Thank you very much for your congratulations and for the encouragement of the work I have been doing for two decades.
Definitely, social media in China have been playing a very important role, because all the traditional print media or even electronic media are all under very strict party control. As a result, social media comparatively have more room to convey messages without that kind of strict control.
Chinese social media such as WeChat and Weibo have been enjoying an audience of billions and billions of people within China as well as abroad. Actually, many Canadians are also users of these two social media. This kind of new media has enabled the Chinese people to more freely express their own ideas and also exchange views.
As a government, the Chinese Communist Party realizes how important social media are within China and abroad, so instead of stopping social media altogether, it actually makes use of them to manipulate public opinion. They pay lots of people, called five-cent people, to create so-called public opinion on social media so as to mislead the general public, as well as media, as to what the real opinion is all about. That actually also happens here in Canada.
Actually, the same manipulation of public opinion also extended to the recent American presidential election. I understand that a lot of Chinese people supported Trump. They used WeChat to spread this message to the community to advocate for people to vote for Trump.