INGOs with a legitimate presence in China tend to take moderate approaches to online activism.| ∎ | 8 | ∎ |
The final dynamic of online activism I will analyze is transnationalism. Many cases in my sample have a transnational dimension. In some, domestic activists reach out to international actors for support; in others, their targets are foreign states or corporations; in still other cases, international nonstate actors seek to influence domestic politics through direct or indirect pressure. I consider activism transnational when it involves nonstate actors reaching across national borders in contentious activities.1 The actors so engaged will be called transnational activists. Such activism is not new, yet its combination with the Internet is new, resulting in transnational online activism.
To move to transnational activism in Chinese cyberspace is to enter a new world of online activism. Here are found all the forms of online activism I have analyzed in previous chapters. But there are new elements too. Some of the most radical and subversive cases and issues of Chinese online activism have a transnational dimension. If the degree of radicalization is measured by the degree of direct challenges against the Chinese state, then the radicalization of Chinese online activism appears to be in direct proportion to transnationalization. The more transnational it is, the more radical it becomes. This chapter maps the varieties of transnational activism online and estimates the impact of transnationalization on online activism in China. It shows that transnationalization both expands and intensifies online activism, creating shifts in scale and intensity. I will differentiate between two types of transnational activism. One originates from inside China, the other from outside. Geopolitics largely explains the differences between these two types. In general, activism originating from outside China is more radical and subversive of state legitimacy than activism inside China. Yet within each type, there are more or less radical forms. These differences are due to the mixture of several additional conditions, the most important being the personal and organizational characteristics of the activists.
The actors involved in transnational online activism fall into three types—domestic, diasporic, and international. Domestic transnational activists operate inside China but attempt to reach outside to enhance their influence. Diasporic activists are ethnic Chinese residing overseas. They attempt to influence domestic politics from the outside, as do international nonstate actors such as NGOs. These three groups are engaged in somewhat different (though overlapping) forms of online activism, reflecting their different agendas, resources, and geopolitical positions. I begin with a review of the historical conditions of transnational activism in China.
Transnationalization of Activism in Recent Chinese History
Although transnational activism had an early history in China,2 political, economic, and cultural globalization in recent decades directly influences the rise of a new wave of transnational activism by creating new grievances and new opportunities.3 In China, these conditions are mixed in particular ways to shape the transnationalization of online activism. The first condition is the history and culture of popular contention in modern China. This is a history not only of global framing and global thinking4 but also of genuine global aspirations, such as the aspirations for the values of science and democracy articulated manifesto-style during the May Fourth movement. With the beginning of the economic reform in 1978, this cultural yearning returned with a vengeance. Not only were the aspirations for enlightenment reasserted in the Democracy Wall movement in 1978, but perhaps more significantly, Democracy Wall activists were already strategically seeking international pressure to aid their cause. During that movement, an open letter to President Jimmy Carter was published as a wall poster on December 10, 1978; another to Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was posted on December 15. The letter to Brzezinski stated: “Human rights in China have suffered the most terrible attacks and are still totally denied…. We hope you and President Carter will be even more concerned with the human-rights movement in our country in the future.”5
In the middle of party-led campaigns against “spiritual pollution,” this culture of seeking international allies waxed and waned in the contentious activities of the 1980s until peaking with the 1989 student movement. On one hand, student calls for democracy and enlightenment in 1989 harked back to the iconic May Fourth era. On the other hand, student activists mastered the new art of performing to the media at the dawn of the global media age. They not only sought international allies through social networks and other channels—more importantly, they moved and agitated the global audience by directly performing for global media. Craig Calhoun captures this drama in the following terms:
The movement existed in a “metatopical public space” of multinational media and indirect relationships to a world of diverse and far-flung actors. The movement’s protagonists consciously addressed this world even though it had to seem distant, insubstantial, and remote from their tangible experience. From the two-fingered “V” for victory to the “Goddess of Democracy” inspired by the Statue of Liberty, the movement wove symbols from a common international culture together with its own specifically Chinese concerns and conscience.6
Second, in the wake of the repression of the student movement, the global elements in this culture of popular contention in modern China were scattered worldwide, when student activists and dissidents went into voluntary or compulsory exile in foreign countries. This created the social basis for a culture of transnational contention. Joined by the growing number of Chinese students abroad, they expanded their international networks while striving to maintain links to the issues of the homeland. Together with their friends and former comrades-in-arms back in China, they became the “linkage agents” in the thriving field of Chinese transnational activism.7
These linkage agents are met halfway by international nonstate activists and organizations, providing the third condition of the transnationalization of Chinese online activism. As discussed in chapter 5, Chinese citizen groups have grown in number and influence since the 1990s. In the same period, international NGOs working in China have also multiplied.8 According to a directory of international NGOs in China published online by China Development Brief, forty international NGOs were operating in China as of 2004 in the environmental field alone. Most of them began to have a presence in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Finally, the history and culture of the Chinese Internet is conducive to the transnationalization of Chinese online activism. The social history of the Internet in China began outside China, among Chinese students and scholars abroad in the late 1980s. The earliest community-based Internet services used by Chinese students abroad were mailing lists and newsgroups. The main cultural products were online Chinese magazines. As mentioned in chapter 7, they were the products of transnational collaboration. From its very beginning, therefore, Chinese Internet culture is a transnational culture. Moreover, as the Internet entered China, Chinese Internet users eagerly explored Chinese-language sites overseas due to the scarcity of content in domestic Web sites. Chinese Internet entrepreneurs similarly drew inspiration from Chinese Web sites abroad. The founder of Golden Book Cottage recalled, for example, that he launched the Web site in 1998 because after visiting the U.S.-based New Threads, he realized that he could build a similar literary Web site in China.9
