Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience

Chinese cyberspace is highly contested given the Internet’s empowering effects and the state’s efforts to control it.² Accordingly, scholars often study online expression from the perspective of digital contention. However, such a perspective downplays the richness of online activism and inappropriately conceptualizes netizen activism within a liberalization–control framework. After all, Chinese cyberspace is pluralized, with the state, its critics, and various citizen groups promulgating distinct beliefs, values, and identities online on daily basis. How, then, do these actors interact with each to shape online expression? How do average netizens, who access the Internet for a variety of reasons, see and react to efforts by the state and other actors to shape online discourse? What are the underlying dynamics that influence the format and content of political expression?

According to the sociologist Guobin Yang, “online activism is par excellence activism by cultural means,” as “it mobilizes collective action by producing and disseminating symbols, imagery, rhetoric, and sounds.”3 Though evaluating online expression from only a digital-contention perspective is constraining, Yang’s point is important in that it recognizes the cultural aspect of online politics. Evidently, culture and politics are indispensable in online expression.⁴ Many studies have explored the relationship between political culture and democracy and how changes in political culture or mass culture may affect democracies.⁵ Others see culture as an instrument in contentious politics. The social movements expert Sidney Tarrow, for instance, identifies culturalism as a major paradigm explaining social movements, which helps shift the focus from structural explanations to the “framing” of collective action.⁶ In his synthesis, culture plays a central role in shaping “repertoires of contention,” mobilization consensus, and movement identities. More recent studies have focused on the impact of specific sources of popular culture on protest. For instance, Nan Enstad has explored how dime novels and films motivated working women to engage in political activism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁷ Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, taking a structural interactionist approach, have shown how music as a social product helps protesters envision an alternative society, crystalize movement identity, recruit activists and maintain the loyalty of long-term members, and articulate movement goals.⁸ China scholars have studied the culture–politics relationship from similar perspectives. Some conduct surveys to measure Chinese citizens’ political beliefs, values, and identities to explore the potential implications for China’s system of authoritarian rule and the country’s prospects for democratization.⁹ Others examine contention cultures, centering their analysis on rituals, performances, and rhetoric in popular protests.¹⁰ Though these studies have diverse focuses, they are informative in similar ways, especially in terms of showing how culture may inform and shape political processes.

But depicting culture merely as an instrument for achieving political goals is inappropriate because culture itself is a social product. This point is worth highlighting because the Internet has enabled both state and social actors to experience culture and politics in fundamentally different ways than before. Ordinary citizens who had previously been largely passive recipients of cultural and political influences are now connected and thus more actively engaged in the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural and political constructs in a nonhierarchical, networked fashion. As a result, one may argue that what constitutes “culture” and “politics” is increasingly based less on the “inherent qualities of a particular genre, medium, or topic” and more on how they are socially constructed.¹¹ This perspective, while seemingly apparent, has not been sufficiently incorporated in current studies on cyberpolitics in China.

Indeed, scholars tend to examine the struggle over online expression from a digital-contention perspective that instrumentalizes cyber-culture as a means of protest. There seems to be an unquestioned assumption that citizens are engaging in online expression primarily to express discontent, lodge complaints, and challenge authoritarian rule. This perspective is further confirmed by studies on the Chinese state’s efforts to control online expression.12 In particular, many scholars are often amazed by netizens’ creativity, artfulness, and playfulness, which are interpreted as necessary to evade and resist state control. For instance, a great deal of online expression has been brought under scrutiny as different forms of artful contention or “digital hidden transcripts,” ranging from creative counter-censorship tactics to spoofing (e’gao), and from dissident-driven spectacles to spontaneous criticisms of the regime.¹³ Such innovative expressional tactics, as Guobin Yang puts it, reveal the change in style of contention from the pre–Internet age’s epic style, which featured “soaring apparitions and death-defying resoluteness to attain noble ideals,” to the rise of “more prosaic and playful styles” characteristic of online activism.¹⁴ By making sense of such light, playful, and low-profile digital contention, such studies go beyond understanding politics as merely direct contests for state power¹⁵ and challenge the viewpoint that the majority of China’s Internet population is politically irrelevant.

However, some scholars are skeptical of this digital-contention perspective, which focuses on confrontation between the state and society. For Jens Damm, focusing exclusively on state control versus social resistance ignores the increase in urban consumerism in China, which is rendering Chinese cyberspace fragmented and localized.¹⁶ After all, in general, Chinese netizens are not politically driven, and the overwhelming majority of online expression tends to focus on issues of private life and personal experiences. In fact, according to James Leibold, “the Chinese-language blogosphere is producing the same sort of shallow infotainment, pernicious misinformation, and interest-based ghettos that it creates elsewhere in the world.”¹⁷ More recent studies, such as one by Min Jiang, have found that uncivil discourse and behaviors coexist with civil activities online, demonstrating a co-evolution of the Internet, an “uncivil” society, and authoritarianism.¹⁸ These studies not only suggest that seeing online expression as digital contention may lead to an overestimation of the Internet’s potential for political change and civic activism, but also imply that popular culture may depoliticize online expression or neutralize its impact on authoritarian rule.

