Page 203 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 7. The Yihuang incident

levels, it then passes down institutions, organisations and communities. It is a general

authoritative mechanism with a keen sense of compulsion, which tends to have a less
satisfactory effect on public participation. New media has already changed this obsolete
mechanism to some extent, but Weibo takes public participation to a higher stage in the
way that information can be circulated with less cost, fewer barriers and faster speeds
due to its ‘self-guarding’ feature. The leading role in public participation is now in the

hands of the public. Weibo’s enormous network supports active participation and ex-
pands the depth and width of information dissemination based on people’s sincere feel-
ings. Users who are concerned about a particular social event naturally take part in this,

whereas those do not wish to be involved can simply ignore the message. An example
explains the mobilisation effect on Weibo: a celebrity appealed for netizens to repost a
message for a charity proposal and promised that she would donate ¥1 for every repost.
The message received 75,000 times repost and the celebrity donated ¥80,000 to charity.
It is a frequently used approach for charity work with Weibo. The example shows the

aggregation structure of Weibo that mobilises public participation. Mutual trust be-
tween users and their followers generates a horizontal social network which enhances
the result of propaganda (Yan, 2014).

7.3 The Yihuang incident and its engagement with the We

Media

The Yihuang case occurred on 10 September 2010. The Zhong family had lived in
Yihuang County, Jiangxi Province, since they moved away from Anhui Province in the

1980s. In 1999, they built a three-story house, which was their biggest property, with
three real-estate licenses (Wang and Wu, 2010).
Yihuang is a small county in Jiangxi province in southeast China. Before 2000,
this county did not have transit roads, state roads, highways, railways, water transport,

or air transport, so it was very impoverished. Economic development was the most
important priority for the Yihuang government. In 2007, local government decided to
build a new bus terminal in the east part where the Zhong family’s house was located.
However, the Zhong family and the Yihuang government could not reach an agreement

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