From Passiveness to Activeness: the Transformation of China's Regulatory Measures on Weibo

摘要

Chinese internet censorship has attracted wide attention from all over the world. With the increasing importance of Weibo in the daily life of the Chinese people, it is necessary to explore how the Communist Party of China specifically responds to and regulates Weibo among other social media. This paper focuses on government Weibo in order to capture the Chinese government's evolving aims, strategies and tactics in regulating Weibo. In addition to the "hard" regulatory measures of censorship, more significantly, this paper highlights the new channels for active involvement of government in the regulation of Weibo, including the establishment of government Weibo accounts and the interaction with the public by this account. This proactive measure for using Weibo has a number of advantages, such as improving the government's transparency and strengthening its legitimacy.