Chapter 7: Citizen Journalism in China: The Case of the Wenchuan Earthquake

In Chapter 7, Nip assesses citizen journalism’s response to the Wenchuan earthquake in southwestern China in May 2008. She reveals how citizen journalists were the first to report the earthquake both to a Chinese and international audience, providing eyewitness reports and expressions of personal emotion – grief, anger, and sympathy. Moreover, in a rare moment of openness under the Communist government, citizen journalists were also able to investigate and critique officials’ handling of the disaster. Such reporting did not completely evade
state censorship, however, and Nip further discusses new government tactics such as infiltration of citizen-generated content – that is, paying for people to post content supporting the government as a strategy to subvert opposition and manage this new form of public discourse.

Author: Joyce Nip

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