The Political Economy of Social Media in China

This paper studies the role of Chinese social media in three areas: collective action, monitoring of politicians, and the gauging of public opinion. Our study is based on a data set of 13.2 billion blog posts from Sina Weibo —the most prominent Chinese microblogging platform —over the period of 2009-2013. In contrast to the previous studies that conclude that collective action events are censored in Chinese social media, we find millions of posts discussing protests, strikes, and demonstration. Moreover, we find that microblog posts 1) are highly informative in predicting collective action events and corruption charges; and 2) have a significant and positive effect on the incidence of strikes and protests, although their effects on the incidence of large-scale massive conflicts and government-sanctioned demonstrations (e.g., anti-Japan) are muted. Finally, we find that the number of government microblog accounts, based on machine learning estimation, is larger in areas with a higher level of internet censoring and where newspapers have a stronger pro-government bias. Overall, our findings suggest that the Chinese government regulate social media to balance threats against regime stability against the benefits of bottom-up information. ∗Bei Qin: University of Hong Kong, beiqin@hku.hk; David Stromberg: University of Stockholm, david.stromberg@iies.su.se; Yanhui Wu: University of Southern California, yanhuiwu@marshall.usc.edu.

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