NOTES

Introduction

1. As proponents of the new social movements have shown, social movements in the past few decades have assumed some new forms. They may exist as “submerged networks” and “invisible laboratories.” Many of their activities are not explicitly political challenges but involve the display of unorthodox lifestyles, the uses of new symbols, and the adoption of cultural practices that jar with the tastes and values of the mainstream society. See Melucci, Nomads of the Present, 205. Sociologists interested in activism have begun to look beyond explicitly political activities to focus more on everyday life and cultural politics. Whittier, Feminist Generations, 23, argues, for example, that the persistence of the radical women’s movement should be seen “not just through the organizations it establishes, but also through its informal networks and communities and in the diaspora of feminist individuals who carry the concerns of the movement into other settings.” See also Almanzar, Sullivan-Catlin, and Deane, “Is the Political Personal?”

2. See Baranovitch, China’s New Voices.

3. O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, 50.

4. Lee, Against the Law.

5. I reconstructed the story using newspaper reports, information collected from the main Web site run by hepatitis-B carriers, and the transcript of a public presentation about the history and development of the hepatitis-B antidiscrimination movement made in October 2007 by one of the movement’s leaders.

6. The following story was constructed on the basis of information collected from the online communities in Tianya.cn as well as mainstream media stories. See especially Duan Hongqing and Wang Heyan, “Hei zhuanyao shijian: Yulun de youli yu wuli [The black kiln incident: the power and weakness of public opinion]”; Zhu Hongjun, “Shanxi hei zhuanyao fengbao bei ta dianran—Xin Yanhua [Xin Yanhua— she launched the storm about the black kiln in Shanxi].” I also benefited from Shi Zengzhi and Yang Boxu, “Civicness as Reflected in Recent ‘Internet Incidents’ and Its Significance.”

7. QQ is an online chat service offered by qq.com. This simple software has helped Tencent, the company that owns qq.com, build an enormous customer base, making Tencent one of the biggest Internet companies in China.

8. CNNIC, “Survey of the Internet in Rural Areas.”

9. The popular blog site EastSouthWestNorth has a story about the protests and images of Feng: http://zonaeuropa.com/20050919_1.htm. Accessed February 29, 2007.

10. Qiu, “Virtual Censorship in China”; Chase and Mulvenon, You’ve Got Dissent!; Kluver, “The Architecture of Control”; Corrales and Westhoff, “Information Technology Adoption and Political Regimes”; Brady, Marketing Dictatorship.

11. Holliday and Yep, “E-government in China”; Hartford, “Dear Mayor.”

12. Barmé and Davies, “Have We Been Noticed Yet?”; Yu, “Talking, Linking, Clicking”; Zhou, Historicizing Online Politics.

13. Hockx, “Links with the Past.”

14. Chu and Yang, “Mobile Phones and New Migrant Workers in a South China Village”; Damm, “The Internet and the Fragmentation of Chinese Society”; Latham, “SMS, Communication, and Citizenship in China’s Information Society”; Law and Peng, “The Use of Mobile Phones Among Migrant Workers in Southern China”; Zhao, Communication in China.

15. Wu, Chinese Cyber Nationalism.

16. Yongnian Zheng’s study contains a fine collection of major cases of collective action online. He pays special attention to the political effects of these incidents. As he puts it, “it is not a question of whether Internet-based collective action is possible because such collective actions tend to become increasingly popular in China…. The question is whether Internet-based collective action can succeed in challenging the state.” Zheng, Technological Empowerment, 136.

17. Garrett, “Protest in an Information Society.”

18. In her introduction to the pioneering volume on cultures of contention in modern China, Elizabeth Perry draws on works of neoculturalist approaches to the study of revolutions to emphasize the importance of a focus on the “language, symbolism, and rituals of both resistance and repression.” Perry, “Introduction: Chinese Political Culture Revisited,” 6.

19. See the essays in Diani and McAdam, eds., Social Movements and Networks.

20. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 22.

21. Armstrong and Bernstein, “Culture, Power, and Institutions.”

22. The classic statement of the political process model is McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970.

23. Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence.

24. Keohane and Nye, “Power and Interdependence in the Information Age.”

25. This contextualism informs Yongming Zhou’s otherwise nuanced study. See Zhou, Historicizing Online Politics.

26. Williams, Television, 6.

27. Judge, Print and Politics.

28. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai.

29. Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China, 253.

30. Schudson, The Power of News, 54.

31. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 4.

32. Ibid., 5.

33. Ibid., 7.

34. Many of them will be cited in the following chapters. Here I will mention only a few samples published since 2005: Cai, State and Laid-off Workers in Reform China; Ho and Edmonds, eds., China’s Embedded Activism; Lee, Against the Law; O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China; Perry and Goldman, eds., Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China; and O’Brien, Popular Protest in China.

35. Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution; McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970.

36. O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China.

37. Goodwin, No Other Way Out.

38. Meyer and Minkoff, “Conceptualizing Political Opportunity,” 1463.

39. Almeida, “Opportunity Organizations and Threat-induced Contention”; Kriesi et al., New Social Movements in Western Europe.

40. Donald and Keane, “Media in China,” 15.

41. Pan, “Media Change Through Bounded Innovations.”

42. O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, 2.

43. Esherick and Wasserstrom, “Acting out Democracy”; Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-century China; Wasserstrom and Perry, eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China; Perry and Li, Proletarian Power.

44. O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China; Lee, Against the Law; Chen, “Privatization and Its Discontents in Chinese Factories”; Cai, State and Laid-off Workers in Reform China.

45. For example, Ching Kwan Lee’s analysis of the use of history and memory as resources of protest. See Lee, Against the Law. O’Brien and Li similarly take note of the rhetorical aspects of rightful resistance.

46. Tilly, Stories, Identities, and Political Change; Polletta, It Was Like a Fever; Alexander, Giesen, and Mast, eds., Social Performance; Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest; Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements.

47. To the extent that rituals and genres are formed over time, they have a relatively permanent quality. As such, they function as cultural structures that both enable and constrain action. At the same time, rituals and genres are materialized only through practice. Only when people conduct a performance, for example, does a ritual or genre materialize. Different performances of the same ritual lead to gradual modification of the ritual form. This is the duality of structure and agency that stand at the center of contemporary sociological theory. See Sewell, “A Theory of Structure.”

48. Shambaugh, “China’s Propaganda System.”

49. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.

50. Zhao, Media, Market, and Democracy in China, 186.

51. Ibid., 111.

52. An oft-cited definition views civil society “as the realm of organized social life that is voluntary, self-generating, (largely) self-supporting, autonomous from the state, and bound by a legal order or set of shared values.” See Diamond, “Rethinking Civil Society,” 5. The question of autonomy from the state is a matter of scholarly controversy, with some scholars insisting on using it as a normative criterion while others consider it an empirical question to be investigated. I make no a priori assumptions about the degree of autonomy from the state, taking it instead as an empirical question to be investigated.

53. As Habermas puts it, “the concept of civil society owes its rise in favor to the criticism leveled, especially by dissidents from state-socialist societies, against the totalitarian annihilation of the political public sphere.” Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” 454.

54. White, Howell, and Shang, In Search of Civil Society; Alagappa, “Introduction.”

55. Cheek, “From Market to Democracy in China.”

56. Castells, The Power of Identity, 9.

57. Yang, “The Coevolution of the Internet and Civil Society in China.”

58. Warkentin, Reshaping World Politics.

59. Bach and Stark, “Innovative Ambiguities.”

60. Piper and Uhlin, “New Perspectives on Transnational Activism,” 5.

61. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders.

62. Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism.

63. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights.

64. Stark, Vedres, and Bruszt, “Rooted Transnational Publics.”

65. Smith, “Exploring Connections Between Global Integration and Political Mobilization,” 258; Grugel, “State Power and Transnational Activism.” On the role of the state in the Internet age, see Everard, Virtual States; Goldsmith and Wu, Who Controls the Internet?

66. On scale shift, see Tarrow and McAdam, “Scale Shift in Transnational Contention”; Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism.

67. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 119.

68. Ibid., 128.

69. Ibid., 133.

70. See, for example, Mosco, The Digital Sublime.

71. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 131.

72. One scholar calls these stories “technobiographies.” See Kennedy, “Technobiography.”

73. Hine, Virtual Ethnography; Constable, Romance on a Global Stage.

74. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System.”

75. Burawoy et al, eds., Global Ethnography.

1. Online Activism in an Age of Contention

1. McGregor, “China’s Official Data Confirm Rise in Social Unrest.”

2. To say that the popular protests in the 1980s centered on democracy is not to deny that multiple interests, such as demands for a better material life, were also articulated. Yet the articulation of these material interests was often couched in the idealistic language of freedom and democracy. On the Democracy Wall movement and the 1980 campus elections, see Nathan, Chinese Democracy; Goodman, Beijing Street Voices. On the 1989 student movement, see Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors.

3. Such as in the Peace Charter movement discussed in Merle Goldman’s work. Indicating the continuity between the Peace Charter movement in the 1990s and the prodemocracy movements in the 1980s, several main activists in the Peace Charter movement were veterans of the earlier movements. See Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen, 80–81.

4. Among the many works in this area, several edited volumes give a good sense of the broad range of issues. See Perry and Selden, eds., Chinese Society; Perry and Goldman, eds., Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China; Ho and Edmonds, eds., China’s Embedded Activism; O’Brien, ed., Popular Protest in China.

