Of all the aspects of Chinese Internet culture, the most important and yet least understood is its contentious character. Media stories and survey reports have perpetuated two misleading images of the Chinese Internet: one of control and the other of entertainment. These two images create the misconception that because of governmental Internet control, Chinese Internet users do nothing but play. The real struggles of the Chinese people are thus ignored, and the radical nature of Chinese Internet culture is dismissed. Yet, not only is Internet entertainment not apolitical, but political control itself is an arena of struggle. Contention about all other domains of Chinese life fills the Chinese cyberspace and surges out of it. Is it still possible to understand social change in China without understanding the popular struggles linked to the Internet?
This book is about these Internet-related struggles, which I will call online activism. My thesis is that online activism derives its forms and dynamics from a broad spectrum of converging and contending forces, technological, cultural, social, and economic, as well as political. It must therefore be understood as the result of the interaction of multiple forces. The dynamics are multidimensional. For this reason, analyzing online activism will both reveal the new forms, dynamics, and consequences of popular contention in the age of the Internet and will shed light on general patterns and dynamics of change in contemporary China. I show how Chinese people have created a world of carnival, community, and contention in and through cyberspace and how in this process they have transformed personhood, society, and politics. This book is about people’s power in the Internet age.
China achieved full-function connectivity to the Internet in 1994. By June 2008, the number of Internet users had reached 253 million. In over ten years, about a quarter of the urban population had gained Internet access. In both work and leisure, people depend on it more and more. The result is the rise of a dynamic Chinese Internet culture. This is a creative culture full of humor, play, and irreverence. It is also participatory and contentious. Its bulletin-board systems (BBSs), online communities, and blogs are among the most active in the global cybersphere. Fully a quarter of all Chinese Internet users frequent BBS forums. The most unorthodox, imaginative, and subversive ideas can be found in Chinese cyberspace. Authority of all kinds is subject to doubt and ridicule. Ordinary people engage in a broad range of political action and find a new sense of self, community, and empowerment. All this forms a sharp contrast to the official newspapers and television channels, where power and authority continue to be narrated in drab tones and visualized in pompous images, so as to be worshipped. And all this Internet culture is burgeoning under conditions of increasing political control.
Scholarly works have explored many aspects of this Internet culture. There are important studies of Internet control, e-government, cybernationalism, and online participation. Some analysts have argued, for example, that Internet control has been tightening in China. Others have studied the formation of online literary communities. Still others have explored Internet-based political action. Yet these different aspects remain disconnected in current studies. The power, dynamics, and contradictions of Chinese Internet culture remain clouded. Why is popular contention occurring under conditions of growing control? How do netizens and civil-society groups resist and challenge Internet control? What cultural forms do online activism take on? How do people build online communities? What is the role of Internet businesses in all this? What is the power of online activism as a force of social change?
These questions cannot be answered separately and in isolation from broader social and historical processes. The creativity, community, contention, and control in Chinese cyberspace are interrelated features. Online community is both a social basis and an outcome of contention. Contention challenges control and adapts to it. Popular contention and the search for community are processes of human agency and creativity. And of course, Chinese Internet culture is not just about the Internet. It mirrors larger trends. The creativity, community, contention, and control in Chinese cyberspace are evident in other areas of contemporary life. The Internet revolution parallels the expansion of culture, community, and citizen activism beyond cyberspace. I show how Chinese citizens, within the limits of objective social conditions, have expanded culture, community, and political participation in the information age. Collectively, these efforts make up China’s new citizen activism. The story I tell is about the interfacing of this new citizen activism with the Internet. It is a story of social change told through the lens of online activism.
Online Activism: A Tale of Identity and Contention
Online activism refers to contentious activities associated with the use of the Internet and other new communication technologies. It can be based more or less on the Internet. On the one hand, the Internet is increasingly integrated with conventional forms of locality-specific protest. For example, it is used to mobilize offline protest events. In many cases, however, contention takes place in cyberspace. It may spill offline, but its central stage of action is the Internet. Contention is a matter of degree. Among the less contentious activities are the social and political discussions and debates that take place online daily. More contentious action includes Web campaigns, signature petitions, outright verbal protests, and online direct action such as virtual sit-ins and hacktivism.
Activism is often taken to mean contentious political activities. Yet contention is not limited to the political realm. Activism can take cultural and social forms without being any less contentious.1 Many cultural and social activities in modern Chinese history were just as political as political movements were. The “misty poetry” movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a literary movement, yet it was politically subversive. Such is also the case with Cui Jian’s rock-and-roll music.2 Nor does activism necessarily have explicitly political goals. Often, people engage in cultural contention to express or oppose values, morality, lifestyles, and identities.
One of the fascinating aspects about online activism in China is precisely its ambiguous nature. Sometimes it takes the form of protest; at other times, it borders on dissent but is not clearly so. In the words of Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, it is “boundary spanning.”3 It crosses between the legitimate and the illegitimate. At still other times, online discussions are not meant to be political but may be interpreted as such by government authorities. Thus, following the broad conceptualization of activism in recent social-movement scholarship, I understand online activism to be any form of Internet-based collective action that promotes, contests, or resists change.
Online activism in China touches on all imaginable issues, from consumer-rights defense to sexual orientation, from protests against harms inflicted on vulnerable individuals and disadvantaged groups to the expression and assertion of new lifestyles and identities. These issues fall roughly into two types. One consists of struggles for recognition and against discrimination. As I will discuss in detail in chapter 1, this type is about identity politics. The other type involves struggles against oppression and exploitation rooted in grave material grievances. These two types of struggles resemble the “protests against discrimination” and “protests of desperation” among the workers studied by Ching Kwan Lee.4 Yet while for Lee, the protests against discrimination are mainly rooted in material grievances about wage nonpayment, the struggles for recognition in online activism also focus significantly on nonmaterial concerns. Of course, this is an analytical distinction. In reality, most cases of activism involve overlapping concerns and claims, both material and nonmaterial. There is no pure division between material interests and nonmaterial concerns.
