Political Discourse in Chinese Blogs

While scholars have long researched political discourse in China’s tightly controlled mass media, this study is the first to use quantitative methods to examine political discourse in a sample of Chinese blogs, which operate largely outside the system of close party supervision and monitoring of media content. Utilizing a dataset constructed through content analysis, this paper analyzes blogs in terms of freedom of expression, pluralism, and propaganda and compares blog content to an analogous samples of content from newspapers in China and Taiwan. The paper finds that, when compared to Chinese print media, blogging has created new opportunities for political discussion, given voice to more criticism of regime policies, and weakened state control over political discourse.