It is clearly inappropriate to assume that netizens are apolitical simply because they play online.19 After all, online struggles “are diffuse, fluid, guerilla-like, both organized and unorganized, and networked both internally and externally, online with offline.”²⁰ However, assuming online activism to be subversive has its limitations in that creative and artful expression is often reduced to being viewed only as a means of resistance. Even when there is no direct linkage to censorship or state repression, online expression is often interpreted as a “venting machine” or a “weapon of the weak,” implying that netizens adopt innovative expressional tactics only to defend the discursive space against state intrusion.²¹ In this regard, the skeptics have a valid point about the risk of overestimating the significance of online expression.

The literature suggests conflicting views on the political implications of online expression in China. Are scholars reading too much into online activism by taking a digital-contention perspective? Should we dismiss online activism because the majority of netizens are not politically driven most of the time? This chapter attempts to bridge these seemingly incompatible possibilities and decipher the politics and culture of online expression from a perspective that emphasizes both formality and content. It reveals that the dynamics of state control, discourse competition, and netizens’ pursuit of fun have driven the fusion and mutual transformation of politics and cyber-culture in online expression, contributing to the rise of pop activism. This form of communicative activism consists of several reciprocal, intertwined, and interactive processes. First, by embedding digital contention in popular cyber-culture, pop activism helps regime critics evade state censorship and protest themselves against the authoritarian regime.²² Second, pop activism serves as a shared tool for political actors—regime critics, the state and its supporters, as well as ordinary netizens—to promulgate their preferred discourses. Its popularity and appeal are particularly crucial in this discourse competition because netizens’ attention is a scarce resource on the information-rich Internet. Third, since not all netizens are politically motivated, pop activism often serves the function of turning political topics into a special type of consumer good for the purpose of entertainment. In this way, politics becomes an organic component of popular cyber-culture. By analyzing these interrelated processes, the chapter highlights that politics and culture are so fluid and fuzzy in Chinese cyberspace that we should neither dismiss online expression as apolitical, nor view formats of creative expression merely as digital hidden transcripts.

Though taking many different forms, much online activism is driven by the necessity of combating censorship. Facing the world’s most sophisticated censorship system,23 dissidents and resentful netizens have been fighting a guerrilla war with the authoritarian state at unexpected times, on unexpected platforms, and in unexpected ways. Chinese netizens have creatively exploited the weakness of state censorship. Netizens’ ultimate strategy to evade censorship is to “exit” by going beyond the Great Firewall. Circumventing the Great Firewall—“wall-climbing” (fanqiang, 翻墙) as it is called by netizens—has been a routine practice for many. Using proxy servers, penetrating software, and virtual private network (VPN) services, they are able to access sites blocked by the Party-state.

Netizens have also learned about and exploited the loopholes in the operation of censorship. Though automatic filtering systems often run around the clock, the intensity of manual surveillance varies at different times of the day.²⁴ For instance, NewSmth users have noticed that around midnight is a good time to discuss boundary-spanning topics because manual surveillance by forum managers is often weak then, allowing sensitive topics to survive long enough to be discussed.²⁵

Netizens also take advantage of forum functions to reduce the risk of being censored. For instance, many forums allow users to edit their own posts. Thus, one can post a perfectly innocuous post and then later edit it to add more sensitive content.²⁷ Baidu Tieba users have turned a similar strategy into an everyday practice. Many start a thread with the first post containing only “Baidu on the first floor” (yilou baidu, 一楼百度) or “First floor to Lady Baidu” (yilou xiangei duniang, 一楼献给度娘). They do so because the first post of a thread is the most heavily censored, and the whole thread may therefore be deleted if the first post is not verified by the system.²⁸

The censorship system hinges on numerous keywords. As a result, one central task for netizens engaging in political activism is to fight against and circumvent these keywords. Adding an asterisk or some other symbol within taboo words is the most common and simple way to circumvent keyword filtering. In some cases, random symbols are used to replace the taboo word, leaving audiences to guess the meaning based on the context.²⁹ Netizens have also found that reformatting text,³⁰ converting text from an HTML or TXT format into a picture format may be effective because censorship software cannot search for keywords in picture files.

If the coping tactics described so far may be considered largely passive, silent, and defensive, netizens’ expressive activism may be considered to present a more aggressive challenge, partly because it is more visible and thus “public.” Such expressive tactics imply a new type of “digital hidden transcript”—embodied in the creative use of language codes, narrative genres, and multiple performative forms and media formats—that relies less on invisibility and more on a shared cyber-culture to fend off state censorship. It is in this realm that netizens’ creativity is fully displayed. In addition to mocking official discourse, language codes, and propaganda rituals, they have developed an entirely new cyber-language to circumvent censorship and protest the regime.

