Abstract: This paper discusses how citizens get engaged in networks for civic participation and what affects the initiation, continuity, and impact of an actual action. The case study of the citizens’ engagement in rebuilding Enning Road in Guangzhou found that virtual communities expanded people’s actual connections; Internet mobilization, owing to its broad connectedness, helped stimulate the initiation of public participation but the shared channel of this type of media lacked in power to start an actual action or to keep the momentum. The existing studies suggested that whether the public attention and discussion based on virtual communities could be transformed into sustainable and influential public participation in action depended upon whether the “issue” itself had its sustainability and also, upon whether the mobilizing “agent” was a rightsprotecting group that shared similar interests. The case study reported in this paper, however, found that the offline “liaison and mobilization mechanisms,” as well as their closely related characteristics, were significant factors, too. Connection and mobilization via interpersonal networks pushed virtual discussions into real actions and helped keeping the actions going on, while the open space of the city expanded the actual social and policy influences for such actual civic engagement. The distinction of different liaisons from mobilization mechanisms illustrated in this paper helps the explanation of the civic engagement in contemporary China from the “diachronic” and “differentiated participation” angles. The paper concludes that either interpersonal networking organizations being supplementary to the organization of social groups or the public space opened up by the city being supplementary to the closed nature of the structure of the political system itself is still quite limited in the civic engagement in China.