The story of Zhang Xianzhu and other hepatitis-B carriers is emblematic of Chinese online struggles for recognition.5 On November 10, 2003, Zhang Xianzhu, a member of a BBS forum run by hepatitis-B carriers, sued the Human Resources Department of Wuhu’s municipal government in the province of Anhui for discrimination in its recruitment of civil servants. Aged twenty-five, Zhang was first out of thirty candidates competing for one civil-service position. But on September 20, 2003, after three months of ordeal, Zhang received a notice from the Human Resources Department that he was not eligible for hiring because his physical exam results showed that he was a hepatitis-B carrier. Devastated, Zhang shared his story with members of the hepatitis-B forum. He received immediate emotional and moral support. He took forum members’ advice and took his case to court. The BBS forum launched a campaign to aid Zhang’s cause. The moderator of its newly opened “rights-defense forum” found a well-known professor of law from Sichuan University to appear as Zhang’s defense lawyer. Other members contacted newspapers and television stations to seek media coverage of Zhang’s case. The forum also set up a bank account for people to donate money for Zhang. On April 2, 2004, the local court ruled that the Human Resources Department did not have cause to cancel Zhang’s candidacy. On April 19, 2004, the intermediate court rejected the appeal of the Human Resources Department. This court ruling marked the victory of the first-ever legal action against hepatitis-B discrimination in job placement, and it had far-reaching reverberations. In August 2004, the Ministry of Personnel and Ministry of Health removed articles about hepatitis-B from the national “Physical Exam Criteria for Civil Servants Recruitment,” making hepatitis-B carriers eligible for civil-service jobs. The victory of the case showed that people could use the Internet not only to provide and seek social support but also to mobilize and organize collective action. Since then, the hepatitis-B carriers’ antidiscrimination campaign has grown into a full-blown national movement. The movement still relies heavily on the Internet, but the social networks that have evolved from the Internet forums have become an important social basis.
The exposure and contention about slave labor in the illegally operating kilns in the province of Shanxi is a story of struggles against oppression.6 On May 19, 2007, the Henan television station aired a short program about the kidnapping of young boys for slave labor in the illegally operating brick kilns in Shanxi and the horrible experiences of parents trying to find their missing children. The program received attention in the province of Henan, and follow-up stories were aired in the following weeks. In Shanxi, newspapers covered the story too. Yet it was not until early June that the issue gained national media publicity, leading to the direct intervention of the central government. The transformation of this story from local news to a national issue happened because of an open letter a woman published anonymously online. The letter appeared on June 6 in the “Great River Net” (dahe wang), the official Web hub of Henan. By June 18, it had attracted 300,000 hits. As soon as it appeared, the letter was crossposted to Tianya.cn, one of the most popular and influential online communities in China. There it attracted an even larger number of hits for the same period: 580,000. Numerous responses were posted. Netizens expressed shock at this case of twenty-first-century slavery. They demanded the punishment of both local kiln owners and the police and government personnel who helped them cover up the case. Many people proposed specific avenues of action: building QQ-based mass-mailing lists to keep the communication going,7 establishing emergency citizen organizations to raise funds to help the parents and their abducted children, contacting international media and religious organizations to expose the affair, calling for government intervention, and so forth. In the middle of these protestations and mobilization, national newspapers, television stations, and Web hubs began to cover the case extensively, and the central government dispatched officials to Shanxi to investigate. The wave of popular contention subsided in early July with the prosecution of the key suspects.
These are just two of the many stories I will tell in the following pages. These stories are about real people and their experiences. Their experiences hinge one way or another on the Internet and other new information technologies, but they are not confined there: they often spill offline into the streets. These people are an extremely diverse and motley crowd. They are activists, dissidents, lurkers, gamers, hackers, and bloggers. They are environmentalists, nationalists, whistleblowers, feminists, and idealistic utopians. They are high-school students, college graduates, white-collar professionals, homeowners, pet owners, consumer activists, and just plain and simple wangmin—netizens. Although there are significantly fewer active participants from the rural population, rural representation cannot be summarily dismissed. As of December 2007, over 52 million (7.1 percent) members of the rural population were online. The increase in the number of Internet users in rural areas far outpaces that in urban areas, indicating that the Internet is undergoing rapid diffusion in rural China.8 Moreover, rural representation sometimes happens in other ways too, such as through the mediation of wired urbanites, many of whom join online activism about rural social issues. Readers may still remember the touching image of the eighty-year-old peasant woman Feng Zhen in the village of Taishi, which was widely circulated on the Internet in 2005. Holding a megaphone and with an upraised fist, Feng was pictured delivering a speech to fellow villagers who were petitioning to impeach their village head.9 Like powerful television images, these indirect representations have direct consequences in mobilizing online publics when they enter circulation in the Internet networks.
Multi-Interactionism: An Analytical Approach
Why has online activism been on the rise? What are its main forms and dynamics?