First, netizens have used official discourse as a means of challenging state censorship. For instance, after Premier Wen Jiabao’s statement about the government should create “favorable conditions for the people to criticize the government,” his words were frequently cited online by netizens, but those posts were subsequently deleted.31 An even more interesting case occurred after the official takeover of Smth, in which many users quoted Chairman Mao’s words from Xinhua Daily reports from the 1940s before the Chinese Communist Party took power, which advocated strongly for civil liberties and democracy.³² Such activism is more provocative than what Guobin Yang describes as online “rightful resistance” in which activists seek to “avoid repression and to widen the channels of communication,”³³ because netizens who engage in this activity are fully aware that the Party-state will not stop censoring their posts. They are clearly challenging and denying the regime’s legitimacy, not simply attempting to avoid repression.

Netizens have also challenged the authoritarian regime by parodying familiar tropes of state propaganda.34 For instance, in June 2010, a group of Tianya users began creating a series of short weekly videos that mocked China Central Television’s (CCTV’s) Evening News (Xinwen Lianbo, 新闻联播) and responded to hot-button issues not being covered by state-run media outlets. The videos parody the Evening News style, format, and language, and cover topics such as inflation, soaring housing prices, and rampant corruption. In the producers’ words, “Put simply, we will cover whatever topics the ‘fartizens’ (pimin, 屁民) are concerned with.”³⁵ The series is very critical of the regime, and its title, The Emperor Looks Happy (Longyan Dayue, 龙颜大悦) echoes the nickname of the Evening News, the Happy Evening News (Xiwen Lianbo, 喜闻联播), thus satirizing CCTV’s inclination to please top leaders rather than meet the needs of ordinary citizens.³⁶ As an interviewee once said, the message of the CCTV Evening News is that “everything in China is great, and all foreign countries are suffering” (guonei xingshi yipian dahao, guowai shuishen huore; 国内形势大好,国外水深火热).³⁷

In addition to parodying state propaganda, netizens have created numerous cyber-vocabularies using homophones (e.g., “river crab” stands for the official ideology of “harmony” because both terms are pronounced hexie in Chinese), homonyms (e.g., Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-Il are called “King Fucked” and “King Fucking” because the Chinese character “日” in their names can be understood either as “the sun” or “fuck” depending on the context), nicknames (owing to his ideological construct of the “harmonious society,” President Hu Jintao is referred to as the “Crab Emperor” [xiedi, 蟹帝]), metaphors, and even the so-called Martian language (huoxingwen, 火星文).³⁸ It is fair to say that Chinese netizens have created a complete cyber-vernacular corresponding to all major political figures and events. Table 4.1 provides some further examples of political cyber-speak.

^d Deng Xiaoping is nicknamed “Laughing at the Poor” because China’s economic reform has widened the country’s income gap and left the poor behind. He is called “286” (a reference to Intel’s 80286 central processing unit [CPU]) because he was the core (hexin, 核心) of the People’s Republic of China’s second-generation leadership. He is called “Shopping” because this word in English has a similar pronunciation to “Xiaoping.” There is a joke about this: While visiting the United States, Deng was interviewed in English while waiting for his interpreter. The reporter asked him, “What’s your next stop?” Deng couldn’t understand but thought the reporter might be asking about his surname. So he replied in his Sichuan dialect accent, “Wo xing deng,” which sounds like “Washington.” The reporter then asked, “What do you plan to do?” Again, Deng could not understand but guessed this question might be about his given name. So he replied, “Xiaoping,” which sounds like “shopping.” The reporter continued with a few questions about Taiwan’s leadership after Chiang Ching-Kuo, to which Deng replied, “Ni deng hui er” (“Wait a moment”) and “Suibian” (“whoever”), which sound like “Li Teng-Hui” and “Chen Suibian,” respectively.

^j Bo Xilai, Party Chief of Chongqing, became the target of censorship in the spring of 2012, when he lost his position following the scandal over the death of the British businessman Neil Heywood. “The King Who Pacified the West” was the title given to a general in the early Qing period, Wu Sangui, who surrendered to the Manchurians. Netizens call Bo the “King Who Pacified the West” for two reasons: Chongqing is located in southwest China, geographically close to Wu’s fief in Yunnan Province, and, like Wu, Bo was not trusted by the central government.

