Page 163 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 6. The Xiamen PX plant event

is healed!’, and ‘Don’t lift a rock only to drop it on your own feet!’ (Huang, 2010).

On 3 June, the Xiamen Municipal Public Security Bureau made an announcement
that the organisers of the demonstration must turn themselves in within three days or
they would be severely punished. The Xiamen Public Security Bureau announced that
the ‘leisure walk’ incident on June 1 and 2 was a severe violation of the law and that
people who had participated should surrender themselves as soon as possible. It also

detained and questioned some of the participants and organisers, but they were soon
released (Huang, 2010).
After weeks of mounting tension, local political leaders formally responded to

the torrent of online and offline protests by reaffirming the suspension of the project
pending a further environmental review for six months from June to December 2007.
Meanwhile, the Xiamen municipal government announced a public hearing and delib-
eration to demonstrate the shift of the government’s stance from strong condemnation
of criticism to embracing all forms of public opinion (Hung, 2013).

The new environmental assessment was released on 5 December 2007. It said that
Haicang District was too small to buffer the detrimental influence of atmospheric pol-
lution, and that the municipal government should re-consider its development plan and

whether the area should be a petrochemical industrial zone or a secondary city centre. It
also called for an early decision (Hung, 2013).
This shows that the Chinese government possessed the wisdom and approach
to handle mass events. In the Xiamen, the official sector’s solution was to alternate
between a mercy and an authority stance. It announced the government’s decisions

through SMS; collected public opinion through both the traditional and new media plat-
forms; and disseminated the knowledge of PX plants in a scientifically-oriented way by
distributing brochures, but it also declared the demonstration illegal and announced the

punishment of the ‘rebels’ in government departments and newspapers. In the context
of the Chinese society, offline campaign has more chances to arouse the attention of the
central government, thereby to push local government to focus on the real issues and to
deal with social incident in a more effective and proper way.

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