Existing work contains many useful insights. Many studies reveal the institutions, practices, and architecture of the political control of the Internet in China.10 Others have explored the practices of e-government, namely, the use of the Internet and other new information technologies to promote transparency and enhance governance.11 Many have examined different aspects of the political, social, and cultural uses of the Internet, SMS (short message service), and mobile phones, revealing the expansion of intellectual and public discourse,12 the formation of online literary communities,13 the expression of social conflicts and the empowering of marginalized groups such as migrant workers,14 the rise of cybernationalism,15 and the effect of political liberalization.16 Although many of these works touch on various issues related to online activism such as Internet control and public expression, a systematic, in-depth study focusing specifically on online activism is still lacking. Online activism has not been subject to theoretical explanation.
Online activism is a topic of great interest in the social sciences, yet most social science studies are attempts to extend established theoretical frameworks to the analysis of online activism. The typical research question is about the role of the Internet in various aspects of social movements (such as mobilization or the framing of issues). For example, one author finds from a review of existing studies that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enhanced movement mobilization by reducing costs, promoting collective identity, and creating new opportunities. ICTs have also accelerated and extended the diffusion of protest, enlarged the repertoire of contention, and facilitated the adoption of decentralized, nonhierarchical organizational forms.17 This line of research has the virtue of linking online activism to a well-established theoretical literature. Yet arguments about how ICTs have changed or not changed this or that aspect of social movements can only go so far, because they are handicapped by the unexamined assumption of technological determinism. To argue that the Internet has changed certain aspects of popular contention is to assume that technology produces its own effects.
In short, current scholarship has touched on many aspects of the Chinese Internet. Although it contains many insights, these are often isolated and disconnected. For an analysis of online activism (and of the Chinese Internet more broadly), what is needed is an approach that can capture its multidimensional dynamics. This is the approach I will propose for my study. I will call it the multi-interactionism model of online activism.
Multi-interactionism refers to the multidimensional interactions that both enable and constrain online activism. Multidimensional interaction is an increasingly important condition of social dynamics in the age of information and globalization. It involves multiple parties, and the influences go in multiple directions. For example, state political power both shapes and adjusts to online activism.
Specifically, my analytical framework will foreground online activism in interaction with (1) state power, (2) culture, (3) the market, (4) civil society, and (5) transnationalism. Online activism is a response to the grievances, injustices, and anxieties caused by the structural transformation of Chinese society. State power constrains the forms and issues of contention, but instead of preventing it from happening, it forces activists to be more creative and artful. Culture, understood as symbolic forms and practices,18 informs and constitutes online contention through the tradition and innovation of rituals and genres of contention. Business interests favor contention despite the dangers of manipulation. Civic organizations and online communities, the main force of civil society, strategically use the Internet for social change. Transnationalization expands the scale and radicalizes the forms of online activism. All this adds up to a complex picture of online activism as a central locus of social conflict and social transformation in contemporary China. The complex interactive relations may be represented as shown in figure 0.1.
This multi-interactionist perspective draws directly from recent developments in social-movement theory. Reflecting the broader intellectual trend of understanding interrelations in a complex society, social-movement theorists have begun to give more attention to relational dynamics.19 Even famed structuralists have rejected narrowly structural approaches in favor of relational and interactional dynamics. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly write:
FIGURE 0.1 The Multidimensional Dynamics of Online Activism
We come from a structuralist tradition. But in the course of our work on a wide variety of contentious politics in Europe and North America, we discovered the necessity of taking strategic interaction, consciousness, and historically accumulated culture into account…. We have come to think of interpersonal networks, interpersonal communication, and various forms of continuous negotiation—including the negotiation of identities—as figuring centrally in the dynamics of contention.20
Whereas the relational persuasion in this articulation stresses intra-movement and interpersonal interactions, other scholars emphasize multi-institutional interactions. Elizabeth Armstrong and Mary Bernstein have proposed such a “multi-institutional politics approach.”21 They argue that the influential political-process theory, which explains social movements as the outcome of political opportunities, the mobilization of resources, and strategic framing,22 exaggerates the role of the state and underestimates other institutional factors, especially culture. They note that a “multi-institutional politics” approach may be particularly helpful in explaining transnational social movements, precisely because the nation-state becomes only one of multiple actors in these movements.
This new attention to multiple institutional factors is more than just a critical response to the political process model of social movement theory. Perhaps more importantly, it reflects and captures the new conditions of complexity in contemporary society. In the field of international relations, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye have characterized these new conditions with their theory of complex interdependence. The concept refers to the mutual influences among multiple actors in international transactions, such as the flow of money, goods, people, and messages across international boundaries. The emphasis is on the interactions and interdependence among multiple actors and the increased role of civil-society actors rather than the dominance of the nation-state.23 In an update of their theory, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye take into consideration the new conditions of the information revolution. They argue that in the information age, the influence of states depends increasingly on their ability to remain credible, and nonstate actors can now challenge this ability more easily because new communication technologies give citizens better means to transmit critical information.24
If international societies are becoming more complex, so is Chinese society. Indeed, the concept of multi-interactionism is useful for analyzing Chinese online activism precisely because it captures the growing complexity of contemporary Chinese society. Online activism in China is unrivalled by any other contemporary social phenomenon in that it is constituted by and constitutive of numerous political, social, cultural, economic, technological, and demographic forces at multiple levels—structural, institutional, and individual; transnational, translocal, and local. It is the point of convergence, conflict, and contestation. Online activism epitomizes these dynamic interactions.
Below, I will elaborate on the five dynamics of online activism, as shown in figure 0.1, and situate them in the main currents of theoretical literature. I start with a general discussion of the relationship between technology and society in order to clarify my basic assumptions about the study of the Internet.
