Assessing political participation on the Internet in contemporary China

Exploring the effects of traditional media, social media, and foreign media on hierarchical levels of political trust in China

“…Social media promote peer-to-peer communication instead of elite-controlled content (Ceron, 2015; Davis, Love, & Killen, 2018) and enable fast spreading of democratic values across international borders (Khondker, 2011). In China, social media have empowered the public through more open public discourse, unmediated civic engagement and expanded participation, creating challenges to governmental control over public discourse (Xu et al, 2018; Ye et al, 2017). Because local governments in China have broad discretionary power to make and implement policies but lack oversight of its power, corruption and abuse of power exists more at the grass-root level (Gong, 2006).…”

“…According to the call for China Positive Energy 2021 Five-100s Stories, the goal of publicizing these stories online is to gather "positive energy" in cyberspace and prepare China to forge ahead in the years to come (CCTV, 2021). On the other hand, the central government also uses the Internet as a check on corruption (e.g., the online platform and mobile app created by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection), and it is not uncommon to witness misconducts of governmental officials being exposed on social media in recent years (Xu et al, 2018) despite its content control and monitoring on the Internet (King et al, 2013(King et al, , 2017. With all these measures, the negative influence of social media on trust in the central government is discounted when encountering the central government's systematic ideological discourses and cyberspace regulation and monitoring.…”

“…The emergence of Web 2.0 technology opens discussions on a new era of e-democracy because new media empowers the public through more peer-to-peer public discourse, unmediated civic engagement, expanded participation and more governmental accountability (Best & Krueger, 2005; Hindman, 2009; Nisbet, Stoycheff & Pearce, 2012; Xu, Ye, & Zhang, 2018; Ye, Xu, & Zhang, 2017). Social media provide “egalitarian accesses to the production and the consumption of news that is no longer elite-biased” and can “help citizens evaluate the performance of the political system without the lens of elite media outlets” (Ceron, 2015, p.490).…”

“…The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, for example, opened an online platform and created an interactive mobile application to allow citizens to report corruption (Fu, 2015). Revealing misconducts of governmental officials on social media has become a popular trend in recent years, causing the downfall of many corrupted officials and making the government more transparent and accountable (Xu et al, 2018). Qin, Strömberg and Wu (2017) analyzed a dataset of 13.2 billion Weibo posts between 2008 and 2013 and reported a significantly large number of posts on topics such as corruption allegations and protests.…”

Basic human values and political participation on the internet: Different basic motives for male and female groups

“…Active and passive actions are two keywords that can explain PPI as the fundamental action in politics. This concept is also translated by Xu, Ye, and Zhang (2018) who propose PPI using three behavioral concepts, (1) contacting government officials; (2) monitoring governmental policymaking process, and (3) collective action and social protest. These three behavioral dimensions can also be categorized into two dimensions of PPI, passive action for point (2) and active action for point (1) and (3).…”