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THE RITUALS AND GENRES OF CONTENTION

Contention always has a cultural aspect. It involves contentious performances and uses symbolic resources such as narratives, languages, imagery, and music. Recurrent performances become rituals. Symbolic resources fall into genres. The quality that distinguishes the use of certain symbolic resources in certain historical periods, regions, and social strata constitutes style.¹ A culture of contention is thus recognizable to the extent that contentious rituals, genres, and styles can be identified. It is through the rituals, genres, and styles of representation that activists express demands and grievances, identify opponents, arouse public sympathy, build a sense of solidarity, and mobilize participation.

Culture is thus the symbolic vehicle of contention. Popular contention does not come from nowhere; it travels by culture. For this reason, changes in the culture of contention signal and initiate changes in other aspects of contention, and vice versa. While age-old rituals of contention provide ready-made forms of action, the appearance of new rituals, genres, and styles reflects changes in the contents and conditions of contention. Similarly, creativity in contention may start with innovations in the culture of contention.

Despite its short history, online activism in China has developed its culture. Focusing on its rituals and genres, this chapter will show that the culture of online activism contains both traditional elements of popular contention and important innovations. Through their use of the new media technologies, people have created new rituals and genres of contention. These digital rituals and genres are particularly effective in mobilizing collective action through the mobilization of emotions such as anger, joy, sympathy, humor, and laughter.²

The rituals and genres of online activism are forms of action and expression. They are cultural forms. Raymond Williams’s conception of cultural form therefore provides a useful tool for such an analysis.

Cultural Form and the Human Condition

In discussing television as a cultural form, Raymond Williams starts by noting the “complicated interaction between the technology of television and the received forms of other kinds of cultural and social activity.”³ He acknowledges the claim that “television is essentially a combination and development of earlier forms,” but he emphasizes that “it is clearly not only a question of combination and development” but involves “significant changes” and “some real qualitative differences.”⁴

News, for example, is an existing form commonly associated with the print media (newspapers). The airing of news on television may appear to be the incorporation of an existing form into a new media form. Yet Williams suggests that news on television is not exactly the same as news in newspapers. Among other things, there are differences in the sequence and format of presentation. These differences affect both the audience and the forms of editorial control. Newspapers present multiple news items on the same page. Despite the different degrees of importance conventionally assigned to different parts of the page, readers have more control over what to read first and what next. Television and broadcast news, however, is presented in linear fashion, one item following another. The audience has less control. These different forms of news thus reflect different kinds of editorial control and induce different audience behavior.

This suggests that new cultural forms appear through human agency in response to specific social conditions. Thus television is a new cultural form created by people to meet new needs under new historical conditions. Two central concepts in Williams’s book on television convey this central thesis. One concept is “flow,” which he notes is the main feature of television. On television, news follows advertisements, which follow other features, one after another without interruption, creating the impression of a natural flow. Yet this flow “is determined by a deliberate use of the medium rather than by the nature of the material being dealt with.”⁵ Ultimately, it is “the flow of meanings and values of a specific culture.”⁶ In stressing human intention and agency behind television, Williams intends to expose the power dynamics behind the creation of television as a new cultural form. His focus is on the critique of power and domination. Yet human agency also appears as resistance against power. Subordinate and marginalized social actors may challenge power through the creative use of traditional and new cultural forms.

Form is related to content. Television as a new cultural form, according to Williams, expresses new social conditions. He uses the concept of “mobile privatization” to capture the new social conditions, which he views as “two apparently paradoxically yet deeply connected tendencies of modern urban industrial living: on the one hand mobility, on the other hand the more apparently self-sufficient family home.”⁷ Television thus served as an “at-once mobile and home-centered way of living: a form of mobile privatization.”⁸ For Williams, this modern urban industrial living is directly linked to industrial capitalist society. On this view, television as a cultural form is a product of Western capitalist modernity and cannot be understood in isolation from this modern human condition.

The Culture of Contention in Modern China

China has a long tradition of popular contention, from peasant rebellions in imperial times to twentieth-century revolutions. Elizabeth Perry finds that one of the most developed means of challenging authority in this enduring tradition is the creative appropriation of state rituals and official rhetoric.⁹ Like Perry, Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom observe the enduring use of ancient rituals in modern protests. The most recent effervescence of this tradition was the student movement in 1989. These scholars identify the following elements: (1) inversion of state rituals and ceremonies such as memorial services for state leaders,¹⁰ (2) adherence to traditionally sanctioned modes of behavior through the use of remonstrance and presentation of petitions,¹¹ (3) the presentation of banners representing one’s work-unit,¹² (4) vowing to sacrifice lives for beliefs (and thus achieving martyrdom),¹³ and (5) street theater consisting of both traditional dramatic repertoire and new cultural forms borrowed from Western traditions.¹⁴