With this wide vocabulary, Chinese netizens are able to comment on political affairs without resorting to keywords that may trigger state censorship. Take the Bo Xilai incident of early 2012 for example. Bo, a high-ranking official and “princeling” (a term often used in a derogatory manner to describe descendants of prominent Party officials), was removed from the post of party secretary of Chongqing Municipality, which caused great political turmoil among the top leadership. A report on Sina.com on the marketing war between two instant noodle producers caught netizens’ attention as a political metaphor.³⁹ The report was titled “Master Kang Intensifies Its Conflict with Uni-President, and a Fierce Fight Over Instant Noodle Marketing Channels Is Imminent.” To those in the know, the piece described a rumor about Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang (“Master Kang”) disputing the handling of Bo Xilai with other Politburo members (“Uni-President”; “统一,” tongyi, meaning unity or consensus).

The corruption scandal surrounding former premier Wen Jiabao clearly illustrates the dynamics between state censorship and the evolution of netizens’ creative expression. When Wen’s name became a taboo word after the New York Times reported on his family’s hidden wealth,40 nicknames like “Best Actor” (yingdi, 影帝) and “Teletubby” (tianxian baobao, 天线宝宝) were used to refer to him. In response, the state started censoring these terms, which only pushed netizens to innovate further: They started to call Wen “Starry Sky” (xingkong, 星空) because he had once composed a poem titled “Looking up to the Starry Sky.”⁴¹ Netizens’ messages were conveyed in ways such as, “Looking up to the starry sky, there are 2.7 billion stars, and the brightest one is Sinovel.”⁴² This sentence appeared completely apolitical but delivered a clear message to anyone who could decipher it: Wen’s family had accumulated $2.7 billion of hidden wealth and made their biggest fortune from Sinovel, China’s largest maker of wind turbines.⁴³ Netizens also used the scandal to enrich their cyber-language by inventing new terms to refer to Wen, including “Wen27” (温27), “271,” and “Aunt 27” (27姨). The latter two nicknames are both pronounced as “2.7 billion” in Chinese). Baidu Knows, a user-generated knowledge base, explains why Wen is called “Best Actor,”⁴⁴ what “271” stands for,⁴⁵ and what “2.7 billion” refers to.⁴⁶

Indeed, netizens have developed a whole cyber-narrative to engage in politics using various linguistic and rhetorical tools and many performative and media forms. They have not only mocked official propaganda, developed cyber-vocabularies, crafted jokes, and composed poems, prose, and parables, but they have also created multimedia commentary, using text, audio, graphic, and video elements in their online expression.47 The most well-known case of this kind is the “grass mud horse” (cao ni ma, 草泥马) meme (a unit of cultural transmission whose role is similar to that of a gene in the biological sphere).⁴⁸ The pronunciation of “grass mud horse” in Chinese is similar to “fuck your mother” and was once used simply as a dirty pun. However, it was then politicized by netizens who constructed stories about the grass mud horse (actually a type of alpaca) fighting the river crab (i.e., the official ideology of harmony), which alluded to the fight over state censorship. The story was produced, told, and retold in numerous formats, including text, picture, song, video, and even comic.⁴⁹ Similarly, to protest the Green Dam software, which the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology attempted to have pre-installed on all computers sold in China to filter unapproved information, netizens created a comic figure of the “Green Dam Lady,” performed costume plays featuring the character,⁵⁰ and even crafted the “Song of the Green Dam Lady.”

Netizens are not simply creative in discussing political topics. They often politicize playful topics by mixing a discussion of them with discursive protests. For instance, when one Tianya user asked fellow netizens about what they would put on their tombstone, many complained about social ills such as rising housing prices and forced demolition through humorous, though often satirical, replies. One user said sarcastically, “Thanks to the government for solving my ‘housing’ problem.”⁵¹ Others added satirical elements by writing “Land claimed by government; [burial plot] must be demolished,”⁵² and “Soon after you are buried, your precious piece of land will be claimed by a real estate developer, and urban management officers (chengguan, 城管) will come with bulldozers.”⁵³ An even richer and more straightforward satire of high housing prices goes as follows:

It would be a very tall tombstone, and my name would be tiny, only readable with a microscope, followed by ‘XXX, lives on XXXX floor of Tomb No. 20349. It is a studio, 90,000 yuan per square feet.’ Below that: ‘Developed by Poor-Don’t-Bother Tomb Estate Developing Company. New villa-style tombs by our company are on sale. Book right now!’ At the bottom: ‘Burying yourself arbitrarily or secretly is against the law and will be punished severely!’⁵⁴

Some attacked the family planning policy as well as rising housing costs; for example, “[You] will die without a burial place. Where do you put the epitaph if you cannot even afford a burial place?” and “[You] have only a daughter, and she will marry away (jia chuqu, 嫁出去). So [you] won’t need a grave since no one will visit [you]!”⁵⁵ (In China, a woman is often considered only a member of her husband’s family after marriage).

