Chinese social media as a dominated online public sphere: A case study of the 18th

National Congress of Communist Party of China on Sina Weibo

Yanshuang Zhang
The University of Queensland, Australia
y.zhang22@uq.edu.au

Abstract
The Internet has long been the focus of utopian arguments proposing its democratic potential. Most
recently, social media has been proposed as facilitating the Arab Spring and other political changes
toward democratic ideals in authoritarian societies. While many observers are fascinated by the
revolutionary potential of social media, others are skeptical of this excessive optimism. This paper
investigates the most significant Chinese political event of 2012, the 18th National Congress of
Communist Party of China in which Chinas new leadership was elected, through the twin lenses of
social media and traditional media. It empirically compares and contrasts depictions of the event in
the most popular Chinese social media service, Sina Weibo, against those from the most circulated
traditional mass media outlets. Through a combination of computational text analytics and qualitative
content analysis, we observe a remarkable topical similarity between the two media spheres, albeit a
distinctive narrative pattern and some subtle resistance in Weibo posts. It is argued that, insofar as
China still retains a restrictive approach to press and internet freedom, social media is more inclined
to be dominated by traditional media in framing certain major political events, where the mediasphere
is critically censored, and the public discourse heavily swayed by institutional accounts representing
the official orthodoxies. In such circumstances, social medias purported power thus has a substantial
boundary that constrains itself from serving as an obvious quasi-revolutionary facilitator of dramatic
institutional changes envisioned by Western commentators. The impact of social media on Chinese
society is, therefore, an extremely complex and long term evolutionary issue.
Keywords: public sphere, social media, Weibo, leadership, censorship, China

The conceptualization of Public Sphere is based on the ideas expressed by Jrgen Habermas who uses
this concept to refer to a public space emerging in eighteen centurys Europe where private people
began to come together as a public and debate over social issues of common concern, thus monitor the
state authority through informed and critical discourse (1989). Against the backdrop of the new media
environment, the concept of public sphere has been revitalized as the philosophical background for a
number of electronic participation studies (Iosifidis, 2011; Roberts, 2009; Sb, Rose, & Flak, 2008;
Sanford, 2012; Scammell, 2000). The public sphere draws attention to the intimate connection
between a web of free, informal personal communications and the foundations of democratic society
(Rheingold, 2008: 101) and the idea of public sphere as a place for discursive debate thus can provide
new media researchers with a useful concept which helps explain the significance of online discursive
participation and civic engagement.
Especially today as we are living in a global network society (Castells, 2004) woven by all kinds of
technologies with networking features, new media and networks of publics have generated a global
networked public sphere and civil society (Castells, 2008; Papacharissi, 2002). With the public sphere
of traditional sense settling in physical places in old days, the modern-day public sphere has expanded

through the networked publics.

Among others, social media can be viewed both as technology and space for expanding and sustaining
the existing networks that have been established by Internet. Relying on its focus on sharing and
participation of an increasing number of populations could encourage more citizens to participate,
social media within the Internet are seen as potential mediated publics where public discourse takes
place and public opinion as function of the public discourse is facilitated. And many scholars have
argued that such networked public spheres are indeed emerging in social media (Castells, 2008;
Iosifidis, 2011; Knox, 2013; Mazali, 2011; Pannen, 2010).
Such a new concrete form of public sphere has been staying on discussing and research agenda
because on the one hand the new media are still in an evolving process and new patterns of
communication in public course are just emerging one after another; consequently on the other, a fast
conclusion on their impact on human society should be avoided. A long term examination of social
medias profound influence on different social structures and political ecosystems remains yet to be
done.
Bruns et al. (2011) argue that social media furnish platforms for the emergence of publics in postHabermasian sense and based on this proposition the new empirical methods of social media can
reach beyond the political blogosphere. Via social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube et cetera
which contains interest-based communities and support both interpersonal communication and public
discussion, the theoretical shift as well is realized from the public sphere to affective and emergent
publics.
Shirky (2011) also argues that empirical conclusion on the subject is hard to draw due to the novelty
and rareness of relevant examples. The safest and most promising position may be social media as a
long-term tools can strengthen civil society and public sphere, especially that they have the most
dramatic effects in states where a public sphere already constrains the actions of the government (p.
30). Even the increased sophistication and force of state reaction underline the basic point that social
media alter the dynamics of the public sphere. The state can only prevail by reacting to citizens
ability to be more publicly vocal and to coordinate more rapidly and on a larger scale than before
(Gladwell & Shirky, 2013).
Among Chinese new media studies, a few earlier studies also point out the potentiality of Chinese
social media as an emerging public sphere and its possible impact on Chinese society (Lu & Qiu,
2013; Shen, 2011; X. Zhang, 2010; Zheng, 2012). Some show social medias success in publicizing
examples of government malfeasance, official corruption and scandals (Hassid, 2012; Sullivan, 2013;
Wu, Hofman, Mason, & Watts, 2011). And some examined particular local incidents where this online
public sphere played an important role in dispute settlement process and even induced direct
institutional changes (Bei, 2013; Ross, 2011; Sullivan, 2013; Xu, 2011).
Since most existing studies focus on analysis of some particular social issues where censorship failed
to exert a pervasive influence and social medias role was comparatively tangible for evaluation,
studies on political issues especially those associated with the paramount rule of the Party are lacking
due to practical difficulties in collecting data and even publishing findings. Thus questions may be
raised: how social media depict political issues in China? Does this online sphere exert an impact if
any on public opinion in such events? And, what can we expect from Chinese social media in terms of
its purported democratizing power from other countries experience?
This paper is an attempt at this direction. By investigating public discussions happening on social
media around the paramount event of the 18th National Congress of Communist Party of China
(hereinafter: 18th NCCPC) in November 2012, during which the significant Chinese leadership
transition occurred, the paper tries to figure out how social media depicted this political event and
whether this online sphere induced any changes in decision-making process.

