Page 188 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

ernment has the technique to track netizens’ online behaviour through the ‘interaction’

with media companies. An evident change is that the government now holds a relatively
tolerant attitude towards online protests, partly because they are less likely to pose real
threat to the regime and the stability of society, and partly because of the difficulties in
detecting and eliminating gatherings in cyberspace (Tai, 2006, p.291).

6.4.3 State-owned media platforms: following the government’s orders
According to Li, Ng and Skitmore (2012), the Chinese government established a

‘principle of mass participation’ which is essentially different from public participation
in international discourse. They identified the distinction between the two as: the for-
mer forced the people to cooperate in and support the implementation of governmental
policies, plans or projects; whereas the latter focused on ‘the rights of people to be in-

formed, consulted and heard in the decision-making process’ (ibid, p.9). According to
the notion of public participation in the West, the government is obligated to inform the
people about proposed policies, plans or projects, to supervise the implementation pro-
cess, and to provide open access to information and decision-making to the public (Zhao,

2010).
However, public participation in China’s physical world seems to be much more
difficult than in western countries. Shao, Lu and Wu (2012) argued that communication
structure has been a crucial factor because China historically lacked a social system

that promoted horizontal communication among citizens. Since the long-rooted verti-
cal communication system was usually controlled by the government, citizens’ active
exchange of views was limited (Sun, 2004). Because information is a source of power,
the government has to control information flow to ensure its position, and so restricts

citizens’ access to information (Wang and He, 2004).
According to my questionnaire about the Xiamen PX plant controversy incident,
only 11.43% of the respondents had received the text message about the event. In a cen-
tralism state, it is risky to organise or participate in a protest in the real world and so it

is understandable that only one-tenth of the respondents were involved in the collective
demonstration. Even if they were alerted to the harm that PX might bring to the local

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