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Abstract
Public discourses over the same social crisis—the most deadly train crash in recent times in China, in July 2011—show three divergent but interactive packages across the government, the media, and online public opinion. The government dominated public discourse and framed the crash as an intra-institutional flaw. The media sought to legitimize the official rhetoric by focusing on victim compensation, official concern, and rescue. Online public opinion, however, contested both official rhetoric and media discourse, and highlighted the train crash as terrible malfeasances of the government. Constructed as a result of the state legitimation crisis, the three perspectives are entangled in a tense “dominator–mediator–challenger” relationship. However, the seemingly diversified opinions and conflicting ideas have been maintained within the sphere of legitimate controversy that does not necessarily undermine state legitimacy. The coercive state’s control and the mimetic organizational responses to crisis direct social actors to behave similarly and form institutional isomorphism. The dominance of political power over social power is thus manifest in the process of discursive competition and interaction. The discursive framework developed in this study illuminates similar crisis events in Asia and in Western democracies where social trust in government and in media is relatively low.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, Durban, South Africa, July 2012. We thank Dr. King-wa Fu, the leader of the Weiboscope Project at The University of Hong Kong, for his generous sharing of data.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 During the 2013 National People's Congress held on March 10, 2013, the State Council was approved to revoke the MOR. Its administrative duties were taken up by the Ministry of Transport, and corporate management by the newly founded China Railway Corporation. Since the structural reform, the original website of MOR and its content are not accessible any more. Therefore, although this study expanded the examination period from two months in the original design to 162 days in later version, it is not possible to collect more data from the MOR website.
2 Since the original research design did not include quantitative data analysis, we did not sample the real-time Weibo posts/reposts. Instead, we searched the posts/reposts later, which turned out to be highly censored and “safe” ones, and the number of texts was much less. Even though, most of the existing netizens' posts/reposts were still critical and questioning. It is thus inferable that the censored and deleted ones could be more challenging. The same case applies to the data collected from Tianya Forum.
3 The Weiboscope Project is conducted by the research team at the Journalism and Media Studies Center at The University of Hong Kong. The introduction of the project is available at http://weiboscope.jmsc.hku.hk/datazip/.
4 The data we referred to are not open to the public. However, through personal communication, the project leader was kind enough to share the data with us. We acknowledge that the data are not representative of the whole population of Weibo posts about the Wenzhou train crash. We did not use the data in statistical analyses, but mainly for general reference.
5 The content was retrieved from Sina Weibo (weibo.com) by searching the keyword “standard fill-in-the-blank report of accident.” This is the most reposted version.
6 Retrieved from the New York Times article “Train Wreck in China Heightens Unease on Safety Standards” (July 25, 2011, A4).