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Can Social Media Clear the Air? A CaseStudy of the Air Pollution Problem inChinese CitiesSamuel Kaya, Bo Zhaoa & Daniel Suiaa The Ohio State UniversityPublished online: 01 Dec 2014.

To cite this article: Samuel Kay, Bo Zhao & Daniel Sui (2014): Can Social Media Clear the Air?A Case Study of the Air Pollution Problem in Chinese Cities, The Professional Geographer, DOI:10.1080/00330124.2014.970838

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Can Social Media Clear the Air? A Case Study of the Air PollutionProblem in Chinese Cities

Samuel Kay, Bo Zhao, and Daniel SuiThe Ohio State University

Since the U.S. Embassy in Beijing placed an air quality sensor on its roof and began publishing the results on Twitter in 2008, airquality has gained widespread attention on Chinese microblogs. When the Chinese government introduced new air qualitystandards in 2012, some hailed this as a victory for Chinese microbloggers, signifying the emergence of social media as ademocratizing force leading to greater citizen power. Using a representative sample of microblog posts collected from October2012 to June 2013 on the topic of air pollution, as well as contextual information from a variety of sources, we examine how thegovernment, companies, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals approach the Chinese social media landscape. We findthat although microblogs are capable of empowering citizens to advance an environmental cause, social media have also beenincreasingly employed by the government as a tool for social monitoring and control and by companies as a platform forprofiting from air pollution. KeyWords: air pollution, Chinese cities, social media, urban political ecology.

自从2008年美国驻北京大使馆在屋顶安置了一个空气品质感应器，并开始在推特上发表侦测结果以来，空气品质便在中国

的微博得到广泛的关注。当中国政府于2012年引进新的空气品质标准时，部分人士欢呼此为中国微博客的胜利，强调新兴

的社群媒体做为引领更强大的公民力量的民主化趋势。我们运用搜集自2012年十月至2013年六月中，在微博以空气污染

为主题所发表的文章之代表性案例，以及不同来源的脉络化信息，检视政府、企业、非政府组织与个人，如何应对中国的

社群媒体地景。我们发现，儘管微博能够对公民进行培力，以促进环境保育的目标，社群媒体却同时逐渐被政府使用作为

社会监控的工具，并被企业用来作为从空气污染中获利的平台。 关关键键词词:: 空空气气污污染染，，中中国国城城市市，，社社群群媒媒体体，，城城市市政政治治生生

态态学学。。

Desde cuando la Embajada de los EE.UU. en Beijing coloc�o en su techo un sensor de calidad del aire y empez�o a publicar losregistros en Twitter en 2008, la calidad del aire ha ganado vasta atenci�on en los microblog chinos. Cuando el gobierno chinopresent�o nuevos est�andares sobre calidad del aire en 2012, algunos saludaron esta acci�on como una victoria de losmicroblogueros chinos, vi�endola como el surgimiento de los medios sociales como una fuerza democratizadora que apuntabahacia un mayor empoderamiento ciudadano. Mediante el uso de una muestra representativa de correos de las microblogrecogida entre octubre de 2012 y junio de 2013 sobre el t�opico de la poluci�on a�erea, lo mismo que informaci�on contextualobtenida de una variedad de fuentes, examinamos la forma como abocan el paisaje de los medios sociales chinos el gobierno, lascompa~nías, las organizaciones no gubernamentales y los individuos. Descubrimos que si bien las microblog son capaces deempoderar a los ciudadanos para promover una causa ambiental, los medios sociales tambi�en han sido crecientemente empleadospor el gobierno como una herramienta de monitoreo y control, y por las compa~nías como una plataforma para beneficiarse conel tema de la poluci�on del aire. Palabras clave: poluci�on a�erea, ciudades chinas, medios sociales, ecología política urbana.

Y ears of planning, billions of dollars, and untoldhours of labor went into the three-week-long

Summer Olympics that took place in Beijing, China,in August 2008. Monumental stadiums were con-structed, lines were added to the subway, and a termi-nal was added to the airport; even the sky was madeready. At the urging of the International OlympicCommittee (IOC), the Chinese government shutdown hundreds of factories, power plants, and con-struction sites within a 150-km radius of Beijing;removed millions of vehicles from the road; plantedtrees to prevent sandstorms; and seeded clouds tochange the weather. These costly efforts resulted in asignificant reduction in air pollution in Beijing (Richet al. 2012). The emissions reduction coincided with adrop in biomarkers of cardiovascular disease amongyoung adults, which increased again when the gamesand air pollution reduction measures ended (Richet al. 2012). Although the measures taken to prepare

for the 2008 Summer Olympics cleared the skies andtemporarily improved health, they were short-lived.In the years since the Olympics, air pollution hasworsened, but Chinese citizens have also becomemore vocal about the issue than ever before, particu-larly using the medium of microblogs. This articleexamines the perplexing role of social media in thedebate over air pollution in Chinese cities.For decades, the Chinese government blamed hazy

days on fog or dust. Publicly released government airpollution reports completely ignored certain pollu-tants such as PM2.5, airborne particulate matter 2.5micrometers or less in diameter, which because of itssmall size can penetrate deep into the cardiovascularand respiratory systems (Rich et al. 2012). Starting in2008, when the U.S. Embassy in Beijing began pub-lishing air quality data on its official Twitter feed,PM2.5 received more attention on Chinese socialmedia as microbloggers reposted and commented on

The Professional Geographer, 0(0) 2015, pages 1–13 © Copyright 2015 by Association of American Geographers.Initial submission, September 2013; revised submissions, January and March 2014; final acceptance, March 2014.

Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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the U.S. Embassy numbers, much to the consternationof Chinese officials. In 2012, the central governmentadopted new national air pollution standards, and byearly 2013 the air pollution problem led to unprece-dented political transparency as municipal govern-ments began to release PM2.5 readings and the newsmedia began to more freely report on the issue. Thesedevelopments have been hailed by some (Stout 2013;Wong 2013) as a “bottom-up” victory for ordinarypeople.This article problematizes the role of the social

media landscape in the debate over air pollution as afield for the creation and contestation of environmen-tal knowledge and narratives. We examine the multi-ple ways in which ideas about air pollution areproduced and contested by different users of SinaWeibo, China’s most popular microblogging web site.Taking a critical political ecology approach, we exam-ine the intersection of the socioecological process ofurbanization, its attendant environmental and socialproblems, the neoliberalization of Chinese environ-mental governance, and the role of social media in theproduction and contestation of environmental knowl-edge and narratives. Using the case study of the debateover PM2.5 that has played out largely on microblogs,we discuss whether social media represent an effective(or ineffective), just (or unjust) new form of citizenpower in China and how they contribute to or detractfrom the likelihood of adaptation and mitigation.

Social Media, Unfair Air, and China’sEnvironmental Governance

Social Media in China: A “Liberation Technology?”

More than 500 million people use the Internet inChina, and more than 400 million of them use SinaWeibo.1 Some herald the Internet and microblogs as apossible step toward democratic civil society in China(Hu 2010), but an elaborate and robust system of cen-sorship enables the state to use the Internet and micro-blogs for its own purposes, privileging the creation ofcertain types of knowledge by certain types of people.Scholars disagree over whether social media in Chinawill act as what Diamond (2012) calls a “liberationtechnology,” perhaps bringing about more open, dem-ocratic policy debates, or will instead contribute to abroadening and deepening of government controlover public discourse.Xiao (2011) argues that the Internet, although sub-

ject to government censorship, has created a new classof “netizens” engaged in a relatively open “cyberpo-litics” with real-world results. Censorship remains aformidable force on the Chinese Internet (Warf2010), but Xiao points to the clever ways in whichChinese web users have resisted efforts at censorship,such as the creation of the “grass mud horse.”2 Xiaoargues that the Chinese state has adapted to the Inter-net by becoming more responsive to citizens and

allowing greater citizen participation in decisionmaking.On the other hand, MacKinnon (2012) argues that

what has emerged out of the growth of the Internet inChina is a repressive “networked authoritarianism.”The Chinese government has adapted to the spread ofthe Internet and social media, she argues, by using itas a surveillance tool to predict and prevent or rechan-nel protests. This capability was demonstrated in May2013 when officials in Chengdu, having caught windof the details of a protest against the construction ofan oil refinery through social media and text messages,altered the work week (making Saturday, 4 May, aworkday) and deploying a heavy police and paramili-tary presence near the site of the planned protest (Lim2013). Social media, which allowed organizers to easilycommunicate the details of the protest to a wide audi-ence, also made it easy for the government to preventthe protest and identify key organizers through theirpositions in online networks.Due to the socially and spatially uneven distribution

of Internet access and technological literacy in China,many people are excluded from these networks (Xiao2011). Weibo users are young—about 92 percent wereborn since 1980—and highly educated; more than 70percent of Weibo users have received higher educa-tion (Sina Weibo 2013), compared to less than 9 per-cent of the overall Chinese population (NationalBureau of Statistics of China 2011). Weibo has slightlymore female than male users, but male users are morelikely to have larger numbers of followers (Sun 2013).Moreover, microblog posts are censored at widely dif-ferent rates in different regions: 53 percent in Tibetand Qinghai, compared to 12 percent in the easternprovinces and cities (Bamman, O’Connor, and Smith2012). China’s Internet censorship likewise takes sev-eral different forms. A large number of outside websites and networks are blocked by the “Great Fire-wall,” search terms are screened, and chat and micro-blog posts are selectively deleted. In many cases,censorship involves detaining or threatening to detainoutspoken bloggers. Internet companies are heldresponsible for content posted on their sites, obligat-ing them to carry out their own censorship activitiesalongside those of the government (Xiao 2011; Bam-man, O’Connor, and Smith 2012; Eaves 2012; Magis-tad 2012). But censorship is not about completelypreventing the spread of any news or knowledge oreven government criticism. Many recent cases, such asthe discussion of the Bo Xilai scandal on microblogs,show how the government will allow many onlinedebates to continue more or less unfettered as long asthese online discussions are not translated into orga-nized political actions (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013).