At the time of writing, Sina Weibo, as the leading Chinese microblogging service has over 500 million
users within and outside the territory, accounting for more than half of the Chinese Internet population
(XinxiShibao, 2013). Therefore, it is taken as the main platform on which we carry out this study and
generalize our conclusions to draw further inferences for subsequent similar studies.
Data and methods
This paper examines the public discourse surrounding the 18 th NCCPC which was convened in
Beijing from November 8 to November 14, 2012. On this congress, Xi Jinping as the new General
Secretary of the Party, also the chairman of the Central Military Committee was elected. He is also the
de facto president of China. Besides, a new politburo standing committee with seven seats was elected
to take charge of different areas of the state affairs.
Considering the significance of this congress, the Chinese government initiated the most stringent
censorship towards media coverage especially on Internet. The microblogging service providers also
proactively set up stricter self-censorship mechanism and deployed more personnel to regulate online
speech. Offline physical surveillance was also launched to complement the authoritys censorship
efforts. For this reason, a large proportion of the microblogs about the event before November 2, 2012
were blocked or deterred for public search. And there was also limit for daily retrieval of historical
posts, which was 1000 post at most.
The timeframe of sampling is set between October 8 and November 21, at the time points when the
national media began to preheat the event and when the most media coverage began to shift to other
issues. A purposive sampling was conducted using the key term 18 th NCCPC on Weibos own
search engine, and more than 5000 posts were obtained based on the parameter of popularity. The
search parameter is a built-in feature of Weibo search; when it is defined as searching by popularity,
the most circulated posts would be shown on top of the results and thus collecting this kind of posts
could ensure the representativeness of the popular posts. Then the collected posts are pre-processed
into appropriate format for further text analysis. To gain a deeper understanding of the online public
discourse, the study also collected news articles from three traditional media for comparison. They are
Peoples Daily, Xinhua News Agency and Southern Weekend which represent the most circulated and
influential national news outlets. Within the same timeframe and same key word, a total of 2,804 news
articles were collected from the three news sources through Factiva and their official web databases.
The traditional media dataset was also pre-processed into appropriate format for further analysis.
The methods employed in this study combine content analysis and discourse analytical approaches to
acquire a comprehensive interpretation and understanding of the civil discourse in the political event
on Sina Weibo, and reflect how such civil discourse, as the self-expression of people in lifeworld,
articulates their identity and concern, fostering dialogue between and among various social and
political actors of Chinese public sphere.
Content analysis is a method in the social sciences for studying the content of those types of empirical
documentation that is written texts and artefacts. Tipaldo (2013) defines content analysis as a wide
and heterogeneous set of manual or computer-assisted techniques for contextualized interpretations of
documents produced by communication processes strictiore sensu (any kind of text, written, iconic,
multimedia, etc.) or signification processes (traces and artefacts), having as an ultimate goal the
production of valid and trustworthy inferences. The core questions of content analysis can be briefly
put as who says what, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect? (Lasswell, 1948) Content
analysis is also perceived to make inferences by systematically identifying specified characteristics of
messages.
Content analysis can be operated both quantitatively and qualitatively. In this study, both approaches
will be used. Through a systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns
3

