Towards Democratisation?: Understanding university students’ Internet use in mainland China
Online news reading, information search, and lecture
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- 4.3.2 Online information search
- 4.3.3 Online lecture
4.3 Online news reading, information search, and lecture4.3.1 Online news readingOnline news has always ranked within the top four most popular Internet services in China (CNNIC, 1997-2013). Moreover, ‘news is still the most frequently searched content’, and ‘news search ranks the first on both computers and mobile phones’ (CNNIC, 2013, p.61). However, Chinese Internet users spend less time on online news than on other online activities such as shopping and networking (e.g. Shen & Liang, 2014, p.68). Social and political news always ranks the last both in terms of visit frequency and duration regardless of cross-year differences compared with soft news including entertainment, sports, etc. and finance and economy news (Shen & Liang, 2014). Online news is an important battlefield for the State’s ideological propaganda. In 2000, The State Council Information Office established an Internet Propaganda Administrative Bureau, responsible for ‘guiding and coordinating’ web news content. Despite heavy censorship and brief news consumption, political and social implications of online news still attract media scholars’ attentions (e.g. Shen & Liang, 2014). A positive relationship between Internet news use, broadly termed as information use of the Internet, and political efficacy, political knowledge, and political participation has been found (Shen & Liang, 2014). Online news is believed to experience less strict control than traditional news (Lee, 1990; Zhao, 1998). The researcher classifies online news service providers in China into four groups: Chinese government news portals referring to domestic news sites by Chinese government official media and traditional media, domestic commercial portals, Chinese foreign portals referring to the Chinese news websites provided in foreign countries, and English foreign portals which refer to the English news websites provided in foreign countries. Foreign portals in other languages are not considered in this research since they are too many of them, they are too diverse and they are not readable or understandable to the overwhelming majority of Chinese people. Moreover, the participants of the search did not mention any foreign portals in any language other than English. Driven by both the political concerns and economic interests, Chinese government news portals have launched their online versions (Chan, et al. 2006). Like their commercial counterparts at home and abroad, their news websites are huge and contain various features. However, their news websites were found to be ‘in a primitive stage of development’ and there was not any significant difference between online newspapers and their print versions (Shen & Liang, 2014, p.62). Domestic commercial portals began to catch the attention of the public in the late 1990s and now there are numerous commercial portals. Among them, Sina, Sohu, Netease, and Tencent are the four most popular comprehensive commercial portals. Despite their rapid development and great popularity among Chinese Internet users, some scholars (e.g. Couldry, 2003; Couldry & Curran, 2003) argued that it was difficult to for commercial portals to develop truly alternative journalism in cyberspace in China due to political control. In addition to self-censorship, commercial portals in China are prohibited from direct news-gathering (Xu, 2003). They have no ‘interview rights’ and can only serve as ‘news aggregators’ instead of news agencies (Shen & Liang, 2014). Such a regulation disadvantages commercial portals in their competition with official news websites. As a result, it was argued that official news websites enjoyed ‘advantages in the amount of news, speed of updating news, self-reported news and perceived status’ (Chan, et al., 2006, p.930). However, there are also scholars who believe that ‘fierce competition in the private sector has become a major force pushing the boundary of online news services in China’ (Shen & Liang, 2014, p.63). In order to capture a larger audience share, commercial portals take their advantage of user generated content and information synthesising capacity to provided audiences with different related stories or information and different perspectives and understandings. Moreover, they make most use of ‘grey areas’, for example small-scale social incidents. Thanks to their strategies to attract more audience, opinions and information on commercial portals are diverse compared with that of traditional media and official news websites. As a result, the most popular news portals are all commercial portals (Shen & Liang, 2014). In addition, it is also believed that the increasing popularity of microblogging and the interconnectivity of news portals and microblogs has increased audience’s chances of running into news ‘incidentally’. Most English news websites are available online including BBC, Mail Online, VOA, CNN, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and so on. They are blocked only at sensitive times or when they have sensitive news reports. There are also Chinese news websites provided by foreign countries available online, for example, stock.zaobao.com based in Singapore. However, there is little, if any, literature studying the use patterns or the influence of those news websites. One important purpose of participants’ Internet use is to obtain information including news, information for study and research, and other needed information. News reading was common among the participants, but they differed greatly in terms of message, habit and channels. Table 13. News reading: channel and frequency