Political Ecology of Urban Air Pollution

In 2011, China’s urban population outnumbered itsrural population for the first time. The United Statespassed this threshold in 1920 and the world as a whole

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is estimated to have passed it in 2007. As an increasingproportion of the world’s population lives in cities,scholars have engaged more deeply with urbanizationand society’s relationship with nature, in part throughthe interdisciplinary field of urban political ecology(UPE;Cronon 1991;Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw2006; Cook and Swyngedouw 2012). With roots inMarxist analysis and historical materialism, UPErejects the notion that cities are not natural places andinvestigates urbanization as a socioecological processtaking place within a context of uneven power struc-tures. UPE examines the role of power and politics inthe production of “urban natures,” investigating “whoproduces what kind of socio-ecological configurationsfor whom” (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006, 2).Although much of the political ecology literature

has focused on natural resources such as water, miner-als, and land, scholars have recently turned their atten-tion to how power relations manifest in the air(Harper 2004; V�eron 2006; Buzzelli 2008; Whitehead2009). Much air pollution research focuses on theoutdoors, but Biehler and Simon (2011) have calledon geographers to examine the indoors as political–ecological spaces that are both socially produced andinextricably linked with the outdoors. Although out-door air is difficult to capture and commodify at thehuman scale, air conditioning and filtration can pro-duce clean air indoors, for a price.Writing about Houston, Texas, Harper (2004, 309)

argues that air pollution is relatively egalitarian: “AllAmericans, regardless of social standing, breathe pol-luted air; and a number of middle-income white com-munities . . . are near freeways and pollutingindustries.” Indoor air filtration technologies, how-ever, have the potential to counteract the ostensiblynondiscriminatory behavior of air pollution. Thosewho can afford to live in apartments, shop in malls,and drive in vehicles equipped with this technologyconsume clean air (and cardiovascular and respiratoryhealth) as a luxury good, especially when we considerthe fact that we as humans spend only 5 to 15 percentof our entire life outdoors (Myers and Maynard 2005).Paradoxically, although severe air pollution has beenshown to take an economic toll of possibly hundredsof millions of dollars (Schmitz 2013), it creates oppor-tunities for profit for a burgeoning filtration industry,real estate developers, and others. Companies fromHaier and 3M to Geely-Volvo and Pond’s have movedquickly to capitalize on the air pollution crisis.

China’s Environmental Governance

Scholars have recently noted a neoliberal turn in Chi-na’s environmental governance characterized in partby the emergence of “ecological modernization” as adominant state narrative (Carter and Mol 2006; Yeh2009). This narrative “privileges entrepreneurship andmarket dynamics in creating environmental solutions”(Yeh 2009, 884). Yeh argues that Chinese ecologicalmodernization favors technical solutions over political

innovations. This bias is evident in the Chinese state’spolicies toward PM2.5. Since more openly acknowl-edging the existence of the air pollution problem in2012, the state has undertaken extensive air pollutionmonitoring efforts similar to but technologically farmore advanced than London’s twentieth-centuryurban smoke observers (Whitehead 2009).The Chinese state contends that the air pollution

problem can be solved through the adoption of newtechnologies rather than any fundamental shift in Chi-na’s political or economic structures, treating air pol-lution as a scientific problem, not a political problem.The state’s use of social media to disseminate its del-uge of air pollution data (and drown out alternativedata and opinions through censorship) can be thoughtof as a kind of technologically mediated political inno-vation, albeit one that is meant to maintain a politicaland social status quo.Grumbine (2007) argues that China’s rise is driven

by government policy decisions, globalization, and thescale of development and is constrained by environ-mental degradation, political instability, coal and oilconsumption, and carbon dioxide emissions. We arguethat through its adoption of a narrative of ecologicalmodernization, China’s leadership is trying to turnenvironmental degradation to their advantage by usingthe air pollution problem to advance a regime of urbanatmospheric governance that contributes to the politi-cal and social status quo. Yeh (2009, 885) reminds usthat “environmental projects are always more thanenvironmental projects.” Through narratives such asecological modernization, China’s leaders are respond-ing to environmental problems in ways that strengthentheir continued rule. According to Wang (2013), thecentral government has turned to cadre evaluation as away to reduce air pollution, devolving responsibility forpollution reduction to governors, mayors, and state-owned enterprises, while also demanding continuedeconomic growth. Wang argues that this policy isdesigned to limit risks to the regime’s hold on power,using environmental protection to further the goals ofeconomic growth and social stability. This form ofaccountability encourages local leaders to bend therules by falsifying pollution numbers or concealing theoperation of major pollution sources (Ma 2011; Wang2013). Citizen science and crowd mapping could offernew powerful ways to rectify these problems in China’senvironmental governance (Sui 2013b).In summary, by situating this article in the broader

context of recent research on social media, UPE, andenvironmental governance in China, we aim to shedlight on the ways in which multiple actors use socialmedia to tackle the air pollution issue in China. Weargue that although it is encouraging that a peacefuloutpouring of clearly articulated public opinion oversocial media helped prompt an authoritarian regime tochange national environmental laws, we should bemindful that the debate over air pollution and theregime’s response is more than a straightforward vic-tory for social media as a liberation technology.