Indeed, netizens are good at weaving hot-button issues into short, funny passages (duanzi, 段子) to express discontent.56 In the thread about epitaphs, one duanzi parodied the alleged epitaph of the most unfortunate man ever who had failed at everything in his life and died tragically, and this appeared several times.⁵⁷ Satirically titled “Records of the Grand Historian: A Biography of the Post-1980 Generation,”⁵⁸ the passage is as follows:

(He) studied literature early on, reached twenty-six with a debt of over 100,000 yuan. He then tried hard to earn a living and took no rest for a decade. Finally he accumulated 100,000 yuan but still could not afford a house. He invested his wealth in the stock market, and it shrank to 10,000 yuan in a year. He was very depressed and got sick. But the health care system refused to cover him because he was ineligible for the major diseases insurance.⁵⁹ He spent all he had to get into a hospital for a week but then recovered without any treatment. A friend pitied him and gave him a bag of Sanlu milk powder.⁶⁰ He drank it and died.⁶¹

This single piece of duanzi targets the education system, inequality, unaffordable housing costs, stock market volatility, the health care system, and food safety issues, all of which are major social concerns in today’s China. As a parody of the epitaph of the most unfortunate man in history, it serves as a poignant self-portrait of the post-1980 generation, their life opportunities, outlook, and discontent. The pervasiveness of such a mentality among netizens helps explain the rise of the diaosi (屌丝, literally means “penis hair”) culture among young netizens who mock themselves as “losers” as an implicit protest against the dominant state and mainstream culture.⁶²

It is fair to say that Chinese netizens have developed pop activism as a means of countering state censorship and challenging authoritarian rule. However, not all netizens engaging in pop activism practices are political—both the format and content of political expression can be entertaining and fun for their own sake; thus, many netizens simply join in for fun rather than out of political motivation. Moreover, in addition to dissidents and resentful citizens, other political actors such as the state and various pro-regime netizen groups also embrace popular cyber-culture to shape discourse to their advantage.

Wall-climbing (i.e., circumventing the Great Firewall) serves as an unlikely example of engaging in politics without being political. The action constitutes an explicit and direct, though passive, challenge to state censorship. But wall-climbers have mixed and complicated motivations. Though resisting censorship is a serious concern for many wall-climbers,63 it is a secondary concern or even irrelevant to others who motivated simply by the fun or “coolness factor” involved. In addition to the sense of achievement gained and the heroic sentiment of fighting the formidable state apparatus involved, netizens adept in the art of wall-climbing are often perceived as tech savvy and envied by people around them, thus generating a certain degree of self-esteem.⁶⁴

Many netizens do not view wall-climbing as a form of resistance or struggle for freedom. Instead, they see it as an action to overcome a politically neutral obstacle to get what they need and want. For instance, some interviewees with whom I spoke admitted that they circumvented the Great Firewall primarily to access porn.⁶⁵ Though it could be argued that it is normal for single men to access porn, these individuals accept that the state prohibition is morally justified. Moreover, some wall-climbers still actively support the state and distance themselves from the dissident groups that help them circumvent the Great Firewall. A netizen using Freegate, the Great Firewall–breaching software developed by the controversial spiritual group Falun Gong and spread secretively among wall-climbing netizens, stated, “Recently, I have been using the wheels’ [Falun Gong’s] Freegate to access porn sites. No more work finding proxy servers. It is very convenient. The wheels, after all, have produced some benefits.”⁶⁶ The use of the term “wheels” (lunzi, 轮子), is a sign of disrespect.⁶⁷ This particular case is even more telling, and ironic, considering that these same porn-site visitors actually sided with state on its censorship of Google.⁶⁸

In comparison, online expressions using semantic and rhetorical tactics are more typical cases of netizens engaging in political expression with apolitical purposes because they are by nature more popular, more entertaining, and more controversial. Take the case of the grass mud horse as an example. The short video of the grass mud horse fighting the river crab went viral online not only because of its protest message, but also because of the image of a cute alpaca and the lovely voices of a children’s choir that were used.69 The same case also demonstrates how an apolitical meme can be politicized. When it first appeared on forums, “grass mud horse” was simply an expedient term to bypass forum regulations prohibiting dirty words. Even when it was selected as one of the “Top Ten Holy Animals” in late 2008 and early 2009, it was still more playful than contentious and was not linked explicitly to censorship.⁷⁰ This becomes obvious when looking at the rest of the holy animals, all of which are homophones of profane or vulgar terms.⁷¹ These terms were at best social and cultural resistance rather than political contention, not to mention that many just use them for fun. But “grass mud horse” was immediately politicized when it was linked to the state discourse on harmony, as in “The Song of the Grass Mud Horse” (Cao Ni Ma Zhige, 草泥马之歌).⁷²

