Between an emerging civil society and commercialization
Jens Damm
The unprecedented rise of social media in China, involving for various reasons the use of homegrown and localized applications instead of global ones, has its origin in the decision by the Chinese state in the late 1990s (Damm and Thomas 2006; Leibold 2011; F. Liu 2011; Xiao 2011) to foster the informatization (xinxihua) of its society in order to leapfrog economic development, to place China among the front ranks of global, economic, and political players, and to control the content so as to preempt any potential threat to social and political stability. This has led to a cat and mouse game being played between the state—the CCP (Chinese Communist Party)—and netizens who use the social media applications for commercial purposes, for interaction, and for critical engagement with the state (Yu 2011).
In this part I shall first provide an overview of the history of social media in China and some basic facts and figures. Second, I present how the role played by the state has led to popular practices involving the use of social media as a political playing field and for the purpose of parody in the cat and mouse game being played with the censors. Third, I show how social media have become a replacement for traditional media as well as a tool for improving traditional media (Xu 2015). These points shall be illustrated by references to a few well-known cases. Finally, I consider the question of the extent to which Chinese social media are integrated with other Asian cyber cultures, including those of Taiwan and Hong Kong. In order to provide a future perspective, a brief look will be taken at some of the more recent developments that have occurred since Xi Jinping became President, in order to assess whether, as a result of certain control mechanisms, the content of social media has shifted from being social and political to being trivial, commercialized, and geared to entertainment.
Up until 1992, the Internet in China was not developed and was used only for the exchange of emails among a few selected destinations. Between 1992 and 1995, a national infrastructure was built, which was then followed by the construction of the Great Firewall. Since 1998, the Internet has become a powerful social tool in China, while, at the same time, technological improvement and control have played a dominant role (Clark and Harwit 2006).
China has about 670 million Internet users today with an Internet penetration rate of 48.8 percent. Interestingly enough, 88.9 percent of these users access the Internet via mobile devices. From the most recent report of CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center 1/2016), one can see that the consumption behaviors and consumption needs of the netizens are being highlighted, and companies are being encouraged to develop new social media applications for these presumed needs. The interactive part, including microblogging, which was so intensely discussed only a few years ago, now draws much less attention (see, for example, the earlier 2013 CNNIC report, stating “Users of microblog kept growing, and mobile users saw a gradually dominating trend” (CNNIC 2/2013).
Another factor still very dominant in China is the digital divide between rural and urban areas (e.g. China’s Internet penetration is up to 64.2 percent (Crampton 2011) in urban areas and 30.1 percent in rural areas). There are also problems in gender structure, with 55 percent being male users, and an age structure in which most users (78.4 percent) range in age from ten to thirty-nine years (CNNIC 1/2016; see also Qiu 2009).
The most widely used applications in China are various forms of instant messaging, followed by news, search engines, and blogs, in addition to the streaming and downloading of multimedia content. The use of microblogging (see below) is at 30 percent overall and 27 percent for mobile Internet (CNNIC, 1/2016). Globally well-known social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, flourish in Chinese language media spaces such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, but have been blocked in China since 2009, and this also applies to Wikipedia (replaced by Baidu Baike). Nevertheless, from the data available at CNNIC, China’s own social media are prospering, and in many respects the use of social media and the Internet in China resembles the pattern found in the Western developed world and Japan and South Korea more than that in comparable developing countries (Crampton 2011; Damm 2014). While many social media applications in China have only become en vogue after their international counterparts were blocked, they nevertheless possess their own characteristics, influenced by China’s social infrastructure, the specific written form of the Chinese language and usage preferences, e.g. the high penetration of mobile Internet usage. Interestingly enough, in Taiwan and in Hong Kong, no localization of applications can be observed (for example, Facebook has its worldwide highest user rate in Taiwan) (Wu and Wu 2013); what is even more astonishing is that in other East Asian countries, e.g. South Korea and Japan where there are no strict regulations, international applications are nevertheless seldom found (Qin 2011).
At this point, I would like to briefly introduce the various Chinese versions: for instant messaging, Tencent’s QQ and WeChat are the most popular, while the previously popular MSN messenger became defunct in China in 2014 (much later than in the rest of the world) and was replaced by a Chinese version of Skype. The internationally well-known applications of WhatsApp (Europe, North America), LINE (Japan, Taiwan), and KakaoTalk (South Korea,) are also of little significance, again mainly due to the Great Firewall. Aside from the more rudimentary QQ, WeChat as a mobile application has become the most popular form, and in many cases the social and political discussions that were once found on Weibo have found their way to what is assumed to be the more secure space on WeChat, although recent reports show that WeChat accounts have been monitored and deleted. The entire official narrative on the usage of social media, however, is shifting away from user to user and social interchanges towards commercialization aspects, e.g. the marketing mode and the service mode (CNNIC 1/2016). There is also a wide range of newer social media, such as Momo, Wangwang and Dingtalk and Wumii, with a strong focus on market and commercialization aspects. Yu, Asur, and Huberman (2011) concluded that the content shared on Weibo is more focused on jokes, images, and videos than on current political and social issues; a large number of tweets are also just retweets.