assisted by computer, a subjective interpretation of the content of the text data will be attempted to
make implications or inferences on the social phenomenon concerned. To assist this process, a text
analytics software, Leximancer, will be employed to conduct analyses of the conceptual content of the
transcribed microblog posts.
Leximancer can be used to analyze the content of collections of textual documents, and to visually
display the extracted information. The information is displayed by means of a conceptual map that
provides an overview of the material, representing the main concepts contained within the text and
how they are related (Leximancer White Paper, 2010).
As a method for transforming lexical co-occurrence information from natural language into semantic
patterns in an unsupervised manner, the Leximancer system involves two states of co-occurrence
information extraction: semantic and relational, each of which uses a different algorithm that are
statistical, but employing nonlinear dynamics and machine learning (Smith, Humphreys & Jones,
2006).
In this study, a discourse is defined as a set of meaning as well as social practice through which a
group of people communicates about a particular topic, and discourse analysis is adopted as an
analytical method to examine a set of selected social media texts reporting on the content of civil
discourse in the online event, in particular pertaining to the sociocultural practices in online public
sphere. The social media discourse is of the researchers particular interest not only because it is a rich
source of readily accessible data for research but also it can reflect and influence the formation and
discourse practices of politics, culture and social life in a civil society. Therefore, the analysis of such
discourse ought to reveal the social action shaped in a particular context through peoples discursive
participation in different domains of social life.
Discourse analysis has been used as a research methodology in a variety of disciplines to understand a
wide range of texts including natural speech, professional documentation, political rhetoric, interview
or focus group material, internet communication, journals and media. In the more socio-culturally
oriented areas such as media studies and cultural studies, discourse is considered primarily in relation
to social contexts of language use, while in linguistics discourse tends to focus more on language and
its use (Garret & Bell, 1998). Among a variety of discourse analytical approaches, Fairclough (1995)
straddles both the linguistic analysis and context analysis, which not only includes detailed attention
to language and texture but also be mapped on to analysis of the institutional and wider sociocultural
context of media practices. So examining the media discourse should be recognized as an important
element within research on contemporary process of social and cultural change.
To distinguish itself from sociolinguistic approach to media discourse, however, this research is
primarily focused on the macro aspects of a discourse, which means, the external social practices
acting on or relating to the discourse, and how the discourse exerts influence if any on the social
phenomenon under study. If the sociolinguistic approaches can be viewed as looking inward at text to
reveal the linguistic and discoursal nature of a social practice, then the discourse analytic approach
employed by this research is doing otherwise by looking at how the social context is projected in civil
discourse and what further social implications might be inferred from the interaction between the two.
Its worth adding that a participant observation was also involved in this study so that the analysis
started even prior the data collection and lasted throughout. The researcher observed and sometimes
participated in the dynamic interaction in online public sphere, to obtain a better understanding of the
issue of concern and its associated bigger picture of socio-political conditions, and to maintain a
larger perspective on the research.
Findings

1. Similarity of topics in two spheres

Traditional media
Sina Weibo
Concept
Weight
Concept
development
38%
18th NCCPC
Party
24%
Party
Socialism
21%
People
people
16%
Celebration
Chinese
16%
Election
building
16%
representatives
18th NCCPC
15%
China
scientific
14%
Report
economic
13%
Beijing
reform
13%
Security
system
12%
Public
promote
12%
Police
social
11%
Reform
Society
10%
Social
Note:
Improve
10%
Victory
indicates a
China
10%
Political
matching
Report
9%
Market
relation
Construction
9%
System
between
Important
9%
Economic
Weibo
concepts and Reporters
Road
8%
traditional
Rural
8%
Country
media
Income
8%
Important
concepts
Growth
7%
National
World
6%
Leadership
Political
6%
Policy
Cultural
6%
Government
national
6%
society
Country
6%
Future
Public
5%
Congress
Leadership
5%
World
innovation
5%
Stability
government
5%
Road
Beijing
5%
Reporters
representatives
4%
construction
Achievements
4%
power
Economy
4%
Cultural
International
4%
Economy
power
4%
Corruption
Table 1 Main concepts emerging from traditional media and Sina Weibo

Weight
51%
18%
10%
9%
7%
7%
7%
6%
5%
4%
4%
4%
4%
3%
3%
3%
3%
3%
3%
3%
3%
2%
2%
2%
2%
2%
2%
2%
2%
2%
2%
2%
2%
1%
1%
1%
1%
1%

Table 1 captures a snapshot of main themes and concepts that emerged from legacy media and Weibo,
with their top concepts listed alongside correspondingly. A remarkable topical similarity to legacy
media public sphere was observed in the online public sphere. Although the proportion of each
concept to its context blocks in two public spheres show their different focuses and topical density,
still four fifth of Weibo concepts are aligned with those of the traditional media in a computational
sense, regardless of their specific meanings in respective contexts.
We further looked into the thousands of Weibo posts and found, Weibo mainly focuses on conveying
basic informational messages about this event without much deep inquiry into the specific agendas
and matters of concerns. Such concepts account for a large proportion of the total topics we found in
online public discussion.
For example, Party indicates the caller of this congress; Beijing is the location where this event
occurred; the representatives of CPCs Central Committee are the attendees; leadership transition
is the main purpose of this congress; while in all the hype of celebrating, this most significant event of
the Party was also subject to the highest-level security, of which the heavy coverage implied a
deterrent to potential threats. In a word, a large proportion of users tended to talk broadly about the
basic information of the event without much inquiry into specific issues on the Congress agenda.
5

