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While there is a large literature on the determinants of generalized trust, few studies have explored the impact of internal migration and attempted to tackle potential endogeneity issues. Using nationally representative data from the latest five rounds of the China General Society Survey, this paper estimates the impact of internal migration on generalized trust by exploiting arguably exogenous, historical changes in the GDP growth target set by the government and the share of migrants at the county level. We find evidence of a significant negative impact of internal migration on generalized trust. We also investigate the moderating role of Internet use, and find that whilst Internet use significantly attenuates the negative impact on generalized trust of internal migration, this moderating effect is much stronger for urban-to-urban migrants than it is for rural-to-urban migrants. The results further indicate that internal migration in China has led to the deterioration of subjective well-being, changing perceptions of fairness, increased likelihood of downward social mobility, and deterioration in social relations, which we interpret as potential mechanisms behind our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse of ‘rights defence’ (weiquan), referring to the grassroots’ struggle for legal redress after their lawful interests are encroached upon, has gained increasing popularity in China in the last two decades. Given the ubiquity of the Internet nowadays, rights defence activities also take place online; in a small number of cases, they develop into a form of online activism. But what determines or contributes to the online visibility of some rights defence cases and the invisibility of others? In this paper, we investigate this by examining three highly visible workers’ rights defence campaigns in comparison with three similar cases that received almost no attention. Analysing the variousactorsinvolved, we argue that online rights defence tends to become visible and develop into online activism when one key actor, thestate,which ought to be an impartial source of justice, is perceived to be collusive or to be playing an active role in the encroachment of people's rights and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the differential impact of Chinese citizens’ use of traditional media and Internet sources on their political views about the country’s territorial dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Chinese citizens can utilize a variety of conduits of information that allow varying degrees of government control over the way foreign affairs and other controversies are presented. Those who rely on mainstream, state-controlled television, radio, and printed media for information on the disputes, and those who turn to less-prescriptive sources on the Internet, can be expected to have distinctive political attitudes. We use original 2013 Chinese survey data to explore patterns of media consumption and citizens’ attention levels towards the Sino-Japanese island dispute, and views regarding the government’s performance in handling the issue and appropriate policy responses. Those who derive their information from traditional media tend to view the government’s performance more positively, and are more likely both to favour compromise and to oppose the use of military force. By comparison, information from Internet sources, which is more user selfselective, sustains a wider range of attitudes about the Sino-Japanese island dispute and the appropriate policies for dealing with it, including both militaristic and moderate stances. All told, we find that Chinese citizens bring distinctive predispositions to their consumption of media information on this issue, but our results also clearly reflect an ongoing, pervasive influence for China’s state-run traditional media. These findings have important implications for considering the resilience of authoritarian systems in the Internet era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China has a long history of distance education with one of the largest and longest standing television distance delivery systems in the world. However, with the advent of online learning environments, China must face a brave new world of innovation. This paper examines the political rhethoric surrounding the allocation of funds and energies to online learning and considers critical components of that rhetoric including democracy, market driven education, open access, as well as issues of power, customization, and globalization which affect the ways in which China adopts new online learning technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(How) are Chinese actors contributing to increased state influence in Internet standard-making? In its open and private-based dimension, the Internet is possibly the twenty-first century's epitome of the liberal international order in its global spatial dimension. Therefore, many see deep normative challenges deriving from the rise of powerful, non-liberal actors such as China. In particular, China and Chinese stakeholders are often portrayed as supporters and promoters of a multilateral Internet governance model based on digital sovereignty aimed at completely replacing the existing multistakeholder, private-based model. Academic views on this topic have become less dichotomous throughout the years, especially as China's position on it has become more nuanced. However, this academic and policy debate is still open. This article analyses Chinese stakeholder actions in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the key venue for Internet standard-making. Through network analysis, this article maps the engagement of Chinese stakeholders in selected working groups of the IETF over time. Through expert interviews, this