Keywords: New sources of information on public opinion and the use of social media to voice public opinion

Though studies on agenda-setting formally started or developed on the 1968 American Presidential election, by Max McCombs and Donald Shaw, we could trace the thought to Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion, which published in 1922. In the book, Lippmann argues that the virtual images built by mass media have the power to strongly affect, or even decide that in public’s minds.
The traditional agenda-setting studies have three variables, media agenda, public agenda and policy agenda. The most common hypothesis is taking the media agenda as the independent variable and the public agenda as the dependent variable. In 1971, Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder opened a new research field of agenda building, from the angle of political science. In either the studies of agenda setting or building, the public agenda are always viewed as a target, their power in the agenda process is very weak. This tendency has been changed, to some extent, with the advent of the internet, especially the SNS.
Some scholars, like Kim and Lee, noticed that the agenda setting research on the internet should be differed from that in the traditional way, because the internet has enormous capacity for the users to interact with the traditional mainstream media, and eventually affect the policy agenda. Most of such studies are conducted in the western world, more than others, in USA. Can this mechanism work in the context of mainland China? If could, how does this work? I would like to answer these questions in the paper, through a typical case, Wei Zexi Event, which happened in the earlier part of 2016.
The main hypothesis I propose is that: in the era of social media, the public have strong power to build the Chinese authoritative media agenda, and this will always result in government’s action. And this could be divided into to two sub-hypotheses:
H1, the public could set authoritative media agenda via social network and then force government to take action.
H2, the authoritative media play a very weak role in the process of public-policymaker agenda setting.
To demonstrate the hypotheses above, two methods will be employed. One is time-series analysis, trying to show the agenda transforms from one to the other among public, media and policymaker in time order. The other is framing analysis, comparing the frame between public and media, to try to prove: whether the public agenda have strong power to affect media agenda; whether the media agenda could reverse the agenda set by public.
And I find: 1, social media play a very important role in the process of public agenda setting media and policymaker agenda; 2, opinion leaders always represent the public to set the other two agenda; 3, public agenda could result in policymaker’s action, not through the authoritative mass media, but through social media directly; 4, authoritative mass media are very weak in the public-policymaker agenda setting, 5, when policymakers take action, the agenda setting goes to the end.