The street theater of 1989 was alive with contentious performances, including chanting slogans, singing songs, hoisting banners and signs, making public speeches, issuing open petitions, and distributing leaflets and big-character posters. In examining early twentieth-century student protests, Esherick and Wasserstrom showed that foreign models were a natural source for at least part of the repertoire of this street theater, especially the culture of public meetings, demonstrations, and speeches. These elements were then practiced and passed down through the Republican era to the PRC period. The state itself, whether it was Guomindang or the Communist Party, helped transmit this political culture through its mechanisms of patriotic mass mobilization and political campaigns. The culture had become so powerful that by the time Deng Xiaoping emerged from the Cultural Revolution to initiate the economic reform, he was unsuccessful in his attempt to abandon it. As Esherick and Wasserstrom put it, “some public rituals are always necessary, and in those rituals there is always the danger that students or other actors will usurp the stage and turn the official ritual into their own political theater.”¹⁵

Perry’s analysis provides another way of understanding the contentious repertoires in modern China. She emphasizes how state responses to contention shaped the forms of contention historically. Challenging authorities, or the Mandate of Heaven, as Perry puts it, was a legitimate part of China’s Confucian political culture. This element has persisted. It may even be observed during times when Confucianism itself was discredited, such as during the May Fourth movement and the Cultural Revolution. Yet authorities often respond in different ways to different kinds of protests. These responses were historically conditioned. Taking three contemporary cases as examples, Perry argues that the central government was tolerant of subsistence-based protests by farmers and workers, because historically such protests of moral economy enjoyed some legitimacy in Chinese political culture and were not deemed particularly threatening by the regimes. In contrast, religious protests by Falun Gong practitioners carried the memories of sectarian-inspired rebellions that had overthrown past Chinese dynasties. They were particularly feared by the central authorities and most ruthlessly suppressed. Finally, toward student nationalistic protests against the bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade in 1999, Chinese state authorities entertained great ambivalence. The Chinese Communist Party itself was born out of such student movements in the early twentieth century. Central authorities understood that both supporting or opposing students’ nationalistic sentiments could backfire. That government authorities first opposed and then supported student rallies reflected their ambivalence. They ended up supporting the demonstrations at least partly because the events happened just after May 4, the anniversary of the sacred May Fourth movement in the history of the Chinese communist revolution. Opposing students at this time would risk “being accused of failing to protect Chinese sovereignty.”¹⁶

The repertoire of contention in modern China reflects the peculiar relations between state and society. The inversion of state rituals and ceremonies, the adherence to traditionally sanctioned modes of behavior, the exemplary role of national martyrs, and even the hoisting of work-unit banners all betray a degree of mutual legitimization between state and citizens. For citizens, appropriating state rituals is a means of legitimizing their own contentious activities. This does not minimize the power of protest. Protests often gained power through the appropriation of state rituals. But it is important to see how forms of contention reflect the institutional arrangements of power and their relations with citizens.

Perry finds that the peculiar state-society relations formed throughout the centuries have yielded an “intellectual traditionalism,” an “emperor-worship mentality” in popular protests in modern China. This mentality was found even among Chinese student protesters in 1989. For even as students demonstrated against the government, they yearned for recognition from government leaders. Zhao Ziyang was a target of attack in the early days of the protests, but when he visited the hunger strikers on May 19, he became an instant hero.¹⁷ This intellectual traditionalism is a telling part of popular contention in modern China, suggesting how powerful the Confucian political culture continues to be.¹⁸

Writing about Chinese political culture and the meaning of democracy, Andrew Nathan appears to share the view of a persistent intellectual traditionalism in China. Yet with a focus on democratic struggles in twentieth-century China, he sees this traditionalism mainly in the high degree of harmony of interests between democrats and the state when they were faced with the crisis of national salvation. All modern Chinese constitutions recognized the sovereignty of the people, he argues, but individual interest was almost always subordinate to the higher interest of the nation. Democrats since Liang Qichao have cherished the same aspirations for strengthening the nation as have state rulers. Down to the Democracy Wall movement and the student movement in 1989, many democracy activists and state authorities continued to share the same instrumental view of democracy as a means of achieving modernization rather than as an end in itself.¹⁹ This vision derives from the historical struggles in search of wealth and power for the nation.²⁰

Nathan notes, however, that the more radical activists in the Democracy Wall movement made original contributions to China’s democratic struggles because they “insisted that democracy could not perform its functions unless it involved the exercise of real power by the people…. The significance of the democracy movement in modern Chinese history was thus that it denied the facile identification of the people’s interests with the state’s, an identification that had dominated the Chinese vision of democracy since Liang Qichao.”²¹ Nathan suggests that, at least among the more radical flanks, the “emperor-worship mentality” had dissipated by the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Why did it resurface among students and intellectuals in 1989? An important reason is probably a discontinuity following the repression of the Democracy Wall movement.²² All the major Democracy Wall activists were put into prison or went into exile in foreign countries. Inside China, the movement was little known. At the time of the student demonstrations in 1989, the “black hands” behind the students did not include many Democracy Wall veterans. More importantly, despite “democracy salons” and cultural debates in the 1980s, the students most active in the movement belonged to a younger generation with little experience in political activism. To be sure, students had the May Fourth tradition to look back to. But the May Fourth tradition was passed down to them in school textbooks and distilled of its most democratic elements. Its sacredness derives from its mythical function “as a prologue to the Revolution.”²³ May Fourth was exalted as a tradition of patriotism more than anything else. It hardly contained the inklings of the Democracy Wall activists’ rejection of what Nathan refers to as “the facile identification of the people’s interests with the state’s.” Thus in 1989, Chinese students had to learn their democracy lessons anew. An “emperor-worship mentality” persisted.

