Shortening the Distance between Government and Public in China II

Methods and Practices

Liu Xiaoyan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367619305
• eBook ISBN: 9781000219890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Distance, in its traditional sense, connotates "estrangement" and "division". But in the context of modern political studies, it means a controllable resource which can be manipulated to change the relationship between the government and the public.

Drawing on this concept from western political science, the author explores the law and mechanisms of China's political communication. In this volume, the author introduces the empirical investigation of the distance between government and the public in China. First, it discusses how the use of online social media, such as Weibo, can be used strategically to mediate the distance of offline communication. Then, it points out that social media can also lead to unlimited expression of general will, to which governments should pay attention. An empirical study on how rural residents of five provinces in China obtain political information is used to illustrate the point.

Students and scholars who are interested in political science and political communication, especially Chinese politics, would find this title a useful reference.

1 A mechanism for regulating the distance between the government and the public

Online political communication: a mechanism for regulating the distance between the government and the public

In government communication, the widespread use of social media, such as Sina Weibo, has changed the mode of political communication, prompting the government to adjust its strategy to adapt to a newly formed media environment. Through effective online political communication, the government can regulate the distance from the public and increase mutual political trust. This chapter will explain the effective use of online political communication from the following aspects: firstly, how online communication functions as a safety valve and a mechanism to balance interests; secondly, how to cope with group polarization and online populism; and thirdly, how to build a communication platform for different interest groups. Meanwhile, it also explores online political communication as a mechanism of regulating the distance between the government and the public through the perspective of constructed political trust in the process of online political communication, direct dialogues on the Internet, and the significance of key opinion leaders in achieving effective communication. Obviously, the effective use of online political communication is undoubtedly one of the main strategies to narrow the distance between the government and the public and serves as a powerful complement to offline political communication.

Political communication in the new media environment

Political communication is a two-way or multidirectional and multidimensional process, rather than a one-way or one-dimensional process. In a broad sense, political communication includes all activities that transmit political information and exchange political ideas. To narrow it down, it refers to the exchange and transformation of political information in the input and output processes of political systems.¹ According to David Miller & Vernon Bogdano, political communication is the flow of information and intelligence that constructs structural and meaningful political activities. It not only points to information delivery from elites to ordinary people but also all other informal communication in society as long as it influences politics in any way. It not only points to information delivery from elites to ordinary people but also all other informal communication in society as long as it influences politics in any way.² Obviously, online political communication is the exchange and transformation of political information through new media.

New media promotes direct communication between the government and the public

According to The 36th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China published by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), by the end of June 2015, microblog users in China had reached 204 million, and the usage rate was 30.6%. Among netizens, instant messaging users had reached 606 million, accounting for 90.8% of total Internet users. Among them, there were 540 million mobile instant messaging users. New social media platforms, such as Sina Weibo and WeChat, have emerged where the public receive information and provide feedback on social affairs. The public even actively release information and express opinions on such platforms.

This situation is closely related to its social background. For one thing, with economic development and the overall improvement of education, people’s demands are diversified, and their rights are no longer confined to satisfying their basic needs of life. For another, the rapid popularization of the Internet and the low cost of application have made it possible for people of different social classes to get involved, to acquire a large amount of information, and to express opinions about their concerns. Additionally, since various network terminals for opinion expression tend to be diverse and portable, public opinion expression becomes much more convenient and faster than before. For example, mobile terminals like mobile phones and tablets make information circulation and acquisition easier. When traditional media is controlled by a small number of elites, it is very difficult for relatively disadvantaged groups to express their opinions. In comparison, regulations for online posts are weaker than those for traditional media. To a certain extent, it empowers relatively disadvantaged groups and individuals, weakens the authority of traditional media in the information dissemination system, and opens up special platforms and a domain for the public to directly express opinions and disclose information. On an online platform, once a viewpoint conforms to a wider group of netizens, it can be widely disseminated, and even affect the development of the original event. The controversial “online trial” or “media trial” in recent years, for example, is exactly the reflection of this phenomenon.