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Chinese Urban Air Pollution and SocialMedia: A Case Study

Air pollution is closely associated with China’schanging position within the global economic sys-tem. The main sources of air pollution in Chinesecities include industry, construction, vehicles, andhousehold pollution (Hao and Wang 2005). Pollut-ing industries come to China in part through theprocess of international dirty industry migration(DIM), which means that some of the pollution isessentially being offshored from the United Statesand other countries that import manufactured goodsfrom China (Mehra and Das 2007; Lu 2008; Sui2013a). Among air pollutants, airborne particulatematter (PM) can be especially harmful, contributingto cardiopulmonary disease (Kappos 2011) anddecreased life expectancy (Chen et al. 2013). Thesmaller the particle, the more harmful it is. Partiallyfor this reason, PM2.5 was quickly able to capturethe attention of Chinese microbloggers.The recent social media debate over PM2.5 in

China was spurred in part by the decision in August2008 of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to install an airquality monitor on its rooftop and publish real-timereadings on Twitter every hour (Figure 1). At thetime, Beijing’s Environmental Protection Bureau(EPB) did not widely collect or publicize PM2.5 levelsbut instead based its air quality announcements onother pollutants, such as PM10.3 In 2009, ChineseMinistry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) representatives metwith U.S. State Department officials to protest thepublication of the readings. According to a leakedState Department cable, MFA representatives com-plained that the data released on the Twitter feed“conflicted” with “official” Beijing EPB data, causing“confusion” and “undesirable ‘social consequences’

among the Chinese public” (U.S. State Department2009).Undesirable social consequences and confusion did

indeed ensue, as Chinese microbloggers took notice ofthe disparity between the U.S. Twitter feed and offi-cial EPB assessments. During a period in 2011 whenPM2.5 readings went off the chart (beyond index) ofthe U.S. Embassy Twitter feed, key opinion leaderson Weibo, including Pan Shiyi, a prominent realestate developer, organized an informal vote onWeibo calling for stricter air quality standards.In January 2012, the Beijing EPB started reporting

PM2.5 levels, and on 1 March 2012, the State Counciladopted new nationwide air quality standards thatincluded PM2.5 for the first time. Official state mediareported the new standards as a victory for microblog-gers under the headline “PM2.5 in air quality stand-ards, positive response to net campaign” (Xinhua2012). The debate over air pollution in China is ongo-ing. In January 2013, several days of severe air pollu-tion again prompted a social media outcry but—forthe first time—also garnered significant coverage instate media outlets and relatively open discussion byofficials. Off-the-chart pollution levels were widelyreported in Chinese and Western news outlets (Wong2013). In January 2014, the government announcedthat it would require major polluters to begin releasingnear-real-time air quality measurements.In the period of a few years, air pollution went from

a taboo subject with data either not collected orshrouded in secrecy to a sensitive but widely discussedissue. Near-real-time air pollution readings from adizzying array of sources are now available to techno-logically savvy Chinese citizens. The rapidly shiftingdebate about urban air pollution in China has changedthe way the government, corporations, and citizenstalk about, think about, and adapt to the polluted air.

Figure 1 PM2.5 monitoring device mounted on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (Source: Reuters/U.S. Embassy

Press Office). (Color figure available online.)

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The central role of microblogs in the air pollutiondebate has prompted hopes that social media can actas a stand-in for a democratic process—a kind of gov-ernment-by-crowd-sourcing—and that the socialmedia landscape could be rich territory for occupationby activists. To assess these possibilities, we took acloser look at the air pollution debate as it unfolded onSina Weibo, asking who is posting (and where), whatthey are posting, who gets the most attention, and towhat extent these answers align with an “even” socialmedia landscape conducive to open, democratic dis-cussions, or an “uneven” authoritarian landscape.

Data and Methods

We draw on a number of sources to examine the socialmedia–driven debate over air pollution in Chinese cit-ies, including Weibo posts, collected from October2012 to June 2013; official and unofficial media cover-age in China; advertisements for various air pollution–related products; diplomatic communications; govern-ment reports; and public statements made by officials.Methodologically, this article is tied to the grow-

ing literature on using mapping and analyzing socialmedia data (Tsou and Leitner 2013; Xu, Wong, andYang 2013). The primary object of our analysis isthe debate over air pollution on Weibo. Using apurpose-built crawler, we collected about 250,000statuses, reposts and comments from about 127,000Weibo users from October 2012 through June20134 with a six-day gap in January 2013. Mostsocial media sites have an application programminginterface (API) for the purpose of collecting anunbiased subset of data. We employed a heuristicprocedure, first collecting sample posts to identify

key terms relevant to the topic and then using thosekey terms to collect our data set. The terms we usedto collect our sample were PM2.5, PM, haze, airpollution, xikeliwu,5 and air quality.Using the Sina Weibo search topic API, our data-