International NGOs in China
International nonstate actors connected to Chinese citizen activism are of two types: those who operate from outside China and those with a presence (such as offices or projects) in China. The majority are international NGOs. Generally speaking, INGOs in China refrain from directly challenging state authorities. Like their Chinese counterparts, they operate under conditions of political uncertainty and administrative ambiguity. Many operate without registration; some are registered as business entities, and as Katherine Morton puts it, “in practice, they tend to negotiate their own terms with government agencies and local partners.”10 Reflecting domestic political conditions, they avoid confrontational approaches. Like their Chinese counterparts, their work focuses on public education, consciousness raising, capacity building, and other politically safe activities. For example, although Greenpeace is known for its use of radical tactics, according to a program officer, its office in China relies on media campaigns rather than on disruptive tactics.11 This comes across in an introduction to Greenpeace’s office in China:
In the West, spectacular “direct action” tactics have helped make Greenpeace a household name. Greenpeace will not again attempt direct action protests in China, according to Beijing office director Sze Pang Cheung, but will concentrate on “putting solutions in place.” He believes the Chinese government is responsive to constructive advocacy, and that the Chinese mass media are also receptive to the critical themes that Greenpeace has identified.12
INGOs in China contribute to online activism through capacity building, public communication, and promoting citizen participation. Their public use of the Internet falls along similar lines. World Wide Fund for Nature, for example, runs an extensive Chinese-language Web site. There, volunteers can sign up to participate in its activities, journalists can register if they are interested in covering a particular issue, and Internet users can join discussions in the BBS forums. Internews, an international media development NGO based in California, teams up with local Chinese institutions to develop Web information and educational resources for media and legal professionals.
China Development Brief was another INGO focusing on public education and capacity building in China. Its forced closure in 2007 indicates the INGOs’ tenuous position in China’s political environment. China Development Brief was an independent and nonprofit publication launched in 1996 and conceived as an information platform and capacity-building tool for China’s growing nonprofit and philanthropic sector. Its English-language edition “attempts to help foreigners reach a more informed and sympathetic understanding of China,” while the Chinese edition, inaugurated in 2001, “attempts to help Chinese actors reach a more informed and sympathetic understanding of international approaches to development.” Its Web site “receives tens of thousands of individual visitors per month.”13 However, in a statement issued on October 7, 2007, its editor, Nick Young, announced that the publication was forced to close by Chinese authorities: “I, as editor of the English language edition of China Development Brief, am deemed guilty of conducting ‘unauthorized surveys’ in contravention of the 1983 Statistics Law, and have been ordered to desist. It was made perfectly clear to me that any report posted on this Web site (which is run off a UK server) would count as the output of an unauthorized survey.”14
International NGOs Outside China
INGOs outside China cover a broader range of issue areas related to China. Their strategies are more diverse and confrontational. In the areas of Internet use and online activism, there are INGOs engaged in capacity building, information sharing, advocacy, and media campaigns. An example of an INGO working in the area of capacity building is Global Greengrants Fund. With a mission to nurture a global grassroots community of activist groups, it has supported grassroots citizen groups in China since 2000. One area of support is the building of Web sites as communication networks and resource centers. According to the list of grantees published on its Web site, Global Greengrants Fund has provided funding to many small citizen groups for Web site development. In 2001, for example, it provided one thousand dollars to the Tibetan Antelope Information Center to “improve the English version of a Chinese Web site that distributes information about poaching of the endangered Tibetan antelope.”15 In 2002, it made grants to about ten grassroots groups to support their Web site development. For example, it provided three thousand dollars to one organization to “help raise public awareness of environmental issues, maintain a Web site, and produce a quarterly newsletter for Chinese green NGOs” and two thousand dollars to another to “fund creation of a Web site and communication materials for a network of environmental student organizations.”16 In 2006, it provided three thousand dollars to Guizhouren Net, “a Web-based community promoting rural education, improvement of living conditions, and environmental protection in poverty-stricken regions of Guizhou Province.”17
Many INGOs outside China work to promote human rights and freedom of speech in China. They utilize a well-established repertoire of action common in INGO culture. This repertoire includes documentation and exposure of the Chinese government’s repression of online activists and dissidents and petition campaigns directly challenging and condemning Chinese government behavior. Examples include Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Human Rights in China. A report issued in January 2004 by Amnesty International documented the names of fifty-four people “who had been detained or imprisoned for disseminating their beliefs or information through the Internet,” including “students, political dissidents, Falun Gong practitioners, workers, writers, lawyers, teachers, civil servants, former police officers, engineers, and businessmen.”18 Human Rights Watch ran a Web campaign called “China’s Olympian Human Rights Challenges.” Human Rights in China is engaged in extensive and pioneering Internet activism. It maintains an active and informative English Web site and runs a weekly Chinese-language e-newsletter (huaxia dianzi bao) and a Chinese-language Web site on human rights (ren yu renquan).When I accessed its English Web site in February 2008, the site was hosting a petition to support the Tiananmen Mothers and an Olympics Campaign, “Incorporating Responsibility 2008,” “to leverage international and domestic windows of opportunity promoting equitable development, freedom of expression, and other human rights in China.”19 On its campaign Web site, Human Rights in China calls on bloggers to “blog for human rights in China”:
