Engagement or Control? The Chinese State's Burgeoning Presence in Online Environmental Discourse

Students, faculty, and staff are invited to join the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and the University Program in Environmental Policy for the first presentation of their Fall 2019 seminar series. The featured speaker will be Dr. Coraline Goron, an assistant professor of environmental policy at Duke Kunshan University.

Since 2013, Chinese environmental authorities have become extremely proactive in expanding into online spaces. This has been seen alternatively as a promising attempt to improve governance by increasing citizen engagement and transparency, or as a new tool of societal control. However, empirical research into the practices of state microblogs are rare, and the implications of their emergence for state-society relations remains poorly understood. In this talk, Goron will present research using a combination of online and offline methods to analyze Chinese state microblogs, focusing on the 172 local environmental authorities at various administrative levels in Shandong Province.