article interprets the drivers, evolution, and impact of such engagement. This research yields two main findings: first, it shows that the Chinese government does not have full control of its domestic private actors, among which there is both collaboration and conflict. Second, it concludes that Chinese stakeholders have increasingly accepted the existing functioning of IETF standard-making as they grew influential within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the areas that the advent of the Internet has changed most profoundly is the relationship that human beings have with their past. Sources that would once have been barely accessible after a difficult and taxing search are now available to one and all, and can be compared to more traditional texts. The article sets out to show how knowledge of Mao's China and the Cultural Revolution in particular will benefit significantly from the immense pool of recordings and video clips available on the Internet. With the resources afforded by the Web, a brand–new way of linking up words and images, text and visual sources, has become possible, providing the study of history and memory with unexplored tracts of promising terrain. But the importance of this emerging material is not just to do with historical knowledge and methodology. Its main contribution is political: the persecutors and the victims of those years have spoken out, they have deposited their memories online, exercising a faculty that the Cultural Revolution and post–Maoist political institutions had denied them for decades. Through the bottom–up perspective that the Internet provides, the historical protagonists have been able to bear witness in potential perpetuity without needing the researcher's mediation. By speaking directly to the public, the witnesses cease to be merely pieces of the past. They are not just victims or perpetrators who condemn past deeds, but, as the actors who made and endured history, they can turn themselves from passive historical figures into active political agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of who controls meta-information online has become a hot-button issue with profound political implications. The present article explores how state-led online censorship in the People's Republic of China can create information bubbles, and how it is possible to analyze them. The article is based on a systematic comparison between 3,000 Google.com and Baidu.com image search results on a series of selected, potentially sensitive, keywords. This allows us to discern how censorship and information bubbles are connected, and how it is possible to detect and analyze them. To facilitate this, we offer a typology for conceptualizing the different dimensions of internet censorship. Our analysis points to the importance of censorship on meta-information and suggests that generally censored internet contents can also spill over to a liberal context through the Sinophone internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media have both enabled and reinforced a shift towards the personalization of politics and collective action that is also occurring in China. In addition to street actions, the country is seeing a continuously growing number of so-called online mass incidents. While they have been attracting growing scholarly attention, most analyses have been based on anecdotal evidence and have treated netizens as a uniform group without evaluating the event's internal discursive dynamics. In order to assess such micro-blogging incidents' actual potential for political change, we investigate the case of the largest ‘online mass incident’ in China since the advent of Chinese micro-blogging services in 2009, prompted by the crash of two high-speed trains near the city of Wenzhou in July 2011. Drawing on the systematic content analysis of more than 4600 micro-blog posts published in the aftermath of the accident, we analyse the events' discursive dynamics, focusing on the composition, transformation, and radicalization of claims and targets. Our analysis demonstrates that the level of radicalism of the Wenzhou online mass incident is rather moderate and that no radicalization took place before the debate levelled down. While the incident significantly enhanced the tendency in Chinese online activism towards the broadening of the critical debate on national affairs, expectations about a democratizing impact of online debates might be premature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article pursues a context-rich understanding of how digital media offer unique opportunities for citizens residing in mainland China to participate in civic engagement and organize their civic values. While the Chinese state authority keeps a heavy hand in any form of media, old or new, for use of overt political expressions, I provide empirical demonstration of the link between entertainment media experiences and the exchange on more serious civic topics. In doing so, I argue for a more expanded notion of civic engagement for political environments such as China and develop an empirical scheme that incorporates ordinary citizens' interactions with more leisure-oriented media texts. Such theoretical and empirical moves, as I point out, can contribute to a more thoughtful discussion of the Internet and civic engagement in China. Furthermore, this article pays particular attention to how the Internet provides a valuable channel for community formation among ordinary Chinese citizens outside the mainstream media, which are mostly occupied by state elites. My examination suggests that the Internet helps online discussants reach further depth in their extension from entertainment discussion to constructing serious discourses on important social issues, more so than the mainstream newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]