Adopting microblogging solutions for interaction with government: survey results from Hunan province, China
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852319887480 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Adopting microblogging
solutions for interaction
with government: survey
results from Hunan
province, China
Vincent Homburg
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Rebecca Moody
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Qiaomei Yang
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Victor Bekkers
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
Authorities in the People’s Republic of China communicate with citizens using an esti-
mated 600,000 Sina Weibo microblogs. This study reports on a study of Chinese
citizens’ adoption of microblogs to interact with the government. Adoption results
from trust and peer pressure in smaller-network ties (densely knit, pervasive social net-
works surrounding individual citizens). Larger-network ties (trust in institutions at large,
such as the Chinese Communist Party, executive organizations, the judicial system, the
media, etc.) are not associated with the adoption of microblogging. Furthermore,
higher levels of anxiety are correlated with lower levels of use intention, and this finding
Corresponding author:
Vincent Homburg, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences,
Department of Public Administration and Sociology, PO Box 1738, NL3000DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: homburg@essb.eur.nl
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852319887480
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2022, Vol. 88(1) 76–94
underlines the impact of the Chinese authority’s surveillance and control activities on
the lives of individual Chinese citizens. Based on these findings, we outline a theory of
why citizens use microblogs to interact with the government and suggest avenues for
further research into microblogs, state–citizen communication patterns and technology
adoption.
Points for practitioners
Our research identifies trust in individual civil servants, citizens’ anxiety and peer
pressure as drivers of Chinese citizens’ intentions to use the Weibo microblogging
platform to interact with the Chinese government. This insight allows practitioners
to better understand citizens’ drivers and obstacles in the use of social media in state–
citizen relations in China.
Keywords
adoption, China, diffusion, microblogging, Sina Weibo, social media, trust in
government
Introduction
The government of China is an avid user of microblogs (Ma, 2014; Schlæger and
Jiang, 2014). In this context, microblogs refer to social-networking services like
Sina Weibo, Tencent, People’s Net and Xinhua Net, through which users – indi-
viduals, businesses and government agencies alike – can post, share and comment
upon messages that are limited to 140 characters, pictures or videos. Academic
literatures have extensively researched the motivations of Chinese officials, agen-
cies and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Harwit, 2014; Ma, 2014; Meng
et al., 2017; Schlaeger and Jiang, 2014) to use the estimated 600,000 government
and CCP microblogs (Qin, Str€
omberg, and Wu, 2017), as well as authorities’
practices to regulate and control communication on microblogs (Harwitt, 2014;
King et al., 2013; Qin et al., 2017). However, Chinese citizens’ motivations and
uses have gone largely unnoticed (with Medaglia and Zhu’s (2016) study being a
notable exception). It is the express intention of our article to fill this gap and to
produce and test an explanation of Chinese citizens’ adoption of microblogs to
interact with the government. Moreover, by constructing and testing such an
explanation, it is also our ambition to reflect on how new technology-enabled
forms of interaction, deliberation and communication fit into the state–citizen
communication patterns of authoritarian governance regimes. China is an inter-
esting case in this regard because it combines an authoritarian regime with a large
user base that is described in the literature as being, on average, young, social and
outspoken (Hassid, 2012).
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Homburg et al.
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