The Internet, and blogs in particular, have made it easier for people to express themselves to a potential audience of millions. They have also created an enormous opportunity for disseminating information about, and ending, human-rights abuses around the world. If you are a blogger, you can use your bully pulpit to stand with victims and activists to prevent discrimination, uphold basic freedoms, protect people from inhumane treatment in wartime, and campaign to bring offenders to justice. More specifically, you can seize the historic opportunity of the Beijing Olympic Games to challenge the Chinese government to improve human rights in China. We can help you do this. Human Rights Watch offers dozens of RSS feeds on pressing human-rights issues, classified according to theme and region.20
A new trend in recent years is that outside China, a growing number of Web-based projects, especially blogs, are devoted to publicity and advocacy on China-related issues. Both China Digital Times and Global Voices, for example, cover cases of citizen activism in China extensively. They often publish timely English-language translations of Chinese online postings, thus helping to disseminate the contentious messages of Chinese activists to a global audience. One example is Global Voices’ coverage of Chinese blogger Zola Zhou, hailed as China’s “first citizen reporter.”21 As discussed in chapter 4, in March 2007, Zola traveled two days by train to Chongqing to cover the “nailhouse incident,” which involved a couple who refused to relocate because of inadequate compensation. The following is a sample of the extensive English translations of Zola’s blog posts carried by Global Voices:
As everyone knows, some reports of news like this which involves the government will surely never be reported, and [online] stories will be deleted at the request of unknown “relevant departments.” There had been a Sina blog reporting 24 hours a day on the situation, but that blog later disappeared. That’s why I realized this is a one-time chance, and so from far, far away I came to Chongqing to conduct a thorough investigation, in an attempt to understand a variety of viewpoints.22
Global Voices has an advocacy program that “seeks to build a global anticensorship network of bloggers and online activists dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.”23 When I visited the Web site on February 4, 2008, its top story was about China’s human-rights activist Hu Jia, who had been put under house arrest before being arrested by police. After his arrest, his wife and two-month-old daughter were also put under house arrest. The story in Global Voices reports the numerous efforts to blog the lives of Hu Jia’s family:
Since AIDS-activist-turned-house–arrested blogger Hu Jia’s arrest, he’s been described as a one-man human-rights organization, that bloggers like him are the kind The Party fears most, and that for every Hu Jia silenced, ten more bloggers like him will pop up to take his place; shame, say some, and smooth move others. With Hu’s wife Zeng Jinyan and their 2-month-old daughter Hu Qianci having been under house arrest for over a month now and in effect having been made state secrets of themselves, even more are saying now is the crucial time to be blogging about them….
Bloggers from different parts of the country started talking about a milk-powder delivery mission, and now the exact location of Zeng’s home in BOBO Freedom City is neatly marked on Google Maps, with notes of where to watch out for the secret police. If you don’t want to risk going in, word is Zeng can be seen clearly in her window from the grassy patch across the road.24
Chinese Virtual Diaspora
The Chinese diaspora is a heterogeneous entity. Scholars often argue that China’s widespread diasporic networks have made important contributions to China’s economic development in the reform period. The Chinese diaspora is no less influential in China’s political affairs. As mentioned in chapter 1, its involvement in online activism dated back to the student movement in 1989, when Chinese students overseas used the Internet to mobilize support for their domestic counterparts.
At least four types of diasporic networks are engaged in transnational online activism. The first is individual direct participation by accessing BBS forums in China and posting messages there. In the large-scale online protests in my sample, I found ample evidence of a diasporic presence. For example, in the protests surrounding the death of Qiu Qingfeng in 2000, some messages that appeared in BBSs in China were clearly posted by users residing in the United States. These users tended to identify themselves as Beijing University alumni. For example, a message was posted on May 29 in the Strengthening the Nation 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 might learn from the American example.
The second type of diasporic activist network is the Chinese student associations in foreign universities. With the launching of China’s “open door” policy in 1978, Chinese students began to pursue their education abroad. Where their numbers are large enough, they are organized into “Chinese Students and Scholars Associations.” These organizations provide help and a sense of home for students away from home. They are also conduits for other forms of organizing, including transnational activism. For example, in 1989, Chinese student associations overseas made active use of newsgroups and e-mail to mobilize support for protesters at home. In 1996, an online campaign was staged successfully to protest against NBC’s coverage of Chinese athletes at the 1996 Olympic Games.25 In 1998, online protest was combined with offline demonstrations against ethnic violence in Indonesia.
The 1998 case illustrates well the transnational scope of online activism.26 From May 12 to May 15, 1998, riots and violence broke out in Jakarta, Indonesia, with widespread looting and destruction of property owned by Chinese Indonesians and, as revealed in the days following the riots, the mass rape of ethnic Chinese women. The global protests against these acts of violence started with a Mr. Joe Tan in New Zealand, who “felt ashamed for doing nothing and got a bit sick of the indifferent attitude of most people.”27 Together with Tan Tse, a Chinese Canadian research engineer; Edward Liu, a San Francisco- based attorney; and W. W. Looi, an ethnic Chinese-Malaysian working for Oracle in California, he set up the World Huaren Federation (www.huaren.org), a Web site that directly invoked the idea of a cultural China to stage transnational protest against the ethnic violence in Indonesia.28
The protest began to escalate when William Wee, a Chinese-Filipino teaching computer science at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, urged the Chinese student association there to organize a demonstration in Washington, D.C. Wee’s letter about plans for the demonstration, written in English, was posted on July 17, 1998, in the North America Freedom Forum, a popular Chinese-language forum known for its harsh criticisms of the Chinese government.29 An ad hoc committee was set up to mobilize the demonstration in Washington, D.C., while plans were under way, largely through communication on the Internet, to synchronize demonstrations in different parts of the world. What happened over the following weeks was truly amazing. On August 7, 1998, demonstrations protesting against the atrocities in Indonesia were held in Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, New York, and Toronto. On August 8, demonstrations were held in Helsinki and Auckland, New Zealand. On August 15 and 16, demonstrations were staged in Atlanta and Vancouver, respectively. And on August 22, Dallas had similar demonstrations.
