Citizen attitudes towards China's maritime territorial disputes: traditional media and Internet usage as distinctive conduits of political views in China

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the differential impact of Chinese citizens’ use of traditional media and Internet sources on their political views about the country’s territorial dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Chinese citizens can utilize a variety of conduits of information that allow varying degrees of government control over the way foreign affairs and other controversies are presented. Those who rely on mainstream, state-controlled television, radio, and printed media for information on the disputes, and those who turn to less-prescriptive sources on the Internet, can be expected to have distinctive political attitudes. We use original 2013 Chinese survey data to explore patterns of media consumption and citizens’ attention levels towards the Sino-Japanese island dispute, and views regarding the government’s performance in handling the issue and appropriate policy responses. Those who derive their information from traditional media tend to view the government’s performance more positively, and are more likely both to favour compromise and to oppose the use of military force. By comparison, information from Internet sources, which is more user selfselective, sustains a wider range of attitudes about the Sino-Japanese island dispute and the appropriate policies for dealing with it, including both militaristic and moderate stances. All told, we find that Chinese citizens bring distinctive predispositions to their consumption of media information on this issue, but our results also clearly reflect an ongoing, pervasive influence for China’s state-run traditional media. These findings have important implications for considering the resilience of authoritarian systems in the Internet era.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• border disputes
• digital media
• mass media
• Internet
• regime resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

We are grateful for the support of this research project received from the Perth USAsia Centre and its director, Gordon Flake, the National Institute of South China Sea Studies in Haikou, China, and the Asia-Pacific Research Institute at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou.

Notes on contributors

David Denemark is a Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on political trust and attitudes towards democracy, electoral politics, and the political impact of the mass media in citizen information levels and voting patterns. Recent publications include articles on terrorism and security policies around the world, gender and voter evaluations of Australian leaders, and popular attitudes towards democracy and democratic institutions in emerging and established democracies. His research has been published in a number of leading journals around the world, including the British Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and Electoral Politics. [email: [email protected]]

Andrew Chubb is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Western Australia conducting doctoral research on the relationship between Chinese public opinion and government policy in the East and South China Seas. Coordinator of an original survey project aimed at measuring and tracking Chinese public attitudes towards these disputes, he has published articles in academic and policy journals including the Journal of Contemporary China, China Brief, and East Asia Forum. In 2014 he spent two months as a Library Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University. His blog, South Sea Conversations (southseaconversations.wordpress.com), provides translations and analysis of Chinese discourse on the South and East China Sea issues. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. A study of the party-state's censorship behaviour across multiple online platforms indicated that criticism directed at the party-state was not particularly likely to be censored; rather censorship tended to focus on forestalling social mobilization (King, Pan, & Roberts, 2013).

2. Original data were produced as part of a Beijing HorizonKey research consultancy's self-sponsored survey (see Chubb, 2013a).

3. According to industry professionals at two Beijing-based survey companies, randomized telephone surveys on such topics in China typically produce response rates of between 5% and 10%.

4. Among the four online sources (news portals, BBS forums, Weibo, and Weixin) news portals clearly dominate. More than 22% of respondents said they ‘often’ obtained information about China's maritime disputes from news portals, while only 10% said the same for Weibo, 6.7% for BBS forums, and only 3.4% for Weixin. More than 80% of these frequent Weibo and Weixin users also rely on online news portals ‘often’ for their information on the maritime disputes. Therefore, we use a combined ‘Internet Sources’ category in several of the tables in the article, reflecting citizens’ overall reliance on digital news sources, which share the similar user experiences of voluntary exposure to content, compared with the more prescriptive traditional media.

5. Respondents who said they heard about the maritime disputes through television were invited to name a specific outlet. More than one-third (36.9%) named the central broadcaster CCTV, while the remainder named provincial and satellite stations. This indicates that respondents distinguished television (dianshi) from online video platforms like Youku.