Only a small fraction (weight3%) touched a broader range of topics which also well matched the
traditional media coverage.
Apart from such basic information, a more profound and comprehensive elaboration of specific issues
around key topics was observed in traditional medias news articles. Especially with the approaching
of the Congress, the sampled legacy media proceeded to conduct large amount of focused discussions
about some key topics such as Socialism, scientific development, economy, system, reform and so on
from perspectives of national policy and public management. The hype of news coverage lasted for a
considerable time period (more than 3 months).
For example, the focused discussion was closely around the key topic development. To concretize
this broad topic, topics on reforming systems, promoting innovation in science, culture and so on were
discussed. All these aspects would contribute to comprehensive development of the society and
further consolidate Chinese socialist construction. Additionally, internal issues and external affairs
were also articulated. For internal issues, economy, technology, public management, education, rural
development especially the migrants livelihood were all critical issues China is confronting as
frequently discussed in the public discourse of traditional media; for external affairs, how to keep a
good relationship with other countries in order to promote international cooperation would be the
focus of foreign policies of the new Chinese government.
In conclusion, collectively the Weibo posts harvested and analyzed in this sample seemed to be rather
similar to mainstream traditional news reporting than harsh and hostile projections of criticism and
dissidence that have been recorded elsewhere (Havel, 1975; Ji, 2012; Yeo & Li, 2012). The result may
be partly attributed to the analytic approach adopted in this research which attempted to make sense of
a larger text body through qualitative analysis software. Yet the result as a whole gives a general,
rational conceptualization of what kind of discussions were prominently occurring on Weibo and what
an ordinary user would be likely find about the 18th NCCPC on this online sphere.
2. Institutional users as dominants
We further examined all the collected utterances that occurred around the topic of this political event,
and found that, nearly 80.6% were contributed by individual users (including verified individual
users), and 19.4% by verified institutional users. According to Weibos verification program, verified
users are mainly composed of known people and organizations. In the sampling it was observed that
most institutional actors were either governmental bodies or traditional media groups.
Although the verified users only contributed a comparatively small proportion of the discussion about
the event, they were actually the most influential actors on Weibo because of their celebrity effect
on millions of followers. Their content, usually well organized and clearly stated, had virtually
generated a skewed topical distribution with a long tail which was composed of the large bulk of
fragmentized, unsystematic content produced by individual users (see Fig.1).

Fig.1 Concept distribution on Sina Weibo

One indicator of the most influential posts is the forward number which indicates how many times
the original posts are forwarded by the users followers and non-followers. The more forwards, the
more people the post would exponentially reach, and the more influence the post might have exerted
on the public sphere.
For example, institutional weibo user Headlines, the official account of a Sina news service with
about 18 million followers, posted a weibo on November 8, 2012 as follows:

[CPC declares to build socialism with Chinese characteristics on five fronts] The 18 th
NCCPC opened today declares to promote eco-civilization equally with economics,
politics, culture and society construction. This is a new idea in the 18 th NCCPC report.
Experts claim that CPCs unprecedentedly emphasizing eco-civilization will make a big
difference to both China and the whole world. [See more: http://t.cn/zjvoBoH]

The post was forwarded by 976 times, and would theoretically reach more than 19 million weibo
users through more than four penetration levels, as indicated by WeiboReach-a weibo analytical tool.
Most forwards occurred in the first following hour, and at the first penetration level (see Fig.2).

Fig2. Penetration path and levels

Table 2 sampled the most circulated 1000 posts on November 9, 2012, which was the second day of
the Congress session, and calculated the forward frequency of main weibo users. The result shows
that the top addressors of the day were all institutional actors, including the Partys leading
mouthpieces and other media outlets. It is worth noting here that Sina news and Sina video are two
internet services provided by Sina.com.cn, which is also the service provider of Sina Weibo- the
microblogging platform sampled and examined by this study. The website proactively provided large
amount of information in concert with mouthpieces headlines during the event.
No.

User name

Forward frequency

User category

@Caijing

25202

The official account of a news group

@Headlines

21059

The official account of Sina news service

@PeoplesDaily

9036

@SouthernMetropolisDaily

4235

1320

The official account of the State newspaper, Peoples Daily

The official account of a Guangzhou based local newspaper,
Southern Metropolis Daily
The official accounts of the State news agency, Xinhua News
Agency and its affiliated column, Xinhua Viewpoints
The official account of Sina video service

