered the un-
blocking of information moving from the public to the government. Even though the

Guangzhou government took measures to control the local media’s reports on Sun
Zhigang, the traditional media from other provinces or cities could report the case and
disseminate the information to the public. More importantly, numerous internet users
spontaneously helped the dissemination of the case via web portals, online chatrooms,

BBS and forums. They were thousands of scattered nodes in cyberspace, but they came
forward to follow and participate in the same event. It was a spontaneous collective
movement – incidental grassroots activism.
The sympathy effect is one of the reasons that lead to the spontaneous public par-

ticipation. Migrant workers are the major labour force in the urban areas in China and
are needed as cost-efficient labours, but they do not have access to the social benefits
that the urban residents enjoy such as pension, health and unemployment insurances.
They are a marginalised group and are less valued in the Chinese society (Li, 2008).

105
105