base of microblogs containing these terms was contin-uously updated. The data were then cleaned andgeocoded. One of our primary analytical tools was tomeasure the frequency of different terms in our dataset. Unlike English, words in Chinese are not sepa-rated by spaces, so calculating terms’ frequencies firstrequired word segmentation analysis. To accomplishthis, we integrated ICTCLAS (Zhang et al. 2003)—apopular Chinese-language analytical module—intothe Weibo crawler.To create a spatial–temporal model of the data, it

was necessary to geocode the posts. Posts from GlobalPositioning System (GPS)-enabled devices alreadyincluded latitude and longitude coordinates. Toextrapolate approximate location from nongeocodedposts, the crawler took the location information fromthe user profile, and attempted to find correspondingcoordinates first in the gazetteer database and, ifunsuccessful, in pygeocoder, a Python library thatmakes use of Google’s geocoding functionality. Next,the data were checked for semantic and logic areas.Using this process, the sample was collected fromWeibo, cleaned, geocoded, and built into a database.Figure 2 illustrates this process.

Results and Discussion

The Chinese central government (eventually)responded to the PM2.5 debate by acknowledging anair pollution problem, setting new air pollution

Figure 2 Web crawler procedure for harvesting Sina Weibo data. API D application programming interface.

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guidelines, and introducing new enforcement mecha-nisms. Although many (including, notably, the Chi-nese government) hail these steps as a victory formicrobloggers, bolstering the hopes that Sina Weiboand other social media will become democratizing“liberation technologies” in China, our analysis of thedata also show how companies, the government, and afew opinion leaders have shaped the discussion alongnarrow—and profitable—lines. The most influentialusers in the debate were almost entirely comprised ofgovernment sources, companies, or famousindividuals.We first address the question of who participated in

the social media debate and where they were. One wayof assessing the extent to which a social media debatereflects the sentiment of the general public is to seewhether the participants in the debate roughly matchthe general public demographically. As discussed earlier,Sina Weibo users tend to be younger, more educated,and more affluent than the Chinese population as awhole. Our analysis shows that participants in this par-ticular debate are evenmore out of line with the Chinesepopulation than the general pool of SinaWeibo users.Mao Zedong famously declared that Chinese

women “hold up half the sky,” but our analysis showsthat they are underrepresented in the social mediadebate over the pollutants in that sky. The underrep-resentation of women in this debate is particularly sig-nificant in a country where only about 10 percent ofprovincial party elites are female (Su 2006) and femalelegislators attending the eighteenth party congresswere described by state media as “beautiful scenery”(People’s Daily 2012). Female users are estimated toslightly outnumber male users of Sina Weibo (Sun2013), but our data show that the opposite is true forparticipants in this debate; female users account foronly 46.5 percent of users participating in the air

pollution debate. The disparities only get moreextreme when looking at the most influential usersmeasured by weighted in degree, a measure of users’importance to a debate.6

We found that the top 1 percent of users in our sam-ple (measured by weighted in degree), numbering1,270, account for over 80 percent of the totalweighted in degree. The top 0.01 percent (127 out ofa pool of about 127,000 users) account for over 60 per-cent of the weighted in degree. In other words, 127users hold about 60 percent of the influence among agroup of 127,000. This elite group deserves closerscrutiny. Table 1 shows the attributes of the toptwenty users—the elite of the elite.We found that most of the users with the highest

weighted in degree were not individuals but were gov-ernment agencies, nongovernmental organizations(NGOs), and companies. Of the top 0.01 percent ofusers, just 20 percent are individuals. At the time ofwriting, all accounts on Weibo—including those notassociated with an individual person—are required toidentify as either male or female. Of the top 0.01 per-cent of users, 56 percent identified themselves as male.Among the subgroups (government, company, NGO,or individual), slight majorities of companies andNGOs identified as female (51 percent and 52 percent,respectively), whereas 64 percent of the individualaccounts and nearly 90 percent of the governmentaccounts identified themselves as male.By geocoding the Sina Weibo users, we are able to

map out the geographical distribution of the top twentyusers and their level of influence by weighted in degree(Figure 3). Four urban clusters clearly dominated inthe debate. Not surprisingly, three (Beijing/Tianjin,Shanghai, and Guangzhou/Shenzhen) out of the foururban clusters are located in the eastern, economicallymore prosperous region of China. Only one of these

