The Arab Spring and Jasmine Revolutions in the Middle East and Northern Africa led to considerable hope for some people that China would experience a similar political uprising and considerable anxiety for the ruling regime. While there are a number of significant differences between China and MENA countries, there are all also enough commonalities to justify concerns about political instability. Whether China will ultimately be able to avoid the fate of authoritarian regimes in MENA countries will turn on its ability to overcome a series of structural challenges. This article examines the conflict between the rising pressure for social justice and the ability of China’s legal institutions to satisfy them.
As King, Pan, and Roberts write in their 2013 study on Chinese social media; research into the dynamics of internet censorship in China, “exposes an extraordinarily rich source of information about the Chinese government’s interests, intentions, and goals”. This paper seeks to use the dynamics of internet censorship by China’s most important social media site, Sina Weibo, to achieve a better understanding of the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012. To this end, searches were performed daily on the names of all 2,270 delegates to the Party Congress on Sina Weibo for five weeks before and after the event. Data recorded included information on the number of results reported and whether the keywords were reported to be blocked or not.
As a complement to work by researchers including Gary King, David Bamman, King-wa Fu, and Tao Zhu into Chinese social media censorship, our study concludes that Sina Weibo actively manipulated and filtered the search results of Communist Party delegates — particularly higher-ranked and incumbent officials — during the observation period, with an apparent decrease in search blocks after the Party Congress. This study offers evidence that the Party, through proxies like Sina Weibo, proactively attempts to shape public opinion online, just as they do in traditional media. The decrease in search blocks perhaps indicates that the Party is possibly still seeking to find a balance between utilizing the internet as a check on officials and suppressing the internet to prevent dissent; or perhaps it is a short-term effect due to a new wave of leaders taking office.
Following the collapse of long-lived dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, many analysts have turned their attention to China to identify possible stirrings of revolution. Of course, in the Middle East and North Africa, the Chinese Jasmine Revolution stimulated little domestic interest and failed to materialize into a popular movement. Beginning with the cases of Egypt and Tunisia, this article critically examines recent literature identifying the causes of the Arab Spring revolutions to develop several hypotheses on the sources of diet vulnerability and their applicability in explaining the exceptional resilience of single-party rule in China. After the collapse of the long dictatorships of Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, many analysts turned to China to identify possible seeds of revolution. In fact, as the movements formed a revolutionary spiral in North Africa and the Middle East, the Chinese Jasmine Revolution caused few domestic reactions and failed to materialize in a popular movement. From the cases of Egypt and Tunisia, this article critically examines the recent literature identifying the causes of the revolutions of the Arab Spring 2011, to develop several hypotheses about the sources of the vulnerability of regimes in these countries and to consider their adequacy in explaining the exceptional resistance of the one-party authority in China.