Twelve participants are grouped into two categories in terms of frequency: frequent online news readers including all participants except P07, an occasional online news reader. In terms of the number of news sources, they are grouped into three categories: single-source readers; dual-source readers, and multi-source readers. All participants except P07 reported using more than one channel for news and half of the participants reported using more than two channels. The channels are grouped into four categories: Chinese commercial news portals including QQ news, PPS news, Sina, Sohu, Baidu news, Taobao news, Ifeng news or Phoenix, Put English Listening Club; Chinese government news portals including China Daily, Chongqing Mobile Newspaper, People news, Xunkoo, South Weekly, New weekly, New women; foreign news portals including BBC, VOA, CNN, ABC, NBA Chinese website, and other foreign websites accessed by climbing over the Great Wall; and social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo, Qzone, and one forums. Chinese commercial new portals are the most frequent used and also used by all participants. Next is social networking sites and online forums. Chinese government news portals rank third. South Weekly, a news portal of a traditional medium affiliated to the government, however, has been described by The New York Times as “China's most influential liberal newspaper” (Rosenthal, 2002) as a result of commercialisation and deregulation (Donald et al., 2002). Foreign news portals are last and were used only by English majors and P09 who regularly climbed over the Great Wall. The findings support the assumption that studying English as a major is an important factor that affects participants’ choice of English news websites as sources. Three English majors all utilised English websites or English mobile newspapers as their sources of news while none of the other participants claimed they did. However, those three also differed from each other. P06 utilised the English websites for information. P05 and P12 employed the English websites first for English learning and gained some information while learning English. The author argues that language becomes a barrier to exploring and enjoying the wealth of knowledge and information while the whole world is theoretically connected together by the Internet and everybody on the Internet can access information across borders. Obviously, language is an obstacle that is not easy to tackle, but there is a barrier that is not so obvious. It is the recognition that the world is connected and the motivation to get connected to the world. We are affected by things geographically, culturally, and languagely remote from us (Zuckerman, 2014). Therefore, we need to get connected to the world instead of just the world around us. We need to be motivated enough to tackle the language barrier and the discomfort and conflict that diversity brings (Zuckerman, 2014) to embrace the diversity that inspires us. In China, every student is required to learn English from secondary school. English education actually starts from kindergarten or primary school in cities. The vast majority of universities in China require their undergraduates to pass the College English Test Level 4 and postgraduates CET 6 to be qualified for their degrees. Therefore, reading English news or materials is difficult for non-English majors in China but not insurmountable. What stops them from stepping into the English world is a lack of motivation to know and be connected to the world. As to the question of whether or not the Internet provides equal opportunities to various individuals (see Chapter 2, 2.2.2), the findings tend to support a negative answer. With rich resources online, the Internet tends to advantage those whose abilities, skills, or beliefs serve them better in realising the theoretical potential of the Internet. Among those abilities, skills and beliefs, skill in English is one. An awareness of the potential of the Internet and the connectivity of an individual’s life to the world and thus a willingness to explore diversity and conflicting ideas is another.
The Xiaoyueyue Accident: Wang Yue (Chinese: 王悦; pinyin: Wáng Yuè) was a two-year-old Chinese girl who was run over by two vehicles on the afternoon of 13 October 2011 in a narrow road in Foshan, Guangdong. As she lay bleeding on the road for more than seven minutes, at least 18 passers-by skirted around her body, ignoring her. She was eventually helped by a female rubbish scavenger and sent to a hospital for treatment, but succumbed to her injuries and died eight days later. The closed-circuit television recording of the incident was uploaded onto the Internet and quickly stirred widespread reaction in China and overseas. The accident was widely covered by English media such as the BBC (Yip, 2011), The Guardian (AP foreign, 2011), The Wall Street Journal (WSJ, 2011), and The Telegraph (Moore, 2011a; 2011b). The third index is whether or not the participants purposefully chose different news sources to meet their different needs. Those who always chose news sources purposefully are categorised into purposeful online news readers; those who sometimes chose news sources to meet their special needs are called semi-purposeful online news readers; and those who read from news resources that came to them while using other Internet service and just follow the path the websites set without purposeful searching are called random online news readers.
