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The internet is widely touted for its potential to reduce inequality in political influence among citizens, but research focusing on advanced democracies has yielded mixed results. We provide new evidence on the internet's equalizing impact by studying how political participation via a major national online petition forum affects local government policies in China, an authoritarian regime with the world's largest internet-using population. Content analysis of over 900,000 petitions reveals that the forum was predominantly used by citizens from rural areas and low-income groups. Linking geographic and temporal variations in petition volumes to a new dataset of government policy priorities, we further show that increases in online participation led city governments to place greater emphasis on social welfare issues, which tend to disproportionately benefit the poor. Additional analyses suggest that online participation induces policy changes by both raising the authority's awareness of disadvantaged citizens and amplifying the threats of collective actions.