Discursive strategy of opinion expression and government response in China: Text analysis based on online petitions

Abstract In the Internet era, citizens’ opinion expression through online petition platforms provides us a new opportunity to explore the interaction between citizens’ interest articulation and government response. Using a huge amount of text data from a Chinese online petition forum started in 2008, we explored the citizens’ discursive strategies to express their demands and examined the effect of political discourses on government response. From the perspective of self-identity, we identified three separate discourses: individualism, relational collectivism, and group collectivism. In general, nowadays Chinese citizens prefer the discourse of relational collectivism, and the governments are more likely to respond to demands reflecting relational collectivism. We also distinguished the way of opinions expression with paternalistic discourse and legalistic discourse. Although more citizens justify their demands with legalistic discourse, the governments are more likely to respond to expressions reflecting paternalism. We found that Chinese citizens strategically express their demands by employing different political discourses, such as the discourses of relational collectivism and paternalism, whereas the government’s selective response implies that the discursive strategy may fulfill citizens’ interest to some extent.