Telematics and Informatics 34 (2017) 691–693

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Telematics and Informatics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tele

Social media in China: An unprecedented force for

an unprecedented social change?

Over the last several decades, one of the most important global phenomena is the daily explosive growth of the Internet.
Particularly, the swift development and ever wide and large-scale use of social media is used by billions of people – every
minute and hour, day and night.
Among all the countries in the world that have experienced this ‘‘information and communication revolution,” in the
past few years China stands out. China is number one in terms of speed, scope, and scale of growth and development of both
the Internet and social media, especially the geometrical type of daily increase in the quantity of users as well as the infor-
mation, messages and opinions disseminated. According to a most recent report issued by China’s government (The Internet
+ Future, 2016), by the end of 2015, the country has nearly 700 million Internet users, and 90% of them are social media
users. Both figures are far more than that of any other countries in the world.
The importance of the explosive growth of the Internet and the worldwide large-scale use of social media is that they
have been yielding an unprecedented impact on each and every society in the world, though to a different extent. These
impacts range from apparent social changes to hidden social changes and from revolutionary types of social transformation
to salient but silent types of social transformation (Wang and Hong, 2010).
This special issue about social media and social change in China examines the current situation and unique characteristics
of Chinese social media, the significance of social media in China’s social transformation, and particularly their influences on
political change. The goal of this special issue seeks to explore how social media is changing the Chinese country. The
Internet and social media in China have witnessed the most explosive growth in the world, yet they have been fettered
and controlled by the authorities most strictly. China is the world’s most populous nation with the most Internet and social
media users in the world, and it is the nation that is currently in an unprecedented historical transformation in some aspects,
but is also very limited in some other aspects. Simply put, China is a country of various serious contradictions and is going in
many conflicting directions. Nevertheless, despite all those contradictions and conflicting directions, social media has been
inevitably influencing and affecting the Chinese society.
This raises some interesting and important questions: How? To what degree? And, so what? Selected by the reviewers
from a large number of submitted manuscripts, the eleven articles making up this special issue of Telematics & Informatics
examines how social media is changing China politically, economically, culturally, societally, etc., as well as what the
theoretical and practical implications are.
The eleven articles fall into three categories. The themes of the first three articles are about public sphere, public
discourse and public engagement that are related to social media in China. The article, How Does Social Media Change
Chinese Political Culture authored by Pei-ren Shao and Yun Wang examines social media and the formation of an emerging
fragmentized public sphere in China. The authors of this article suggest that social media in China has promoted a broad
discussion about the contemporary public sphere in the country, and that analyzing the relationship between social media
and democratic politics in the unique Chinese societal context can help us rethink a metamorphosis of Habermas’s public
sphere model. This study supports the idea that the online public sphere would more often than not be transformed into
a fragmentized formation of the multiple tensions between participatory democracy, journalism transformation and
governmental authority. However, the authors argue that it may be difficult to map out the complexities in Chinese social
media under a single theoretical framework of civil society. The key issue is how a fragmentized structure of the online
public sphere can be integrated in the power game process of achieving consensus, and based on China’s specific Internet
policies and political environment, the public sphere theory and its implications need to be reconsidered.
Drawing on the theoretical view of cyberspace’s role in engagement in public discourse and the civic activities, the paper
titled Social Media, Public Discourse and Civic Engagement in China authored by Yinjiao Ye, Ping Xu and Mingxin Zhang
investigate how social media use is related to public discourse and civic engagement in mainland China. Moreover, this

