Jens Dammjournalists, the plan by Taiwan’s Xianglu Dragon Group to build a PX plant in the coastal city
of Xiamen, Fujian province was successfully stopped. The protests were not limited to social-
media platforms and SMS text messages, but culminated in citizens demonstrating on the streets
of Xiamen. However, the construction of the plant was then relocated to the neighboring city
of Zhangzhou. Other issues hotly debated in China’s blogosphere have included technological
safety (for example, after the Wenzhou high-speed rail crash) and corruption (for example, the
case of the National People’s Congress, when photos were put on Weibo showing represent-
atives of poor districts wearing expensive luxury clothes). These cases certainly resulted in a
certain level of empowerment for the Chinese people (for example, in the case of the Xiamen
factory), but the new social media have often seemed to function more as a safety valve for
spontaneous expression of bitterness, as the case of the high-speed rail crash has shown, where
all the discussions that took place at that time have since been erased from the Internet in China.
Conclusion
Together with the official narrative on commercialisation, the question is, in which direction will
China’s social media go? Will social media foster freedom online, political participation, and the
emergence of a public sphere/civil society, or will the Great Firewall “win”? What roles do the
Internet intermediaries play? These questions are tricky to answer. In general, freedom of the press
is almost non-existent in China, as the France-based group “Reporters Without Borders” ranked
China 175 out of 180 countries in its 2014 worldwide Index of Press Freedom. On the other hand,
many Chinese netizens basically regard the Internet and social media as tools for spreading infor-
mation, for commercial activities, and for dealing with specific issues concerning the environment
and customer rights. There is little discussion, at a more abstract level, on freedom of speech. The
space offered by social media, however, is no longer restricted to a tiny minority at subnational
and transnational levels, but is being increasingly taken up by many netizens on various occasions.
The reasons for these contradictions are manifold. For example, while trying to control the
content of the Internet and making it thus similar to traditional media, the Chinese state has
also spent hundreds of billions on infrastructure and regards informatization as essential for the
nation’s economic growth as well as for its special form of good governance under CCP’s one-
party rule. Another reason is increasing rural to urban migration over long distances, leading
migrants to increasingly employ social media for their communication.
There are also some latest developments, especially taking into account Xi Jinping’s state-
ments, demonstrating China’s insistence on Internet sovereignty, or cyber sovereignty, as CCP’s
central policy concept for dealing with the Internet (Bandurski 2015):
Properly conducting public opinion work online is a long-term task, and [we] must
innovate and improve our online propaganda, using the principles of Internet commu-
nication, carrying forward the main theme, exciting positive energy, and energetically
fostering and fulfilling the socialist core values, ensuring a good grasp of the timing,
degree and effectiveness of online public opinion channeling, so that the online space
becomes clear and bright.
(Bandurski 2015)Thus, for China in the near future we may expect a more nationalized social media environ-
ment and more commercialization, but less microblogging and less personal space. In addition,
the trend towards national online Chinese social media will continue, while existing contacts
to the outside global world, including the Chinese language Internet space, will further shrink.