@XinhuaNewsAgency
@XinhuaViewpoints
@SinaVideo

individual users

425

including verified and unverified users

Other institutional users

420

including ordinary organizations as well as the Partys grassroots

departments

2385

Table 2 Main user accounts of the most circulated 1000 posts on November 9, 2012

In content, many Weibo posts conveniently fed off traditional medias editorials or news articles.
Taking one post released by institutional user Headlines, the representative Weibo account of Sinas
news service, on October 1, 2012:
[Peoples Daily Editorial points out Chinas modernization cause is at an extremely
important point in history] Today Peoples Daily published an editorial under the title of
Advance along the Chinese Path that is Brimming with Hope. Looking back at the
development China has made in the past decade since the 16th NCCPC, the article
pointed out Chinas modernization cause is at an extremely important point in history.
We shall seize opportunities to push the cause and proceed on the hopeful Chinese way,
to welcome the convening of the 18th NCCPC with excellent performance.
http://t.cn/zlcYPiK

The content of the post was mainly an excerpt from Peoples Daily editorial (see Fig.3), and the
hyperlink in the post would redirect to a reprinted version of the editorial by Xinhua News Agency. In
this way, Weibo and the Partys two leading mouthpieces were highly synchronized, through
hyperlink and media reprinting, forming an interrelated topical network. Social media genuinely
8

became an extension of the traditional media in terms of both the content and influence.

Fig.3 Screenshot of Peoples Daily Editorial on October 1, 2012

This reciprocity can be observed in a large number of posts published by institutional Weibo users,
especially those official accounts of governmental organizations at all levels. Besides the most
authoritative national media like Peoples Daily and Xinhua News Agency, the Partys other local
media outlets were also frequently quoted as news sources in these users posts. Such institutional
actors, including news groups, government sectors and organizations et cetera, with an attribute of
informants or quasi-propaganda have actually dominated the public discourse on social media. And
the symphony of social media and legacy media thus play up a strong spin doctoring in both public
spheres.
In sharp contrast, most ordinary individual users posts, either reposting institutional users content or
describing their personal experience associated with the event, tended to be overwhelmed by the flood
of the uniform information disseminated by institutional users, and therefore presented a relatively
weak public opinion field.
This phenomenon further confirms the Matthew effect, i.e., the rich get richer and 80/20 rule,
which widely exists in various areas including online discussion where popular participants will get
more attractive in a growing conversation network (Castells, 2008; Castells & Cardoso, 2006; Sb,
Rose, & Nyvang, 2009). Through a study of Twitter discussion, Wu et al. (2004) also find that elite
users usually dominate the major attentions albeit they compromise only a minor proportion of the
user population. The same also applies to Weibo and particularly in this case study the discussion
dominators were elite institutional and governmental users.
3. Agenda setting function
Agenda setting is about the effect and influence of mass communication. It specifies the practice that
mass media pick out important aspects of the reality according to their own values and principles,
process these facts and then report them to the audience following a certain structure and procedure
(Knox, 2013). In this case study, by highlighting some key topics, the traditional media played a
focused role as agenda setter, keeping impressing and influencing the audience through repeated and
comprehensive coverage pre, during and post the congress. With clear intent of propaganda, the
sampled traditional media had comprehensively reported every aspects of the event in a formal,
elaborative way and thus generated a rational, systematic agenda-setting coverage.
Fig.4 traces the evolutionary trends of 18th NCCPC event on legacy media over a time series of 2
months. The trend map shows a steady distribution curve throughout, with flat curves on weekdays
and down valleys on weekends, except the two prominent spikes at the beginning and the end of the

Congress. This indicates an explicit agenda setting effort of traditional media.

1200
1000
800
600
Am oun t

400
200
0

Fig.4 Event trend on traditional media

As a matter of fact, such kind of propagandist agenda setting has become the Party medias consistent
practices for major political events in China. It usually commences more than one month before the
event, and will follow up for more than one month after. Also, by further examining the content of the
traditional media, it can be well observed that the traditional media tend to discuss issues at national
level especially those closely associated with the Partys rule and national policies.
Table 3 examines the concepts emerging from news articles of the three periods and the top ten
concepts were extracted from the texts respectively. The table shows that there was little difference
among key topics emerging from legacy medias pre, during and post- Congress coverage, and
suggested a monolithic block of propaganda with shocking consistency and agenda setting effort.
Time period
Pre-Congress
(Oct.8- Nov.7)
During Congress
(Nov.8-Nov.14)
Post-Congress
(Nov.15-Dec.8)

Top 10 concepts
development, Party, people, social, reform, economy, China, construction, scientific, system
development, Socialism, characteristics, China, people, Party, economy, reform, system,
scientific
development, Socialism, Party, China, people, scientific, economy, social, report, system
Table 3 Top 10 concepts emerging from legacy medias periodic coverage

For example, a most circulated weibo on November 26, 2012 was posted by institutional user
SouthernMetropolisDaily, the official account of the newspaper, Southern Metropolis Daily:
[CCDI: In no circumstances should corrupted officials be allowed to have hiding places
within the Party] CCDI has released a notification requesting all discipline inspection
and supervision organs to learn the essence of 18 th NCCPC. It claims to have a stronger
resolution and take greater efforts to combat corruption, and to establish a sound system
to punish and prevent corruption. Anyone violating Party disciplines and state laws will
be seriously dealt with in line with laws, with zero tolerance. There is no place for
corrupt figures to hide away within the Party. Xinhua News Agency http://t.cn/zjGLRwa

