Page 147 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 5. The Sun Zhigang incident

day’s cyberspace. Although technological development has empowered easy access to

information exchange and online public opinions can be formed more efficiently than
before, government officials only pay attention to the hotly debated issues. The current
situation is that any kind of overly-sensitive or anti-Party public participation will be
censored or deleted in the very early stage without any negotiation, which represents
the bottom line for such a centralism state like China.

Figure 20. What do you think of the government’s control of the content on the internet?
Scholars have pointed out that the internet might pose ‘an insurmountable threat
to the regime and that such a threat may arise from internet use in the mass public, civil

society, the economy and the international community’ (Chase and Mulvenon, 2002,
cited in Zheng, 2008, p.79). In Information Regime III, citizens are empowered by
opportunities that include rapid communication with like-minded individuals, greater
political expression, more accessible information, easier mobilisation, and less formal
restriction than the official media. The dominant official sectors are the Ministry of

Information Industry, Information Office of the State Council, the Central Propaganda
Department, web portals, media websites, blogs, and covert party organisations (influ-
encing public opinion) (Esarey and Xiao, 2011). Considering the development of the

internet, from the BBS age to today’s Weibo age, 59.01% of the respondents in Figure
20 thought the government’s control of online public participation and media informa-
tion was stricter.
The internet as a fundamental medium in Information Regime III plays a vital
role in the interaction between the public and the government. As Tai (2006, p.97) in-

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