New Media: a Rising Way for Public Involvement in China
--Based on Case Study
Chun Li 1,
1
School of Management, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
(lichun0893@126.com)
Abstract - Because traditional forms of political
participation, such as voting and membership in political
parties in China is not as efficient as expected, new media to
some extent has paved a new way for Chinese citizens to
express their request and engage the process of public
policy-making. As to the relationship between new media
and public involvement, there are two kinds of theoretical
framework, Competition framework and Promotion
framework. In this paper, two Chinese cases has been
introduced, describing and explaining how new media
reshape Chinese public involvement in East China and
proves that the promotion framework is suitable for
analyzing China’s case. In the end, it explains why new
media is a rising way in Chinese public involvement and
furthermore reveals some dilemmas faced by Chinese new
media as the way for public involvement.
Keywords - Case study, China, Competition framework,
New Media, Promotion framework, Public involvement
gradually able to exert their influence on governments.
Although there are some people who hail the rising way
of new media as an effective path for public involvement,
however, others express their worry that huge public
involvement might result in disorder, even turmoil and
disable the governments’ efficiency.
It is interesting to find that in contrary to the
decrease of social capital and public participation in USA
in accordance with Putnam’s research, the rising of new
media triggers more public involvement in China. To
what extent, new media reshape Chinese public
involvement? How does that process happen? What
obstructive factors will Chinese new media encounter in
near future while pushing the public involvement in
China? All these questions are on Chinese current
research agenda.
II. DEFINITION AND THEORY FRAMEWORK
I. INTRODUCTION
With the growth and expanded development of new
media, the research on the relationship between new
media and public involvement has been being multiplied
greatly, in particular what role new media plays in
reshaping political participation. During the globalization
time, China has inevitably also been being influenced by
the new media as well as the western political
development, especially in public involvement.
As far as new media is concerned, it is one of the
most fast-developing industries in contemporary China, in
particular the Internet and mobile phone. It’s reported that
according to the 23rd Statistics Report on China Internet
Development, published by China Network Information
Center, by the end of 2008, the popularizing rate of
Internet in China was 22.6 percent, exceeding the world
average level of 21.9 percent, and Chinese Internet-users
are more than 298 million, even the broadband-users are
up to 27 million[1]. Besides, the number of Cell phoneusers is more than 50 million[2] .With the fast development
of new media, Chinese government leaders, President Hu
Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, also begin to pay more
and more attention to these newborn things. A number of
analysts pointed out that the two leaders’ visits could be
seen as the strong signal that Chinese top leaders
gradually attach more and more importance to the newlydeveloping new media, and Chinese new media starts its
new epoch, playing an increasingly important role in
political arena. Some scholars also hailed the two visits,
and believed that with new media Chinese people are
Generally speaking, the concept of “New media” can
be traced back to 1967, when P. Goldmark, the then
director of Broadcasting and Television Technology
Institute at Columbia Broadcasting System, proposed the
concept in an EVR commodity development report for the
first time, indicating the new media forms based on radio
wave and video, and much different from the traditional
printed media. In this paper, public involvement is
defined as the citizens of certain electorate district input
their request, need, support, objection and satisfaction
evaluation of public policy by various ways into public
administration system, so as to influence the public
decision-making process as well as public management,
and finally satisfy their need or fulfill their political
ideology.
As for the relationship between new media and
public involvement, there are mainly two different
theoretical frameworks, which could be tagged as
Competition framework and Promotion framework. The
former raises the standpoint that new media depletes the
social capital and consequently decreases public
involvement in real political system, but the latter argues
that new media promotes public involvement via the
convenient and various communication channels,
especially with a lot of proofs of survey and data.
In the competition framework, it’s believed that the
more time people spend in surfing on internet or
communicating via cell phones, the less they would like
to participate in the real community. New media competes
against public involvement. In this framework, it is
further divided into two sub-frameworks, titled as
displacement theory and cultivation theory (Mohan J.
Dutta-Bergman, 2006). Displacement theorists indicates
that within the limited time if people spend more time
consuming media in their private spaces, they have less
time for public involvement in their real communities
(Putnam, 1995; Shah, McLeod, &Yoon, 2001).
