The Rise and Fall of Weibo Online Mass Incidents in China from 2010 to 2016

This research aims at understanding the rise and fall of online mass incidents in China from 2010 to 2016. Online mass incidents are often initiated by individuals’ attempts to harness public attention to their griefs while finally lead to large-scale contentious gatherings online. Since 2010, the microblogging service Sina Weibo, born in a phase of political vacuum with no other space for political dissents, has become the major arena for online mass incidents. However, this short-term rise has stopped since 2013. This article attempts to explore the factors involved in this change. As for the theoretical framework, I propose to see online mass incidents as online crowds and analyse the forming process from two aspects: the role of leaders and the acts of seeking visibility. The reason to build on the crowd theories is that this concept allows for the ambiguous, fragmented and conflicting nature of online mass incidents, which epitomize the Chinese society in a dramatic way. The empirical research is based on cases studies of three incidents occurring respectively in 2010, 2013 and 2016, which mark the rise, peak and fall of online mass incidents in China. For each case, I conduct in-depth interviews with the initiators and opinion leaders and content analysis of online posts. An initial finding is that the political atmosphere, the news media industry’s condition and the platform provider’s development needs are all important factors. For example, Weibo is far from a neutral platform, instead it had strong intentions to direct people’s attention to contentious issues and assisted initiators to create mass incidents because they saw this as the way to quickly attract users. However, since 2012, with increasing pressures coming from the government, Weibo transformed itself to a commercial and entertaining platform, which led to new forms of creating mass incidents on Weibo.