Skip to main content
An official website of the European UnionAn official EU website
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary

Social Media and Traditional Media in China: Political and Economic Effects

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - MEDIACHINA (Social Media and Traditional Media in China: Political and Economic Effects)

Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2024-06-30

New media are rapidly increasing the amount of information available to citizens and leaders in many autocracies, including China. The consequences for political accountability and regime stability are unclear. The new media can be used to spread information and organize opposition against authoritarian governments. However, autocrats may censor the information, or even use it for surveillance to solidify regime stability. China is leading this development, because of their adoption of state-of-the-art censoring and surveillance technologies. The development in China is of huge importance in its own right. However, social media effects in China today may also point to the direction of social-media effects in other non-democracies, that may soon have reached similar level of social-media penetration and technological sophistication as China has today.

This project will analyze how economic and political outcomes in China are affected by traditional and social media. A major impetus for this project is that an explosion of social media use in China has produced an information shock to society and its leaders, also supplying a data shock to researchers, which is magnified by the digitization of traditional media content and coupled with new methods for analyzing this type of data, originating from the big-data and machine-learning revolutions. As a result, a large set of previously unanswerable questions are now open for research.
In (Qin et al. 2017), we provide the first large-scale evidence on the effort and effectiveness of building an e-autocracy through social media. In particular, we examine the effectiveness of surveillance and the extent of propaganda in China’s social media. Our study is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo – the most prominent Chinese micro blogging platform– over the period 2009-2013.

A first result is that social media are very effective for surveillance of protests and strikes. We analyze 545 large collective action events that took place in mainland China between 2009 and 2012, and find that these events can be predicted by social media content, one day in advance, with excellent accuracy. We find millions of social media posts discussing collective-action events in our data. In contrast, newspapers are completely silent about these events. We also find that social media posts are also effective for corruption surveillance, although less informative than in the case of protests.

We finally document the extensive use of Sina Weibo for government propaganda. We identify government accounts from user names and using textual analysis of the posts in our data. According to this estimation, there are 600,000 government-affiliated accounts, including government organization, mass organization, and media users. In comparison, Sina Weibo substantially under-reported Government presence, to 50,000 accounts.

In Qin et al. (forthcoming), we study the effect of Chinese social media on the spread of protests and strikes. We identify approximately 4 million tweets mentioning protests or strikes during 2009-2013. These tweets appear in bursts around the time of actual events in the real world. To measure how information diffuses between cities on Weibo, we use retweets. Our results show that roughly 28% of the retweets occur within one hour of the initial message being posted, while 75% happen within one day. Weibo thus creates an unprecedented information network in China, instantly informing distant individuals of sensitive events.

Our empirical analysis produces four main findings. First, information diffusion on Weibo creates a strong ripple effect that swiftly spreads protests and strikes across cities.
Second, information on Weibo enlarges the scope of protests and strikes. Apparently, Chinese social media helps connect protesters with diverse goals, which facilitates the formation of substantial protest waves. Third, Weibo increases the likelihood of very large protest waves. Our simulation shows that without Weibo, the share of the affected population would have increased to 6% by 2013, whereas with Weibo, it would rise to nearly 15%, only slightly below the share in reality; see Figure. This considerable effect is driven by the strong information connections that social media creates between China's large and distant cities.

In Qin et al. (2018), we study the Chinese newspaper market. We examine the political bias (measured by the amount of government mouthpiece content compared to commercial content) of the Chinese newspapers from 1981 to 2011. Although all general interest newspapers in China are owned by the state, their direct ownership is at the hand of local governments that have strong incentive to produce newspapers that sell. We demonstrate that in such a market, it is impossible to achieve “prosperity without freedom”. In particular, we find that:
- lower-level governments under-supply propaganda relative to a level desired by the central government and proliferate less politically biased newspapers;
- competition between local governments handicaps the media control strategy of aligning the dual politico-economic goal; and
- the markets for political and commercial information cannot be entirely segmented. Hence there is a trade-off between political and economic goals.

The overall findings in our study show that even in a highly controlled environment such as China, market competition plays an important role in reducing audience exposure to propaganda because it shifts the politico-economic trade-off. Consequently, the increasing competition in the Chinese newspaper market has meant that propaganda through the marketplace has become less effective. In response, the Chinese government has altered its media control strategy in recent years. One strategy is to manufacture propaganda on social media platforms, which have more concentrated markets and are directly regulated by the central government.
Qin et al. (2018) goes beyond the state of the art by demonstrating that, even in a highly controlled environment such as China, media bias is affected by a trade-off between political and economic goals. As long as the system creates enough incentives for media owners to pursue economic benefits, the cost of manufacturing media bias will escalate with market competition. We create a novel measure of media bias in the Chinese context, based on coverage of government mouthpiece content (propaganda) relative to commercial content. We find that a reform that forced newspapers to exit (reduced competition) affected media bias. Moreover, lower-level governments produce less biased content and launch commercial newspapers earlier, eroding higher-level governments’ political goals.

Qin et al. (2017,forthcoming) goes beyond the state of the art in the following ways. It documents the spread of information about protests and strike on social media in China and showing that this impacted the spread of real-world events. It uses retweets to measure the network of social media information flows across cities and to estimate the effects of this rapidly expanding network. It shows that the social media network has a sizeable and significant effect on the spread of both protests and strikes.
figure6-color.jpg