Table 1 Attributes of the top 20 most influential users

English name NameTypeof user Location Gender Verified

Weightedin degree

Shanghai Municipal Report 上海发布 G Shanghai M True 40,960Yan Tang 唐嫣 I Shanghai F True 3,878Pangaoshou Medical 白云山潘高寿 C Guangdong M True 3,834Haier Air-Conditioning 海尔空调 C Shandong F True 3,425Ponds 旁氏Ponds C Shanghai F True 3,161Tongchenhui – Sina corp 微博同城会 C Beijing M True 2,714Philips China 飞利浦中国 C Shanghai M True 2,640I’ve been here_99857 我有来了_99857 I Beijing M False 2,557Practical Tips 实用小百科 N Guangdong F False 2,017Cado Air Purifier Cado蓝光空气净化器 C Shanghai M True 1,682Tianjin Municipal Report 天津市政府新闻办发布 G Tianjin M True 1,627Sichuan Happenings 四川身边事 C Sichuan M True 1,616Hyyakite 海尔凯特 I Japan M False 1,497Wei Qi 戚薇 I Beijing F True 1,369Shanghai Bayan E-Commerce 上海芭妍电子商务有限公司 C Shanghai F True 1,329Zhaopin.com 智联招聘 C Beijing M True 1,303Volvo Safety 沃尔沃汽车安全控 C Beijing M True 1,287Chengdu Municipal Report 成都发布 G Sichuan M True 1,188Chao Xu Environmental Researcher 徐超-环保研究员 I Beijing M False 1,107Beijing real-time PM25 北京实时PM25 N Beijing F False 1,013

Note: C D company; G D government; I D individual; N D nongovernmental organization.

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urban clusters—Chengdu—is located in the Westerninterior, showing that concerns about air quality arenot simply confined to the more crowded east.Although these four clusters are dominant in thedebate, air pollution is increasingly becoming an issuein smaller cities. Figure 3 reveals that concerns over airquality are spiraling down the urban hierarchy, as evi-denced by the increasing proliferation of discussions onair pollution in second and even third-tier cities.

We now turn our attention to the content usersposted on Weibo. In general, the social media debateemphasizes adaptation and steps that individuals cantake (e.g., buying an air filter or staying indoors),deemphasizing steps that society generally and thegovernment specifically could take (e.g., new petro-leum standards, shutting down coal plants, or payingfor air pollution–related health care). A word cloud(Figure 4) gives a basic overview of some of the main

Figure 3 Spatial distribution of the top twenty Sina Weibo users in the air pollution debate measured by weighted in

degree, a measure of how influential a user’s posts are (generated by Wordle). Note: C D company, G D government; I Dindividual; N D nongovernmental organizations. (Color figure available online.)

Figure 4 This word cloud shows the top 150 high-frequency terms from our data set generated by Wordle.

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terms appearing in posts, and a stream graph(Figure 5) gives a sense of the changing magnitude ofposts over time as well as the changing top terms dur-ing the period of our study.Although the social media debate contributed to

new government air quality standards, ostensiblybenefiting everyone equally, these standards have yetto produce meaningful reductions in pollution levels.At the same time, companies have shrewdly used socialmedia to advertise products for adaptation. Althoughthe goal of many participants in the Sina Weibodebate might have been to achieve cleaner air for all,

the result thus far has been an increasingly wide gapbetween those few who can afford luxury adaptationtechnologies and the vast majority of the Chinese pop-ulation who cannot.What is contained in some of the most influential

posts? Periodically, Pan Shiyi—with 16.6 million fol-lowers and counting—posts the official Chinese andU.S. air quality readings for various cities (Figure 6).He also frequently posts about going for jogs in thepark (when the air is clear enough) and installing top-of-the-line air filtration systems in his company’sbuildings. With his posts, Pan is perpetuating an

Figure 5 A stream graph shows the changing magnitude of number of posts as well as the changing top terms over the

time period of our study.

Figure 6 A sample of Pan Shiyi’s Weibo posts dated 14 December 2013 showing the composite air quality index (from

left to right) of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. The official Chinese numbers (top) are juxtaposed with the U.S.

Embassy or Consulate readings (bottom) (Source: Sina Weibo). (Color figure available online.)

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environmental imaginary in which clean air and ahealthy lifestyle are consumable goods. As a celebrityreal estate developer, he has every reason to do this; itincreases the value of his company’s buildings as well ashis own cachet. Pan is not alone in the endeavor of com-modifying clean air. Chinese companies such as Haierand multinationals such as 3M advertise air filtrationsystems on Weibo (Figure 7). Haier advertises a basicmodel for 9,999 Yuan, which is slightly less than halfthe median per capita income for urban residents in2011 (23,979 Yuan) and surpasses the median per capita

income of rural residents (6,977 Yuan) in the same year(National Bureau of Statistics of China 2012).Companies that sell air filters and real estate devel-

opers who sell buildings with filtered air are obviouscandidates for posting air pollution advertisements inthe microblogosphere, but they are hardly alone in therush to profit from pollution. Pond’s, a brand ofbeauty and hygiene products owned by internationalcorporation Unilever, was quick to bring a line ofPM2.5-fighting beauty products to market, advertisedin part by the personal Weibo accounts of celebrity

Figure 7 Air filtration system advertisement by Haier on Weibo. (The advertisement states that “using the most

advanced technology for the filtration of PM2.5,” Haier’s product will enable customers to “breathe healthier air.”)

(Source: Sina Weibo). (Color figure available online.)

