Shifang Protest

The modern use of information technology is advancing at a fast rate.
Recently Information technology has been a successful tool for protesting. In June of 2012, there was a massive protest in Shifang, China. Interestingly, the protest was implemented by some young Chinese students whose generation has been marked as “post 90’s”. The reputation of the “post 90’s” is a bad one. They are seen as lazy and nonproductive. Most of them have their lives made for them and live off of their parent’s wealth. Despite these labels, The Chinese students were concerned about the soon construction of the Molybdenum-copper alloy producing factory. If built, the factory would release various toxic chemicals that are directly related to cancer. In many cities

On June 1st dozens of students rallied around Shifang’s government offices shouting words of objection. The small event was posted all over Chinese social media. Soon, Local residents and many other people who were interested joined the protest. The local government officials became nervous and called in crowd control, but pictures of that were uploaded to social media at enormous quantities. So much so, that the government was not able to censure even half of posts. On the third day of the protest, organizers of the factory gave up. Social media drew too much attention to the matter and the Chinese people would become very angered (Thompson

His strategy began with creating a Facebook memorial page for Khaled Said who had been killed by police brutality. As his followers increased Ghonim filled the page with other happenings of citizen mistreatment and other atrocities. The page filled with people tagging other people and discussing among each other of how something needed to change. Then as the Tension of the people reached its peak, a street vendor set himself on fire. This was exactly what Ghonim needed to get attention from the Egyptians. He then sent out suggestions for a massive protest on January 25. The page he made filled with up to 500 000 members and the people knew they would be backed up by fellow Egyptians. The day of the rebellion was successful and Mubarak stepped down from power just a few weeks later (Thompson 256). This is one many examples of how modern Information Technology has aided people in protest. Of course, posting comments online is not enough to free a country. It takes willingness of the