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Crisis communication is essential to the political stability and legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but how crises are managed in China is little understood. This paper aims to pursue this question through a case study of China's smog crisis since 2013 – a regular recurring crisis that confronts the population and the Chinese government. The paper explores what innovative media strategies and practices have been deployed by the Chinese government to effectively guide public opinion and maintain social and political stability during smog crises. We first examine the smog coverage in People's Daily to critique the propaganda and persuasion techniques in its modern crisis reporting. We then look at WeChat-based citizen journalism as alternative crisis communication to identify its popular themes and the CCP's censorship tactics to manage it. We argue that the CCP's propaganda during times of crisis has been mainly achieved through the revamping of official journalism on its state media and the differential censorship of citizen discourse on social media. The double-pronged approach ensures the public opinion is properly guided in crises and possible disruption to the regime's stability is minimized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how WeChat, contemporary China's most popular mobile phone application, is affecting digitally enabled citizen journalism. Based on focus-group research with WeChat users, and building on the insights of previous studies of digitally enabled citizen journalism within and outside of China, we find that WeChat's integration of multiple communicative networks renders it a multiversal space where citizen journalistic practice can bleed across public, semi-public, and private spheres. We show that WeChat offers diverse communicative affordances facilitating practices of "metavoicing" as a form of citizen journalism, blurring divides between news production and consumption. This dynamic affects users' experiences of news and can influence news agendas story lifecycles. WeChat also faces important limitations as a citizen journalism platform: it is a space where political discussion can be readily reported, where the tone of current affairs coverage is often sensationalized, and where the reliability of content can be difficult to discern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Citizen journalism" is a term used to refer to ordinary individuals who act as journalists during some part of the process of creating content for mainstream journalism coverage. In China, besides ordinary citizen journalists, some professional journalists have been regarded as citizen journalists if they write stories online that would otherwise not be publishable in traditional media. Unfortunately, since the real name registration system was launched on the Internet in 2012, the activities of both professionals and average citizens in China are frequently limited. So, is citizen journalism a role that can only be practiced in very limited ways in China? This article adopts a broader definition of citizen journalism, in which, through the use of social media to discuss and comment on news and social issues, ordinary citizens in China act as collective citizen journalists, which insulates them against individually targeted criticism for their opinions. We applied agenda-setting theory to explain citizen journalist contributions to the content of traditional media and the policymaking process in China. Using several forms of Chinese media and rank-order cross-lagged correlations, we found that online public opinions in social media influenced the agenda of traditional commercially oriented media, but not the agenda of traditional government-sponsored media. The policy agenda was partially influenced by the online public. The online public acted collectively to influence and contribute to the content of the traditional media and policies the government considers, thus changing the nature of journalism and public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how citizens contribute to rumour verification on social media in China, drawing on a case study of Weibo communication about the 2015 Tianjin blasts. Three aspects of citizen engagement in verifying rumours via Weibo are examined: (1) how they directly debunked rumours related to the blasts, (2) how they verified official rumour messages and (3) how they used Weibo's community verification function to collectively identify and fact-check rumours. The article argues that in carrying out such activities, ordinary Weibo users were engaging in practices of citizen journalism. Findings from our analysis suggest that even though citizen journalists' direct engagement in publishing debunking messages was not as visible as that of the police and mainstream media, self-organised grassroots rumour-debunking practices demonstrate great potential. In terms of both the reposts and the positive comments they received, rumour-debunking posts from non-official actors appear to have been given more credibility than those from their official counterparts. In contrast, the official narratives about the Tianjin blasts were challenged, and the credibility of the official rumour-debunking messages was commonly questioned. Nevertheless, this article also shows that Weibo's community verification system had limited effects in facilitating how Weibo users could collaboratively fact-check potentially false information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to its Western counterpart, China's media culture has its uniqueness. The relationship between Chinese media and media users presents 'Chinese style' characteristics, especially with the rise of participatory journalism online. Based on critical reflections on the agenda-setting theory and existing research work on participatory journalism, this essay proposes three models of participatory journalism in the Chinese context. Depending on the interaction between media agenda and audience agenda, the three models are as follows: (1) the incompatible model, (2) the negotiatory model, and (3) the unconventional model. This essay aims to use these three models to demonstrate the notion of 'journalism as process' proposed by Robinson and the significance of the socialization and politicization of audience understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using China’s Red Cross scandal as a central case, this study examines the interaction between Chinese mainstream media and media users on China’s Internet in the course of the event. This study reflects on how the participation of Chinese netizens impacted Chinese mainstream media in the digital age, how Chinese mainstream media responded, and how the interplay between the media and media users affected the trajectory of the event. The Red Cross case indicates that in today’s China, the boundary between the political domain and the entertainment domain is fluid. The two domains have different functions and implications. The specific case discussed in this paper traveled back and forth between the two domains depending on the power dynamic between the media, media users, and the larger social, political context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]