The third type of diasporic activists comprises the dissident communities overseas. There are diverse types. The more prominent groups include the veterans of the Democracy Wall movement (DWM), the 1989 movement, the Falun Gong movement, the Tibetan exile community, and the cyberseparatist Uygurs. They may have different political agendas, target different constituencies, resort to a wide range of strategies and tactics, but they share one thing in common—the creative use of the Internet. Dru Gladney’s study of cyberseparatism reveals the heavy Web presence of Uygur separatist organizations outside China. Michael Chase and James Mulvenon’s study shows the pervasive use of the Internet among the Tibetan exile communities, the Falun Gong organizations, and other dissident groups, including exiled activists of the DWM and 1989 generations.30 Online activism among the diasporic activists has remained highly visible in recent years, with growing efforts to voice support for the rights-defense movement inside China.31
Transnational online activism among dissident communities has several features. One is an early awareness of the Internet as a tool for expressing dissent. In this, they share the visions of domestic dissidents. The editing and distribution of the Tunnel magazine discussed in chapter 3 is matched overseas by VIP Reference. According to a story in the Los Angeles Times in 1999, the editors of VIP Reference, a Chinese-language dissident magazine based in the United States, distributed the magazine to 250,000 e-mail addresses inside China. To avoid censorship, it was sent from different addresses and delivered randomly.32 The second feature is the adoption of diverse tactics in order to infiltrate China’s firewall and reach domestic audiences. This includes two-way and one-way communication such as e-mail, chat rooms, BBS forums, Web-based petitions, distribution of Internet magazines, and in some cases, hacktivism.33 The third feature is the evolution of complex communication networks combining television, newspapers, radio stations, and the Internet, aiming both to increase pressure on the Chinese regime and to keep the movements in global spotlight. Yuezhi Zhao’s analysis of Falun Gong media activism illuminates this feature.34 She describes Falun Gong media as a “rhizomatic,” “global,” “multilayered,” and “interactive” network in which the Internet plays an increasingly important role:
If books and audiovisual tapes were the main carriers of the Falun Gong message in its early years inside China, the Internet has been instrumental to its more prominent emergence a transnational global community. This association between Falun Gong and the Internet is indeed “a marriage made in the Web heaven.” Falun Gong has a massive and extremely sophisticated presence on the World Wide Web.35
The fourth type of diasporic activists consists of nonprofit, Web-based organizations. One influential case is the Web site New Threads (Xin yu si), which exemplifies the effective watchdog function of transnational online activism. New Threads was a Web site run by Shi-min Fang (using the penname Fang Zhouzi), a biochemist based in California. Started in 1994 as an online Chinese magazine of news and literary works, New Threads has since become known in China for exposing plagiarism and other kinds of corrupt and unethical practices in the Chinese scientific and intellectual communities.36 Over the years, these online publications have generated heated responses from China’s academic communities, making New Threads one of the most influential watchdog Web sites outside China. In one case, in response to a report in New Threads about Chinese biochemists’ abuse of their scientific authority, the Chinese Association of Biochemists issued a policy prohibiting its members to appear in commercial advertisements in the name of the association.37 Reflecting the offline influences of the Web site, collections of Fang Zhouzi’s essays have been published in China and Japan. In 2004, a magazine in Guangzhou named Fang as one of the fifty public intellectuals most influential in China, citing his achievements in exposing more than three hundred cases of academic corruption (xueshu fubai) and restoring respect to individual autonomy and rational judgment.38
Another influential case is China News Digest. CND had an activist tendency in its early days and since then has developed some unique features, such as hosting a virtual museum of the 1989 student movement and another of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Its “Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution,” the most comprehensive online resource on the Cultural Revolution, is a unique case of the Chinese diaspora using the Internet to challenge information control inside China.
Virtual Museums of the Cultural Revolution
The Chinese “Cultural Revolution” (CR) is one of the most controlled topics of public discussion in China.39 The “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the PRC” issued in 1981 officially denounced the CR as a ten-year disaster,40 but its history has remained much contested. The official position on the CR maintains its hegemony through the control of media. In the 1980s and 1990s, the CCP Central Propaganda Department and the State Press and Publication Administration issued several directives concerning the publication of CR-related materials. A regulation issued in 1988 states, “from now on and for quite some time, publishing firms should not plan the publication of dictionaries or other handbooks about the ‘Great Cultural Revolution’ ” and that “under normal circumstances, one should not plan to publish titles specifically researching the ‘Great Cultural Revolution’ or specifically telling the history of the ‘Great Cultural Revolution.’ ”41 A party circular issued in March 1992 concerning the commemoration of Mao’s centenary required that works to be published in conjunction with the centenary “are to be strictly reviewed and approved according to the stipulations and guidelines that have been set out.”42 In 1997, the State Press and Publication Administration issued more regulations to Chinese publishers about the reporting of “weighty and big” (zhongda) publication projects, including projects related to the CR.43 In short, publications on CR-related topics are under strict control because of its history’s contentious nature.
The Internet provides new ways of contesting the official history of the CR. It does so by making it possible to transform conventional mnemonic genres into new forms, creating what Wagner-Pacifici might have called “genre-vibrating,” “anomalous forms of commemoration” (see chapter 3 on cultural form).44 An example is the museum. In the 1980s, the well-known Chinese writer Ba Jin called for the building of a Chinese Cultural Revolution museum.45 The proposal never materialized in China because it went against the official position to forget the CR. In the 1990s, with the development of the Internet, Web sites devoted to the CR appeared. Most such Web sites in China are small projects. In 1996, however, the Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution was launched by a group of Chinese students and scholars in Canada and the United States. Since then, this virtual museum has grown rapidly, attracting about two thousand visitors daily as of June 2006.46
Virtual museums are a conventional genre transformed into a new form. In name and structure, the Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution resembles a conventional museum—for example, it has “exhibition halls” and “special exhibits.” Yet in many other ways, it differs from the traditional museum. It is not tied to any physical place, is “viewable” from different locations, and is portable once saved onto CD-ROMs or personal computers.