The research adopted the three categories Shen and Liang (2014) employed in their study. They are soft news, social and political news, and finance and economy news. Each category encompasses sub-categories. Soft news is composed of entertainment, sports, health, and information technology; social and political news consists of society, military, and politics; finance and economy news includes finance and economy, business, and real estate. Every participant read social and political news online except for P07 who did not talk much about her online news reading and P11 reported she read what was new or big every day. Five out of six participants of in-depth interviews reported consumption of soft news of one kind or another. In contrast, not a single participant in the focus group reported consumption of soft news. This is mainly because the focus group concentrated on the question of how Internet use affected them as individuals and society instead the details of participants’ Internet use. At the same time, social desirability also played a part. Finance and economy news has not been found common among the participants. There were only two participants, P04 who was an undergraduate in finance and P05 who was about to graduate and found a job in the area of foreign trade, having reported reading finance and economy news. What has been found in this study is different from what Shen and Liang (2014) found through analysing web browsing data of 600 panel members from Shanghai. They found that soft news ranked first in terms of the visit frequency while finance and economy news ranked first in terms of the duration of visit. According to their findings, social and political news ranked last in terms of both frequency and duration of visit. The demographic features of the two different studied groups, the university students and the big city Internet users, social desirability and different ways of data collecting might explain part of the variance. It is important to note a special finding from the focus group. All other participants including P07, the one-time-climber, admitted that they had never heard about the Tunisian revolution or Iran’s Green Revolution, when P09, who climbed over the Great Wall regularly, raised the issue. P10 mentioned that he learned about problems and situations in the Middle East and Western countries, but he did not admit that he knew about the Tunisian revolution or Iran’s Green Revolution. P06, the other regular climber, also mentioned that he learned about the democratic transition in the Middle Eastern countries (see also Table 16). Information about the Tunisian revolution, Iran’s Green Revolution, and the Arab Spring, is banned in China (Ng, 2013). However, it is plausible to assume that there are channels other than climbing over the Great Wall on the Internet to learn about the information, because P09 reported that he had not learned about it from the Internet but from other channels. The findings suggest that censorship does affect Internet users’ knowledge of political issues. The findings also suggest that those who climb over the Great Wall are more likely to access other sources of politically sensitive content other than that on the Internet than those who do not climb over. However, there is no clear causal relationship between climbing over the Great Wall and having access to other sources of politically sensitive content. Table 16. Online news reading: how do I understand news?
P01, P02, P03 and P04 had a general trust in online news while P01, P02, and P03 reported only a little doubt about online news. P05’s accounts about her learning and understanding about the Wang Lijun Incident demonstrated that she felt it inappropriate to talk about such a sensitive topic. However, she tried to imply something by saying “I have no clue, no clue”. It also indicated that she did not feel obliged to be informed of such a big political scandal. She placed her immediate need, to finish a school assignment, prior to learning about the political news. Table 17. Online news reading: why do I read news?