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actresses such as Tang Yan (唐嫣). Tang Yan and ahandful of other users were in large part responsiblefor the sudden increase in occurrences of the wordskin (皮肤) during April and May 2013 (Figure 5).During April and May, among the top thirty postsincluding the word skin receiving the most reposts,twenty-five made mention of Pond’s. These twenty-five posts were reposted a total of 138 times. Thiskind of sudden popularity for a term is suggestive ofthe presence of the “online water army” (网络水军), agroup of Internet users paid by companies to promotetheir products. Our analysis showed that companiessignificantly influenced the popularity of certain termswith or without the water army. For instance, Sam-sung contributed to the popularity of the term fog dur-ing the first few months of 2013 (Figure 5) by using itin advertisements for its air filters. Advertisingthrough social media, as opposed to web site bannerads or those on the side of a bus, means that companiescan rely on users—whether paid “water army” mem-bers or regular people—to spread their message forthem to their online acquaintances. Our data showthat companies have shrewdly capitalized on the socialmedia debate about air pollution to gain popularityand sell their products.Meanwhile, the Chinese government has used social

media to give the impression that the air pollutionproblem can be solved mostly or entirely throughtechnology and without sacrificing economic growth.Government accounts are largely responsible for theoverall significance of terms such as weather, data, anddensity (Figure 4). This is part of the Chinese state’sefforts to make air pollution a scientific rather than apolitical problem.Breathing clean air is the privilege of those who

can afford to live, work, shop, and drive in buildingsand vehicles equipped with air filtration technology.This is not merely a matter of comfort but one of lifeand death. In a study carried out in Shanghai, Huanget al. (2009) found that low visibility, which is highlycorrelated with increased concentrations of PM2.5and PM10, is significantly associated with elevateddeath rates from cardiovascular disease on the timescale of just one day. Guo et al. (2010) found thatoutdoor air pollution has an hour-to-hour effect onindoor air pollution levels, meaning that stayinginside (without air filtration) provides little respitefrom pollutants, to say nothing of those commutingby foot or bicycle. It is likely that it will be severaldecades before clean air is abundant enough in Chi-nese cities to be enjoyed by those who cannot affordprime real estate or air filtration systems. In a SinaWeibo post from 16 January 2014, Pan Shiyi statedthe obvious: “The outdoor air pollution problemcannot be completely resolved for the time being. Atleast we can maintain the indoor air quality to ahigher standard.” This prescription is only availableto the class of people who can afford expensiveindoor air filtration technology; Pan’s suggestion issimply out of reach for most Chinese citizens.

Like PM2.5, power relations flow through spacesand buildings occupied by different people (Biehlerand Simon 2011), in turn producing atmospheric sub-jects (Whitehead 2009). Chinese city-dwellers aresorted into the categories of those who can afford toadapt to air pollution and those who cannot. TheCommunist party recognized that this inequality couldthreaten its rule. In a 2009 meeting with U.S. diplo-mats to lodge a diplomatic complaint about the U.S.Embassy posting air quality data on its Twitterfeed, Chinese officials expressed concern about the“undesirable social consequences” that could ariseif the air pollution issue remained unresolved (U.S.State Department 2009). Although the party-stateattempted for several years to end the debate bygrossly understating the extent of the air pollution, thepersistence of microblog users and the continued pres-ence of the U.S. Embassy Twitter feed made this diffi-cult. The government could shut down Sina Weibotomorrow,7 but their goal is to channel the publicexpression of netizens, not eliminate it altogether.Instead of banning it, the government seeks to usesocial media as a tool for keeping track of public opin-ion and communicating with the public (Hu 2010).This does not mean that the government is embracinga democratic medium or a new “online politics.” Hu(2011) writes, “The online discussion of politics anddemocratic politics are two separate things. And onlinediscussion of politics will not automatically eliminatethe difficulties in communication that we see in ourpolitics today.”Chinese blogger Jing Zhao (aka Michael Anti), as

paraphrased by Eaves (2012), argues that the centralgovernment uses social media as a “safety valve” to“give people the sense that they can complain aboutissues” without actually engaging in collective actionsthat could threaten the central authority of the state.Allowing open discussion of some issues might be asimportant to the party-state as preventing discussionof other issues. Nonetheless, to the extent that thegovernment fears that it cannot control a certain issuebecause of its proliferation on microblogs, it mighttake substantive action on the issue rather than con-tinue to sideline it through propaganda and censor-ship. We argue that this is the kind of calculation thegovernment made in the way it eventually respondedto the debate over air pollution. Rather than allowingpressure from microblogs to threaten its legitimacy,the party-state shrewdly occupied the social medialandscape (shoulder to shoulder with companies) toadvance its own environmental narrative.