The Internet also enables the creation of new mnemonic forms. While the Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution follows the convention of museums in its self-identification as a museum, many Web sites devoted to the CR defy any traditional nomenclature. They are a new form of mnemonic practice. An example is the Cultural Revolution Research Net. According to information on its front page, this Web site was launched on July 29, 2005. When I visited it on November 30, 2005, it showed that it had 340 subscribers and had received 77,741 hits. Its functions were divided into columns (lanmu), which included BBS discussion forums and digital archives with names such as Cultural Revolution Art, Cultural Revolution Literature, Cultural Revolution Documents, and Electronic Books. In some ways, it resembles a library or historical archive, but the combination of digital archives with open discussion forums distinguishes it from the traditional archive or library.
Both the Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution and the Cultural Revolution Research Net articulate alternative visions of the CR. The pronounced goal of the Virtual Museum is to collect all “truthful materials and records” (zhenshi de ziliao he jizai) on and about the CR, in addition to CR-related works of art and literature.47 Accordingly, the collections have both reminiscences of the tragedies, horrors, and cruelties of the CR and of happier days. The authors of these reminiscences are diverse, including ones by former rebels whose voices are suppressed in China. The Cultural Revolution Research Net has a radically leftist orientation. Its supporters apparently consider the CR as a distorted historical event to be rehabilitated. This was evident from the portrait of “Martyr” Jiang Qing displayed on its front page when I first visited it. The consecration of Jiang Qing as a martyr flies in the face of the Chinese official denunciation of her as a member of the infamous “Gang of Four.”
One strategy in these online memory projects is, by building digital archives of historical documents, to reveal elements of the past that are obscured or suppressed in the dominant discourses. This strategy challenges the authenticity claims of personal recollections with a different kind of authenticity claim, one contained in historical documents. Both the Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution and the Cultural Revolution Research Net have large digital archives. The archives of the Cultural Revolution Research Net, for example, contain large volumes of downloadable documents about the “Daqing spirit,” “Dazhai spirit,” revolutionary model operas, socialist films and literature, the Red Guard movement, and the sent-down movement. It features a lengthy list of works by Hao Ran, a novelist widely known for his multivolume novel The Golden Road (Jinguang dadao) in praise of rural collectivization. Another example is a PDF file of a four-volume, thousand-page book titled Long Live Mao Zedong Thought (Mao Zedong sixiang wansui). This is a collection of Mao’s writings and speeches that mostly did not appear in the official collected works of Mao, covering the period from 1943 to 1968. According to the description on the Web site, these are important documents for a proper understanding of Mao’s thought. The author of the description claims that for those who have been exposed only to the distorted view of Mao presented by China’s mainstream elites, these documents will restore the “complete picture of Maoism.”48
The Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution and the Cultural Revolution Research Net are located in computer servers outside China. This does not mean that there are no Web sites about the CR in China.49 Still, systematic and large-scale memory projects such as these, which conflict with the official master narrative, have difficulty surviving in the increasingly controlled environment of the Chinese Internet. In the 1970s and 1980s, the party-state initially controlled memories of the CR through political campaigns and the control of media channels (such as the publishing industry). In the 1990s, commercialization contributed to the relaxation of control and the proliferation of a nostalgic literature. As the Internet is becoming more influential, it has become the new frontier of struggle.
Transnational Activists Inside China
Transnational activists inside China are of various stripes. As far as online activism is concerned, three types stand out: NGOs, human-rights activists, and cybernationalists. Extending Keck and Sikkink’s analysis of the boomerang effect of transnational advocacy networks, Sidney Tarrow proposes that the externalization of transnational activism follows one of three pathways: an information pathway whereby domestic activists diffuse information abroad to seek a “boomerang” effect, an institutional pathway whereby activists seek the authority of international agencies to turn domestic claims into binding rules, and a “direct action” pathway whereby activists organize action to directly challenge their opponents.50 Of the three types of Chinese transnational activists, NGOs tend to emphasize the information pathway, cybernationalists favor direct action, and human-rights activists combine all three.
Above, I showed how INGOs such as Global Greengrants Fund aid Chinese NGOs in capacity building. Chinese NGOs on the recipient side are similarly transnational. My analysis of NGO Internet use in chapter 6 shows the importance of the Internet for networking and interacting with INGOs. This indicates the importance of the information pathway in their transnational activism online. This is supported by additional evidence in two of the most dynamic issue areas of citizen activism in China: HIV/AIDS and environmental protection. NGOs in both areas are closely linked with the international community. They send regular information updates, action alerts, and news feeds through newsletters and massive e-mail lists. Recipients usually include both activists in China and INGO and media professionals.51 In one of the most subversive cases of such information transmission, HIV/ AIDS activist Wan Yanhai and director of Aizhi Action Project in China forwarded a government document on blood collection in Henan Province to an electronic mailing list. This exposed the blood-collection scandal but also led to his detention by the authorities.52
Cybernationalists are the second type of transnational activist in China. When nationalist protests target foreign states, corporations, commodities, and culture, they take on a transnational dimension. Cybernationalists are engaged in various forms of contention. Verbal protests in BBS forums are the classic form. Others include Internet signature petitions, the use of the Internet for offline mobilization, and the hacking of Web sites. The most transnational aspect of cybernationalism is also its most aggressive: the hacking of foreign Web sites, which, according to some analysts, may reach the scale of cyberwarfare.53 I will limit my discussion to this last form.