Chinese people’s enthusiasm for supervision of and participation in public affairs is largely seen in and fueled by new media. In the past, due to limitations in communication technologies and communicative channels, the government often needed to rely on third parties, such as traditional mass media, to communicate. Such government communication presented the feature of “waterfall” in the mechanism of opinion generation. This feature is what Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, a social and political scientist from Prague, proposed in his argument that public opinion flows downwards in a multi-step manner like the way a waterfall is cut off by a series of pools. The top pool is composed of economic and social elites, followed by the pool of political and ruling elites, the pool of mass media, the pool of key opinion leaders, and finally the pool of the public.³ However, new media, like the Internet, has been widely used as platforms of public opinion expression, which enables the formation of a new opinion hierarchy. This breaks the pattern that traditional power groups control social discourse power and the mechanism of public opinion generation. With the use of new media, the dialogue barriers between the bottom pool and the upper pool can be greatly reduced, and opinions of the bottom-level people are able to exert great influence on public opinion, which in turn affects decisions of the upper elites.

In this sense, the traditional order of government communication has been broken, and new media, represented by the Internet, has become one of the major platforms for political communication. Members of the public depend on new media to issue information and to ask the government, the information receiver, to give feedback concerning the sent information. Nowadays, members of the public tend to actively participate in social and political affairs thanks to the Internet. Political activities are put into practice mainly on the Internet, for example. People would gather information and spread it, or express opinions to supervise public affairs.

New media enables ordinary people to act as information senders to directly talk to the government in political communication. Besides, compared with traditional mass media that government communication often relies on, new media also influences the content traditional media provides, forcing it to adjust its previous authoritative position as the master of discourse power and to include ordinary people’s discourse so as to make their voices heard. Currently in most cases, what is presented in traditional mass media is alternative information in comparison to the one formed by new media platforms. That is because in the same period of time, their focused topics and expressed opinions often differ greatly. However, with the increasing significance of new media, like the Internet, as a major social and political communication platform, traditional mass media is also required to respond to this information field and incorporate netizens’ demands and opinions into their agenda. This is intended to reduce differences in the understanding of social environment presented by these two information fields.

Similarly, the government is actively using new media platforms to directly communicate and make contact with the public. In this way, the government can directly and accurately disseminate information to the people. In addition, it can make use of the possible “nuclear fission” effect to expand the influence of governmental information so that the government can promptly respond to the public’s demands on those platforms. For example, since the police office of Zhaoqing County, Guangzhou Province took the lead in opening a Weibo account, many police offices in other parts of China have followed suit in order to promote the interaction and communication between the police and the public.

On the whole, Twitter prefers the expression of personalized content in the United States and other places. However, China’s local Weibo gives more attention to social and public affairs, and its significance is more prominent in its use as a platform for people to strive for rights and express opinions. Weibo has demonstrated its important role in information dissemination and in organizing and mobilizing the public for activities like anti-corruption, resistance to forced demolition, and opposition to violent enforcement or other public interest activities. All this justifies new media as a new platform for political communication to effectively regulate the distance between the government and the public.

Features of online opinion generation

As mentioned earlier, in contrast to traditional political communication which relies on traditional mass media, opinions are first generated among the public and then transmitted to the upper class in the new structure of political communication formed by new media platforms. This process has several features.

First of all, specific issues or hot topics can easily attract attention, prompting the rapid generation of online public opinion and accordingly strongly pushing people to take action. New media, like Weibo, has a strong tendency to encourage “decentralization”. To be specific, users often disseminate information based on their own interests, values, and benefits. On this basis, they are clustered into small groups and closely linked to specific media platforms. Therefore, users on the same application platform have much in common within the same group but differ among groups. On the whole, users of different application platforms differ widely. However, given that many social events relate to interests of a relatively large group of people, one message can be spread on a new platform by means of being “on-looked”, being reposted, and receiving comments, and being shared with others. This transcends the differences of the diverse users both on traditional and new platforms, resulting in wide information dissemination among Internet users of different social statuses. For example, the “Xinjiang Nut Cake” Event in 2012 was triggered by a message initially delivered by a government microblog on Weibo. It then spread to other microblog circles, and other social platforms like Renren Net, online forums, video websites, etc. Finally it caught the attention of traditional media.