Technological Determinism and Determined Technology
Assumptions of technological determinism often underlie both media stories and scholarly work about the Internet in China. Take two oft-repeated statements. For some time, it was fashionable to consider the Internet as a force of democratization. Then the tide changed and it became even more fashionable to claim that the Internet does not lead to democratization. Both statements are misguided because both draw a simple line between technology and society, omitting all the rich human experiences and institutions in between. The second, currently more fashionable statement that the Internet does not lead to democratization is in a sense even more problematic, because it both fails to see the real changes that are taking place at the grassroots level and dismisses too easily the daily experiences of millions of people in their actual engagement and encounters with the Internet.
In an initially healthy but ultimately uncritical move away from technological determinism, some scholars go to the opposite end. Rejecting technological determinism, they opt for a simple contextualism where all that matters is context and, consequently, technology itself becomes an epiphenomenon.25 Raymond Williams calls this fallacy “determined technology.” In this view, technology becomes an effect just as simple as the cause it is assumed to be in technological determinism. Williams distinguishes between two types of technological determinism. In “pure” technological determinism, technology is viewed as “a self-acting force which creates new ways of life.” In “symptomatic” technological determinism, technology is “a self-acting force which provides materials for new ways of life.”26 The first view exaggerates the role of technology, whereas the second considers technology only as accidental and marginal. Both ignore human intention, purpose, and practice.
Williams subtly joins a recognition of the centrality of technological and cultural forms in shaping reality with an emphasis on the role of real people and institutions. At a time when television was not viewed as “serious culture,” his pioneering study of it articulated a democratic vision about popular cultural forms. In academic studies—if not in everyday life—today’s Internet culture, including forms of online activism, is in a marginal position similar to that of television culture in the early 1970s. Although Williams retains a degree of ambivalence about television culture, he celebrates the creativity of the common people in his study of popular television forms. This is directly relevant for studies of Internet culture today.
Outside the fledgling field of Internet studies, there is thriving new historical scholarship on the development of the print media in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century China. Some scholars stress human intention rather than technological function. Joan Judge’s study of the political press in the late Qing period stresses the role of journalists and other cultural entrepreneurs, as well as the importance of discourse in promoting social change.27 Christopher Reed’s work shows that entrepreneurial personalities decisively shaped the rise of a Chinese print capitalism in the late Qing and Republican Shanghai periods.28 Kai-Wing Chow argues, “it is not printing itself that determines how it will be used, but rather the specific attitudes of the group who come to use that technology as well as the ecological, economic, social, and political conditions under which a specific technology is developed, introduced, marketed, used, and resisted.”29
Whereas this perspective stresses the role of people, another focuses on texts, conventions, and cultural forms. This line of research is directly informed by Michael Schudson’s work on the American news, where he argues that the power of the media lies mainly in its power to provide the forms and conventions of expression.30 In her study of the newspaper Shenbao, Barbara Mittler focuses on text rather than context, treating the newspaper “as a cultural phenomenon, as a novel form and collection of writings introduced to the Chinese during the nineteenth century.”31 She argues, “as a text, the press acquired considerable symbolic power by adapting to Chinese styles of writing, by speaking ‘in the words of the sages’ and in the pose of the remonstrating official, and by exploiting the authority of the Chinese court gazette.”32 For her, Shenbao is “a polyphonic text in the Bakhtinian sense: a phenomenon multiform in style and in speech and voice, an accumulation of several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often situated on different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls.”33
If a single newspaper one hundred years ago produced polyphonic texts and Bakhtinian heteroglossia, what does this mean for understanding the endless flow of multimedia discourse on the Internet today? How does Williams’s democratic vision about popular cultural forms inform studies of the Internet? Part of the project of this book is to reveal the democratic aspirations of the common people in the ways in which they produce, receive, and respond to critical, contentious discourses on the Internet. A central argument I will develop in chapter 3 is that online contention is constituted in the process of the creative use of contentious rituals, practices, and speech genres. Internet activism draws upon the traditions of popular contention in modern China while developing its own cultural characteristics.
The Dialectics of Power and Resistance
In the wake of the 1989 student movement, studies of popular protests flourished and then subsided as scholars turned their attention to the dazzling array of new developments since the 1990s. It is only in the recent few years that, with the rise of new waves of protests, there has been a strong revival of interest in this area. New works have revealed the new mosaic of popular contention in China.34 There have appeared studies of rural protests, labor protests, religious agitation, women’s activism, popular nationalism, environmental activism, homeowners’ activism, NGO activism, and so forth. Individually, these studies show the proliferation of contention and the diversification of contentious forms since the 1990s. Yet most studies focus on specific sectors, such as workers or peasants, without asking why there are so many different forms of activism and what this diversification of forms means for understanding social change.
Online activism is a preeminently new form of activism. It compels us to ask questions about repertoires, imagery, symbols, rhetoric, and rituals and their relations with general social and political conditions. How new are the forms of online activism? What do they signify about the changing conditions of popular contention in China? How do they reflect the changing nature of state power?