The Persistence of Traditional Rituals

China’s time-honored culture of contention endures in the Internet age. Many long-established practices are replicated online. Yet even as traditional forms persist, people create new ones. Some new forms are creative adaptations of traditional practices to the new media; others are expansions made possible by the new media. I will discuss the continuity of contentious rituals first.

Contentious rituals can take verbal or nonverbal forms. Popular verbal rituals in Chinese contentious culture include the submission of petitions, the issuing of open letters, the posting of wall posters, the circulation of leaflets and handbills, the publication of self-edited newspapers and magazines, the chanting of slogans, the singing of songs, public speeches and debates, and the voicing of moral support (shengyuan). Nonverbal forms include rallies, demonstrations, sit-ins, “linking up” (chuanlian), the occupation of public spaces, and hunger strikes. The Internet lends itself naturally to practicing verbal rituals, but even some nonverbal forms are replicated online. On the Internet, a street rally becomes the rallying of BBS posts. In December 2003 and January 2004, Chinese netizens challenged the court ruling that gave a light sentencing to a BMW owner who ran over and killed a poor farmer. People accused the court of corruption and demanded a new trial. A message posted on January 16, 2004, called on Chinese all over the world to have an “Internet rally … by simultaneously posting messages in all Chinese BBS forums.”²⁴

Second, the tradition of popular contention informs online activism by providing a cultural toolkit. Thus many traditional rituals of protest, such as sloganeering and the use of wall posters, are replicated online. In the Maoist era, shouting and posting slogans were everyday elements of the contentious repertoire. Shouting typically happened in groups, but the posters could appear in any public space and could be done individually. Slogans are easy to write, do not require a great deal of analytical skill, express strong opinions and emotions, and are memorable. For example, “Down with so and so!” was a favorite slogan during the Red Guard Movement and even the student movement in 1989.

Protests in Chinese cyberspace are full of sloganeering. In the protests surrounding the death of Beijing University student Qiu Qingfeng, one message posted on May 25, 2000, in the “Current Affairs” forum of Sohu.com, titled “Give back the safety and peace of the campus,” consists of the following slogans:

Save our compatriots!

Save ourselves!

Stand up! Our determination!

Our dignity!

The author of another message, posted on May 26, 2000, in the same forum, exclaimed: “I am angry not just about the murder of the female student in Peking University, but about what the university did before and after the student was murdered!!!!!”²⁵ The multiple exclamation marks are common in these protestations. They both express the authors’ own strong emotions and appeal directly to the emotions of the readers on the Internet.

Internet posts resemble big-character posters both in form and function. Like wall posters, online posts encompass various genres—essays, letters, poems, slogans, one-sentence statements, and single-word exclamations such as “Yes!” and “Nonsense!”²⁶ For example, during the aforementioned protest, several poems were dedicated to the victim and circulated in online forums. I mentioned one poem, titled “Maple Flying: For the Soul of the Dead,” in the previous chapter. Some users posted messages in the form of letters that conveyed a strong sense of solidarity. One letter begins thus: “So glad to hear back from you in such a short time. Previously, I’ve read your postings about the Beijing University incident in ‘Ji’an Forum’ and the ‘China and the World Forum.’ I am not completely clear about the details of the incident (no time to follow everything), but based on what I know, I have developed my own views.”²⁷ The letter writer then explained that the protest was important because it articulated the widespread problem that the interests of some segments of the population lacked protection.

A third type of ritual that is replicated online is “linking up” (chuanlian). This practice may have an early origin, when people traveled long distances to submit petitions to rulers. Wasserstrom mentions a case in 1931 and compares this practice to the religious tradition of pilgrimages, with all the rituals and mobilizing power of a pilgrimage.²⁸ The linking-up practices from the Red Guard movement to the student movement in 1989 were pilgrimage-like petition journeys. They were an effective tactic of translocal mobilization and were much feared by the state. One reason for the quick spread of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 was that students traveled across the country to “link up” with students in other cities. Both during the Democracy Wall movement and the 1989 student movement, activists across the country again linked up. Some of this was done by phone and mail. In other cases, people traveled around to meet fellow activists. In both movements, activists in the provinces traveled to Beijing to link up. These linking-up activities became an important means of spreading protests.

In the protests surrounding the death of Qiu Qingfeng in May 2000, activists accomplished new ways of linking up online. These were linkages between cyberspace and physical spaces and between domestic and transnational spaces. The links between cyberspace and physical spaces took three forms. First, some messages in the bulletin boards were printed and posted on the walls in some campus areas, providing a source of wall posters.²⁹ The author of one post reported reading a campus wall poster that had first appeared on the Internet.

Second, online forums were used to announce campus protest events, thus turning the Internet into an organizational space for offline activities. This happened both in Beijing and elsewhere. In Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, for example, small-scale memorial gatherings were organized by “net friends.”³⁰ In Beijing, a demonstration from Tsinghua University to Beijing University on the night of May 23 was much publicized in a widely circulated post.³¹ This same pattern of mobilization would happen again and again in later years, such as in the anti-Japanese protests in 2005 and the Xiamen “PX incident” in 2007.

