Two Faces of Protest Signals and Media Responses: How to Evaluate and What to Determine the Impact of Chinese Protest on Media

Many scholars have argued that 1989 Tiananmen Protest is not the end of Chinese popular protest, but a beginning of a new wave of social insurgency in this authoritarian regime. Despite the increasing body of literatures focusing on Chinese protests, most of them explain the mechanism of mobilization and only a few studies aim at exploring protest impacts. So, here questions arise. How can we determine whether these protests make actual changes to Chinese society? How can we explain why some protest events are more influential than others? Focusing Guangdong Province in which media field is most critically active and political participation is widest in China, this study will elaborate the ‘interrelated’ configuration of news articles responding to protest events and identify causal pathways to different protest media outcomes by applying QCA. It is known to all that media coverage has been viewed as an important type of social movement outcome, but what needs to be stressed is the complexity and heterogeneousness within media field and protest-relevant news outlets, especially in terms of their various stances and focuses. Firstly, this study, following signaling theory, will view protest as carrier of message and argue that the message they channel to social institutions is inevitably mixed. On one hand, challengers will convey the issues they claim to the public. On the other hand, because of authoritarian regime, protests also signal themselves as threats to social stability. Thus, mainstream news organization, as social institution, will receive both kinds of signals and respond to them respectively. Then, by searching newspaper archive from 2014 to 2016, this study will map out the complex pattern of institutional responses to protest events, namely protest-relevant coverage, and argue that the ideal outcome of protest is the combination of high coverage of issue-relevant news and low media visibility of threat. Secondly, data collected by Chinese activist Lu Yuyu will be used to capture the overview of protest signals from 2014 to 2016 in terms of strength, clarity and level. And multiple causal pathways to different combinations of media outcomes will be identified by QCA on basis of a combined theoretical framework of protest signals and opportunity structure, including discursive, political and social. In summary, this study will contribute to social movement outcome studies by addressing the complexity and heterogeneousness of outcomes even within one institution. Also, a typology of media outcomes of protest and the basic rule of protest media impact evaluation will be proposed. Finally, this study will offer causal explanations for the variation of protest media impacts in authoritarian China.