Derailed emotions: The transformation of claims and targets during the Wenzhou online incident

Abstract

Social media have both enabled and reinforced a shift towards the personalization of politics and collective action that is also occurring in China. In addition to street actions, the country is seeing a continuously growing number of so-called online mass incidents. While they have been attracting growing scholarly attention, most analyses have been based on anecdotal evidence and have treated netizens as a uniform group without evaluating the event's internal discursive dynamics. In order to assess such micro-blogging incidents' actual potential for political change, we investigate the case of the largest ‘online mass incident’ in China since the advent of Chinese micro-blogging services in 2009, prompted by the crash of two high-speed trains near the city of Wenzhou in July 2011. Drawing on the systematic content analysis of more than 4600 micro-blog posts published in the aftermath of the accident, we analyse the events' discursive dynamics, focusing on the composition, transformation, and radicalization of claims and targets. Our analysis demonstrates that the level of radicalism of the Wenzhou online mass incident is rather moderate and that no radicalization took place before the debate levelled down. While the incident significantly enhanced the tendency in Chinese online activism towards the broadening of the critical debate on national affairs, expectations about a democratizing impact of online debates might be premature.

Keywords:

• Internet
• social media
• micro-blogs
• contention
• social movement
• China
• online mass incidents

Notes on contributors

Maria Bondes is a research fellow at the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies in Hamburg. Her research centres on popular contention and social movements in contemporary China with a special focus on environmental activism and social media. She is currently writing her PhD thesis in Chinese Studies at Hamburg University on local environmental activism in urban and rural China. [email: [email protected]]

Günter Schucher is a senior research fellow at the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies. He earned his PhD from the University of Hamburg, Department of Chinese Language and Culture. His research interests include the Chinese labour market, vocational education, social security, industrial relations and collective action. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Western social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have been blocked in China since 2009. Chinese Internet corporations such as Sina and Tencent were quick to come up with their own products, however. China now has a multifaceted social media landscape with a multitude of micro-blogging services, social networks, and other applications.

2. WeiboScope search can be found at http://research.jmsc.hku.hk/social/search.py/sinaweibo/. Information on building and deploying the system is given on Cedric Sam's blog ‘The Rice Cooker’ at http://jmsc.hku.hk/blogs/ricecooker/ and JMSC's page on the content-sharing platform GitHub at https://github.com/JMSCHKU/Social.

3. There is no suitable way of including posts that were generally blocked from publishing, e.g. via keyword-based censorship, however.

4. The double slash // indicates a repost. Other than on Twitter, Sina Weibo users can comment on posts with all their comments displayed underneath the original post, thereby facilitating conversation. Each post contains information about the number of reposts and comments. All of the English quotes of micro-blog posts mentioned in this paper are the authors' own translations.