Revisiting media events in Web 2.0 China: a critique of Chinese online activism

Abstract

This thesis investigates how China’s online activism intervenes in and transforms China’s conventional media events. It takes the Spring Festival Gala, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the Wenzhou high-speed train collision as critical contexts to examine the interventional role of online activism in different types of media events in China. This thesis argues that, as an alternative medium of communication, the Internet has empowered some people to transform conventional media events into something more open, contentious, participatory and deliberative. The Internet hence constitutes an important interventional force which transforms the political life of the Chinese nation.

Chapter One provides a conceptual discussion of media event theories and their critiques. Chapter Two takes a critical review of the Internet as an alternative media and of online activism as political communication. Chapter Three examines culture jamming as a mode of online activism in the context of a celebratory media event, the Spring Festival Gala. Lao Meng’s Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala becomes a case study to examine how the shanzhai gala intervenes in CCTV’s power-money dominated Spring Festival celebration. Chapter Four focuses on citizen journalism, as alternative crisis communication, in a disastrous media event—the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It examines three forms of citizen journalism in the aftermath of the earthquake: eyewitness reporting, online discussion and networking, and independent investigation. Chapter Five examines online weiguan as networked collective action in scandalous media events in China, as exemplified in the Wenzhou high-speed train crash. It discusses the concept, platform and practice of the online weiguan phenomenon. In the concluding chapter, this thesis proposes the analytical concept “Internet interventionism” as a way to summarise key arguments of the thesis. It argues that online activism provides opportunities to transform China’s conventional media events into contested platforms and intervene in such platforms with new agency, agendas and voices. The Internet thus becomes a key site for such interventionism to take place. This has significant implications for how we re-conceptualise “media events” and envisage the future of the Chinese nation.