Evidently, politics is highly fluid in cyberspace, as content can be perceived as political or apolitical depending on timing and context.⁷³ But even when content is political—that is, when it carries explicit political messages—online expression is much more than a form of state–society struggle. Indeed, netizens often mix their creativity and artfulness with criticisms of the regime as well as other political actors, including foreign countries, regime critics, and other netizen groups. For instance, the Emperor Looks Happy series emphasizes its entertainment purpose as much as its intent to criticize the Party-state.⁷⁴ Yet, the series is often imbued with nationalism, supporting Johan Lagerkvist’s argument that Chinese cyber-nationalism does not always express “an upset or angry tone,” but sometimes calls for “jubilant and cheery celebrations.”⁷⁵ In one clip, a news story jokes about the Japanese, saying that the legendary Chinese goddess Nü Wa (女娲), who created human beings, has made an apology and resigned from her post for creating malfunctioning humans on the Japanese islands.⁷⁶ The case becomes more interesting when we consider the producer’s response to a user who suggested that the show should not target other countries:

Pro-regime netizens have also mobilized to promote their interests in a playful way. For instance, on military forums, users have created their own vernaculars and narratives, not so much to evade censorship as to entertain themselves and their audiences. For example, China is often called “Bunny” or “Panda”; Russia is often called “Polar Bear”; and the United States is often called “Hawk” or “Lighthouse.” Such vocabularies also include the term “pussy values” for “universal values,” because the English word “pussy” has a similar pronunciation to the Chinese for “universal” (pushi, 普世). Other terms include “underworld-ocracy” (mingzhu, 冥主) for “democracy” (minzhu, 民主) and “persimmon oil” (shiyou, 柿油) for “freedom” (ziyou, 自由).⁷⁸

Based on this wordplay, netizens on these forums develop particular types of narratives, the best example of which is the serial called “The Glorious Past of the Little White Bunny.”⁷⁹ This is essentially a playful recounting of modern Chinese history with a focus on the role of the Chinese Communist Party in unifying and building the nation. Initially gaining momentum from the military forum Cjdby (cjdby.net), the serial has been turned into comics and videos and has achieved incredible popularity and stimulated great support for the regime.⁸⁰ For instance, after China’s first aircraft carrier, Liaoning, was presented to the public, the author of the comic serial soon came up with a new segment called “The Aircraft Carrier Dream.” The segment starts by showing a picture of Admiral Liu Huaqing’s visit to the U.S. carrier Ranger (CV-61) in 1980 (figure 4.1).⁸¹ Many regard Liu, who served as vice-chief of the General Staff, vice-chair of the Central Military Commission, and People’s Liberation Army Navy commander, as the “father of the Chinese aircraft carrier.”⁸² In the picture, as one Mitbbs user commented, Liu looks like a “kid staring at a toy in a toy store.”⁸³ The work conveys nationalistic emotion so well that it attracted 561 replies in less than two days on NewSmth’s “MilitaryJoke” board alone, and over eighty respondents claimed to be “moved to tears.”⁸⁴

It is quite ironic that nationalistic netizens often borrow popular cultural elements from the hostile countries they target. Many are fans of Hollywood movies, Korean television dramas, Japanese anime, and adult videos. For instance, Cjdby users claim themselves to be a trinity of “military, porn, and otaku” (jun zhai huang, 军宅黄).⁸⁵ This fusion of online military, porn, and otaku subcultures is embodied in the “Moé translation” (meng fanyi, 萌翻译) of Area 11 News in which netizens translate Japanese news reports into Chinese using cyber-slang, anime jargon, and porn vocabulary. For example, they refer to Japan as “Area 11” based on the setting of the popular Japanese anime series Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion.⁸⁶ In these posts, China and the United States are often described as a gay couple, Japan as a maid abused by the two powers, and the relationship between the United States and Japan as an incestuous father–daughter relationship.⁸⁷

Another example is the popularity of the Japanese adult film model and actress Sora Aoi among Chinese netizens. When Sino–Japanese disputes over the Diaoyu Islands (called the Senkaku Islands by the Japanese) arose in August 2012, netizens started to joke about the popular actress, who has over 13 million followers on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo.88 After the death of Shinichi Nishimiya, the newly appointed envoy to China, Chinese netizens fabricated stories that the Japanese prime minister had appointed Sora Aoi instead.⁸⁹ Figure 4.2 shows demonstrators holding a banner saying, “Declare War on Japan, Capture Teacher Aoi!” This bizarre fusion of nationalism and popular cyber-culture with Japanese cultural elements embodies the nature of pop activism better than any other example.

