Official microblogging and social management by local governments in China

Abstract

How does the Chinese government's adoption of microblogs affect local governance and social contention it is tasked to manage? This case study explores the extent to which government microblogging could serve as: (1) a battering ram to spearhead reforms; (2) a virus bringing unexpected consequences; and (3) a reinforcer of authorities' existing power, that is, politics as usual. After studying a Chinese municipal government's microblogs (weibo 微博) in depth from the perspective of local governance, we find that official microblogs do not in the short run lead to organizational change. Instead, Chinese local government microblogs function largely as 'beta-institutions' experimenting with ways to interact and negotiate with their microblog publics and microblog service providers and aimed at improving social management and political legitimacy. Local governments are also evolving gradually from service providers to 'service predictors' with enhanced capabilities to deliver individualized services and institute state surveillance via commercial service providers. These developments warrant further studies of the long-term implications of microblogs as part of the government information ecology.

Social Media and Local Governments

“…Governments also embrace the bandwagon to engage the public and rebuild public legitimacy (Noesselt 2014 ), making 2010 immediately becomes the milestone of government microblogging development (Zheng 2013 ;Schlaeger and Jiang 2014 ).…”

Towards a New Digital Era: Observing Local E-Government Services Adoption in a Chinese Municipality

“…Social networking utilization in governmental activities is akin to Twitter in that Weibo allows public departments to create official accounts (Figure 1a) to publish information to citizens directly including government news, announcements, mayors' mailboxes, local issues, online polls, and legislative consultations. It roughly corresponds to established e-government service items in e-information, e-consultation, e-discussion and e-decision-making [43]. Departments can gather public opinion and interact with citizens directly via the Weibo platform.…”

“…Departments can gather public opinion and interact with citizens directly via the Weibo platform. The challenging and glamorous part of official Weibo accounts is that these accounts can be operated by a variety of departments such as e-government portals, public affairs, environmental agencies, and public security, meaning that the accounts are managed under different authorities, governed by different rules and responsibilities [43].…”

Political contestation in Chinese digital spaces: Deepening the critical inquiry

“…8 They start by cautioning that the category of 'government' is too crude to capture the varied responses to social media in government bureaucracies. A major initiative in recent years concerns encouraging government agencies and officials to set up microblog accounts and start tweeting their own messages.…”