Conclusions

The goal of this article is to assess the role of socialmedia as a liberation technology in the debate overurban air pollution in China. Contextualized by earlierliterature on social media, political ecology, and envi-ronmental governance in China, we conducted a case

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study on the social media debate on air pollution inChinese cities from October 2012 to June 2013. Byidentifying who is participating in the debate, whatthey are posting about, and who the most influentialusers are, we were able to trace the broad trends in theair pollution debate as it took place on Sina Weibo.We found that companies (seeking profit) and the gov-ernment (seeking social stability) play a disproportion-ate role in the social media debate. Although this casestudy shows the clear potential of social media as liber-ation technologies in China, their current limitationsmake them unrepresentative of the population in gen-eral and highly uneven along lines of gender, class,and location.It is unlikely that the new air quality standards will

result in significant mitigation in the short term as evi-denced by recent headlines that more major cities allover China have been hit by heavy smog (Xinhua2013), with devastating impacts ranging from localschool closures to disabled security cameras (Simpson2013) and perhaps even harmful impacts on spermquality (Phillips 2013). According to Wu Dui, an offi-cial in the Guangdong Meteorological agency, Chi-nese city dwellers can expect to breathe heavilypolluted air for “another 20–30 years” (Watts 2012).Air pollution mitigation will likely take a slow, incre-mental path: Cleaner technologies will likely be gradu-ally introduced, and dirty industries will eventuallymigrate away from cities and perhaps to other coun-tries as environmental regulations are more evenlyapplied throughout China. In the meanwhile, thosewho can adapt by consuming clean air as a luxurygood will be adding (perhaps negligibly but still sym-bolically) to energy demand and thus emissions byrunning their filtration systems. It is unlikely that Chi-nese urban dwellers will ever again see anything likethe drastic, short-lived pollution mitigation strategiesthat produced blue(ish) skies for the 2008 BeijingOlympics.Our research shows that microblogs are an espe-

cially uneven medium for the creation and contesta-tion of environmental knowledge and narratives. As astand-in for a democratic political system, social mediadisenfranchise anyone without Internet access, liter-acy, or leisure time to browse microblogging web sites.Poor and rural residents are almost entirely excludedfrom the social media landscape. Pellow (2006, 227)argues that digital technologies “facilitate the develop-ment and dissemination of various discourses and cul-tural imaginings, the most effective of which reinforcecapitalist and racist hierarchies within and across societies”(italics added). Moreover, social media are subject tofalling under networked authoritarianism. Throughdirect (action taken directly by state censors) and indi-rect (action taken by companies under explicit orimplied pressure from the state) censorship, the Chi-nese state has the ability to shape the social mediadebate over air pollution or any other topic. In addi-tion to repressive censorship, the government andcompanies can also coopt social media to advance their

own agenda, whether that means defending the politi-cal bottom line of social stability or the business bot-tom line of selling products. Our analysis shows thatthey have done this very successfully. Therefore, it isnot surprising that the social media discussion ofPM2.5 ultimately has not posed a significant threat toparty-state rule or placed greater decision-makingpower in the hands of ordinary people.Although Chinese microbloggers clearly helped

precipitate a policy response from the government, itis unclear whether Chinese microblogs in their currentform—beholden to state censorship and largelyunavailable to the very citizens who suffer the worsteffects of pollution—are an effective or just mediumfor public debate. &

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to ProfessorMorton O’Kelly and Jens Blegvad of the Ohio StateCenter for Urban and Regional Analysis for makingour data collection possible through their generouslogistical support, three anonymous reviewers for theirthoughtful comments in helping us prepare the finalversion of this article, and our friends in the PekingUniversity College of Urban and Environmental Sci-ences for their logistical support and invaluableinsights. The usual disclaimers apply.

Funding

Research for this article is a result of a collaborativeresearch project, “A GIScience Approach for Assess-ing the Quality, Potential Applications, and Impact ofVolunteered Geographic Information,” funded by theU.S. National Science Foundation (Award #104810).

Notes

1Twitter has been banned in China since June 2009.2The “grass mud horse,” or cao ni ma, is a homophoneof a profane Chinese expression. The phrase becamepopular in China in 2009 as a symbol of evadingcensors.

3 Particulate matter 10 micrometers or less indiameter.

4Due to the nature of Sina Weibo’s search API, theseposts represent only a portion of all the air-pollution-related posts from this time period. It is not possibleto know precisely what percentage of all the air pollu-tion posts were collected by our crawler.

5Xikeliwu, which can be translated as “fine particulatematter” was adopted in 2013 as the official Chinesename for PM2.5

6 In degree is a measurement of how many users repostor comment on another user’s post. Weighted indegree measures the number of reposts or commentsa particular user receives. (In degree counts users,whereas weighted in degree counts reposts and com-ments irrespective of the number of users making the

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reposts or comments.) Out degree is a measurementof how much a user comments on or reposts otherusers’ content.

7Weibo and other microblog services were temporar-ily disabled in July 2010 to implement “security”measures (Pierson 2010). Comments and other fea-tures are also sometimes temporarily disabled(Magistad 2012).

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SAMUEL KAY carried out this research as a master’s studentin Geography at Ohio State University, Columbus, OH43210. E-mail: kay.87@osu.edu. His research interestsinclude urban political ecology, health geography, Chineseurbanization, and environmental justice.

BO ZHAO is a PhD student in Geography at the Ohio StateUniversity, Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail: zhao.662@osu.edu. His research interests include GIScience, social media,crowdsourcing, and volunteered geographic information.

DANIEL SUI is a Distinguished Professor of Social &Behavioral Sciences and Chair of the Department of Geogra-phy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail: sui.10@osu.edu. His research interests include GIS-cience, crowdsourcing, volunteered geographic information,Chinese cities, and health geography.

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