Utility, surveillance, and diversion are suggested as three types of needs mostly related to news consumption (Shen & Liang, 2013). Utility is also called social utility. It includes reading news for the purposes of ‘having something to talk about with others’, ‘getting facts that support my ideas for when I am in a discussion with others’, ‘meeting the expectation from my parents, friends, or colleagues, and helping the development of my career or education. It is worth explaining here why ‘to know the political direction and tendency of the state and choose the direction that the state needs most’ is classified into ‘social utility’. The researcher argues that P02’s statement does not express any patriotic sentiment. Instead, P02 expressed the view that he took news reading as a way to know the current social situation in order to find a job after graduation. The meaning of the sentence must be interpreted in the context (see Table 17, P02). For P02 the purpose ‘to know the political direction and tendency of the state and choose the direction that the state needs most’ is to help the development of his career, not to serve the state. Surveillance motivation includes reading news for the purposes of ‘keeping up with the most important things that happen in the world’, ‘staying informed about a range of topics, and ‘keeping up with what happens in my environment’ (Van Cauwenberge, D’Haenens, & Beentyes, 2010, p.342). Shen and Liang (2013) claimed that ‘surveillance motivation was the prime driving force for news information attention’ (p.64). Diversion encompasses three sub-categories: entertainment, pastime and escape. Entertainment motivation includes the needs or purposes of entertainment, relaxation and excitement. Pastime includes reading news to pass the time, or to read news ‘when I don’t have anything better to do’, or ‘when there is no one else to talk with or be with’. Escape includes reading news for the purposes of ‘escaping the daily problems’ or ‘forget work or study’. Social utility is the major motivation for the participants’ news consumption and surveillance ranks second. There was not any participant who reported diversion motivation for online news consumption. 4.3.2 Online information searchSearch engines have been playing an increasingly important role as the volume of online content grows explosively. The proportion using search engines had increased dramatically since 2003 (Guo, et al., 2007). Search engines have increased the capacity of Internet users to know and communicate about social and public issues. Social news ranked third with 61.2% in the list of information searched on a search engine (Guo, et al., 2007). Ranked first is work or study with 73.6% and second entertainment or relaxation 69.2%. Search engines are among the Internet services frequently concerned when discussing Internet censorship in China. Search engine companies store large quantities of data that can track individuals’ online activities. Such a capacity can be utilised by the government against its dissidents. In 2004, Shi Tao, a journalist who worked in the central city of Changsha, was arrested and sentenced to prison for ten years by the Chinese authorities and Yahoo! supplied the data that contributed to his conviction (Jenny, 2006). Moreover, popular search engines in China, like other popular Internet services, are responsible for censoring their search results as the state demands (Naduvath, 2009; MacKinnon, 2009). Despite being censored, ‘an overwhelming majority of Internet users are satisfied with search engines’ in China (Guo, et al, 2007, p.49). According to Xiao (2011), search engines like Baidu are among those Internet services that have given Internet users unprecedented capacity for communication (p.48). The two most popular search engines in China are now Baidu and Google0 together with 88.5% market share (Su, 2014). Back in 2003, the Chinese search engine market was more evenly divided across four search engines: Google 24.0%, Sohu 23.3%, Sina 15.5% and Yahoo 13.7%. At that time, Baidu accounted for only 2.5% of the market share. However, the share of Baidu has dramatically increased within two years and reached 46.0% in 2005. The popularity of Baidu in China has continued to grow and finally it dominates the Chinese search engine market with about 80% of market share (Greenberg, Jie & Hardy, 2009; Amanda, 2013). It also becomes the world’s leading Chinese language search engine and ranks as the world’s fifth most popular web site (Alexa.com, 2014). The essence of Baidu’s business model is to ‘comingle paid search results with natural ones’ (Whatley, 2013, p. 230). Its marketing tactics involving ‘paid search ranking, site blocking, and paid removal of negative results’ are considered aggressive and sometimes even questionable (Whatley, 2013, p.230). Baidu was regarded as ‘the most vigorously self-censored Chinese search engine’ (Xiao, 2011, p.53; Deans & Miles, 2011). Censorship is believed to contribute to its dominance in the Chinese search engine market. Google used to control the highest proportion of the Chinese search engine market. It did not only lose its market share in China, but has also come under criticism because of its compliance with the Chinese Government’s tough censorship laws in the USA (Jenny, 2006). After long negotiation with the Chinese authority, Google finally decided to close its China-based Internet search service and direct Chinese users to a Hong Kong-based uncensored version of its search engine due to the non-negotiability of self-censorship and Chinese hackers intrusions in 2010 (Helft & Barboza, 2010). Table 18. Online information search: channel and message