Social theorists have long debated about the relationship between power and resistance. A key issue hinges on the notion of political opportunity structures. Eminent authors have argued that mobilization is more likely to emerge under more open political conditions.35 Others counter that political opportunities are a matter of perception36 and that the sudden closing of opportunities may in fact galvanize challengers and result in mobilization. Political repression can lead to revolution.37 Still others attempt to disaggregate political opportunities or link political opportunities to forms of contention rather than the absence or presence of contention. David Meyer and Debra Minkoff argue that “a polity that provides openness to one kind of participation may be closed to others.”38 Others suggest that the degree of institutional access influences the violent or nonviolent character of contention. When political structures are relatively open, people are likely to resort to institutional channels and moderate, nonviolent forms of contention. When they are closed or ineffective, people may resort to more radical and noninstitutional forms.39
Power shapes contention, but precisely how it does so and to what effect is not always clear. In analyzing the relationship between state power and online activism, I will argue, first, that state power channels online activism into some issues but not others. In other words, online activism responds to issue-specific political opportunities in China. Issues that are more politically tolerable and more resonant with the public are more likely to enter the public sphere and become contentious events. Moreover, as state power attempts to control the Internet, the Internet users and activists respond creatively to state control. People are not “captive audiences”40 but rather “skilled actors” in China’s complex media environment.41 They negotiate Internet control and express contention artfully through skillful use of the Internet, as well as legally and rightfully by operating “near the boundary of authorized channels.”42 Thus political domination shapes the forms of contention but cannot prevent it from happening. Third, while power constrains contention, it also responds and adapts to it. The result is that both power and contention undergo change in their interaction. This aspect of the relationship between Internet control and Internet activism is neglected in current scholarship. I will argue that both the forms and practices of state power and online activism have become more sophisticated over time. They interact with and adapt to each other, and the coevolution of online activism and Internet control in the past decade presents almost a quasi-experimental case to evaluate the effects of this interaction.
Online Activism and the Cultures of Contention
In the 1990s, several scholars pioneered the study of the cultures of popular protest in modern China through analyses of student movements in the early twentieth century and in 1989.43 They made rituals, performances, and rhetoric the center of their analysis. The next wave of studies turned to labor and rural protests that accompanied the acceleration of the market reform.44 Although some of these scholars pay attention to the cultural strategies in these protests,45 by and large they follow the political-process model of social-movement theory without making culture the focus of their analysis.
The study of online activism calls for renewed attention to the culture of contention. Perhaps more than other forms of protest, online activism is par excellence activism by cultural means. It mobilizes collective action by producing and disseminating symbols, imagery, rhetoric, and sounds. This process is characterized by both innovation and the appropriation of cultural conventions. To understand how culture enables online activism therefore requires an analysis of (1) how the cultural tradition of popular protest in modern China is inherited and reinvented and (2) what cultural innovations have appeared and how they relate to online activism. I will address these questions by examining the rituals, genres, and styles of online activism. I argue that these cultural forms of online activism mobilize collective action through the mobilization of emotions. The symbols, rhetoric, imagery, and rituals of online contention appeal especially powerfully to people’s moral sensibilities.
The cultures of contention include both contentious performances and symbolic resources such as narratives, languages, imagery, and music.46 Analyzing the rituals and genres of online activism, therefore, provides a unique angle for understanding how culture enables action.47 Style is an important element both of literary and artistic expression and of political expression. As I will show in chapter 4, social movements and collective action may assume a variety of styles, some epic and heroic, others quotidian and prosaic. Style has an epochal or collective quality. In the world of literary and artistic expression, styles are the markers of different historical eras or different artistic schools. If Chinese society is undergoing epochal changes, then it is entirely possible that these changes will be reflected in the styles of popular protest. Analyzing the styles of contention, therefore, will reveal another important aspect of the relationship between culture and online activism and will shed light on the broad contours of historical continuity and change.
The Business of Online Contention: An Unusual Synergy
In his study of China’s propaganda system, David Shambaugh argues that even though the propaganda system still has its uses, the ability of the propaganda authorities to control information has decreased over time. He attributes this to several factors, including the commercialization of the media, the effects of globalization, the sophistication of technology, and the increased awareness of the public.48 I will argue that these very same factors—the market, globalization, technology, and civil society—that have reduced the power of the authorities to control information have contributed to the rise of online activism. The market, civil society, and globalization are three central factors in the multi-interactionism of online activism. In each case, the interactions take place in the broader social context and in relation to all the other factors under consideration.
Between online activism and the market there exists an unusual synergy. It is unusual because it is not often found in other contentious forms, such as street demonstrations. The synergy emerges out of the interactions between online contention and Internet business. Internet businesses benefit from promoting online contention. Contentious activities are more likely to flourish on commercial Web sites than on government-run Web sites. This is because Web sites depend on Web traffic and contentious activities such as online debates and other forms of interactions can boost the volumes of traffic. The logic behind it is that of nonproprietary social production that Yochai Benkler has recently explicated.49 In this logic, it is the users and consumers that produce much of the information online through peer sharing, peer production, and sheer large-scale conversations and interactions. This is the logic that drives Internet businesses. Contentious events generate social interaction (and vice versa), thus boosting Web traffic. This is what happened during all the major cases of online activism in China in recent years. The implications of a business interest in contention are ambiguous but important. Does business indirectly promote democratic participation? What about the dangers of manipulation by commercial interests?
Political scientists and communication scholars have long debated about the relationship between market development and democratization in China. Of those who focus on market change and media opening, Yuezhi Zhao’s work is representative. She argues forcefully that media commercialization has transformed the relationship between the party and the media, but instead of leading to democratization, it produces the interlocking of party control and the market logic. Zhao’s critique aims just as much at party control as at the liberal model of the market economy: “The current intertwining of Party control and market forces is highly problematic, but the complete commercialization and the replacement of Party control by market control alone will not lead to a democratized system of media communication either.”50 For Zhao, one of the great dangers of media commercialization is the displacement of concerns with social equality and justice. She mentions the decline of newspapers for peasants and workers. Zhao’s focus, however, was almost exclusively on newspapers. Her more recent work discusses the potentials of the new media as an outlet for airing social issues. She points out the surprising irony that the rapid developments of the new information industries, as an important part of the Chinese economy, “have contributed to China’s impressive growth on the one hand, and its extreme form of uneven social development on the other.”51 The contradictions and ambiguities in the relationship between market and democracy invite sustained debates, not closure. For one thing, any such relationship can only be a historical one. At some point, under some conditions, some elements of the market may be conducive to democratic participation in citizen affairs, but the conditions can always change. Based on evidence in my analysis of online activism, I argue that the synergy between Internet businesses and online contention contributes to the rise and diffusion of contention but does not preclude the possibility of manipulation.
