Masaryk university
DANCING IN SHACKLES? WEIBO USE AND COLLECTIVE ACTION INVOLVEMENT
Download 0.54 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Research Hypothesis
- Findings
DANCING IN SHACKLES? WEIBO USE AND COLLECTIVE ACTION INVOLVEMENTThose who wanted to find comprehensive information about the July 23 train collision in Wenzhou most likely found it on Weibo rather than from any other media. Two cars of a high-speed train collided and fell off a bridge on the evening of July 23 in Wenzhou, a city in China’s Zhejiang province, killing at least 39 people and injuring 200 more. The earliest news of this train crash was sent by people on the trains during the accident. “Please save us,” a passenger wrote on Sina Weibo (a Chinese microblog site like Twitter) four minutes after the train accident. Nine minutes later, another passenger posted a call for help on Weibo that was forwarded 100,000 times instantaneously. Two hours later, a call for blood quickly spread online, and the local hospitals were soon flooded with blood donors (Wines and LaFraniere 2011). Weibo also played an important role in revealing the Ministry of Railways’ hasty burial of train wreckage, which would have been very difficult to publish without significant alteration under censorship in traditional media. Fewer than four days later, Ministry of Railways officials announced that there were no living survivors at the accident scene and ordered backhoes to bury the wrecked trains. Photos taken at the site and videos shot during the burial created powerful waves of questioning online that led netizens to “abhor this hasty and cold-blooded decision” (Gao 2011). The hasty clearing of wreckage ignited the users to accuse the government of “destroying undesirable evidence that may embarrass them through jeopardizing lives of undiscovered survivors” (He 2011). A survivor was even found in the remains of the train after the rescue efforts were stopped. Meanwhile, Weibo was also the first to reveal that Wang Qinglei, a hostess of CCTV (China Central Television) news channel “24 Hours,” was suspended over her critical and frustrated remarks about the current situation of the country and her contention that the locomotives were buried too quickly (He 2011). At a news conference after the train crash, Wang Yongping, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Railways, apologized for the collision and said no one could or would bury the story. He said a colleague told him the wreckage was needed to fill in a muddy ditch in order to make rescue efforts easier. “No matter whether you believe it or not, I believe it,” he commented under journalists’ flooding pressure. This comment quickly went viral on Weibo, and was quoted widely by netizens with mockery and disdain. A poll on Sina Weibo after the media conference showed that, among 62,926 voters, 98% (N=61382) of participants believed that the Ministry of Railways buried the wreckage only to destroy the unfavorable evidence (Gao 2011). The government’s handling of the Wenzhou train collision was under unprecedented scrutiny and suspect from the public “thanks [to Weibo’s] unique function of information dissemination that made everything more transparent, and thereby revealing, to the extreme embarrassment of the Chinese government, the opacity of the country’s social management” (He 2011). Within a week of the accident, more than ten million messages had been sent and forwarded. The sheer amount of postings made it impossible to censor everything, and doing so “would have risked further angering of the Chinese netizens who were already outraged” (International Media Support 2011). The overwhelming criticism online even forced the Ministry of Railways to dig out the previously buried bullet train. However, Weibo is not only a place for contentious events. There are numerous Weibo-driven events aimed at helping people from disadvantaged groups. Sociologist Yu Jianrong initiated a series of Weibo-driven events, for example, to find lost children, help homeless people, and donate books to rural areas. Most of them are charity-oriented and have led to a lot of collaboration to help people in need. For online activists, using Weibo is like dancing in shackles. Even though state control and monitoring is ever-increasing, there is probably no other platform in China that provides such mobilization power to reach so many people in such a short time. Will Weibo continue to show its power in collective action mobilization under increasing state control? Moreover, what do people generally use Weibo for? Who are Weibo activists? What are the factors driving people to join in collective actions? In this chapter, I focus on how Weibo use might affect people’s collective action involvement. Two related questions were explored: 1) What is the main motive driving people to use Weibo? 2) Who are Weibo activists? Using data from my online survey, I first introduce the demographics of the total sample population (Internet user population) as well as the Weibo user population, and compare them with findings from CNNIC. Then, I present my findings on whether Weibo is primarily used as an information platform. The correlational relationships between individual factors, Weibo use patterns, and Weibo activism use were examined to find out who Weibo activists are. Finally, I use the binary logistic model to test if Weibo use will affect collective action involvement.
Based on the research questions, five research hypotheses were formed to guide the analysis process. H1: Weibo users are primarily driven by information motive to use Weibo. H2: Weibo users with higher SES-markers are more likely to be Weibo activists. H3: Weibo users who use it more frequently are more likely to be Weibo activists. H4: Weibo users who use it for informational purposes are more likely to be Weibo activists. H5: Weibo use can predict higher levels of collective action.
A total of 206 respondents completed the online questionnaire. Over 96 percent of participants lived in China, and others lived in the Czech Republic, England, Ireland, Australia, South Korea, and Dubai. More than 85 percent of respondents used their own computer to connect to the Internet; only about 9.5 percent of respondents used mobile devices. Nearly three quarters owned one computer; one quarter of respondents had two computers or more. Among them, 47.1 percent were male, 52.9 percent were female. The age of respondents ranged from 13 to 59 years. Nearly three quarters were 18 to 25 years old; about 22 percent of respondents were between 26 and 39 years old. Nearly half of respondents were students. About 21 percent of respondents worked as company employees. The average respondent was highly educated. More than half—67 percent—had obtained a bachelor’s degree, about 14 percent had obtained a master’s degree or higher. Nearly 40 percent of respondents had no income and 11.4 percent earned less than 2,000 yuan (€246) per month. Almost half were Youth League members (a kind of loose political affiliation similar to Boy Scouts in the U.S.A.), 35 percent were Communist Party members, and 19.9 percent had no party affiliation. Table 3 Survey Sample Demographics
Compared with the survey results from CNNIC, this study has several differences: 1) More female respondents than male respondents. The ratio between male and female respondents in this research was almost equal (47.1:52.9) but had a higher ratio of females compared to CNNIC (55.1:44.9). 2) Younger. While 80 percent of CNNIC’s total respondents were between 10 and 29 years old, 94.8 percent of respondents in my study were between 13 and 39 years old. 3) More highly educated. Only 11.7 percent of respondents from the CNNIC survey had a bachelor’s degree or above. However, more than 81 percent of my respondents had a bachelor’s degree or above. 4) More students. Nearly 30 percent of respondents from CNNIC were students; about 45 percent of my respondents were students. Due to the constraints of resources and time in undertaking a master’s level thesis project, my research relied on a limited sample (N=206) that doesn’t represent the total population of Internet users or Weibo users in China. However, it presents an analysis based on well-educated young people, most of whom are students, definitely a population of interest in the contemporary Chinese context of social network use. Moreover, the sample mirrors the “typical” Weibo user. According to CNNIC’s report on social network sites in China, more women than men are Weibo users. Weibo has a large student population. Social network site users had a higher education level than the average internet user, and Weibo users’ education levels are generally even higher than those of the users of other social network sites (CNNIC 2011).
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||