The third linkage between cyberspace and offline space was the almost instantaneous online broadcast of campus events. One post described the evening vigil on May 23 thus: “On the stairs near the Triangle area, a huge heart-shaped pattern was created with flickering candles, with little white-paper flowers in the middle of the heart.”³² Online broadcasts helped keep interested persons informed about what was happening on the ground. They also helped create a sense of drama for those who were not present, and in so doing, generated emotional appeal. Sociologists maintain that the “drama” of social movements needs to be sustained by keeping up the interest of the “cast” and the audience.³³ Online broadcast of the offline events served this purpose.

Besides the links between cyberspace and physical spaces, there were transnational connections between bulletin boards in and outside China. Some posts were crossposted to Chinese-language forums in the United States. Some messages that appeared in BBS forums in China were clearly posted by overseas users, especially Beijing University alumni. The author of a message posted on May 29, 2000, argued that fighting for one’s own interests, something common in the United States, was a sign of social progress. Another message was posted the same day in another forum by someone called “Wanderer.” Self-identified as a Chinese student in an American university, “Wanderer” praised the security measures on American campuses and suggested that Chinese universities should learn from the American example. In these ways, the linkages between online space and offline space shaped the online and offline protest. The Internet was used to organize and mobilize offline protest. The online broadcast kept people in other places informed about events on the ground.³⁴

Innovative Rituals in Online Activism

Repertoires of collective contention are resistant to change. Once people become accustomed to particular modes of action, they do not easily abandon them. A modular change in repertoires, however, took place when a traditional “parochial/patronized” repertoire shifted to a modern “national/ autonomous” type.³⁵ This change happened with the rise of modern print capitalism. Newspapers and books helped bind geographically dispersed people together in emotional ties, creating long-distance imagined communities and “communities of print.”³⁶ Powerful movements such as the American and the French revolutions happened because, in Sidney Tarrow’s words, “the loose ties created by print and association, by newspapers, pamphlets, and informal social networks, made possible a degree of coordinated collective action across groups and classes that the supposedly ‘strong ties’ of social class seldom accomplished.”³⁷

In China today, new forms of contention—new rituals and genres—are appearing. Innovative use of the Internet for contentious purposes is common. Such innovation reflects both the technological capacities of the Internet and the social, cultural, and political conditions in which they are deployed. Most cases in my sample involve one of the following practices:

 Contention in BBS forums

 Short text messaging

 Blogging

 Hosting of campaign Web sites

 Online signature petitions

 Hacking of Web sites

None is entirely new. Even Web hacking is reminiscent of the defacement or invasion of public or forbidden areas common in street protests. Yet all are innovative because of their use of new digital technologies. With few exceptions, BBS forums are not set up for protest. They are online communities for everyday socialization. Yet they have often lent themselves to protest and contention.³⁸ All the major cases of online protest in China have happened in BBS forums. There are economic and social reasons for this, which I will explore in detail in later chapters. For now, suffice it to note that the blockage of other channels for public protest, the political risks in street protests, and a participatory Internet culture have combined to render BBS contention a popular new form. It is also among the most powerful forms of online activism, because it tends to involve large numbers.

Short text messaging is another innovative ritual. Sometimes critical messages are circulated by cellphone. This happened frequently during the SARS crisis in 2003.³⁹ Another well-known case, which I will discuss below, is the circulation of a satirical poem by text messaging, which led to the arrest of its author, Qin Zhongfei. Text messaging has also been used to organize offline protests. The best-known example is the Xiamen PX (para-xylene) case. At the end of May 2007, Internet and cellphone users in the southern city of Xiamen began to receive information about a “leisure walk” to take place on June 1 in the city center. The information was circulated in posts in BBS forums and through SMS (short message service). The walk was to demonstrate opposition to the construction of a PX chemical plant in the vicinity of the city, because, the messages explained, PX is highly hazardous to human health. City officials learned about the planned “walk,” and to forestall it, they discussed the PX project in city newspapers to assure residents about its safety. Then on May 30, again in an attempt to dissolve the planned demonstration, a deputy mayor announced at a news conference that the project would be postponed and a comprehensive environmental impact assessment would be conducted. Residents were apparently not convinced, and the “walk” took place as planned.

The choice of words here was of special interest. It again aimed at creating a particular kind of emotional appeal. By calling on citizens to take a “leisure walk” rather than join a premeditated demonstration, the organizers added a lighthearted tone to a serious event. For potential participants, this helped to reduce the sense of fear and anxiety that often accompany such activities. It was also an effective rhetorical strategy to forestall potential government repression, because even harsh government authorities would find it hard not to let citizens take “leisure walks.”⁴⁰

Blogs are a new digital form often used for contentious purposes. In some ways, blogs are the Internet extension of the traditional diary. Not only does the term itself, “weblog,” refer to a form of diary, but their actual uses also resemble those of the traditional diary. Like diaries, most blogs chronicle personal experiences in addition to other issues of personal or public interest. Like diaries, blogs often have an informal style and personal touches. There are also major differences between blogs and the traditional diary. Although some diaries are written for publication, the typical diary is private. It is written for personal use, not to be read, circulated, and discussed by others. But blogs are open documents published on Web sites. They are public, and readers can leave comments and otherwise interact with the blog writers and other readers. Bloggers want people to visit and read their Web sites, and they try hard to attract readers.