Institutional user PeoplesDaily, the official account of the State paper, Peoples Daily posted on
November 26, 2012:
[Hello Tomorrow] There is no place for corrupt figures to hide away within the Party.
The stern claim of CCDI shows Chinese people the new leaderships clear standpoint
and strong resolution. When the Party echoes with the will of people to declare war to
corruption, we should also amend the inspection systems to make sure the power is
carried out under the sun, and to create smooth channels for public opinions. Strong
resolution is valuable, but a perfect system values more.

Institutional user SouthReviews, the official account of the magazine, South Reviews posted on
November 27, 2012:

10

[Use democracy and the rule of law to prevent power abuse] Corruption results
essentially from the abuse of power. How to bind power is no more than democracy and
the rule of law. It can be achieved through the power structure adjustment and more
political engagement of citizens. Only generated as well as inspected and constrained by
the way of democracy and the rule of law, can power abuse really be prevented.

All the exemplifying posts listed above, their efforts in disseminating information or initiating
discussion about anti-corruption, though from different interpretive perspectives, had exactly
extended the official discourse from traditional media to social media. Since the Partys mouthpieces
were the only legitimate news sources about such political events given the governments particular
press regulation, their social media surrogates, thus, became the biggest spin doctors in online public
sphere. Ordinary citizens just had no other way to get more diversified information. With the
concerted efforts of legacy media and social media, a strong, unified opinion field was being formed
in both mediaspheres.
By contrast, social media users tend to use a more personalized expression to convey quite emotional
messages, generating a redundant, fragmentized information flux, and thus collectively formed an
inconsistent, weak public discourse in this event, as will further be unpacked in section 4.2. What is
worse, due to CPCs unwavering censorship effort combined with ruthless offline stabilitymaintaining measures, such as throwing irresponsible netizens to jail, most social media users had
enough awareness to self-censor their own speech lest they invite unpleasant trouble.
70000
60000
50000
40000
30000
20000
10000
0

Fig.5 18th NCCPCs Weibo Trend

Fig.5 traces the evolutionary trends of 18 th NCCPC event on Weibo over a time series of 2 months,
showing three evident spikes of online public discussion before (spike A) and after (spike B and C)
the congress. The curve, with remarkable ups and downs, implies an inconsistent, fragmentized
attention from Weibo users to this event.
The first sharp spike of discussion of the event on Weibo appeared expectantly before the event on
November 6, but what is odd is that immediately after that day the curve went to a downswing and
remained unreasonably low throughout the Congress (from November 8 to November 14), indicating
an evident political apathy or withdrawal behavior of ordinary citizens.
This result, tallies well with the conclusion of previous studies. Du et al. (2013) conduct a
comprehensive survey on topics Chinese netizens are concerned with, and find that the public showed
a remarkable apathy to serious political topics, especially news about those significant political
conferences or events. They further tentatively point out the main reasons behind this apathy is threefolded: the coverage is fairly propagandist and monolithic given the news sources of such political
events are mostly the Partys media outlets: the stereotyped description and depersonalization of
officials as well as their achievements fails to attract the audience; most importantly, the stringently
11