In an article published online in early 2005 on the occasion of the disbanding of the influential Chinese hacker organization cnhonker.com, media scholar Min Dahong describes in detail six major hacker attacks launched by mainland Chinese hackers. The first happened in August 1998, in response to violence against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. The targets were Web sites in Indonesia. The second happened in May 1999, in reaction to the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in former Yugoslavia. The targets were American government Web sites. The third attack happened in July 1999, in response to then Taiwanese president Lee Tenghui’s public statement of treating cross-strait relations as interstate relations. The targets were Web sites in Taiwan. The fourth attack happened in January 2000, in response to Japanese right-wing conservatives’ denial of the Nanjing Massacre during the Japanese invasion of China. The targets were Web sites in Japan. The fifth attack, which happened in February and March 2001, targeted Japanese Web sites in response to a Japanese history textbook’s distortion of World War II history and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. The sixth attack happened in April 2001, in response to the U.S. EP3 spy plane’s collision with a Chinese airplane and the death of the Chinese pilot.54 In all cases, Chinese hackers succeeded in hacking into the targeted Web sites and replacing them with messages of protest.55 In all cases, they met with counterattacks from hackers in the targeted nations, creating what some analysts have called cyberwarfare.
The third type of transnational activist inside China consists of the human-rights activists. In a sense, they are the mirror images of China’s cybernationalists. Whereas the radical hacker cybernationalists aim at foreign targets, human-rights activists reach out to international communities for help and support in their struggles against political authorities at home. But as I note below, they differ significantly in their repertoire of action.
Human-rights activism is among the most transnational of contentious issues worldwide.56 This is true in China too. If the number of human-rights activists detained or imprisoned is a plausible indicator of the contentious nature of human-rights activism, then the overall number of human-rights activists in China has been growing in recent years. The 2004 report published by Amnesty International, cited above, shows a growing number of detentions and arrests compared to 2002. A 2005 update of the 2004 report cites evidence of continuing growth.57
China’s human-rights activists differ in age, occupation, and many other respects.58 They are engaged in a variety of human-rights issues, from speech freedom to labor rights. Freedom of speech is perhaps the most important issue in the area of online activism. Like their overseas counterparts, activists inside China from early on perceived the Internet as a tool in their struggles for freedom of expression. Not surprisingly, the use of the Internet in these struggles took on a transnational dimension from the very beginning. The story of Tunnel (Sui dao), a dissident magazine launched on June 3, 1997, in China, is an early exemplary case. Tunnel claims to be the first “free magazine” edited in mainland China and distributed by e-mail, with a mission “to break down the information blockade and suppression of free speech in mainland China.”59 As of February 10, 2008, geocities.com archived 208 issues of the magazine, the last of which was published on December 22, 2002.60
In an interview published on July 25, 1997, in its thirteenth issue, the editors explained how the magazine was edited in China but distributed from overseas:
Our editorial policy is primarily to provide mainland readers with voices that are different from or opposed to the mainland authorities…. Admittedly, Tunnel cannot openly solicit subscriptions now. This means that it has to be sent directly to e-mail addresses we have collected through all kinds of channels…. The distribution of Tunnel is based overseas. This is because distributing it from inside China will lead the public security authorities to investigate and close it down and may put the participants in danger.61
Human-rights activists share one thing in common: they are savvy users of the new information technologies in their daily struggles. This is true of the activists in the China Democracy Party, who persist in their activism through the use of the Internet even after their leaders are arrested.62 Liu Di, the “Stainless Steel Mouse,” became famous through her online posts. Among the most influential human-rights activists, Liu Xiaobo and Hu Jia are masterful users of the Internet. Liu Xiaobo is a veteran of the 1989 movement. After the repression of the movement, he persisted in political activism inside China and was imprisoned from 1996 to 1999. Since then, he has engaged in activism through publishing blistering critiques of China’s human-rights conditions. He describes the importance of the Internet for his writing in an essay titled “Me and the Internet”:
On October 7, 1999, when I returned home after serving three years in prison, I already had a computer in my home. It was a gift to my wife from friends…. As somebody who makes a living through writing, and as a participant of the ’89 movement as well as a long-time veteran of popular movements after June Fourth, whether for personal reasons or for public reasons, I cannot describe how grateful I am to the Internet.
Because of the blockade on free speech, my articles can only be published overseas. Before I started using the computer, it was difficult to edit and revise my handwritten manuscripts, and the costs of transmitting them were high. They could be intercepted if sent by mail. To avoid interception, I would go from the western side of the city to the east to find a foreign friend with a fax machine whom I must trouble to fax my manuscript. This was costly and it affected the efficiency and enthusiasm of my writing. It was quite good if I could publish one or two articles overseas a month.
