Online Participation Chaos: A Case Study of Chinese Government-Initiated E-Polity Square

ABSTRACT

The research examines a government-initiated online engagement program in China, mainly including its history, mechanism, and how netizens participated in it. To clearly address the participation scenario, a framework is proposed to further explore the quality of participation. The result shows that participation chaos is prevalent with poor-quality proposals. A government censorship exists all the time and changes with the popularity of the forum. It also implies that the purpose of a Chinese government-initiated online engagement forum may be varied, one for engagement and the other for maintaining stability, which partly attributes to the online participation chaos.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• governmental censorship
• government-initiated
• online engagement
• participation chaos

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Professor Robert Y. Shapiro (Department of Political Science, Columbia University) for his critical review and suggestions for the early draft, and Dr. Jing Shi (School of Public Administration, Huazhong University of Science and Technology) for her professional opinions in E-government and public participation.

Funding

This work was supported by National 985 Project of Non-traditional Security at Huazhong University of Science and Technology; National Social Science Fundation of China [Grant 11&ZD033]; and China’s Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Science Research Youth Fund [Grant:15 YJC630168].

Notes

1. Two sessions or Lianghui refers to the two conferences, the NPC (National People’s Congress or China’s Congress) and CPPCC (Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference or China’s Top Advisory Body). It is held every March and lasts for 15 days or so. During two sessions, the public opinion from the representatives nationwide will be collected and submitted to the Communist Party and the central government.

2. Online censorship. Most of the time the online censorship involves a filter by keywords association mechanism first, and then followed by a manual process to prevent sensitive words from appearing out of negligence by the previous mechanism. The confrontation between netizens and online authority seems like a hide-and-seek game (If a certain wording is prohibited, the netizens can always create another word to replace those sensitive wordings and successfully escape from the filter system for quite a while, that is, if Bo Xilai is a sensitive word, the netizens would create words like “Bo,” “King of Sichuan (Xi’nan),” or “Bxl” to spread information online). The underlying reasons for government to initiate such forums are that they feel the pressure and in the hope of manipulating public opinion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National 985 Project of Non-traditional Security at Huazhong University of Science and Technology; National Social Science Fundation of China [Grant 11&ZD033]; and China’s Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Science Research Youth Fund [Grant:15 YJC630168].