ABSTRACT
Online fora and social media in China are generally seen as new input channels that allow the articulation of public opinion and enable people’s indirect political participation. The past few years have witnessed an unforeseen rise of social media in China, followed by a sharp decline in open online deliberation since 2012/2013: Between 2009, when the Chinese Internet company https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-u.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315180243/c5c9deaa-10d1-47d8-b9c2-c28f2e3f1a89/content/www.Sina.com">Sina.com launched its new microblogging service, and 2012 the number of Chinese microblogs increased exponentially. In 2012, the total number of officially registered microblog users in China was over 300 million netizens. Microblogs were seen in these years as being new tools of low-cost, multi-directional information exchange, as central platforms for the emerging civil society and, at the same time, as transmission belts of information in state–society interactions. Due to increased censorship and control, however, starting in 2013, after the ascent of a new leadership generation headed by Xi Jinping, there has been an unanticipated decline in official microblog user numbers, as people have commenced to turn instead to alternative, “closed” communication tools such as Tencent’s smartphone app WeChat. 2 The tools of communication might vary, the outcome, however, remains the same: the nature of political debate has changed as a consequence of social media and multi-user messenger apps directly challenging the Party-state’s control over information flows.