There are three types of channels for information search: search engines, academic resources, and specialised forums. The channels are mainly utilised for news and study, and sometimes for daily problems and questions. The most frequently used channel is search engines, among which Baidu is the most popular and Google ranked the second. Search engines were used most frequently for news searching and sometimes for course study. What they searched for differed greatly from one to another to serve their own purposes and interests. Influence of their course and grade on the content they searched is evident. Table 19. Online information search: search habit
Search with key words is the most frequent way. Only P06 reported that he sometimes used key words in English when he knew the English words. The other way which is much less common is to surf the websites or to check regularly specialised websites and forums. Information search with key words is found to be puzzle-and-problem-solving oriented. Information search usually occurred when the participants learned about something they did not know from someone or a source without detail, or a problem emerged. Their search was oriented to gain further information to solve the puzzle or the problem. P01 also reported that he sometimes searched information to check if a message shared by others is true. The Internet changes the way information is consumed. Compared with the traditional media, the Internet is user-oriented. When using a traditional media, a user follows the path that the medium sets, and it is difficult to gather together the information on a certain topic that interests a user. On the Internet, a user can theoretically reach all the information online through applications such as search engines, super links, social networking applications, news websites, and so on, at a time when he or she needs it. Therefore, the participants seemed to believe that instead of being passive receivers, they have positively and purposely sought the information they needed and made their own judgements. P08 reported that she would extensively search for information about the incident that interested her and got to understand it. However, the information-search ability that the Internet enables and tools that the Internet provides to make the world’s information universally accessible are blamed for being only helpful in discovering ‘what we want to know’, but not powerful in helping us discover ‘what we might need to know’ (Zuckerman, 2014, p.11). The way information consumption and communication is ‘pre-selected and mediated by the individual user’, what Sunstein (2001, cited in Benny, 2014) calls the ‘Daily Me’, is also believed to reinforce and polarise political ideologies and communities by helping the individual users find what they want (Benny, 2014; Zuckerman, 2014). Moreover, it would be dangerous to assume that the search ability of the Internet serves only citizen users. In fact, there is abundance of evidence that it advantages the party-state much more than its citizens (Morozov, 2011). Through controlling what is displayed, what is not displayed, or where to display certain content in the list of search results, the party-state manipulates what conclusions the recipients will reach, while the Internet users strongly believe that it is they who draw the conclusions from their own judgement (see Tables 73, 75, 82, 84, & 86). The party-state does their best to manipulate the evidence and thus there is no need to mind ‘the public reaching their own conclusions independently’ (Morozov, 2011, p.131). In such a way, propaganda is made more concealed and more effective. P01’s accounts about how his searching of politically sensitive content failed (see Table 19, P01) demonstrate one way censorship works to stifle individual’s curiosity. P01, P05 and P11 reported that they usually did not care about or pay attention to the sources of the searched results, but focused on whether the message itself met their interest or their needs. P01 and P05’s accounts indicate that they possessed curiosity about politically sensitive content. Their search for politically sensitive content was not affected by censorship as most critics worry, but by the fact that their curiosity was not strong enough for them to circumvent the Great Wall. 4.3.3 Online lectureTable 20. Online lecture
P05 reported one-time use of Netease open lecture online. It indicates that lectures of foreign countries, especially top universities in English-speaking countries, might influence values like happiness and ways of teaching and learning of Chinese people through the Internet. NetEase Open Lecture is a public welfare programme launched in November 2010 by Netease, a Chinese Internet company that operates 163.com, a popular web portal ranked 27 by Alexa as of April 2014 (Alexa, 2014). The programme provides free translated lectures from world famous universities and other resources including TED, Khan Academy, and the like. It collects and offers more than 13,000 open lectures online. Download 3.43 Mb. Share with your friends:
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