Now, the computer made my writing convenient, the Internet made it convenient for me to obtain information and liaison with the outside world, and what is more, it gave me great convenience to send my articles overseas. The Internet is like a super-engine. My writing has erupted like an oil well. The royalties I make out of my writing are enough to support an independent and livable life.63
Liu is a fearless defender of Internet freedom and has initiated many online petitions and protests about Chinese government’s crackdown on Internet activists. For instance, he petitioned for the release of the “Stainless Steel Mouse” and Du Daobin. He condemned Yahoo! for turning information over to the Chinese government that led to the arrest of Shi Tao. And he led a petition protesting the forced closure of the popular intellectual Web site Century China. Published in the New York Review of Books on November 2, 2006, this petition begins by stressing the importance of the Internet for liberal Chinese intellectuals: “For many days since July 25, 2006, Chinese intellectuals and other netizens have been living in misery because the Web site that had been their spiritual home for six years, Century China (www.cc.org.cn), was shut down by the Chinese authorities.”64
Liu Xiaobo’s most recent petition is a call for the release of Hu Jia, another prominent human-rights activist known, among other things, for his use of the Internet to keep in touch with activists in China and with the international community. Hu Jia started out as an environmental activist. He was a veteran of Green Camp, organized by Tang Xiyang. He realized from early on the significance of the new information technologies for citizen activism in China. Back in 1998, together with a small group of fellow environmentalists, he launched a Web site on the protection of the endangered Tibetan antelope, as I mention in chapter 6. The Web site served as an information and communication center on the protection of the Tibetan antelope and other endangered species in China. One of the features of the Web site was reports about what was happening in the “battlefield” of the fights against illegal poaching on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, as well as information about how volunteers could help in this endeavor.65 As he moved into the areas of HIV/AIDS and human-rights activism, Hu Jia’s confrontations with state authorities increased. So did his reliance on new information technologies in order to document human-rights violations in China and expose them to the world. A story in the Guardian about Hu Jia captures an image of this Internet activist:
Last year, he and his then pregnant wife were under house arrest for 214 days in their flat in BOBO Freedom City. But he used the Internet to publicize the cases of peasants who lost their land, arrested dissidents and other victims of injustice.
He kept a daily blog, joined a human rights debate in the European parliament via a Webcast, went on hunger strike and made a short film of his life in detention, Prisoner in Freedom City. The video, much of it filmed from his flat’s window, is a testament to the dreariness of his captors’ lives. It shows security officials falling asleep, killing time by playing cards, waiting for their shift to change and following his wife on her way to work each morning. In a rare dramatic scene, Zeng confronts her pursuers by standing in front of their car in a busy street with a sign saying: “Shame to insult a woman.”66
Causes of Transnational Activism
The growing transnationalization of Chinese online activism raises important questions. Why do people try to reach across national borders to propagate their causes? What do they strive to achieve in these causes? Although the three different types of transnational activists are engaged in activism for different reasons, they share one thing in common: Border crossing for them is a means of building alliances and collective identities, a process greatly facilitated by the opportunities and resources of new conditions of complex internationalism,67 including the development of new communications technologies.
The easiest to understand are perhaps activists inside China. For them, the international community of NGOs and activists are a source of prestige, funding, expertise, and understanding. Chinese ENGOs, for example, have tapped the resources of the international environmental community to achieve growth and influence.68 And as chapter 6 shows, for all types of Chinese civic associations, the Internet is an important means of networking with the international community.
Besides these more moderate forms of Internet use among civic associations, transnationalization is associated with some of the most radical and subversive forms of online activism. It appears that the more connected with the international community an activist is, the more likely he or she will resort to radical and confrontational forms of action. This does not mean that globally connected activists are all radicals but rather that radicals are seldom individuals cut off from the world. To be connected to the global community means to be connected to potential sources of moral support. When people know that they are not acting alone but have the world behind them, they act more boldly than they ever could individually. That is why collective action makes heroes. Furthermore, as the student protesters in 1989 demonstrated, performing in front of global media to a global audience may itself be a radicalizing and transformative experience.69 Chinese activists engaged in online activism are, to certain extents, engaged in global media activism. Before, the whole world was watching; now all the world is blogging, youtubing, podcasting. The global stage has not shrunk because of the Internet; it has expanded with it.
The reasons for INGOs to be engaged in activism related to China are more complex. For one thing, INGO participation reflects the general trend of globalization—the growing integration of the world’s regions, including China’s growing integration into the world. If transnational interactions in other areas of contemporary life have increased, there is no reason that transnational interactions of an activist and contentious nature should not increase accordingly. Yet there are more specific reasons too. Perhaps the most important is a new synergy between local aspirations and global intentions. As local activists look beyond their home territories for ideas and allies, INGOs and activists readily provide these supplies. These interactions are facilitated by two parallel processes. On the one hand, global institutions in support of these causes have been growing.70 There is, in the words of Clifford Bob, a global market of contention, where local activists and INGOs are engaged in complex processes of exchange.71 On the other, this synergy is fueled by the global communication networks such as air transportation, global media, and, of course, cellphones and the Internet.
The third group of transnational activists, the Chinese diaspora, is similarly motivated by complex factors in their participation in online activism related to China. Again, the availability of global communication networks and the relative ease of communication are basic conditions. But there are more fundamental factors. Perhaps the most significant factors are biography and history. The more active and radical diasporic activists are veterans of recent Chinese social movements. Some were leaders in these movements; many had profound transformative personal experiences during the movements. They left China as political exiles. Studies of the biographical consequences of social-movement participation suggest that because of such biographical experiences, activists will continue to be politically engaged.72 This is so even under hostile conditions and can only be more so under favorable conditions. When these activists left China for Western countries, especially the United States, they left for conditions undoubtedly more favorable to their activist aspirations than back at home. The more prominent among them, such as Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan, received a hero’s welcome upon entering the United States. Others obtained material and moral support to organize opposition, publish magazines, and run Web sites. Thus biography and history together sustained former activists in their transnational activist endeavors.
Furthermore, the experiences of diasporic activists as new immigrants also shape their political activism. All four types of diasporic networks I discussed comprise mainly recent, first-generation immigrants. Beyond its political functions and purposes, participation in transnational activism has a crucial social function. It creates and sustains a sense of community and identity. The publications produced by Chinese democracy activists based in the United States, such as Beijing Spring, often feature photographs of meetings, social parties, and other group activities. While the articles are often highly critical of the Chinese regime and advocate various causes of social justice and human rights, the pictures convey a sense of camaraderie, collegiality, and community. Ultimately, activism and community become so deeply interdependent that to sacrifice one would undoubtedly damage the other.