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2016.12.006
0736-5853/Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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study examines how political interests, the general trust in people, and life satisfaction modify the interdependence of social
media use and public discourse and civic engagement. This research is based on data analyses of a survey of 1202 online
Chinese people to show that social media use is significantly related to both public discourse and civic engagement. The
authors suggest that political interest in China has a consistent and strong modification on the role of social media use in
public discourse and civic engagement and both general trust in people and life satisfaction moderate some of the relation-
ships examined but not all of them.
The article, The Internet Ecological Perception, Political Trust and Political Efficacy of Chinese Netizens authored by Nai-
peng Chao et al., studies social media in China based on the relationship between political efficacy and political democracy.
This research finds out that as social media has grown and evolved, it has greatly changed the Chinese public’s political
perceptions. It also finds out that Chinese Internet governance has shifted the mode of ‘‘vague governance” and ‘‘subsequent
punishment” from traditional political governance into the Internet ecology. The authors suggest that Chinese citizens’
speech criteria and means of political participation depend largely on their perceptions of the political ecology. Based on
a survey of 1558 people, this paper discusses the impact of Internet ecological perception and political trust on Chinese
netizens’ political efficacy. The results demonstrate that Chinese netizens’ perceptions of Internet ecology have significantly
positive effects on external political efficacy but no significant effects on internal political efficacy, yet the country’s netizens’
perceptions of Internet ecology positively affect their political trust, which in turn have significant, positive effects on both
internal and external political efficacies.
The theme of the second category’s four articles is about some of the most important public events in Chinese society in
recent years that are related to social media. The article, Social Media and Internet Public Events in China authored by Tiance
Dong, Chenxi Liang and Xu He explores how the newly born social media in China has participated in the historical process
of the country’s reform and social change. Based on some 60 in-depth analyses of the most important and typical social
media and Internet public event cases in China in recent years and from the perspectives of the social transformation theory
and theories of civic society and public sphere, this research finds out that social media in China is not only an important
information source and means for online civil mobilization, but also provides the netizens with an open and free space
for discussion of Internet public events. Social media’s impact on promoting social change is reflected in the supervision
of governmental, judiciary and other public power, maintenance of justice and protection of vulnerable groups, attracting
the government’s attention, urging governmental information publicity and investigation of the events, and promoting
social management innovation and institutional change; thus, social media in China is a helpful force in the construction
of the cyber public sphere and civil society. However, in the meantime, social media is also likely to be a breeding ground
for nationalist, ultra-leftist, ultra-rightist or any other types of extremist discourses.
The paper, Chinese Social Media Users’ Communication Behaviors during Public Emergency Events authored by Yungeng
Xie et al., examines social media and public emergency events in China as a newly emerged but increasingly important way
for crisis communication. Based on a national survey of people’s use of social media, people’s concerns regarding public
emergencies, and people’s need to monitor the government’s performance during public emergencies, this research demon-
strates that social media in China has become the most used communication venue of netizens during public emergency
events. More and more netizens tend to use social media to express their views and discuss events with others and share
information, which significantly influence their online information dissemination behaviors.
The article titled Popularity Prediction of Social Classified Hot Online Events in China authored by Tieying Liu, Yang Zhong
and Kai Chen offers an interdisciplinary study of computer science and social science to analyze behaviors surrounding three
types of online events in China: political events, social events, and non-public events. Based on the intrinsic characteristics of
the three event types, this paper creates an effective method to predict such events, which was based on the collected 14
million ‘‘hot” posts from Sina Weibo and developed a database of 4000 hot online events and nearly 8 million threads. This
study finds out that Chinese people are quite concerned with social affairs that relate most closely to their personal interests
and preferences, and people tend to cluster around political events more often than social events and non-public events.
The statistical findings of this research are justified by Habermas’ public sphere theory and the theory of vertical/horizontal
collectivism/individualism.
The last article in the second category examines the interplay of social media and a public event that received a wide
attention in China in the past recent years. The study titled Public Relations, Media Coverage, and Public Opinion in
Contemporary China: Testing Agenda Building Theory in a Social Mediated Crisis authored by Yang Cheng, Yihui Huang
and Chingman Chan investigates a socially mediated crisis affecting the Red Cross Society of China (RCSC), a crisis triggered
by the Guo Meimei incident. RCSC’s public relations efforts, media coverage, and public opinion on micro-blogs are
researched through the theoretical grounding of agenda building. This study extends the theorization of the effects of agenda
building by adding contextual factors about social media and political and cultural characteristics in China.
The theme of the four articles in the third category of this special issue is about the various applications of social media