The Mutual Constitution of Online Activism and Civil Society
Another factor in my model of multi-interactionism is civil society. By civil society, I refer to civic associations.52 They include formally organized groups such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), nonprofit organizations (NPOs), and various stripes of minjian, or unofficial, organizations. They also include informal and grassroots civic groups such as online communities.
I make no normative assumptions about civil society. Much of the discourse about civil society assumes that it acts on behalf of citizens against oppressive states. This discourse is a historical construction produced after the fall of the former Eastern European nations in 1989. In those debates, many scholars saw civil society (such as the church and voluntary associations) as a crucial factor in overthrowing state regimes.53 There is thus an implicit connection between civil society and democracy. Yet, as other scholars have argued, the often touted connection between civil society and democracy is an empirical connection to be investigated, not a logical issue to be assumed.54 Furthermore, the Gramscian notion of civil society has a double character.55 On the one hand, it consists of such intermediary associations as churches, unions, and other civic organizations, which are all part of the hegemonic apparatuses of the state. They extend the reach of the state. On the other hand, they are rooted in society and among the people. This double character does not make civil society automatically good or bad, but “a privileged terrain of political change.”56 An expansion of civil society thus means no more and no less than an expanded terrain of political struggle.
My argument is that civil society and online activism are mutually constitutive under the conditions of complex interdependence in contemporary China. Civil society generates online contention, while contention activates civil society and boosts its development. The mutual constitution of online activism and civil society reveals a trajectory of coevolution.57 They grow together in parallel fashion. Similar arguments have been made with respect to the interactions between NGOs and the Internet in the United States58 and former Eastern European countries.59 In Chinese historical scholarship, Eugenia Lean’s work on the rise of public sympathy in the 1930s underlines the processual nature of publics. Minimally institutionalized in form, this public was very much a product of media events. Lean emphasizes publics as processes rather than spaces or institutions. They do not simply exist out there but are “hailed” into existence under the conditions of growing urban consumerism and a modern media culture.
I examine two different aspects of the relations between civic associations and online activism. One aspect is about how existing civic associations respond to the Internet and whether and how Internet use affects organizational development and identities. The other aspect concerns the forms and dynamics of online communities, specifically what kinds of communities emerge online, whether and how they generate activism, and what forms of activism are generated.
Transnationalism and Online Activism
The final element in my multi-interactionist perspective is transnationalism. Transnationalization, meaning the crossing of national borders, is a condition of today’s world. This is most commonly seen in the transnational flows of people, money, goods, cultural products, symbols, and ideas. In social-movement studies, some scholars consider activism to be transnational if it meets one or more of the following conditions: (1) it focuses on transnational issues such as environmental and health problems, (2) the activists have an organizational structure that is not territorially bounded or are concerned with issues in a country other than where they reside, (3) it involves the use of transnational strategies such as Internet-based mobilization, (4) the targets are based in countries other than where the activists reside, and (5) the activists consider themselves “global citizens.”60 This last condition is open to question, if only because of the dubiousness of the concept of global citizen. Other than that, this conceptualization covers enough ground for analyzing the types of online transnational activism I have observed in China.
Traditional social-movement theories are state-centric, but more recent works have focused on transnational activism. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink show how domestic activists generate an international boomerang dynamic to challenge domestic state actors.61 Sidney Tarrow analyzes the double processes of internalization and externalization in transnational activism.62 Saskia Sassen underlines the new global assemblages made possible by new information technologies and how they enable local actors to participate in global politics.63 In a study of civic organizations in Hungary, Stark, Vedres, and Bruszt, contrary to the common view that transnational connections often come at the expense of local integration, find that civic organizations can be both locally rooted and globally connected.64
Transnationalism is an integral part of my multi-interactionist approach to online activism, both because transnationalization is a salient feature of Chinese online activism and because it interacts with other factors in my model. Thus Chinese civil society has assumed a transnational feature as civic groups cultivate ties with their counterparts in other countries. With the cultural translation and transnational diffusion of repertoires, discourses, and symbols, the cultures of contention similarly have taken on a transnational aspect. The transnational circulation of blog entries and Flash-animation videos comes to mind. Perhaps most importantly, transnationalism is directly related to the changing role and power of the state. Transnationalism does not mean the decline of the state, yet it raises new questions about how activists challenge and negotiate state power by seizing new political opportunities, resources, alliances, cultural framings, and communication technologies in the age of information.65
What are the transnational dimensions of online activism in China? How does transnationalization affect the dynamics of online activism? I will argue that transnationalization both expands and intensifies online activism, leading to shifts in scale and intensity.66 More specifically, I will differentiate two types of transnational activism. One originates from inside China, the other from outside. Geopolitics largely explains the differences between these two types. 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 history and identity concerns of the activists.