Particularly, Putnam (1995) posits that the surge in media
consumption has contributed to the decline in the amount
of time individuals spend in their offline social network,
because of decreased social capital, which is afterwards
defined as the “connection among individuals-social
networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness
that arise from them”(Putnam, 2000) [3]. The other
cultivation theorists argue that heavy readers or heavy
viewers of new media are guided by the world that new
media constructs with various stories of murder, cheat and
violence, so that individuals do not participate in their
communities due to the decline of trust to others (Gerbner,
Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1980). Turkle (1995)
argued that the Internet provides an escape from the
physical world by providing a more anonymous virtual
world where interactions need not be intimate [4]. Nie and
Erbring (2000) have found that increased Internet usage is
related to feeling of social isolation and lower levels of
community participation [5].
In contrast, the promotion framework generally
supports the standpoint that new media plays a positive
role in promoting people’s participation in their real
communities, because new media connects people much
more easily and quickly . In Hampton and Wellman's
(2003) study of the effects of living in a wired suburban
subdivision on social capital and community involvement,
the Internet especially supports increased contact with
weaker ties. In comparison to non-wired residents of the
same suburb, more neighbors are known and chatted with,
and they are more geographically dispersed around the
suburb. Not only did the Internet support neighboring, it
also facilitated discussion and mobilization around local
issues[6].Mohan J. Dutta-Bergman (2006), based on the
theory of channel complementarity[7], argued that
individuals who participated in online communities to
post and read thoughts about the attacks were also more
likely to participate in real communities[8]. It is interesting
that Kraut (1998) showed that increasing levels of Internet
usage results in a decrease in social participation; but in
his new paper published in 2002 he revised his conclusion
and re-concluded that new media including new computer
and television gave the positive effects of using the
Internet on communication, social involvement, and wellbeing. Michael J. Stern and Don A. Dillman (2006) with a
2005 random sample mail survey of 1,315 households in a
rural region of the Western United States suggest that
increased Internet usage is positively related to nominal
and active levels of community participation and even
supporting affective networks outside the local area.
Particularly this study examined the relationship between
Internet usage and community participation in rural
regions rather than only in large metropolitan areas that
was done previously. Karen Mossberger, Caroline J.
Tolbert, and Ramona S. McNeal (2008) define digital
citizens “as those who use the Internet regularly and
effectively-that is, on a daily basis”, and found that daily
Internet use increases the likelihood that users are
politically involved and benefit economically[9]. Stephen
Coleman (1999) discussed whether new media have
profound effects upon the traditional representative model
of the democratic process, and put forward the notion of
media democracy, which means that an informed
citizenry is one who can consent more knowingly,
scrutinize the political process more simply and obtain
access to government services more readily[10].
In China, within academic circle on new media and
public involvement, there also generally could be divided
into two groups according to their standpoint. One group,
the mainstream theorists, actively supports the role of new
media in public involvement, particularly the Internet. (Lu
Jia-yin & Sun Xu-pei,2008; Wang Xiu-jun etc.,2006; Ke
Jian,2008; Xu Li-ming & Jiang Yan-yan, 2008; Liu Rui &
Tian Chun-miao,2008; Li Bin,2006; etc.) Another group
expresses their worry about the negative effect of new
media in arousing public involvement and they try to
persuade people with possible disorder resulted from
disorderly public involvement aroused by new media,
even leading to anarchy. Thereupon, they propose more
regulation on new media [11]. (An Yun-chu, 2007; Guo
Xiao-an, 2008; He Xiao-hua, 2006; Gu Guang-wei &
Zhang Jing-Chao, 2008; Zhang Ya-yong,2007; etc.)
Besides, Tang Li-ping (2007) also put forward her
pessimistic opinion that Internet democracy could not
fundamentally change the representative democracy, and
would not become the main national democratic
system[12] .Although there are so many research results on
the relationship between new media and public
involvement in China, few of them has deduced their
conclusion by case-study method.
As to the two research framework proposed
previously in this part, which one is more suitable to
analyze Chinese experience? This paper tries to explore
this issue with two latest Chinese cases, embodying how
Chinese people use new media to participate in local
governance.