For video downloading, You Tube has been replaced by Youku, Tudou, and other applications. Possibly for copyright reasons, many clips on Youku and Tudou are much longer than those found on Youtube. Moreover, since many U.S. films and TV series are not officially broadcast on China’s TV networks, their popularity heavily depends on these video-sharing apps, which are only shown and available within China.
The most widely discussed Chinese social media application, in terms of its assumed influence on China’s politics and society, is Sina Weibo, which offers features similar to those of Twitter and, to some extent, Facebook (CNNIC 1/2016; Yu et al. 2011). “Weibo” is generally used to refer to the most well-known Weibo of the company Sina, but it should be kept in mind that other big Chinese portals, such as Tencent and Sohu, have also set up their own localized versions of Twitter and Facebook, which were both banned in China in 2009 after the Urumqi riots (Culpan 2009). Sina Weibo, used by 70 percent, is definitely the best known of all the so-called microblogs—it is basically Twitter with quite a few improvements and the possibility for creating larger groups and adding multimedia content. It is also the most discussed form of social media with regard to the establishment of a society, criticism of the government, etc. Recently, however, stricter censorship measures, the obligation to use real names (which is not really always enforced), and general commercialization have led to a decline in this service, and many discussions today actually take place within WeChat (more similar to the Japanese app LINE or WhatsApp) than on Weibo. Although it cannot be denied that Sina Weibo has more features than Twitter, it has nevertheless remained much more localized than Facebook and Twitter. Sina Weibo has been reluctant to cater to other regions, and it is basically still maintained in Chinese and, for the most part, with simplified characters. A rudimentary English version exists, rumours of a Japanese version have been heard, and a localized version in traditional characters has been set up for the Taiwan and Hong Kong markets (Hk.weibo.com and Tw.weibo.com). Internet searches carried out with the Weibo-specific search engine provide the same results, no matter whether simplified or traditional characters are used (Belkin and Cohen 2015; King, Pan, and Roberts 2013; MacKinnon 2012).
There is no actual equivalent of Facebook in China. Social activists working both in China and in other Chinese language areas tend to copy their content from Facebook to Douban for their counterparts in China. However, in China some functions are delivered by Weibo, and in addition to Douban (which is very much focused on arts, literature, and culture, much less on politics), there are other known applications such as Kaixin001 (more related to big urban areas), QZone (more like Skype), as well as RenRen. Old-style bulletin board systems (BBS) have survived in China, probably due to the fact that they offer more anonymity than the other social media platforms.
The Internet in China, including the various forms of social media, is fairly well developed from the point of view of technology, accessibility, tailor-made social media applications, and bandwidth, but for years it has been severely restricted by a vast number of control mechanisms set up by CCP and the state apparatus. Unlike other authoritarian regimes, however, China has very actively promoted the use of various Internet applications from very early on and regards social media as essential for modernizing the nation—that is to say, both CCP and the state regard the “informatization” of society and the economy as crucial for economic, political, and social development. As social media have provided users with ample opportunities to connect with other netizens, to exchange ideas, and thus overcome the dichotomy between the state and its subjects (the term “qunzhong,” or the “masses,” was used in China until the 1990s), the emergence of social media has led to many discussions both within and outside China. Social media benefit the emergence of a civil society by offering a specific public sphere (taking into account that a public sphere in China is viewed differently from the way it is viewed in the West, as not being separate from the state and the economy, but linked to the state). It has also been argued that for most Chinese netizens, the Internet is regarded as a form of social media, since many users are young and began to utilize the Internet via the various social media platforms. Email and websites play a minor role compared with the West (Chiu, Ip, and Silverman 2012).
Some authors have remarked that the various interactive social media platforms, ranging from the once popular BBS (still in vogue in China and other Chinese language areas like Taiwan) to blogs and finally to the more recent Weibo (Leibold 2011; Yang 2009), offer opportunities for empowerment and civic engagement to various groups that suffer from widespread discrimination and marginalization in society (Ding 2014; Hu 2010; Jin 2008). The idea that this new public sphere, however, constitutes a particular challenge to the CCP’s one-party rule has been questioned, and market-oriented identities and consumer-oriented identities have emerged. This idea of active media citizenship in China, nevertheless restricted by political considerations, means that citizenship in China starting from the mid-2000s can be seen as a fluid and flexible concept built upon the spatial and subjective positions of the netizen (Yu, H. 2011).
