Policy Misreading: An Exploration of Policy Attitudes of Netizens in Transitional China

摘要

In this article, we attempt to study the criticism on public policies from Chinese netizens. The paper firstly introduces two cases which were highly concerned by Chinese netizens. One example is about netizens' questioning the water price adjustment policy and the other is that Flexible working hours of civil servants has been criticized. Then we perform a similar content analysis of the network forum comments and messages about the two public policies on Southern Weekly. Analyzing these cases and the policy background, we find that the Chinese netizens are concerned about public policy from spontaneously to consciously, and criticize on policy from negatively to positively. The paper proposes a concept of Policy Misreading, and concludes that Policy Misreading is mainly caused by policy-critique transfer, policy-precipitation and policy-cognitive inertia.