III . METHODOLOGY
In order to explore the process of Chinese citizenry’s
involvement in governance, this paper take the case study
as the main research method. As Robert K. Yin (1994)
summarized, there are at least four important varieties of
written forms of case studies, which are classic singlecase study, multi-case version, question-and-answer
format, and multi-case studies with no separate chapters
or sections devoted to the individual cases [13]. This paper
tries to make use of the question-and-answer format with
two cases, so as to reveal what factors pushing Chinese
public involvement with new media. Furthermore, in the
analysis of process, it could be deduced that what are the
negative factors that prohibit the further development of
public involvement via new media.
As far as the case study is concerned, what is
difficult as well as crucial is how to select proper cases.
Case study analysis focuses on a small number of cases
that are expected to provide insight into a causal
relationship across a larger population of cases. This
presents the researcher with a formidable problem of case
selection. According to Gerring’s research on Case Study
Principles and Practices, there are two important
dimensions: representativeness and causal leverage,
which to a large extent determine the selection of cases.
Gerring (2007) supplied nine kinds of techniques of caseselection: typical, diverse, extreme, deviant, influential,
crucial, pathway, most-similar, and most-different [14]. In
this paper, typical case selection method is applied, and
selects two cases: PX project in Xiamen and Zhou
Jiugeng’s degradation in Nanjing. In detail, the
dimensions of case selection are the following: widely
influential, informative, and effective. Firstly, the two
selected cases in this paper had attracted nationwide
attention thanks to new media, even were noticed by some
foreign media or scholars; secondly, they are informative,
because the process are highly competitive between
governments and the public, and moreover the process
were reported at large; thirdly, during the two cases,
public involvement effectively influenced local
governments’ public decisions, which displayed the
power of citizenry as well as new media. With the two
typical cases, this paper can also display the roadblocks
that Chinese new media faces at present.
Here, the two cases have been introduced briefly.
The first one is PX project in Xiamen, well reflecting how
people in Xiamen City influenced public decision-making
process of municipal government’s with the assistance of
new media, including cell phone short message, Internet
BBS, and so forth[15]; the second one is Zhou Jiugeng’s
degradation, which depicted how people, beginning from
Nanjing City, started up the anti-corruption procedure,
and even exerted a lot of pressures into local official anticorruption bureaus to push the investigation and
punishment of corrupted officials[16].
IV. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
Generally speaking, China’s cases obviously
demonstrate the above-mentioned promotion framework,
that is to say, in China the new media greatly push the
public involvement positively. Chinese people can be
more successful to express their interest request and
furthermore input their opinion into political system, more
powerful to influence the public decision-making process,
with the competency of new media and the increase of
citizenry right. As for the case of Xiamen PX project, the
citizens succeeded via new media in standing on their
right of protecting a safe and sanitary environment. In the
second case, the people, both in Nanjing and outside
Nanjing, participated via Internet in the anti-corruption
process and finally resulted in the degradation of
corrupted official inspiringly. With the two nationwide
influential cases, we could come to a conclusion that
Chinese new media is to a large degree reshaping the
public involvement as well as the local political system.
Nevertheless, in contrary to the Western experience, the
western-style promotion framework of studying the
relationship between new media and public involvement
is not completely fit for the research context of China,
since at the early stage China has been developing in a
very different way politically, economically and socially.
Thus, there are much more different causal factors that
reshape Chinese public involvement and political system
via new media.
A. Why Can New media push Public involvement in
China?
In order to elaborate the causal factors, we need
probe at least the following five dimensions:
diversification of social interest, increasing civism &
democratic idea, limitation of contemporary political
participation system, fast rise of new media, and
acquiescence of central government.
Firstly, with the amazing development of marketoriented economy, different economic sectors and various
industries are growing like mushrooms in China.
Consequently, people have been gradually classified into
different interest groups, producing diversified social
interest groups. The rise of different social interest groups
inevitably leads to contradiction or conflict, and then
fosters the need to influence the political system as well
as public policy, public decision-making. At the same
time, the democratic thought in traditional socialist
theory, accompanying with western democratic idea
during the Reform and Opening since the end of 1970s,
has been substantially aroused step by step, especially
resulting in the rise of people’s civism and awareness of
citizenship. In order to protect and increase their
accumulation of interest, in addition, some others aspire
after the democratic ideology; they need more ways and
channels to influence governments’ public decisionmaking at all levels, which increasingly push the public
involvement in China. However, Chinese contemporary
political participation institutions could not accommodate
such huge request of public involvement yet. Moreover,
some Chinese local governments are hesitant to respond
satisfactorily to the public request, which is displayed in
the two cases described previously in this paper. The local
governments were powerful enough to ignore public
representative’s proposals as well as public request.