The demand for blogs is one of the many incentives for the rise of citizen journalism in China. Citizen journalism, or participatory journalism, refers to journalism produced “by the people, for the people.”⁴¹ It consists of many broad categories, including photos, videos, and stories produced by individual citizens on their own Web sites, as well as various forms of audience participation in mainstream news outlets.⁴² Blogs are a particularly important outlet for producing citizen journalism, because they are run by countless individuals in all parts of the world. The many special features of blogs, such as openness and interactivity, make blogs an effective form of information sharing and communication.

Chinese bloggers cover issues of broad social concern often neglected by official media. The best-known blogger is perhaps Zhou Shuguang, who I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter. He became famous for covering the so-called nailhouse incident. A nailhouse in this case refers to a family who stubbornly refuses to relocate without receiving proper compensation from the developers.⁴³ At a time when real-estate development is expanding greedily, citizens are often forced to relocate to make way for the development, at great cost. Thus when a couple in Chongqing refused to budge even after construction had begun around their house, they received a lot of sympathy from the public. Sensing the general public concern for this incident, Zola (Zhou Shuguang’s online nickname) traveled to Chongqing from his home town in Hunan to cover the events.

The hosting of campaign Web sites is still another popular new form. Campaign Web sites are set up solely for purposes of protest and contention. They fall into several types according to their main functions. Most are rights-defense Web sites. These are devoted to rights defense on a broad range of issues, such as consumer rights, migrant rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, peasants’ rights, and homeowners’ rights. The second type is watchdog Web sites, anticounterfeiting (dajia) Web sites, and anticorruption Web sites. New Threads has a watchdog Web site for exposing corruption in the Chinese academia and scientific communities. Yuluncn.cn and ff.adbt.cn are among the most influential anticorruption Web sites. The third type, set up for specific campaigns, is usually short lived. Such campaign sites disappear when the campaigns are over. Yet because they have specific targets and often appear in response to issues of current concern, they may be quite influential. The best example is perhaps the anticnn.com campaign Web site, launched to challenge Western media’s coverage of the Tibetan riots in March 2008. Set up by a twenty-three-year-old man, the campaign site uses effective visual presentation to show how several major Western media agencies either cropped images to present distorted pictures of street conflicts in Tibet or, in one case, presented pictures of police conflicts with monks in Nepal as images of police crackdown on monks in Tibet. The small campaign site was widely cited not only by Chinese mass media and major portal sites but also by Chinese-language media outside China. The news agency that used images of Nepalese police as images of Chinese police reportedly made apologies for its error.⁴⁴

Online signature petitions, another popular form, are also of short duration. Some petitions were launched in the middle of BBS-based contention. The petitions were drafted by individuals, posted in BBS forums, and circulated online by netizens. The protests surrounding the death of Wang Han in 1998 and Sun Zhigang and Huang Jing in 2003 all involved the circulation of such petitions. In other cases, signature petitions are hosted on Web sites and supported by special computer software. The most powerful signature petitions so far happened in 2005, when several Web-based nationalistic groups organized petitions to oppose Japan’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council. The petitions were hosted in two dozen Web sites and, from March 21 to May 10, 2005, collected over forty-one million signatures from people in forty-one countries, which were then presented to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.⁴⁵

The hacking of Web sites, or hacktivism, is a disruptive form of online protest. It happens most frequently in nationalistic protests. Chinese hackers, for example, placed anti-NATO messages on the Web sites of three American government agencies during the protests against the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia in 1999.⁴⁶ In March 2001, they targeted Japanese Web sites in response to a Japanese textbook’s distortion of World War II history and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine.

These five types of contentious rituals are used against different targets and are not equally subversive. Typically, the more subversive the protest, the less predictable and more fluid its forms. Online signature petitions and campaign Web sites are stable forms; they tend to have more legitimacy and are less politically subversive. Hacking is an aggressive act, but in most cases, its targets are foreign Web sites. Protests in BBS forums and through text messaging are among the most subversive. They are also the most fluid and unpredictable. The degree of subversion is closely linked to the degree of legitimacy and contingency of the protest activities.

The Genres of Digital Contention

Like contentious rituals, the genres of digital contention consist of both traditional and new types, and genres change just as slowly as do the rituals of contention. As with rituals, relatively few genres of online activism are entirely new. Modifications and extensions of existing genres are much more common than the invention of entirely new genres. Petition letters and poems are time-honored genres of protest in China.⁴⁷ Public speeches and manifestos were imported from the West at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁴⁸ Marx’s Communist Manifesto both introduced Marxist thought across the world and established the manifesto as a revolutionary genre.⁴⁹ Other popular genres before the advent of the Internet include jokes, slogans, couplets, public statements, songs, cartoons, parodies, oaths, curses, and what Northrop Frye refers to as the “primitive language of screams and gestures and sighs.”⁵⁰ All these genres appeal powerfully to human emotions. Poems and manifestos often inspire heroic passions. Jokes and cartoons create laughter and humor. These ancient genres have been preserved, revived, adapted, or digitized in online activism. The traditional genre of the diary, for example, appears online as blogs. The Internet-specific new genres that have been put to contentious purposes include BBS posts, blogs, text messaging, Flash videos, and synchronous chat. The general picture is the flourishing of diverse speech genres. This is in itself is a challenge to power. Whether for lack of political imagination or sheer humor, political authorities everywhere tend to employ a narrower range of speech types, such as public announcements and radio speeches. The variety of genres is not an invention of Internet contention but rather a common feature of protest in modern China. Poems, letters, essays, and proclamations abounded in earlier social movements. A collective memory of popular contention is carried in these genres, so that each time they appear, they give their authors and readers a sense of moral legitimacy and rhetorical power.⁵¹

