Cynthia Guanghan Liang, 38,  is a professor at Sun Yat-Sen University in  Guangzhou, Guangdong China. She completed her PhD in Management and Mass Communications at Zhongshan University. She is currently a visiting researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media where she is studying the differences between civic media in the United States and China. According to Liang, the most salient difference is that civic media in the US is almost exclusively online while civic media in China also appears in print.  She speculated that this difference arises both because people in China are more likely to trust information in print and because many in Chinese have less access to the Internet than those in the US.

Liang related that Chinese civic media is used extensively by nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). NPOs and NGOs use civic media to promote events, recruits volunteers and solicit donations. Liang said ““Most NPOs are very grassroots. Some NPOs only have 3 or 4 people. [But] they can do many things to help people in places where the economy is not very good.” Among the noteworthy successes, was the campaign on weibo, the Chinese equivalent of twitter, to raise money to provide lunches for school children. The campaign raised significant funds and more notably attracted enough popular support that the Chinese central government began funding a school lunch program.