Social Media, Mobile Communication, and the Elections: Examining Independent Candidates’ Weibo Use for Local People’s Congress Election Campaigns in China

Digital activism researchers have paid much attention to the use of communication technology in collective actions in China but ignored the role of new media in formal political participation. This study examined independent candidates’ use of social and mobile media for participating in national politics during local People’s Congress campaigns in 2011 and 2012. The data showed only a limited number of such candidates used mobile devices accessing their social media accounts and posting messages. While social media played a significant role in helping the candidates getting their grassroots voice out to a larger community, mobile technology helped amplify their voice. Mobile devices also demonstrated its techno-advantage regarding their capacity of creating multimedia content any time anywhere. But to some extent, “being mobile” seems to detract from the task of running a LPC campaign. Frequent mobile social media use was proportional to the amount of “selfie-posts,” posts about candidates’ personal lives and experiences. This could also be explained by the fact that most candidates adopted a low-key and non-confrontational strategy in their campaigns to avoid attracting undesirable attention from the government.