censored political environment keeps the public from partaking in open discussion of political issues.
The other two spikes, B and C were provoked directly by the cull of several corrupted officials in the
anti-corruption actions initiated by the new leadership immediately after the Congress, projecting
Chinese peoples real concerns in public affairs which are closely associated with their daily lives.
That is to say, compared with traditional medias organized coverage, Weibo was more instant and
spontaneous in responding to issues of ordinary peoples real concerns, showing in general an everchanging, inconsistent public discourse.
This kind of public discourse intrigued by scandalous affairs, often nuanced and full of vitriolic
sentiment, may have a non-trivial impact on the structural features of online public discussion and
individual behavior, and further even on the political process itself. More recent Weibo cases have
shown success in publicizing examples of government malfeasance, official corruption and scandals
(Hassid, 2012; Sullivan, 2013; Wu et al., 2011). However, among them none were trying to touch the
boundary of the Partys rule. Especially in the most significant congress which signifies the core of
the Partys power, even the most deviant Weibo dared not go beyond the prescribed limit but followed
the universal theme, or silenced itself.
To summarize, from the aforementioned findings, we can clearly see a strong media sphere
constructed by the traditional media for this political event, which spared no effort to conduct a
monolithic, consistent and dense propaganda. The online public sphere shaped by social media,
however, was weak, fragmentized, and inconsistent; most importantly, it is a public sphere dominated
by institutional users- the avatars of traditional media group, and governmental organs official
accounts which in a sense just attempt to extend the traditional medias influence and mainstream
discourse. And in this case study, this sphere was on the whole no different from the official discourse
as the involved traditional media and their Weibo avatars were all under the authority of CPC
propaganda czars.
Discussion
According to Joseph (2012), the process of hashtagging is one way for Twitter to realize the notion of
a vernacular public sphere. This function has improved the searchability of the topic, and further
blurred the lines between institutional and non-institutional discourses. However, a large fraction of
users on Sina Weibo is observed not to make use of hashtags (Gao, Abel, Houben, & Yu, 2012) which
implies that hashtag-based user profiles or topic modeling based on hashtags, as proposed by Romero
et al. (2011, cited by Gao et al.) seem not to be appropriate on Sina Weibo. They further argue it is due
to the high power distance (Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010) in Chinas society that Chinese
users are less eager to disclose information using hashtags to ensure their posts appear in the public
discussion. It can also be implied in another sense that the less use of hashtags can help Chinese users
to avoid their posts being censored in some sensitive occasions.
According to Hofstedes cultural dimensions theory, power distance is the extent to which the less
powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that distributed
unequally (Hofstede, 1991, p. 28; Hofstede & Peterson, 2000, p. 401). Cultures that endorse low
power distance expect and accept power relations that are more consultative or democratic. People
relate to one another more as equals regardless of status, and are more comfortable with and demand
the right to contribute to and criticize the decision- making of the rulers. By contrast, in a high power
distance society like China in this case, less powerful are in relations with power that are more
autocratic and paternalistic. People do not attribute much impact to their individual activities on the
formidable system especially when regarding the rulers internal affairs.
This can well explain Chinese internet users apathy during the Partys Congress because ordinary
citizens believe their posts cannot make a difference in the supreme Party-related issues, especially
12

when positioned in a dominated public sphere by institutional actors and traditional media.
Rather than the political event itself, people are more concerned about the substantial impact of the
event on matters of their interests, including their expectation of the new government before the event,
the realization of promises made by new leaders and the changes of the status quo after the event,
which would have the direct bearing on the authority of the new leadership and the legitimacy of its
ruling. The immediate anti-corruption action initiated after the event by the government has thus
provoked greater repercussion around the public sphere, and formed prominent spikes in public
sphere, as exactly indicated in the social medias trend map.
In the public sphere constructed by the legacy media, more often than not the Partys mouthpieces
dominate the public opinion. They enter the discourse vacuum temporarily generated by the topdown censorship and medias self-censorship during politically sensitive events, and play the role of
spin doctors. When positive coverage will be broadcasted via traditional media like the Partys outlets
anyway, censorship becomes bluntly useful to prevent political instability caused by anticipated online
criticisms.
Weibo censorship has been the subject of a number of previous studies. By performing a statistical
analysis of deleted posts, Bamman et al. (2012) find that the presence of some sensitive terms
indicates a higher probability of the deletion of a post. King et al. (1997) analyze content from
multiple sources including microblogs and summarize categories of content the censors focus on. Zhu
et al. (2013) examine the velocity of microblog post deletions on Sina Weibo which shows the topics
where mass removal happens the fastest are those that combine events that are hot topics on Weibo as
a whole with themes common to sensitive posts, for instance, including Beijing, government, and
policeman et cetera.
Therefore, under such a rigorous regulatory environment and growth of mainstream alternatives ready
to accept required censorship, Weibo, occasionally exhibiting a power that ever changed the course of
events and even the local democratic landscape, has its own intrinsic limitations and resulted in a
highly unusual microblogging environment which is much distinctive from that of democratic
societies.
On the one hand, popular internet events are attributed to a bourgeoning online public sphere which
accommodates information exchange, discursive participation and online mobilization. Via this
platform Chinese netizens have occasionally played the role of agenda setter in a wide range of social
issues, of which some did exert an impact on the governments policy making process. Chines e
peoples awareness has also been well awakened and raised in civil rights, freedom of speech and
democracy.
On the other, it should be acknowledged that the impact of such online events on the Chinese society
at large is far from clear or straightforward (Jiang, 2010). Among a variety of issues sweeping the
Internet and social media, very few could rise to public view and go further to create a considerable
social impact, not to mention any substantial institutional change. Bearing firmly in mind the risk of
overtly challenging the state power, most Chinese netizens are only seeking online for a vent of their
dissatisfaction and indignation with the status quo. Their fragmentized attention to a certain public
issue could rarely last over time, especially when the increasing number of spectacular public events
in online public sphere might even cause the emotional fatigue of those uninvolved gawkers.
While social media have amplified ordinary peoples voices and formed a powerful public opinion
field, Chinese government has also been taking advantage of these new tools to strengthen filtering,
censorship, and regulatory capabilities; more importantly, it has been arguably successful in gaining
popular compliance and cementing its political rule by building and promoting state legitimacy in
economy, nationalism, ideology, culture and governance.