In the broad spectrum of Chinese speech genres, two categories are especially popular in online activism. The first includes all kinds of confessional and autobiographical genres, especially diaries, letters, essays, and personal photographs. Most BBS posts have autobiographical elements, because in them the authors often talk about themselves. Personal photographs and video clips published online also belong here. And, of course, blogs are confessional par excellence. The other broad category of speech genres may be called, following Bakhtin, the “parodic-travestying” form. It encompasses all those genres that use humor for satire, irony, or sheer fun. They include jokes, doggerel, satire (in both prose and verse), shunkouliu, and above all, parody. Parody is as old as human civilization,⁵² yet it has never enjoyed such a renaissance as in Chinese cyberspace today. Everything imaginable, and especially those things involving the powerful and the rich, are subject to parody and laughter in Chinese cyberspace. Table 3.1 lists the two types of genres.

The two categories sometimes overlap. For example, there are Flash videos about personal lives that are not necessarily parodic. And each category mixes existing forms with new digital forms. But it is useful to make this broad distinction in order to stress the salient features of each type. Let me start with an ancient genre: verse. Verse as a form of contention has a venerable tradition dating all the way back to Confucius’s commentaries in the Book of Poetry. The Chinese literati, proud masters of the verse form, used it to air grievances as much as they used it to compose panegyrics and eulogies. When used in contention by ordinary folk, verse assumes numerous variant forms all sharing the features of humor, irony, satire, and parody. Couplets were a popular form of contention among peasants in the Qing period.⁵³ Shunkouliu, which Perry Link and Kate Zhou render vividly as “slippery jingles,” is another popular form of folk wisdom, as is doggerel (dayou shi). Sometimes music is added to these simple verses, turning them into popular tunes.

TABLE 3.1 Two Popular Genres in Online Activism

Confessional/Autobiographical	Parodic/Satirical
Diaries	Jokes
Letters	Doggerel
Essays	Slippery jingles
Personal photographs	Verse
Personal videos	Songs
Blogs	Flash videos

 

Verse is a favorite genre of contention because it is an effective vehicle of mass communication. With its simple and memorable form, it travels easily by word of mouth. Every major revolutionary movement in history has left behind its verse and music. Social movements in modern China are no exception. The 1989 student movement had popular verse jingles about corrupt officials. The April Fifth movement in 1976 was literally a movement of verse, when ordinary citizens posted their angry poems in Tiananmen Square while crowds huddled and jostled to copy and read them. In the Cultural Revolution, “educated youth” songs circulated underground among the young people even though they were officially banned because of their satirical lyrics.

If verse travels easily by word of mouth, it travels even faster in cyberspace. Slippery jingles of political satire are posted in online forums and forwarded en masse by e-mail and text-messaging systems. They are disseminated in such volumes that a veritable folklore of slippery jingles has appeared in cyberspace. Some Chinese Web sites host collections of slippery jingles and other humorous genres.⁵⁴ My own modest collection includes a fourteen-page sample of jingles posted on May 24, 2000, in the popular Strengthening the Nation forum. One of these jingles, titled “A Day in the Life of an Official,” makes fun of government officials’ corrupt lifestyles:

Morning: cruising around in an automobile

Noon: eating at lunch tables

Afternoon: playing at gambling tables

Night: hanging around women

Satirical verse like this exposes social ills in a humorous manner. Its influence comes from its wide dissemination, but the wide dissemination is not only due to the means of communication but also to the rhetorical (and therefore emotional) appeal of the satirical verse form. Historically, authorities went to great lengths to hunt down the authors of subversive verses, but because they passed around by word of mouth, it was not always easy to find their authors. A recent case reveals both how authorities fear the power of such verses when they enter cyberspace and how they can mobilize the resources of control to hunt down their authors. In August 2006, a young government employee named Qin Zhongfei in Pengshui County, Sichuan Province, composed a poem mocking corrupt county officials. He thought his poem was so funny that he text messaged it to friends. On September 1, Qin was arrested on charges of slander. Online, people protested against Qin’s arrest, arguing that he was simply voicing public concerns about corruption and that local officials attempted to silence people’s voices by illegally arresting him.⁵⁵

As ancient genres of contention remain alive and strong online, new ones appear. Blogs are a new fad.⁵⁶ With over seven million active blogs in 2006, it is not surprising that some of them at some points become politically tendentious. Flash videos, another trendy part of the popular Internet culture, have also lent themselves to activism. Other digital genres used in online activism are digital photographs and videos.

