Page 139 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 5. The Sun Zhigang incident

Figure 16. In what ways, did you get involved in the Sun Zhigang case?
The second category – direct participation – includes the following: ‘as a dis-
seminator, I spread information and discussed the incident with others through instant
messaging services (using QQ, MSN, mobile SMS, etc.)’, which accounts for 20% of

all respondents; Only 3.81% of respondents participated in the online petition and sig-
nature activities in relation to the incident. Direct participation in these two forms did
not have the anonymity of indirect participation. The monitoring system operated by

the state-owned mobile companies (e.g. China Mobile Communication Corporation)
or the mandatory installation of a censoring system in major Instant Messaging provid-
ers (e.g. Tencent) may have been a barrier to participation. Moreover, the substance of
online petitions and signature activities equates to the real-life demonstrations and re-
al-name citizen engagement. It explains why most of the online petitions and signature

participants were limited to Sun’s friends, colleagues, classmates and family members.
Finally, 48.57% of the respondents chose to just browse relevant news information and
did not engage in any forms of participation. One may argue that browsing informa-

tion is not a form of public participation and people may just see it the same as reading
news. However, it cannot be denied that some people were worried about the censor-
ship system and punishment measures operated by government officials. Hence, instead
of directly engaging in the activities, they used a moderate way to follow the case.
There is no doubt that ordinary netizens have contributed to the Sun Zhigang

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