The End Of "Boss Rail"

Railroad is one of the most important methods of transportation closely related to public life, and Ministry of Railways, the real manager of which, has long been the topic of public concern. Though Chinese railway has developed at its full speed in recent years, the Ministry of Railways was split under the torrent of public opinion.As the root cause, the strong nature of planned economy can no longer meet the needs of the development of era, but if it were not for the high-speed-rail crash at Wenzhou in July23rd, or the unresolved problems of difficult ticket-purchasing before and after the Spring festival, which has been bothering people for many years, or the exposure of the corruption cases of the Ministry of railways headed by Liu et al,"Boss Rail" couldn’t have been terminated in2013.The split of the Ministry Railways happened in the era of highly developed network media. And it was due to the intervention of such kind of media, a different medium force had been involved during the process of the split. The reports on varios negative events that happened in the railway system in recent years from Media, especially the network media, had created a great power of public opinion in society. Moreover, different types of network media had also played different roles in this public opinion torrent.This paper takes the high-speed-rail crash at Wenzhou, the problems of difficult ticket-purchasing over the years, the corruption cases among senior officials at the Railways Ministry in recent years, until the split of the Ministry of Railways in2013, as a set of cases that interacted with and influenced by each other. Through these cases, it makes a thorough inquiry of how different types of network media reported, presented and so that affected these national events, as well as finds out the subtle relationship in between, by looking at the reaction, interaction and the game of different types of network media towards these events. And finally it explores how the network, under the change from the traditional society to the modern one in China, deconstructed the rationality of the continuing existing of the Railways Ministry steps by steps in the struggle among different powers, and ultimately split it with administrative power.