Temporality alignment: how WeChat transforms government communication in Chinese cities

Abstract

Drawing on media practice and mediation literature, this study explores how the media practices of WeChat account employees have transformed government communication in major Chinese cities. In-depth interviews were conducted with government WeChat account (or Fabu) employees in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. The analyses of the interview transcripts demonstrated that in daily media practices, the Fabu employees penetrated deeper into internal government decision-making processes by identifying themselves with the municipal authority, building binding ties by forging trustworthy dependence relations with other government offices, and spreading multiple WeChat expert networks to public sectors of the entire city. These routinized practices aligned the digital temporality of WeChat-based public engagement to the legacy temporal order of communication within Chinese city governments. The findings of this study contribute to the literature by suggesting that WeChat engenders temporal alignment as a reconciliatory and asymmetrical mode of mediation that exploits trust and interpersonal relationships to re-establish the time–space order of (semi)authoritarian city governments in which certain processes are difficult to change.

Keywords:

• government communication
• WeChat
• media practice
• Chinese cities

Notes

1 According to China’s National Statistical Bureau (2018), Shanghai has 23,019,100, Shenzhen 10,357,900, and Hangzhou 8,700,400 permanent residents.

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by Fudan's New Media Lab, MOE KRI Project (16JJD860001) and China's Social Science Foundation (15AXW007).

Notes on contributors

Ji Pan

Pan Ji is a full professor in the Journalism School and the Center for Information and Communication Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. He received a PhD in Communications from the University of South Carolina in 2010. He then worked for two years as a research fellow in the new media research cluster at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests are related to the effects of information technologies on mediated social connectivity, urban communication, and social change.