An influential case of blog-related contention is the sex diary published by Muzimei in 2003. Muzimei’s detailed and liberal descriptions about her numerous sexual partners provoked nationwide debates about sexual mores in contemporary society.⁵⁷ Another influential case is a controversy about single motherhood. In August 2006, a blogger named “Ground Melon Pig” (diguazhu), pregnant but unmarried, announced in her blog that she had decided to give birth to the baby and be a single mother. Supporters, who included other single mothers, expressed admiration for her courage. Some suggested starting Web sites for single mothers to socialize and provide mutual support. Critics noted the social pressures the single mother would face and argued that a baby could not be without a father. The issue aroused such intense debate that according to one source, her blog attracted more than 300,000 hits in one week.⁵⁸

Visual images such as digital pictures are an important new genre in contention. In social movements, political cartoons are a favorite genre of expression. They gain new power in the digital age because of the ease of production and dissemination.⁵⁹ In November 2006, for example, images of Beijing residents protesting the municipal government’s crackdown on dog ownership were posted and circulated online, provoking both protests and counterprotests from those who claimed that their lives had been disrupted by the dogs. During the “nailhouse incident” in Chongqing in 2007, blogger Zola Zhou posted many digital pictures of the nailhouse and its owners. In the “PX incident” in Xiamen, images of graffiti expressing opposition to the PX project were widely circulated in BBS forums and blogs.

Of the various digital genres, Flash videos are especially popular, giving rise to a special social group called shanke (flash guests), in imitation of such familiar terms as heike (dark guests, referring to hackers) and bo’ke (bloggers).

A Flash movie is a digital video file created with Adobe’s Shockwave Flash software. Such files are small enough to be easily loadable and viewable online. With their visual and aural appeal, Flash films are a very popular part of Chinese Internet culture. One of the most popular Web sites in China devoted to Flash movies is flashempire.com, launched in 1999.⁶⁰ Since then, many creative Flash artists have appeared. Chinese Flash films have touched on a broad range of contentious topics. Female artists have created Flash movies to express feminist views of the world. Nationalism and environmental protection are also popular topics.⁶¹

Undoubtedly the most famous of all Chinese Flash movies is the parody of celebrity director Chen Kaige’s big-budget film The Promise, a romantic fantasy set during a time of war in ancient China. The story opens with a scene of a small girl pillaging the corpses of soldiers for food. She finds a bun (mantou), loses it to a tricky boy, then gets it back by outwitting him, only to drop it into a river while fleeing the boy. A goddess appears and tells the girl that she can give the little girl a life of luxury but that all the men she loves will die. The girl accepts the offer and the film flashes forward to the adult world of military battles and court intrigues. Now a grown woman, the heroine is pursued by three men—a duke, a general, and a slave. The duke and the general die at the end, but the slave survives.

The Promise was met with negative reviews in China. Filmgoers generally felt that Chen had squandered money on a film with an artificial and improbable plot and that it was an unsuccessful attempt to produce a film of epic grandeur. BBS forums were full of critical comments. People also blamed the film crew for causing environmental damage to a pristine region in Yunnan province where the film was shot. It was in this atmosphere that Hu Ge made a twenty-minute Flash film titled “A Bloody Case Caused by a Steamed Bun,” to make fun of The Promise.

A young man of thirty-one, Hu Ge worked in Shanghai as a salesman of audiovisual equipment and as a music-and sound-effects editor. After seeing The Promise on December 18, 2005, he posted critical comments on the film in his personal BBS forum. Then it occurred to him that he could make his own version of the film using Flash software. He spent five days writing a script and four days producing the sound and visuals. Upon finishing the project, he shared it with a few friends and loaded it onto his BBS forum. Soon his short film appeared on many Web sites; BBS forums were full of talk about it. Then mainstream television and newspapers covered the story and the parody received national attention.⁶²

Chen Kaige, the target of Hu’s short film, charged Hu of violating copyright laws by using footage from his film without permission and threatened to sue. This again made national news. Public sympathy was overwhelmingly with Hu Ge. In an online opinion poll conducted by Sohu.com, 93 percent of 10,728 votes supported Hu Ge.⁶³ People thought Chen was overreacting. Lawyers offered to defend Hu Ge pro bono. Scholars published articles debating the legal issues involved. The “Steamed Bun” case became the top Internet incident of 2006. Hu Ge, a “small person” (xiao renwu), emerged triumphant and famous. The case exemplifies a particular kind of cultural contention in Chinese cyberspace—challenges by “little people” against cultural power and authority. The power of the case derives from the creativity of the genre.

An ingenious aspect of “Steamed Bun” is that it combines tradition with innovation. The Flash movie is a new media form of artistic expression. In addition to its ease of production and speed of dissemination, it has the capacity to mix together different genres and media effects. “Steamed Bun” juxtaposes cuts from The Promise with familiar images and rhetoric from everyday life to create a storyline both tied to The Promise and alluding to issues of common concern in people’s everyday life. Thus the Flash movie is not only full of humor and fun, but it is also loaded with social sarcasm. For example, it uses the familiar CCTV program “Rule of Law Online” (fazhi zaixian) as an organizing framework. As the Flash movie opens, the anchor of the TV program announces a murder case: “On a certain day in a certain month of the year 2005, a mysterious murder happened in a certain city.”⁶⁴ The Flash movie then shows scenes of killing from The Promise. In one sequence from The Promise, two protagonists are shown fighting on top of a building. The voiceover that follows this sequence alludes to the common social problem of delayed payment of wages in China: “According to information from insider sources, these two people have not received their wages for the past months. Therefore they have climbed up the building to threaten jumping off it if they do not get paid.”