Structures of Feeling
Online activism may be viewed as a new social formation still in the making. Raymond Williams conceives of social formations as “conscious movements and tendencies which can usually be readily discerned after their formative productions.”67 Yet when a new social formation, an emergence, becomes recognizable, it has already been turned “into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes.” He continues: “Analysis is then centred on relations between these produced institutions, formations, and experiences, so that now, as in that produced past, only the fixed explicit forms exist, and living presence is always, by definition, receding.”68 This living presence is what he means by structures of feeling. It is what social analysis should strive to capture. He notes that an alternative definition for structures of feeling would be structures of experience,
but with the difficulty that one of its senses has that past tense which is the most important obstacle to recognition of the area of social experience which is being defined. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought; but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.69
New structures of feeling in a society indicate major change. If online activism is a new social formation in the making, then it should reveal some elements of the new structures of feeling in Chinese society. What these elements might be I will attempt to describe in the conclusion. But laying the challenge on the table at the outset is important because it provides a useful critique of a tendency in current scholarship on new media both in the field of China studies and in general social science. This is the tendency to dismiss the significance of the Internet by labeling it a mere incarnation of a digital utopia or the digital sublime.70
There are several variations on this theme. Some argue that the Internet is a virtual world, and being virtual is being unreal. Others suggest that what people do with and on the Internet is a mere extension of what they have always done and therefore of negligible value, perhaps even cheap. The most deceptive version claims that the Internet seems to be important only because it is still new and people still have a sense of curiosity about it, but as the Internet becomes more integrated into everyday life, it will all be “life as usual” and the Internet will only prove to be a passing fashion. Such assertions are often made in comparison with the fate of the telephone in modern American history. As retrospective historical analyses of things past, these studies are extremely valuable in revealing repetitive patterns of history. Yet, if history often repeats itself, it does not mean that people who repeat history have wasted their lives. Our fascination with the Internet may well be identical with people’s earlier fascination with the telephone. The Internet, like the telephone, may not directly lead us to a more just and equal society. But people will have lived their lives. They will have experienced and even waged struggles. There is intrinsic value in that historical experience. This is our unique advantage in studying the Internet. Without the advantage of hindsight, we are nevertheless blessed with the opportunity of observing people’s experiences with the Internet firsthand, of talking with them, listening to them, feeling and thinking with them. Online activism is an important part of this living experience. It is in this sense that a study of online activism is not just a study as such but is a window into emerging structures of feeling.
As Williams points out, social analysis of emergence and structures of feelings has methodological implications. The consequence is that
the specific qualitative changes are not assumed to be epiphenomena of changed institutions, formations, and beliefs, or merely secondary evidence, of changed social and economic relations between and within classes. At the same time, they are from the beginning taken as social experience, rather than as “personal” experience or as the merely superficial or incidental “small change” of society.71
Throughout this book, I present vignettes of online activism, relate stories from my interviewees, cite passages of BBS posts collected through online ethnography, offer samples of Internet autobiographies, and, in one chapter, weave survey statistics with qualitative research findings. I do this not only to tell personal stories but to explain the rise of online activism and ultimately to convey the meanings of the broad range of experiences Chinese people have had with a new technology in their struggles for justice and belonging in their rapidly changing society.
Methodological Reflections
The research for this book was done over a period of about ten years. I began collecting data on the social uses of the Internet in late 1999, when I was writing about nostalgia among China’s former “educated youth” (zhiqing). One of the things they did when the World Wide Web became available was to build personal homepages with names such as “The Home of Educated Youth” and “China’s Educated Youth.” From 2000 to 2002, I was an active member of a BBS forum run by a group of former “educated youth,” and I eventually joined the Web site’s volunteer management team. With some members in different parts of China and others overseas, the team functioned completely online through both its BBS forum and an e-mail list. The members were informed that I was doing research as a participant observer.
This experience convinced me of the significance of understanding Internet culture through direct participation. Learning about Internet culture is like learning a new language. Immersion is the most important approach— but immersion in cyberspace has its seductive side. There is always something new: there are always new developments related to the Internet, whether technological, social, cultural, or political. Studying the Internet did indeed feel like shooting a moving target. But as my research and writing evolved, the “moving target” theory became unconvincing. A “living record” theory seems more appropriate. To be sure, the Internet changes daily. But that does not mean what happened yesterday is meaningless today, for every little development in the past becomes a part of the present. The development of the Internet is like the development of a person or a society. One’s past is always part of the present identity. Seen in this way, no research of the Internet can really be outdated. The material collected at a particular time and place is the living record of the history of the Internet at that point.
Thus, over the past ten years or so, I collected as many materials as I could for this study. In addition to the experience of participant observation mentioned above, the other main types of research and data collection projects are as follows:
(1) From May 23 to June 4, 2000, I spent an average of six hours daily monitoring the developments of an Internet-based protest surrounding the murder of a Beijing University student. I selected six BBS forums for intensive observation.
(2) In 2001, I collected seventy-four personal stories about encounters with Internet cafes. The stories were initially published on the Web site Sina.com from 1998 to 2000. I call these personal stories “Internet autobiographies.” They are essential for understanding digital experiences.72 More Internet autobiographies would be collected later on.
(3) In June 2001, I conducted a content analysis of four BBS forums, two in China and two in North America, to understand variations in the level of interactivity and issue representation.
(4) In the summer of 2002, I conducted field research on Internet use by environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in China. I interviewed people from fourteen ENGOs, including four Web-based groups.
(5) From 2002 to the present, I have been on the mailing lists of six Chinese NGOs, including one Web-based charitable organization. I follow their developments through the newsletters sent through the mailing lists.
(6) In 2003, I conducted a survey of Internet use among civic associations in China. The sample size was 550 civic associations in urban areas. This yielded 129 valid questionnaires for analysis. The survey data are the main basis of my analysis in chapter 6.
(7) From October 2003 to February 2004, I conducted a study of the Web presence of Chinese environmental NGOs. Of the seventy-four ENGOs in my sample, forty had Web sites. I studied the contents of these forty Web sites.