The fusion of politics and popular cyber-culture is driven by several mechanisms that speak to the realities of online politics in China. First, to engage in politics, netizens and regime critics often have to circumvent highly sophisticated state censorship. In other words, political expression must be guarded, implicit, or innovative.90 Thus, it is not surprising that netizens and regime critics would disguise their political messages with playful expressional formats. Second, online expression in China is pluralized, as various actors—that is, the state, its critics, and various netizen groups—are involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of online content while competing with each other to promulgate preferred discourses.⁹¹ Such discourse competition drives the actors to use popular cyber-culture to attract an audience before attempting to win their hearts and minds. Third, most Chinese netizens are not politically motivated. Rather, they tend to be more interested in material and lifestyle topics than political debates.⁹² But politics can be made fun, and apolitical netizens can be politicized; for example, in 2008, events such as the Lhasa riot, the Sichuan earthquake, and the Beijing Olympics quickly drew apolitical netizens into discussions of politics. The combination of fun and politics, as these examples illustrate, was a major contributor to the evolution of pop activism.

In effect, within the relatively free discursive space enabled by the Internet, the struggle over online expression in a way resembles a market in which various actors attempt to “sell” their ideas. Since the audience—who are also the potential redistributors and reproducers—vote with their attention, the sellers then must not only produce messages, but also provide an attractive packaging to attract potential consumers.⁹³ Moreover, sellers cannot control their potential buyers, who may consume the products—the messages and the packaging—at their discretion. Politically motivated buyers may take the message but throw away the packaging. Others, however, may enjoy the packaging more and disregard the message that comes with it. Moreover, since consumers can actively engage in reproduction and redistribution, they may take the original message out of its packaging and replace it with a new one. Such a rapid switch in the roles of producer, distributor, and consumer makes online expression an extremely fluid and dynamic process.

Indeed, participants in pop activism often improvise. A random netizen may become a key player by coining a phrase to describe a certain event, inventing a story, or creatively using a rhetorical tool. Building on such creativity, pop activism gains momentum, as numerous motivated and even unmotivated netizens spread, interpret, and re-create online messages. This process is indeed a networked one.94 Such spontaneity explains why pop activism seldom involves systematic attention to a particular political agenda, as the rise and fall of many pop activism memes demonstrates. This echoes the media and communications scholar Meng Bingchun’s perception of online spoofs, which “neither qualify as rational debates aiming to achieve consensus nor have produced any visible policy consequences,” but serve as a “component of civic culture that offers both political criticism and emotional bonding for all participants.”⁹⁵

The impulsive nature of pop activism partially explains why the popularity of topics changes so fast online. However, this is not to say that netizens do not have any political consciousness. A few consistent themes sustain pop activism, including concerns about disadvantaged social groups, criticism of corruption, patriotism, and the pursuit of freedom, justice, and democracy. Changing views of Mao’s grandson, Mao Xinyu, reveal how netizens’ shared concern over corruption has influenced the evolution of pop activism. Mao Xinyu has been frequently satirized because of his corpulence and because he is a high-profile example of nepotism in the Chinese Communist Party. However, popular opinion of him changed a bit in 2012 during the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Whereas other representatives wore luxury brands, particularly other princelings such as former premier Li Peng’s daughter, Li Xiaolin, he wore a military uniform and carried a paper bag. Netizens started to juxtapose photos of him with those of representatives wearing designer clothes. Comments on Mitbbs hailed him as “a pollution-free, all-natural organic person compared to those official and rich offspring bastards” or someone who “not only is harmless, but also brings laughter to us people.”⁹⁶

Pop activism is not always spontaneous. Motivated actors such as dissidents and opinion leaders play an important role in producing, interpreting, and politicizing the content of pop activism. Take the artist and activist Ai Weiwei as an example. Though the state media have tried to describe him as a deviant, a plagiarist, and a tool of Western political interference,97 dissident groups, Western media, and his supporters often see him as a one-man hero courageous enough to question the repressive state.⁹⁸ Ai has created a series of first-rate online spectacles that have challenged the Party-state.⁹⁹ For instance, in 2010, in response to the demolition order of his Shanghai studio, Ai hosted a river crab feast for over one thousand guests.¹⁰⁰ As the river crab represents the state ideology of “harmony,” and thus state censorship, the feast was clearly an act of protest. The feast quickly became a hot topic online and was widely viewed by Ai’s supporters as an open but creative challenge to censorship.

Ai’s contribution to the politicization of the grass mud horse provides a clear example of the role of the “activism entrepreneur.” In one of his pieces of performance art, he took a number of pictures of himself in which he was naked except for a toy alpaca in front of his crotch. The message conveyed was “Fuck your mother, CCP Central Committee” because the alpaca is the grass mud horse, which, as mentioned, is a homonym for “fuck your mother,” and “center of the crotch” is a homonym for the Party’s Central Committee.¹⁰¹ This highly provocative performance politicized the grass mud horse meme significantly by going beyond targeting the censorship system to challenge the Party-state regime directly. Furthermore, when Ai was charged with tax evasion in 2011, he and his friends again made the incident a cyber-spectacle by launching an Internet fundraising campaign to pay his unpaid taxes and fines.¹⁰² Ai added to the episode in November 2011 by singing “The Song of Grass Mud Horse” in jail at the request of creditors who had donated money to his fundraising campaign.¹⁰³ This could be viewed as a large-scale performance that expressed not only his but also his supporters’ protest against state censorship and repression.