and their socio-political implications. The first article in this category studies how one of China’s most important media
organizations, China Central Television (CCTV), has been using social media to survive in today’s much changed media
landscape and society. The article titled Functions and Roles of Social Media in Media Transformation in China: A Case Study
of ‘‘@CCTV NEWS” authored by Li Huang and Wei Lu attempts to find out how social media has contributed to the transfor-
mation process of traditional mainstream media in China. This study is based on many valuable first-hand data obtained
from the New Media Department of CCTV News Center, along with in-depth interviews and content analysis.
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The second article in this group is titled Social Media, Social Integration and Subjective Well-being among New Urban
Migrants in China authored by Lu Wei and Fangfang Gao. This paper examines the impact of social media on the current
generation of migrants in Chinese cities, named ‘‘new urban migrants,” to reflect one type of social change in today’s China.
This research finds out that these urban migrants are increasingly dependent on new media, particularly social media for
news, entertainment, and social interaction. Their social media use contributes to their social integration and subjective
well-being. Based on an online survey, this study identifies a positive relationship between new urban migrants’ social
media use and their subjective well-being, as well as the possible indirect relationship through social integration.
This research suggests that their social media use can contribute to their social integration, including their building of social
identity and social network as well as their real world social participation, and their level of social identity is significantly
associated with their subjective well-being.
The third article in this category studies the use of social media by ‘‘Chinese Dama” and the implications. The paper titled
Characteristics and Social Impact of the Use of Social Media by ‘‘Chinese Dama” authored by Qin Li suggests that the use of
social media by ‘‘Chinese Dama” can be perceived as an exemplar of media-driven social change. ‘‘Chinese Dama” is a buz-
zword coined in tandem with the development of social media in the country since 2013. This term represents a particular
group of middle-aged Chinese women who reflect a distinctive social phenomenon in the Chinese society. A growing
number of ‘‘Chinese Dama” are learning to use social media and have established thousands of social media communities,
exerting a significant influence on the social environment. This study focuses on the major changes undergone by the
‘‘Chinese Dama”, transitioning from being passively covered by media to becoming active users of social media. The author
suggests that social media has contributed to narrowing the digital divide in China and resulted in the Dama’s gaining more
discourse power and ushered in new diverse lifestyles, exerting both a far-reaching positive and negative influence on the
Chinese society.
The last article in this group examines how social media is used in Taiwan for political campaigns. The paper titled
User-orientated Perspective of Social Media Used by Campaigns authored by Chi Ying Chen and Shao-Liang Chang tries to
find out whether social media, such as Facebook, is a more favorable choice of new media for political purposes than a blog.
As a comparative study, this paper is based on the cross-sectional data collected in the 2009 and 2014 Taiwan local elections
to explore the differences among voter motivations, perceived credibility, and dependency between the use of political blogs
and social media. The authors suggest that in political contexts people in Taiwan prefer blogs to social media. This study
advances our understanding on the variations in people’s use of different social media platforms in political contexts.
I am pleased to note that the above-introduced eleven articles in this special issue represent a diverse range of research
topics, contents, and methodologies. Topic and content wise, they include both macro and micro studies and both theoretical
and practical studies; methodology wise, they range from surveys at different levels, content analysis, and in-depth inter-
views. They also include both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Together, these articles attempt to provide theoretical
and practical explorations of how social media has been affecting and changing the world’s most populous country – the
Chinese society – that is in a historical transition (Zheng, 2011).
The various articles in this special issue provide insight into the process and uniqueness of social media as a new societal
force and the ongoing political change in China. They also effectively and thoughtfully analyze and discuss the prospect of
social change in the Chinese society. I hope and believe that this special issue will therefore serve to encourage more further
and solid research on how new media, social media being the most prominent one at least for now, will fundamentally affect
and change today’s society. Again, without a doubt, the case in China is particularly interesting and important because it is
the world’s most populous country, it is in a historical transition, it is still under a communist political regime, but it has the
world’s largest and most active social media users. More studies on China’s social media and social change will certainly
contribute to our knowledge of this increasingly important area.

References

The Internet + Future, 2016. China Today 56 (5), 5.

Wang, S., Hong, J., 2010. Discourse behind forbidden realm: China’s internet surveillance and its implications on the blogosphere. Telematics Inform. 27 (1),
67–78.
Zheng, Y., 2011. As genuine as it sounds: gradual transition. China Elect. Govern. 30, 2011.

Guest Editor
Junhao Hong

Junhao Hong is a Professor at Department of Communication, State University of New York at Buffalo, and an Associate in
Research of Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. His research interests include international
communication and politics, media and society, and new media and its impact. He received a Ph.D. in Communication from
University of Texas at Austin in 1995.