(8) In 2005, I collected thirty-three Internet autobiographies published on-line by Sina.com in celebration of its tenth anniversary.
(9) In the summer of 2007, I conducted twenty interviews with different types of Internet users, including commercial Web editors, a government Web site editor, bloggers, and ordinary users. In addition, I collected eighteen more Internet autobiographies through solicitation.
(10) From April 2007 to April 2008, I ran a personal blog using an anonymous name in order to get a personal understanding of the blog culture in China. The blog was initially on Sina.com and then moved to Sohu.com.
(11) For the past ten years or so, I have studied numerous Web sites and closely monitored several large online communities, including Tianya.cn, Sohu.com, Netease.com, Sina.com, and the Strengthening the Nation Forum. One research project about the representations of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the Internet alone involved the study of over one hundred Web sites. I also monitored several university BBS forums for an extensive period of time, until university BBS culture was transformed in 2005 after a national crackdown.
(12) Finally, I made use of mass-media reports about Internet developments in China, including stories from major newspapers and magazines and mainstream English-language media. The Chinese-language magazines I studied include the two major magazines about the Internet: Hulian wang zhoukan [Internet weekly] and Wangluo chuanbo [New media].
As this research chronicle indicates, my study combines qualitative with quantitative methodology but prioritizes qualitative methods, especially participant observation, interviews, and content analysis. Participant observation online has evolved into a mature methodology called virtual ethnography.73 In my own research, I incorporated elements of “multisited ethnography”74 and “global ethnography.”75 Because of the global, networked features of the Internet, studying the Internet necessarily requires strategies to understand these global connections. The multidimensional dynamics of Chinese online activism similarly calls for attention to the diffusion of contention in multiple sites. Whether it is monitoring an ongoing case of contention or trying to uncover information about a case in the past, I often feel like a guerrilla ethnographer following multiple links to different sites, sometimes offline, in order to track down the needed information. I hope, however, that I have woven these rich raw materials into a story with its own coherence and unity.
Organization of the Book
The book is arranged topically following the conceptual scheme outlined above. The first chapter traces the structural origins of online activism. The others examine the five dynamics of online activism separately, with culture and civil society each taking up two chapters. Each chapter begins with a brief historical discussion of the main issues in that chapter to establish points of historical reference and set up the context. For example, chapter 2, on power and resistance, discusses the historical evolution of the Internet-control regime. Similarly, the chapter on online communities contains a historical overview of the development of online communities. These historical overviews provide the broader historical context and conditions of online activism. Together, they represent a preliminary effort to piece together a brief social history of the Internet in China.
Chapter 1 situates online activism in relation to the 1989 Chinese student movement and the broader landscape of popular contention in China today. It shows that in the wake of the repression of the student movement, a new citizen activism has arisen since the 1990s and that online activism is an integral part of it. The chapter argues that online activism responds in two ways to China’s market transformation. It is a countermovement against oppression and an identity movement in search of belonging and recognition.
Chapter 2 examines the political conditions under which online activism happens and the ways in which Internet users creatively negotiate political control. It argues that over the past decade, Internet control has grown more expansive and hegemonic and that an entire apparatus of institutions and practices have appeared for the control of the Internet. Under these conditions, Internet activists have three ways of negotiating political control: rightful resistance, artful contention, and digital “hidden transcripts” of the information age. The main issues in online activism reflect both the political constraints on contention and the social milieu of activism.
Chapters 3 and 4 study the culture of online activism by analyzing rituals, genres, and styles. Through an analysis of the rituals and genres of digital contention, chapter 3 shows that while maintaining continuities with the culture of contention in modern China, Internet activism has important innovative forms, which represent the expansion of the field of contention. Chapter 4 compares the style of contention in the student movement in 1989 with that of online activism. It argues that over this period, the culture of contention has shifted from an epic style to online activism’s more prosaic and playful style. This shift reflects both changes in media technologies and in the contents of activism.
Chapter 5 examines a new relationship that has emerged under market conditions: a relationship between business and activism. It shows that activists are adopting marketing strategies to promote their causes and that Internet business firms are investing in promoting online contention. It argues that despite the danger of manipulation, the business of contention contributes to online activism.
Chapter 6 studies the patterns of Internet capacity and Internet use among Chinese civic associations based on a pioneering survey. It reveals an unremarkable level of Internet uptake yet a remarkable level of Internet use, especially among organizations committed to social change. Case studies of Web-based environmental groups complement the survey analysis in showing the coevolution of civic associations in their encounters with the Internet.
Chapter 7 moves from formal civic associations to online communities and explores why online communities are hotbeds for contention. It argues that although online communities serve numerous practical and utilitarian functions, it is as a space of hope and imagination—or utopian realism— that they appeal most to their socially engaged members. The values of freedom, solidarity, and justice that people attach to online communities compel action in defense of these values.
Chapter 8 examines the causes and consequences of the transnationalization of Chinese online activism. It argues that transnationalization expands the scale of Chinese online activism from the local to the international level and is conducive to more radical and subversive forms of online activism.
The conclusion summarizes the arguments of the book and reflects on larger issues of social change. I argue that online activism is emblematic of a long revolution unfolding in China today, a revolution intertwining cultural, social, and political transformations. The main manifestations of these transformations are cultural creativity, civic engagement and organizing, and citizens’ unofficial democracy. The effervescence of online contention, as part of China’s new citizen activism, indicates the palpable revival of the revolutionary impulse in Chinese society. The power of the Internet lies in revealing this impulse and showing the ever stronger aspirations for a more just and democratic society.