Trump’s win a lesson for China to listen to ‘silent majority’ online
US president-elect offers China a lesson on heeding overlooked views, official says
Chinese authorities should learn from Donald Trump’s win and heed the views of the country’s “silent online majority”, according to an official researcher monitoring internet opinions.
The bulk of internet users were moving away from public social media accounts to airing their views in private internet messaging groups, sending their opinions below the radar, the researcher said on Wednesday.
Zhu Huaxin, general secretary of an internet opinion monitoring service under Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, said the authorities should be keeping up with the views of this silent majority.
Trump’s election says something about how the silent majority can decide the direction of politics
“Trump’s election says something about how the silent majority can decide the direction of politics,” Zhu said. “We should use internet discourse to study the needs of different social groups.”
Part of Trump’s surprise win in this year’s US presidential race has been attributed to a lack of media and political interest in people living in neglected rust-belt areas.
Zhu delivered the assessment during the release of the service’s annual report on discussion of public affairs in the media, online forums, microblogs, blogs and instant messaging services.
The report – part of a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences blue book on society – concluded that the influence of once-popular online opinion leaders had waned significantly and young pro-government internet users dominated online discussion.
Two million ‘internet opinion analysts’ employed to monitor China’s vast online population
The report also called for greater tolerance of online criticism of the government so that real problems could be identified and resolved.
The mainland has the biggest population of online users in the world and one of the toughest policies on speech and internet use.
One of the top social media platforms has been the Twitter-like Weibo service, which became a major outlet for discussion of public affairs after its launch in 2010. Hundreds of online “opinion leaders”, most of them critical of the government, emerged and developed large followings.
But Beijing put the brakes on the discussions when it launched a nationwide crackdown on rumours in 2013, arresting a number of prominent commentators on charges ranging from fraud to sex crimes.
Among those caught in the net was influential investor Charles Xue, who was detained for allegedly soliciting a prostitute in 2014, but later released. Xue’s detention was seen as a move to clamp down on online speech.
With social media now dominated by the views of government supporters, many internet users have simply turned to chat groups on instant messaging applications to discuss public affairs, according to the report.
Four months after prostitution arrest, influential investor Charles Xue remains uncharged
Of all government bodies, the police and education authorities raised the biggest concerns online, the report said, citing the mysterious death in custody of environmental scientist Lei Yang.
Police said Lei was taken into custody after visiting a foot massage parlour in Beijing on May 7. Lei had resisted the arrest for soliciting a prostitute, police claimed. Few details had been released about the case, despite a prosecutors’ investigation into the police officers involved.
The report also looked into the growing group of patriotic mainland internet users following and posting pro-Beijing comments on controversial topics like Taiwan and the Hague tribunal ruling on the South China Sea.
The researchers examined data on roughly 300,000 of these patriotic internet users, and found their median age was 21. Close to 60 per cent of them were female and only 11 per cent of them lived in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, the report said.
