New communication technologies (internet, social media, smartphones) have flooded societies in most parts of the world, altering social and political relations in them. This transformation is of great importance to political scientists who want to know, for example, how in a non-liberal democratic regime the power relationship between rulers and ruled shifts once the ruled possess the new means of communication. Will netizens with technical communicative savvy succeed in destabilizing the regime or will the regime gain even firmer control by using the same technologies to greater effect? To get answers, I examine the contestation between the most technically communicative-savvy netizens—smartphone social media users—and the most technically competent autocrats—Chinese Communist Party rulers. My dissertation consists of three parts, held together by a novel “view-from-above” approach that complements the boots-on-the-ground approach traditionally used by social scientists. Part One introduces such a method—one that involves the use of smartphone social media—to construct a detailed land use map when such maps are not available in a developing country or are available but are not accessible in a non-democratic one. Part Two makes full use of smartphone social media to gauge boundaries of regime confidence: how Chinese rulers permit unorganized clustering of political talk at sensitive times and places. Part Three makes full use of smartphone social media to gauge the degree of netizen confidence in the information rulers dispensed over an intrusive event: how netizens are engaged with rulers’ information but avoid places due to distrust. In the analysis in all three parts, I find myself drawn repeatedly to the role of place—that it resonates, that it is vocal, and that it can even be a megaphone of the political message. Place and politics is also a likely future direction for my research.