Other voices, however, remind us that social media in China have led to Chinese netizens becoming less interested in politics, because these venues provide various forms of new and privatized entertainment. Moreover, the Internet
in China today is shaped by fragmentation and commercialization … Leading to a kind of “cyberbalkanization” of the on-line public sphere, as I have argued before, into increasingly insulated groups of like-minded “interest-based communities” who increasingly know and care more and more about less and less
and which is now especially targeted by commercialized social media (Damm 2014, 12; see also Chiu et al. 2012; Longford 2002; Sunstein 2007).
Another issue is the question of whether the Internet can act as an efficient interface in China and as a tool to foster the development of a civil society, by linking up domestic online communities with their international (and transregional) counterparts. Although China, other Asian countries, and those in Latin America are hosting the most active users of blogs and microblogs compared to the Western world, several research papers have focused on transnational communities (Chen 2012; Liu 2012), which up to now has tended to neglect this issue. In this respect, it should first be pointed out that Chinese cyberspace is restricted by the use of the language. While the issue of traditional characters—used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—versus simplified characters may easily be overcome by various technical measures, the various restrictions imposed by the Great Firewall hinder the more well-known global social media from becoming active in China. Users inside China, in addition, do not usually employ global social media applications, however, in some cases (e.g. the 2015 election of Tsai Ing-wen as Taiwan’s new president), Facebook was opened by the Chinese authorities to allow for criticism of her stance on unification.
Following are some of the well-known examples where Chinese citizens have used the new social media for political empowerment as found in the literature. Although direct political discussions on Weibo are hindered in China, the broader social and political meaning of Weibo lies in identity formation and in the defense of personal rights and interests (Poell, de Kloet, and Zeng 2014). Some of the better-known political cases involve environmental protection, such as the anti-PX-plant demonstrations (Hung 2013). With the help of bloggers and citizens’ journalists, the plan by Taiwan’s Xianglu Dragon Group to build a PX plant in the coastal city of Xiamen, Fujian province was successfully stopped. The protests were not limited to social-media platforms and SMS text messages, but culminated in citizens demonstrating on the streets of Xiamen. However, the construction of the plant was then relocated to the neighboring city of Zhangzhou. Other issues hotly debated in China’s blogosphere have included technological safety (for example, after the Wenzhou high-speed rail crash) and corruption (for example, the case of the National People’s Congress, when photos were put on Weibo showing representatives of poor districts wearing expensive luxury clothes). These cases certainly resulted in a certain level of empowerment for the Chinese people (for example, in the case of the Xiamen factory), but the new social media have often seemed to function more as a safety valve for spontaneous expression of bitterness, as the case of the high-speed rail crash has shown, where all the discussions that took place at that time have since been erased from the Internet in China.
Together with the official narrative on commercialisation, the question is, in which direction will China’s social media go? Will social media foster freedom online, political participation, and the emergence of a public sphere/civil society, or will the Great Firewall “win”? What roles do the Internet intermediaries play? These questions are tricky to answer. In general, freedom of the press is almost non-existent in China, as the France-based group “Reporters Without Borders” ranked China 175 out of 180 countries in its 2014 worldwide Index of Press Freedom. On the other hand, many Chinese netizens basically regard the Internet and social media as tools for spreading information, for commercial activities, and for dealing with specific issues concerning the environment and customer rights. There is little discussion, at a more abstract level, on freedom of speech. The space offered by social media, however, is no longer restricted to a tiny minority at subnational and transnational levels, but is being increasingly taken up by many netizens on various occasions.
The reasons for these contradictions are manifold. For example, while trying to control the content of the Internet and making it thus similar to traditional media, the Chinese state has also spent hundreds of billions on infrastructure and regards informatization as essential for the nation’s economic growth as well as for its special form of good governance under CCP’s one-party rule. Another reason is increasing rural to urban migration over long distances, leading migrants to increasingly employ social media for their communication.
There are also some latest developments, especially taking into account Xi Jinping’s statements, demonstrating China’s insistence on Internet sovereignty, or cyber sovereignty, as CCP’s central policy concept for dealing with the Internet (Bandurski 2015):
Properly conducting public opinion work online is a long-term task, and [we] must innovate and improve our online propaganda, using the principles of Internet communication, carrying forward the main theme, exciting positive energy, and energetically fostering and fulfilling the socialist core values, ensuring a good grasp of the timing, degree and effectiveness of online public opinion channeling, so that the online space becomes clear and bright.
(Bandurski 2015)
Thus, for China in the near future we may expect a more nationalized social media environment and more commercialization, but less microblogging and less personal space. In addition, the trend towards national online Chinese social media will continue, while existing contacts to the outside global world, including the Chinese language Internet space, will further shrink.
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