Page 127 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 5. The Sun Zhigang incident

Interviewee 2 indicated that:

‘from BBS/forums to the age of blogs, and until the present Weibo age, there is
not too much change in the substance of online activities performed by the gener-
al public. The procedures remain to be view, edit and comment online content’.
He acknowledged that the development of ICT, the reduced cost of smart phones,
the increased internet and mobile internet speed, and the popularisation of multimedia

products, enabled people to ‘get connected’ anytime and anywhere. As in the Sun Zhi-
gang case, the easily accessible technology raised the possibility of solving the prob-
lem successfully. With the new media platform emerge new ways of the information

dissemination, which made the negotiation between the public and the government
becomes possible. The popularisation of ICT enables internet users to gain and share
diverse information and cultivates the habit of analysing and solving problems for the
public. For example, at the beginning of the Sun Zhigang case, the Sun family used a
social media platform to post information of the case and sought for help. The popular-

isation of ICT also provides the negotiation space for sensitive social events. Although
the government did not directly communicate with the public in the Sun Zhigang case,
the easily accessible technology overturned the original zero negotiation situation and

empowered the public to be actively involved in social events.

Dynamic interaction between online and offline campaign: a mutual support

Online public participation in China is neither an established concept nor is it the
well-defined:

‘it is a broad combination of public participation and online activities, i.e. the
public use internet as a medium to collect and release information, and a series
of commenting and discussing activities with the intention to influence the public
affairs and government’s decisions’ (Yang, 2010, p.25).

In the Sun case, the interaction between online and offline activities appears to
be involuntary. Citizens collaborated incidentally with professionals’ (law experts and
scholars) offline activities. In China, protest via traditional media or in the physical
world is often accompanied by the high political risk. It is dangerous to plan or organ-

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