This summer has seen push back from the laobai xing 老百姓  – the ordinary people and Chinese journalists as well.  It has indeed been a summer of discontent that the Party/State have found it difficult to contain.

I suppose it is not a surprise that we are witness in the last few days to a visit to Sina by Liu Qi, secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and a member of the Politiburo (See Josh Chin and Loretta Chao, “Beijing Communist Party Chief Issues Veiled Warning to Chinese Web Portal”, The Wall Street Journal (August 24, 2011).  Sina runs one of the most popular weibo (microblogs or “we-media”  in China). Sina in fact has a phenomenal 200 million registered accounts that represent a 40 percent increase over the last three months.

What is a weibo (微 薄)?  Well weibo in China are the cutting edge of social media. Weibo appear to be a combination of twitter  and facebook in China.  As my research assistant at the Munk School of Global Affairs, Qiqi Xie, found:

Since Weibo can sometimes outrun government censors for short periods of time, Chinese citizens can use it to publish more controversial material and to push personal causes … Today, microblogs are increasingly favored over traditional media – which is heavily regulated by the Chinese government in terms of mobilization, amount of information and speed.  According to Meng Lingjun, a lecturer at the Central China Normal University, microblogs “have not only served as a significant tool for information dissemination, but we have also affected the formation and changing of public opinion … in emergency situations.”

Weibo activity was particularly notable at the time of the collision of two high-speed trains near the city of Wernzhou.  As pointed out by Chin and Chao, “Afterwords, millions of users flooded onto the site to exchange information and express frustration with the government’s response.”

While weibo kept the Railway officials from trying to cover up and hide the serious incident, there is continuing worry that this form of citizen opinion will be stifled.  This concern was only heightened by a series by a series of editorials in the state papers discussing the need for more robust effort to refute “rumors” online with particular attention paid to the microblogging.  So the visit by the Party Secretary only raises further the concern over a crackdown on weibo.

The train disaster also gave the traditional news media several weeks of criticism that had seldom been in evidence.  Zhang Zhi’an a journalism professor at Sun Yet-sen University in the southern city of Guangzhou, “Estimates that China now has a pool of up to 500 investigative reporters, and many journalism students want to follow in their footsteps.” (see Kathrin Hille, “Chinese Media Dare to Flex their Muscles”  FT.com (August 11, 2011).

Have we reached a watershed in China for wider public opinion – or are we at the edge of a new crackdown?  More on this soon.