Media Events in Web 2.0 China: Interventions of Online Activism

This book is among the first to use a “media events” framework to examine China’s Internet activism and politics, and the first study of the transformation of China’s media events through the parameter of online activism. The author locates the practices of major modes of online activism in China (shanzhai [culture jamming]; citizen journalism; and weiguan [mediated mobilization]) into different types of Chinese media events (ritual celebration, natural disaster, political scandal). The contextualized analysis of online activism thus enables exploration of the spatial, temporal and relational dimensions of Chinese online activism with other social agents.