Finally, in cases of diasporic participation in transnational activism concerning not just issues about China but issues about ethnic Chinese more broadly, such as the violence inflicted on ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1998, the question of a potential Internet-based transnational Chinese cultural sphere comes to the fore. These cases certainly reflect the concerns of people who share a cultural repertoire.73 It may be a repertoire of some shared history, but it certainly involves shared expressive symbols, such as a common language (if only written). It is the cultural repertoire that they share to lesser or greater degrees that makes this possible.74 At the same time, they also reflect the anxieties of being Chinese in the age of globalization. Writing on Chinese civilization as the roots for a Chinese cultural discourse, Tu Wei-Ming suggests that “by emphasizing cultural roots, Chinese intellectuals in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and North America hoped to build a transnational network to explore the meaning of being Chinese in a global context.”75 It could be argued that in a basic sense, transnational activism among the Chinese diaspora, whether it is about democracy in China or violence against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, is one way of exploring the meaning of being Chinese in the global context. It reflects both the anxieties and the freedom of a transnational “traveler,” as Nonini and Ong might put it,76 under the conditions of cosmopolitan existence.
Conclusion
My analysis in this chapter may be summarized as follows:
INGOs with a legitimate presence in China tend to take moderate approaches to online activism.
Conversely, INGOs with no direct presence in China, especially human-rights NGOs, tend to mount direct challenges against the Chinese state.
Among diasporic activists are found some of the most confrontational forms of online activism directly targeting the state regime, although more moderate forms are also used.
On the domestic front, grassroots organizations tend to take moderate, nonconfrontational forms of action.
However, domestic cybernationalist protests are among the most radical.
Finally, domestic human-rights activists may resort to direct challenges against the state authorities, but often at great risks.
These findings point to a more general pattern. It appears that the radicalization of forms of online activism is in direct proportion to the degree of transnationalization.77 The more transnational, the more radical and confrontational. How to explain this phenomenon?
Clearly, the most important factor is geopolitics. To be free from the direct jurisdiction of the nation-state means freedom from the risks of repression and freedom to challenge the regime. That is why transnational online activism outside China tends to be more radical and more confrontational than inside China and why the most radical forms inside China, cybernationalism, are possible precisely because they target states other than the Chinese regime. Yet geopolitics cannot explain why in the same country some forms of transnational online activism are more radical than others. A host of other factors must be considered.
First, the issues matter. Some issues are more resonant than others. As many scholars have argued, human-rights issues are among the most compelling in the transnational social-movement sector.78 On the domestic front, the grave social injustices and violations of human rights taking place behind China’s economic development have made this issue prominent and morally legitimate. It is not surprising then that the most radical forms of transnational online activism have occurred around this issue.
Second, the propensity to resort to radical and confrontational forms of action has a lot to do with personal history. People are not born activists; they become. If Liu Xiaobo and Hu Jia are the most savvy and radical online activists, it is because they are also among the most seasoned, through their encounters with Chinese state authorities. As a veteran of the 1989 movement, Liu Xiaobo spent years in prison. Hu Jia is an environmentalist-turned-AIDS activist; he becomes more fearless and indignant with each of his brushes with authorities over the years. Being often under the surveillance of public-security authorities alerts him to the importance of documenting his activities and keeping communication channels open with the outside world as a means of self-protection. The dissident communities overseas are even more like communities of shared memories and experiences in past movements. The core members of the democracy activists, for example, are veterans of the Democracy Wall movement and the 1989 movement. Wei Jingsheng, Xu Wenli, and Wang Dan are just a few of the more prominent names. They all spent long years in prison before going into exile. Sociologists know full well that the most radical revolutionaries are made in the intersections of personal biography and social history. “Apprehension and penalization are… critical rungs on the career ladder of revolution,” writes Philip Abrams. “The police record is the revolutionary’s equivalent of the curriculum vitae.”79 The most radical online activists in Chinese cyberspace all have strong CVs.
Thus transnationalization is associated with the radicalization of contentious tactics. How does it affect other aspects of online activism?
To fully appreciate the effects of transnationalization, it is important to view it as a critical link in the general dynamics of Chinese online activism. In this respect, a major influence is scale shift: “a change in the number and level of coordinated contentious actions leading to broader contention involving a wider range of actors and bridging their claims and identities.”80 The transnationalization of online activism in China shifts the scale of local activism to the transnational level. Furthermore, transnationalization expands the political opportunities and resources for domestic activists and undermines political control of the Internet. Domestic activists can disseminate information through their transnational connections. Some choose to run their Web sites and blogs on foreign servers. Activists overseas, on their part, attempt to expose and infiltrate China’s growing political control of the Internet. Third, transnationalization vastly expands the possibilities of learning and creativity for activists at home. In its basic form, transnationalization is about the interactions among multiple actors situated in different cultures and societies. These interactions are processes of mutual learning. Anthropologists sometimes use the concept of cultural translation to designate these processes of mutual learning. The notion of cultural translation underlines agency under constraints, for the translator is a constrained but artful innovator. This process is fraught with tension: some elements are replicated, others are adapted to local circumstances or hybridized with local forms, and still others are contested or rejected.81 The result is a hybrid form suited to—but also constrained by—the local context and the resources of the actors. In online activism and beyond, evidence of such cultural translation abounds in the new organizational forms, forms of action, and norms and discourse adopted by Chinese activists. Thus transnationalization is both part of the complex dynamics of online activism and has broader social and cultural consequences.