Ai Weiwei is fairly unusual, given his international reputation and artistic creativity, compared with ordinary netizens and other dissidents. But he is not singular in taking advantage of pop activism to disseminate his discourse of dissent. For instance, when sex videos purported to feature the actress Li Xiaolu went viral in May 2014, dissidents immediately turned the incident into a vehicle for anti-regime mobilization by inserting messages commemorating the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 into the video clips.¹⁰⁴ Cases like this demonstrate how regime critics can exploit popular elements of cyber-culture to spread their messages.

Similarly, controversial political intentions may result in a severe backlash. For instance, a known dissent activist on Mitbbs once forwarded a false suicide report of a local girl to the forum’s joke board.¹⁰⁸ The post immediately attracted criticism as some users did not see the message as funny at all. Similar conflicts between supporters and protesters of Falun Gong material appear frequently on Mitbbs and other overseas forums, and in some cases force board managers to impose limitations on such postings.¹⁰⁹ The backfiring of certain messages partially explains the rise of pro-regime voices that actively discredit regime critics online, as will be discussed in the following chapters.

The Internet has enabled resentful netizens and regime critics to resist and protest against state censorship and authoritarian rule in creative, artful, and humorous ways. Yet, online expression is more than digital contention. Through an examination of how political messages are produced, circulated, and consumed online, this chapter highlights the pluralization of Chinese cyberspace and reveals the entangled relationship between politics and popular cyber-culture. It argues that the dynamics of state control, discourse competition, and the pursuit of fun have together contributed to the rise of pop activism, in which the content of expression becomes extremely fluid and fuzzy when formats converge. In short, though various actors—the state, its critics, and different netizen groups—may have distinct agendas for their online expression, which may be political or apolitical, anti-regime or pro-regime, they all engage in the production and circulation of a shared Internet culture that centers on the format of expression. This is the key to deciphering political expression in China.

The analysis in this chapter reveals that a liberalization–control perspective runs the risk of downplaying the richness of political expression and implies a narrow view of the relationship between the state and society online. Pop activism as a tool has empowered social resistance to state censorship and authoritarian rule. In particular, motivated activism entrepreneurs such as dissident activists can play an important role in the production, distribution, and interpretation of pop activism content. But pop activism challenges not only the Party-state,110 but also political actors such as regime critics and foreign countries. Official ideologies, such as communism, “Three Represents,” and the harmonious society, have been confronted and deconstructed by many netizens, but so have alternatives to such Party-state ideologies, such as universal values. Moreover, pop activism is a double-edged sword for actors pursuing a political agenda. Though it may be effective in popularizing political information, it sometimes backfires when playfulness dilutes the message and when controversial political ideas cause antipathy among netizens wishing to stay away from politics and simply have a good time online.

This chapter also suggests a new perspective toward Internet politics, particularly with regard to the nature of online expression and its impact on authoritarian rule. Given the diverse actors, complex motivations, and dynamic processes involved, it is critical to examine how political expression is produced, circulated, and interpreted in specific online contexts. Evidently, the struggle is far beyond one between the state and society and is much richer than a story of censorship versus counter-censorship. Thus, the following chapters shift focus from the struggle over censorship to discourse competition by exploring how the state, regime critics, and ordinary netizens shape online discourse through innovative PR tactics, rich rhetorical tools, and creative expression.

English	Cyber-Vocabulary
China	天朝 (tianchao, Heavenly Dynasty)/兲朝(tianchao)^a
The government	朝廷 (chaoting, Royal Court)
The Chinese Communist Party	土共 (tugong, Bandit Communist Party)/TG^b
The Politburo and its members	长老团 (zhanglaotuan, Council of Elders)/长老 (zhanglao, Elders)
Mao Zedong	太祖 (Taizu, Emperor Taizu), 腊肉 (larou, Bacon)^c
Deng Xiaoping	笑贫(Xiaopin, Laughing at the Poor)/Shopping/286^d
Jiang Zemin	才帝(caidi, Emperor the Talented)/江Core (Jiang Core)/386^e
Hu Jintao	团团(tuantuan, Round and Round)/面瘫帝 (miantandi, Emperor the Face-Paralyzed)/蟹帝 (xiedi, Emperor the Crab)^f
Wen Jiabao	宝宝(baobao, Baby)/影帝 (yingdi, the Best Actor)^g
Li Changchun	长春真人 (changchun zhenren, Ever-Spring Immortal)^h
Zhou Yongkang	康师傅(Kang Shifu, Master Kang)ⁱ
Bo Xilai	平西王(pingxiwang, the King Who Pacified the West)^j