Hence, there is a big gap between people’s request and
current political participation system, which of course
accumulates the political pressure day after day. It is
fortunate that the fast-developing new media functions as
an outlet for the pressure, with which people could
express their interest request, and more or less exert some
impact on local governments’ public decision-making. It
is to a large extent because of the malfunction of
traditional political participation that new media push the
public involvement in China. At this point, new media is
an alternative for people’s request of public participation;
or a temporary solution for governments to cool down the
political pressure (see figure below). It is seen that new
media function as the wider channel for people’s requestexpressing, transmitting more civic information into
public decision-making system.
Influence
Public Decision-makingt
New Media
Public Involvement
The Flow of Need to be heard
Limited Local
Political System
the right to be informed, the right to participate, the right
to be heard, the right to oversee [18]. It supports the use of
new media to express their request for local governments.
B. Dilemmas of New media while pushing Public
involvement in China
While new media is increasingly playing a rising role
in pushing public involvement in China, its rise is an
alternative way for assisting the function of contemporary
political system. If new media was expected to exert more
influence on China’s political system, satisfying more
citizens’ request for public involvement, it unavoidably
faces some dilemmas, which would refer to deeper and
greater political reform.
a. Public involvement institutional innovation
Figure: Relation between New Media and Public Involvement in China
Therefore, although Chinese experience is also
applied to the promotion framework, they are quite
different while studying the role of new media in pushing
public involvement. In western political system, the
traditional forms of political participation have been
perfected, and with civism western people are used to
expressing their interest request and even exerting
pressure on political system. Accordingly, new media just
play a supplementary role for public involvement. For
example, Michael Cornfield (2000) once explained how
does the Internet foster smarter candidate-voter (or
grassroots activist-decision maker) communication? First,
the Internet accommodates multimedia presentations, so
that the electorate's suitor may be judged on more than
just their looks. Second, the Internet allows each member
of the citizenry to set his or her own space in evaluating
candidates and ballot propositions [17]. It could be seen
that Internet supplied the supplementary function in
improving public voting. However, in China, the
democracy system need to be further improved, and
people need more education, more knowledge, as well as
more practices to participate in political system. At
present, new media is playing a alternative rather than
supplementary role while improving the public
involvement due to the limitation of political participation
system.
In the end of this part, it is necessary to mention that
the acquiescence of central government is another positive
factor in pushing Chinese public involvement. Despite
some scholars blame Chinese central government for the
slow pace of political reform, particularly for the
authoritative regime, Chinese central government is
gradually sparing more and more space for the
development of new media, especially in pushing public
involvement in China. On April 13th, the State Council,
Chinese central government, issued a national human
right plan, National Human Right Action Plan of China
(2009-2010), for the first time, which shows the
standpoint to guarantee civil and political right, including
This paper holds the standpoint that to a large extent
due to the incrementally wider gap between the limit of
political participation and increasing request of civic
participation, new media has been chose as a temporary
outlet for cooling down social pressure and satisfying
citizenry’s need of civic right. However, with the
enlargement of public involvement via new media,
Chinese civism are greatly aroused and pursue more
opportunities and channels to participate in political
system, which would further widen the wide gap between
citizenry’s request and current public involvement
institution, consequently following with more or less
social instability or what is worse, turmoil, which
definitely can not be accepted by contemporary political
system. Huntington (1968) had pointed out that the
relationship between social mobilization and political
instability seems reasonably direct. Urbanization,
increases in literacy, education, and media exposure all
give rise to enhance aspiration and expectations which, if
unsatisfied, galvanize individuals and groups into politics.
In the absence of strong and adaptable political
institutions, such increases in participation mean
instability and violence [19]. Thus, with the development of
new media in public involvement, what is more important
would be to a degree the innovation of contemporary
political system, especially institutional innovation of
civic participation, so as to accommodate more public
involvement. Take Internet filtering system for example.