Another sequence from The Promise shows a masked horseman killing one of the two people on top of the building. The TV anchor then asks: “Who is this mysterious person? This is the first unresolved puzzle of this case…. According to informants, this horse and this attire belong to Sanada, the director of the city inspection bureau.” Sanada is the name of the Japanese actor who played the general in The Promise. The Flash movie then shows scenes of Sanada with city inspectors beating up unlicensed street peddlers and shouting: “Who lets you set up street stalls? Who lets you set up street stalls?” The peddlers are seen begging for mercy. Produced in 2005, the Flash movie exposes a serious problem plaguing Chinese cities: the unbridled corrupt power and ruthlessness of the notorious city inspectors (chengguan). Two years later, in January 2008, a national scandal occurred when city inspectors in the city of Tianmen, in Hubei Province, killed an innocent bystander who was trying to photograph them beating up villagers, a case I discussed in chapter 2.

The next voiceover alludes to the Japanese invasion of China and uses language directly lifted out of Mao’s well-known essay “In Memory of Norman Bethune”: “Director Sanada is a native of Japan. He is over fifty years old. In order to express his atonement to the Chinese people, he threw himself into the arms of China without hesitation and joined the cause of the construction of China’s modernization. What spirit is this that makes a foreigner selflessly adopt the cause of the Chinese people’s liberation as his own?” The italicized sentence is an exact quotation from Mao’s essay, familiar to most of the adult TV audience. Using such familiar language out of context is humorous and has the rhetorical effect of attracting an audience by using a familiar cultural repertoire.

Conclusion

There is a venerable tradition of popular contention in modern China. With the development of the Internet, a digital culture of contention has emerged. This digital culture combines traditional rituals, genres, and styles with modifications and other forms of innovation. Compared to the 1989 student movement, the digital culture of contention is prosaic rather than sublime. Its rituals and genres are more down to earth. Yet in spirit, the new culture of contention evinces an irreverence toward power and authority, as is seen in the humor, profaneness, jokes, and the downright challenges against power in online activism. Developments in media technologies and large-scale social transformations are the main conditions of this stylistic change.

How does culture influence collective action? Many scholars have demonstrated the mobilizing power of symbols, rituals, stories, and imagery.⁶⁵ This chapter contributes to this literature in two ways. First, I underlined the importance of genres. Marc Steinberg is among the few sociologists who have examined speech genres in collective action. In his study of English spinners’ protests, he finds that the challengers’ discursive repertoire was limited. It was “dominated by a selective appropriation of political economy, political liberalism, nationalism, abolitionism, and other genres through which factory owners mapped out a hegemonic vision of a social order.”⁶⁶ Steinberg thus stresses the appropriation of official genres. My study shows two ways in which speech genres shape collective action—through tradition and through innovation. Speech genres change slowly. The mere persistence of genres of contention provides ready-made cultural resources for collective action. The persistence of particular genres channels collective action into particular forms of expression. If genres change slowly, contemporary China provides a rare context for observing change. Technological development coupled with rapid social transformation provides the background for innovative genres to appear. These new genres have a new power in mobilizing contention. As many of the examples discussed in this chapter show, these genres are especially effective in appealing to human emotions and moral sensibilities. They achieve movement mobilization and diffusion through the mobilization of emotions ranging from sympathy to humor and laughter.

Second, the study of genres and rituals should incorporate the analysis of media. As I have shown, genres and rituals of contention are increasingly difficult to separate from media. Contemporary rituals and performances of contention are more and more mediated. Studying the mediation of rituals and genres opens up new avenues of research. If rituals and genres shape the expression of identities and solidarity, they almost always depend on media. Media not only influence collective action through the images and narratives they present to the audience, but also through the very process of the constitution of rituals and genres. This provides a more subtle view of media than what is available in current literature.

The digital culture of contention does not replace the time-honored culture of popular contention in modern China. It enriches and diversifies it. First, it represents an expansion of contentious forms. The creative, digital adaptation of traditional forms of contention has produced new rituals and genres of expressing identity and dissent as well as new ways of dissemination. This digital culture both accelerates the speed and scale of contention and adds visual and aural appeal to textual persuasion. Not a substitute for brick-and-mortar protests, online activism is increasingly blended with offline activism to create a powerful network of resistance and contention.

Second, the digital culture of contention has expanded the field of contention in China. Culture is not only a way of contention; it is a stake. Thus works of literary dissent are often a matter of political struggle. Moreover, because contentious performances and expressions are often mediated, the media technologies themselves become stakes of contention. The new rituals and genres of expression in online activism, such as the digital circulation of Flash movies or Youtube videos, turns artistic creativity into an ever more contentious activity—and contention into an increasingly artistic activity, in the use of new media technologies. This means that both access to the Internet and the creative use of it are matters of contention. Neither can be taken for granted. Online activism thus stretches the field of Chinese politics into ever more uncharted zones. It challenges state power by stretching its battleground.