Weibo And China's Environmental Protection Policy

Chinese political reformation gradually promoted with the pace of economic andsocial development. In this process, the innovation and development of thegovernmental decision-making model made a great breakthrough. Since the countrywas founded, the Chinese governmental decision-making model has changed a lot,from individual arbitrariness to multi-body participation, from making decision byexperiences to making decision by scientific methods.As a new thing, microblog quickly gained popularity around the country, and becamea tool which can be used to influence the process of public policy-making. Thechange of Chinese policy-making model is the foundation for microblog to play a role.In the mean time, the effect of microblog promotes the change of policy-makingmodel.Some cases of social hot issues, such as argue of PM2.5, were used to prove thatmicroblog take effects in the agenda-setting, policy-debating and policy-acceptingprocesses during environmental policy-making process.There are both positive and negative influences of microblog on Chineseenvironmental policy-making process. On one side, the public could use microblog toparticipate and influence the public-policy, the government could use microblog tofind and solve the policy problems, and microblog could be used as the channelbetween the public and the government. On the other side, the emotional publicexpression on the internet and the influence of some opinion leaders impair thescientific and democratic policy-making process. Therefore, the government shouldaccept and guide the development of microblog and the public opinions on it.