Such political communication is achieved precisely because certain information or viewpoints are amplified through online groups, leading to the formation of online hotspots and sufficient intensity of public opinion, and thus capturing the attention of the upper layer in the political power structure. As a result, the information enters into the public agenda. It might be another case. After an online hotspot is included in the agenda of traditional media, it gains the attention of two opinion fields and powerful public opinion is formed around it. In this way, it forces the political system to have a public discussion about it. This process has a strong mobilizing capability, which is also difficult to achieve for traditional political communication.

Second, populism also exists in online political communication, which has a negative impact on the rational and effective dialogue between the government and the public. In essence, populism is an extreme trend or movement for ordinary people. Prolocutors and representatives are not believed; systems, elites, and authorities are opposed.⁴ Currently, the enthusiasm of Internet users for public opinion supervision is growing. Accordingly, there is increasing awareness for netizens to take an opposing attitude toward mainstream discourse and the central power position held by the government. The advent of the Internet not only means the formation of a direct channel for the dialogue between the government and the public, it also means that the public have the opportunity to vent their feelings, and their dissatisfaction may go to extremes. Populists in the era of new media are more inclined to use this platform for free expression to generate their own opinions. They do not rely on elites such as traditional news agencies, experts, scholars, or government officials; more emphasis is placed on the value of individuals. Some researchers analyzed the trend of populism in China’s cyberspace and found that online populism has a strong appeal, despite the fact that it lacks a form of organization and does not deliberately pursue certain concepts.⁵ In online events, irrational expressions often appear when speakers make arbitrary judgments with no investigation and evidence, and they often use the slogan “for the people’s sake” to implement “people’s trial”.

The agenda of online populism and its function of social mobilization pose a challenge to rational communication on the Internet. The emergence of online populism is closely related to populists’ perceptions and reactions to a crisis. As the British scholar Paul Taggart pointed out, the emergence of a crisis would make populists abandon their reluctance and participate in political activities and actively guard their central area. The difficulty is that the crisis may be imagined by populists, or may represent their real feeling of the world of political and economic crises.⁶ As current internal social contradictions in Chinese society become more prominent and are increasingly perceived, cyberspace is filled with descriptions of these contradictions, along with the public’s expressions of individual crisis. These are the breeding grounds of online populism. A close examination of different online hotspot issues and related discussions would show that this process often begins when an event is “labeled” to make its causes extreme and then connected with other hotspot events such as corruption, government inaction, environmental pollution, law enforcement violence, social injustice, etc. This can effectively capture netizens’ attention and the statements may cater to their concerns, existing values, and perceptions, which ultimately inspire the collective participation of netizens. However, it is worth noting that the hotspot issues involved in online populism are related to the public interest. This echoes the idea mentioned earlier that the Internet offers a platform for people to express their demands. By taking advantage of this platform and the public’s attention, online populism can exist for a long time.

In short, online communication can be either positive and rational or negative and irrational. In some cases, it is how ordinary people present their demands. In other cases, however, there may be hotspot events driven by commercial interests or special interest groups using and manipulating netizens’ emotions to reach their goals.

Effective use of online political communication

The Internet offers an important platform to promote communications between the government and the public. It can also reduce communication barriers and shorten the distance between communicators. Therefore, it has to be included in the development of government communication systems. However, due to the existing phenomenon of public antagonism and even populism in cyberspace, it is difficult to have rational dialogues and communication barriers still exist between the government and the public. Therefore, it is worth thinking about how to effectively use online political communication to regulate the distance between the government and the public.

Online political communication as a safety valve and a mechanism to balance interests

Although it is impossible for any political system to allow every hostile demand to be addressed immediately,⁷ a stable political system must have a mechanism to ease dissatisfaction and hostility. That is, it needs a safety valve to ensure that people’s dissatisfaction and hostility to certain problems in the existing system can be vented and transferred. In this sense, the stability and security of the political system and role players in this system can be guaranteed. The communication system depending mainly on old media failed to provide an effective channel for citizens to vent their emotions. It was hard for rulers at the top to hear people’s demands, concerns, and dissatisfactions. Therefore, political communication in the old communication system would be based on a top-down approach. The controlling and leading role of the top authority makes it impossible to obtain more accurate and general feedback, let alone a platform for people at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A mechanism for regulating the distance between the government and the public
• 2 Rational choice of the government’s response to public will
• 3 An empirical investigation of the distance between the government and rural residents in China
• Conclusion
• Index