Cyberspace and social governance: the role of the Cyberspace Administration office

This chapter focuses on the role of the Cyberspace Administration (CA) office by exploring how the government responds to the societal demands expressed online and how the CA office bridge the government and the public. Based on the interviews and qualitative archive analysis, I show that the CCP establishes local-level cyberspace administration agencies and grid-style cyberspace management to communicate and coordinate local knowledge and assess policies. In particular, the government often proactively collects comments on the policies and social issues online to improve its governance. I find that the CA agencies often use three working mechanisms - fire-alarm mechanism, departmental linkage mechanism, and online and offline coordination mechanism - to communicate the demands of ordinary citizens at the grassroots level to high-level leaders and make the government pay attention to certain social issues. In addition, the cases also demonstrate how CA agencies provide professional instruction and suggestions in preventing the expansion of negative public opinion.