In China, transparency, accountability and civic engagement are all politically sensitive issues. The root of the tension can date back to the Cultural Revolution, when people were told to say what the government, or more exactly, the Communist Party of China (CCP), expected to hear. Those who said what they really thought, or questioned the CCP’s acts, were often jailed or worse. After China’s period of economic reform beginning in 1978, political reform and freedom of speech were brought back to the agenda. In 1987, the 13rd National People’s Congress brought up the idea of “supervision by public opinion,” and specified that “major situations should be known by the people; major questions should be discussed by people.” (Wu Guoguang, 1997) Emphasis on political transparency reached its historical peak in modern Chinese history. The 1989 the Tiananmen Incident was a turning point for China's policy making about the control of public discourse. The CCP used tanks to “clear up” Tiananmen Square, where hundreds of thousands of students demonstrated for political reform to eradicate government corruption and promote democracy and transparency. The international response was enormous, but in China any mention of the incident was banned. On the Internet, keywords such as “June 4th”, “6.4”, and others were all automatically filtered from websites. It is common that young people today in China have no clue about the incident at all. Article 44 of the August 2007 Emergency Response Law offers a small opportunity for improvement because there is no explicit restriction on what the media must do in emergency incidents, compared to past warnings by officials that media should be “helpful, not troublesome.” Also, from a legal perspective, according to Article 41 of the Chinese Constitution, citizens are entitled to not only know what is actually happening, but also to “criticize and make suggestions to any state organ or functionary.” The constitution also specifies that citizens are entitled to demonstrate and protest. However, these civil rights were seldom practiced due to the strict political control enforced by the government. In short, the absence of an independent institution for the trial of laws that go against the constitution means that the articles themselves are not enforced. The press was supposed supervise the state. However, after the Tiananmen incident, China’s media system characterized by a low level of autonomy, high government intervention, strong institutional continuity, and no correlation with any clear pattern of democratization. (Colin Sparks, 2007) He Zhou has referred to the role of Chinese media as “Party Inc.”. In other words, the role of the media has changed from a propaganda machine in the age of the Cultural Revolution to the Chinese Communist Party's PR agent, whose major task is to maintain a positive image of the party. Though most journalists take pride in investigating watchdog stories that also reveal the negative side, they generally choose less controversial topics like consumer culture or environmental protection. No core issue that involves political accountability or the election process can be touched. (Zhou He，2006) The Party, through the Central Propaganda Department and its local branches at all levels, still control mass media content in great detail. It renders public distrust against the government, but there’s still no mechanism for citizens to dissent. In a nutshell, the priority of the CCP is to “maintain a stable society.” Any challenge from the citizens is basically “harmonized,” or filtered from access. Since citizens cannot receive the real and timely information from mass media, new media have become increasingly important in China. In recent years increased participation and communication, two basic aspects of transparency, have taken place on new media platforms. (Yang Guobin 2009) The primary form of netizen participation is online protest and dissent, most commonly in the form of replying in comment and forum threads. There are times that online activities are accompanied by offline activities. Relying on the online community platform, these kinds of activities are spontaneous and loosely organized, but they can have influence not only on online discourse, but also on offline public discourse and government policies. Social problems such as the widening divide between the rich and the poor; corruption; environmental pollution; changes in cultural values, etc. are reflected in the online discussions. (Yang, Guobin, 2000) The rise of an urban middle class is particularly important in the new online activism.