Development of New Media

The establishment of the leading group for network security and informationization of the CPC Central Committee and the action plan for "Internet +" proposed in the Report on the Work of the Government made to the 2015 NPC session heralded the launch of China's strategy for developing its internet industry. As the country strengthens top-level design, the development of new media has approached a new stage where increasing mobility and integration push new media to develop new functions. The effect of the integration of new media with politics, economy and culture at a deep level has kept releasing, leading to the rise of new ideas, new technologies and new types of operation.

I. Rapid Development of New Media Ushers in an Age of Micro-communication

The internet has become an important channel for Chinese netizens to access news and information. By December 2015, the number of netizens in China had reached 688 million, including 620 million connected to the internet via their mobile phones. Internet penetration reached 50.3 percent. More and more Chinese are using mobile phones to surf the internet, with 90.1 percent of cell phones on the grid. Of all the internet applications, news applications had 564 million users, or 82 percent of the online population, 482 million (77.7 percent) of whom are using news applications on their phones. According to iResearch, in June 2015, a total of 55.737 million users visited online news portals daily, spending a total of 99.38 million hours there in terms of effective duration time.

Thanks to diversification of exits and entrances of web news and accuracy of the news content, Chinese netizens are offered more channels to access news. In addition to traditional news portals and websites, browsers boasting huge numbers of clients, instant messaging tools, social media and some application-distribution apps are all feeding news to individual devices by making use of their huge user pool data. Of them, the browsers and distribution apps mainly play the roles of users and incoming flow while instant messaging tools and social media, by making use of their "social" attribute, focus on forwarding the news contents and uploading personalized comments. The various news sources interpret their users through recommending search engines, so as to achieve accurate recommendation to meet their users' personalized needs.

Micro-communication, represented by Weibo (Microblog), WeChat and client-end applications, has gradually become the mainstream means of news dissemination in China. With the popularity of smart phones and the rapid growth of mobile new media and wearable devices, news and information are reaching people via newer and better means, and more people are changing the way they obtain news — from newspaper, radio and television to new media — through which news is read in fragmented time slots. By the end of June 2015, China's Weibo users had reached 204 million, or 30.6 percent of the total number of netizens; Microblog mobile App users numbered 162 million, or 27.3 percent of the netizens and 79.4 percent of the total number of Microblog users. Daily postings on the Sina Weibo service surpassed 120 million. By December 2015, 624 million accounts had been created for instant messaging applications, meaning 90.7 percent of Chinese netizens had such accounts; and 557 million, or 89.9 percent of all netizens on mobile phones, used a cell phone to access the applications.

Administration at all levels made full use of new media in promoting service-oriented government. From central ministries to local townships, the government actively embraced new media, communicating with the public on online service platforms as compared to one-way information releases in the past. By the first quarter of 2015, official government WeChat accounts had reached 100,000, and verified government Weibo accounts at Sina numbered 140,000. "Ping'an Beijing," a Sina Microblog, had 10.28 million followers, and was widely popular as a new online identity for the municipality's public security system. Government WeChat accounts, such as "Communists" and "Shanghai Release," garnered 100,000 views on a daily basis. Xinjiang's WeChat account "The Last Mile" used articles and pictures by grassroots-level officials, and its many services were welcomed by ordinary citizens.

By making use of their advantages, the emerging new media is made possible to pool great positive energy promoting beauty, kindness and improvement through self-improvement and self-purification. On May 21, 2015, "Shaanxi Fire," the Microblog account of the provincial fire corps, tweeted 15 postings after a young child in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province fell into a well, updating on the rescue effort over 16 hours. It also started a fund for the rescued child and collected RMB200,000 to cover the medical expenses. In online voting for "Touching Stories of the Internet" in 2015, millions of netizens took part in order to choose their heroes: a group of young college students who regularly carried their paralyzed teacher to the hospital, the AIDS intervention and prevention specialist Liu Zheng, the farmer who turned barren hills to forests Huang Shenghong, and so many others who played their part or lent a helping hand. According to statistics from communication platform "Baidu Bar," when the cruiser Dongfang Zhixing (Eastern Star) sank in the Yangtze River, half of Chinese netizens engaged in online discussions about rescue plans, and the figure rose to 80 percent on the seventh day after the accident. In the wake of the warehouse explosions in Tianjin, a port city, calls for blood donors on new media met with an active response. Weibo user "Yaoyao Xiaojing" drew a picture of a firefighter walking towards the burning buildings while everyone else was fleeing, moving millions to tears. On August 18, Chen Xiaozhou, a netizen in Hangzhou, called for commemoration of heroes who fought in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression through making cartoons to record their deeds and a gesture with two hands crossing as a dove of peace. Over 1.66 million netizens took part, and positive energy accumulated to permeate the Internet.

While new media bring convenience and free access to information, they also produce certain negative influence. Negative information, rumors and fake news are spread through the internet, and violations of personal privacy occur regularly, disrupting the order of news dissemination, harming social life and infringing upon the rights of the person.