ABSTRACT
Until recently, the Chinese Communist Party-state has tightly controlled discussion of religion in the public media of the People’s Republic of China. Little discussion of religion appears in the state-controlled media apart from anodyne, propagandistic accounts of events such as the Lunar New Year visits paid by religious association leaders to party-state leaders. And even such articles comprise one-way communication in which Chinese citizens only read about, but can neither comment nor challenge the discourse of Chinese Communist Party, state-controlled media channels. For Protestants, limited circulation newsletters and magazines, such as the periodical Tianfeng produced by the official Protestant bridge association or publications by the Protestant non-governmental organization Amity Foundation, do discuss theology, church trends, development issues and post letters from readers. Even so, such accounts do not afford interaction between religious leaders and adherents or between Protestants and other citizens. With the advent of the Internet and social media channels, however, Chinese citizens, including Chinese Protestants, have started interacting much more with each other. One of the most popular communication channels had been SinaWeibo (known as Weibo), a microblogging service similar to Twitter, which had more than three hundred million registered users in 2013 (Hong 2014), until authorities began to suppress its relatively free flow of information (Economist 2014).