Government filtering systems are meant to stop citizens
from accessing parts of the Internet deemed too sensitive,
but it can be easily used by local governments as a tool to
constrain citizenry’s involvement. Some foreign research
found that state-mandated filtering is predominantly
clustered in three areas: East Asia, Central Asia, and the
Middle East/North Africa [20]. In Xiamen case, these
depressing phenomena had been demonstrated. Therefore,
the innovation of Internet filtering system may be the first
step for reforming public involvement institution.
Nevertheless, it has to be mentioned that Chinese public
involvement institutional innovation may be not
inevitably led to west-style political system. China could
and should explore her special political development way.
b. China’s political culture and civism
Public involvement institution can function
effectively only in the fit context of political culture.
Particularly, an important precondition of public
involvement via new media is relevant civism. It’s
generally believed that the U.S. tradition of citizenship in
the context of liberalism is rooted in individual right, free
market, and the right to pursue one’s “own vision of good
life”. Besides, public involvement is accompanied with
decentralization between government and civil society.
And “the type of social, economic and political
environment is a key factor of success for
decentralization.”[21] Whereas, Chinese political culture
attaches more importance to the function of governments
as well as the collective ideology, which means to some
extent does not highlight public input into political
system. Thus, in China, public involvement via new
media functions without the best political context.
Moreover, it has been also reported that some private
interest-hunting groups intentionally exert pressure in
order to meet their own excessive interest, even with
spreading social rumors taking advantage of Internet
anonymity or irresponsibility. These kinds of out of selfcontrolled participations show the absence of civism,
leading to disorder of public involvement and furthermore
backfire, setting back the effectiveness of new media. If
the new media are expected to function more importantly
in China, it’s necessary to educate people’s awareness of
responsible participation, and cultivate Chinese civism &
citizenship.
c. Digital divide
Digital divide is a worldwide roadblock for
improving public involvement via new media, and it is
more severe in developing countries. As a matter of fact,
the digital divide is an issue not only of computer access
but also of high-speed broadband access and,
increasingly, of online skills as well. Online education
competencies may be more important and also make the
issue of digital divide more complicated. Digital divide
will induce more inequality between social groups or
different districts. Kraut (2002) put forward that,
consistent with a “rich get richer” model, using the
Internet predicted better outcomes for extraverts and those
with more social support but worse outcomes for
introverts and those with less support [22]. Similarly, this is
a big dilemma for Chinese new media in pushing public
involvement as well as improving social equality. As we
all know, China is a big country with quite different
districts where new media grows much different. Take
Internet for example (see table on the next page), in
eastern districts, people can easily influence the public
decision-making process with advantage of technical
information infrastructures as well as well-educated
competency; but in the inland China, there are broad poor
rural areas where people even do not know what is
Internet or mobile phones. Again referring to the Xiamen
case, according to the latest news, PX project has been
transformed to Zhangzhou city, another comparatively
less-developed city, 60 kilometers or so away from
Xiamen. It’s also reported that local people would like to
express their opposition following the example of Xiamen
citizens; however, they failed to influence local
governments and Fujian provincial government because
of their less competency of manipulating new media. To a
degree, it embodied that the digital divide of skill in using
new media led to different outcomes between different
cities.
TABLE I
Basic Statistics of Internet Distribution in China in 2005
East
China
Central
China
West
China
Total
Netizen
Ipv4
Domain
Name
Website
57.8%
62.4%
78.5%
79.9%
22.1%
21.3%
11.5%
11.3%
20.1%
16.3%
10.0%
8.8%
100%
100%
100%
100%
Sources: China Internet Network Information Center. Report on the
Development of Chinese Internet, www.cnnic.net,2006.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper the relationship between new media and
public involvement has been elaborated and found that
Chinese experience can also be applied to promotion
framework, that is to say, new media has to a large extent
improve the public involvement in China, too.
Nevertheless, in respect that China develops in a further
more different context, the reasons why new media can
improve public involvement in China obviously
differentiate from Western experience, with Chinese new
media as alternative way for public involvement rather
than a supplementary way in West. Moreover, Chinese
new media faces at least three roadblocks to improve
public involvement further: the limitation of public
involvement institutional innovation, China’s political
culture & civism, and digital divide.
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