13

Thus the complexity of this online public sphere cannot be reduced to a simple zero-sum game
between the state and emerging civil society (Pei, 2010). Taking the 18 th NCCPC, in sharp contrast
with the loose discussion threads of ordinary peoples unspoken revolt on Weibo, the thousands of
governmental users had virtually played as spin doctors in the public sphere with systematic,
overwhelming information feeding, which was closely aligned with that of the CPCs mouthpieces.
Hence, while some researchers optimistically argue Chinese social media has great potential to
facilitate public discussions and debates, cultivate civic awareness and consciousness, reframe the
social structure and ultimately bring about social changes, we should acknowledge that without
diversified implementation ways of democracy and political deliberation embedded in the sociopolitical structures, Chinese social medias quasi-revolutionary power and democratic notion would
still be constrained to a limited impact, especially given the fact the new leadership tends to adopt a
more cautious attitude to social media as well as more stringent internet management policies.
Limitation
Since Sina Weibos Application Programing Interface (API) is not totally open to developers,
currently there is no efficient way to get access to the whole database of Weibo. Moreover, there is
also limitation for daily retrieval of Weibo post search that is 1000 at most. So for individual
researchers, manually harvesting data on the basis of certain terms becomes the only workable way to
perform data collection.
The limitation of the study, thus mainly lies in the smaller data size, which apparently cannot serve as
a sufficient database if we intend to do a big data type study on this issue. Consequently the study
can only focus on one aspect of the whole puzzle of online public sphere facilitated by Weibo, which
is by and large determined by the available posts the researcher could obtain.
The stringent censorship during the event is also an uncontrollable restricting factor which hinders the
researcher to normally obtain posts of particular time period, not to mention get access to those
inharmonious posts. The metadata analyzed in this study were substantially pre-filtered, falling
short of more diversified traits. But in turn this exactly composes one unique characteristic of Chinese
social media as a surveilled online public sphere.
That being said, within a smaller data set a topical network can yet be well observed and a more
detailed qualitative exploration of the data can also be provided, through a multi-process, mixed
method of approach combining relevant keywords extraction, concept visualization and content
analysis. The findings unveiled by the study can also appropriately explain part of the critical facts in
Chinese social medias landscape. With the same effort, the subsequent researches could further
explore other aspects of this online public sphere as well as its impact on social issues based on
different datasets.
Conclusion
Since social media began to rage its popularity in the worldwide, extensive studies have been
conducted to explore its potentiality as technology and space for expanding and sustaining a mediated
public sphere where public discourse takes place and public opinion as function of the public
discourse is facilitated. Particularly after Twitter revolution that occurred in some less free regimes,
researchers have been fascinated by its quasi-revolutionary power of causing fundamental changes.
When it comes to China, there is also shared understanding that the nation is in the midst of a
microblog movement. Although quite a few Anglophone services like Twitter and Facebook are
14

blocked by the Great Firewall of China, the diligent local companies developed their own social
networking services which have been launching a process of empowering individuals as well as their
civic awakening since then. Over several years Chinese ordinary peoples daily lives have been
reshaped by social media in a way that free expression of their common concern about social issues
and even online large-scale mobilizations become possible.
On one hand China enjoys great benefits from the prosperous internet industry since the government
has full control of web servers and internet service authorization. On the other hand, considering the
lessons those involved governments all learned from Twitter-assisted revolutions, Chinese
government has intentionally posed a more rigorous censorship towards the new media, and
accordingly changed their political practices in response to Chinese citizens constant resistance.
Many previous events have witnessed the governments such efforts in constraining any new medias
subversive forces, as well as a growing bureaucratic consensus that favors a much tighter censorship
(Jiang, 2010; Y. Zhang, 2013).
Given this backdrop, this study chose a paramount political event in China-the 18 th NCCPC where the
new Chinese leadership was elected into power and its new ruling guidelines were declared, and
conducted a qualitative content analysis of public discussions happening both on social media and
traditional media around the event. The comparison between the two indicates a legacy mediadominant online public sphere was emerging around this topic due to the highest level censorship,
albeit a marginalized micro political resistance among Chinese netizens by the way of keeping
silence could still be observed throughout.
Therefore, despite the existing studies have showcased Chinese social medias powerful agenda
setting and catalyst effect in some given issues, the disparate dynamics of the this political event has
further revelation about boundaries of social media's so called revolutionary power under an
authoritarian socio-political system. With regards to paramount political issues and many other Partyrelated issues, ordinary peoples voices could not genuinely make much difference through this online
sphere, albeit it might have a profound effect on Chinese citizens psyche and awareness in the long
term. Social medias constrained influence on limited political affairs has added complexity to the
dynamics of the state, public sphere and new technologies, as well as the subsequent Chinese social
media studies.
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