5. The April Fifth and Democracy Wall movements were born out of the Cultural Revolution in the sense that they were a reaction against it.

6. Fewsmith, “Historical Echoes and Chinese Politics,” 322.

7. These are not conditions of postmodernity, however. The remarkable process of economic development in some parts of China has as its peer only the underdevelopment and even regression in other regions.

8. Perry, “Rural Violence in Socialist China.”

9. O’Brien, “Collective Action in the Chinese Countryside”; Bernstein and Lü, Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China; O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China.

10. Pearson, China’s New Business Elites; Dickson, Red Capitalists in China. However, Tsai, Capitalism Without Democracy, shows that private entrepreneurs have produced political change through the informal institutions they create in quotidian activities.

11. Cai, “China’s Moderate Middle Class”; Read, “Democratizing the Neighbourhood?”

12. In December 2007, close to 32 percent of China’s 210 million Internet users were between eighteen and twenty-four years old. See CNNIC’s China Internet Survey Report, January 2008, http:www.cnnic.net. Accessed February 14, 2008.

13. On new types of civil-society organizations, see, among others, Howell, “New Directions in Civil Society”; Ma, Nongovernmental Organizations in Contemporary China; Beijing University Civil Society Research Center, Zhongguo gongmin shehui fazhan lanpi shu [Blue book of civil-society development in China].

14. Sampson et al., “Civil Society Reconsidered.”

15. Pei, “Rights and Resistance,” 23.

16. Davis et al., eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China; Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in Urban China.

17. This and the following two passages draw on materials in Yang, “Contention in Cyberspace,” in O’Brien, ed., Popular Protest in China.

18. Ståhle and Uimonen, eds., Electronic Mail on China, 1:12. The text is quoted here verbatim. The two thick volumes of Electronic Mail on China contain a rich sample of numerous e-mail and newsgroup items produced during and immediately after the student movement in 1989.

19. http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.china/about. Accessed April 19, 2007.

20. Li, “Computer-mediated Communications and the Chinese Students in the U.S.,” 127.

21. See Ståhle and Uimonen, eds., Electronic Mail on China, 1:xxxv. On the popularity of SCC in newsgroups, see Grier and Campbell, “A Social History of Bitnet and Listserv, 1985–1991.”

22. The official view, for a time, was that the first e-mail was sent from China to a German address by Qian Tianbai through the Chinese Academic Network. This view has been contested. Interview with Chinese researcher, July 23, 2007.

23. Qiu, “Virtual Censorship in China”; Chen Chiu, “University Students Transmit Messages on Defending the Diaoyu Islands Through the Internet, and the Authorities Are Shocked at This and Order the Strengthening of Control.”

24. Yang, “The Internet and the Rise of a Transnational Chinese Cultural Sphere.”

25. The forum was later renamed the Strengthening the Nation Forum, and it remains popular today.

26. They are sometimes called “Internet incidents” (wangluo shijian) in Chinese media, just as “mass incidents” (qunti shijian) is used to refer to popular protests.

27. Liebman, “Watchdog or Demagogue.”

28. Liu Xianshu, “Xu ni shi jie de kang ri [Anti-Japanese protests in the virtual world].”

29. Tilly, “Contentious Conversation.”

30. Lance Bennett puts it in the following terms: “Campaigns increasingly do more than just communicate political messages aimed at achieving political goals. They also become long-term bases of political organization in fragmenting late modern (globalizing) societies that lack the institutional coherence (e.g., strong parties, grass roots or bottom-up interest organization) to forge stable political identifications.” See Bennett, “Communicating Global Activism,” 151.

31. Liu Xianshu, “Xu ni shi jie de kang ri [Anti-Japanese protests in the virtual world].”

32. Yang and Calhoun, “Media, Civil Society, and the Rise of a Green Public Sphere in China.”

33. Wang Yubin compiled Hong ke chu ji: Hulianwang shang meiyou xiaoyan de zhanzheng [Red hackers launch attacks: An Internet warfare without gunfire].

34. E-mail communication with one of its organizers.

35. Amnesty International, “People’s Republic of China: Controls Tighten as Internet Activism Grows,” http://www.amnesty.org/en/alfresco_asset/c176cd3d-a48b-11dc-bac9-0158df32ab50/asa170012004en.pdf. Accessed February 4, 2008.

36. See her biographical essay: Liu Di, “Stainless Steel Mouse Goes Online,” http://www.dok-forum.net/MyBBS/yd/mes/27234.htm. Accessed February 18, 2008.

37. Rolfe, “Building an Electronic Repertoire of Contention”; Denning, “Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism.”

38. For discussions of hacktivism in China, see Denning, “Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism.”

39. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution; Polletta, It Was Like a Fever.

40. Poster, The Mode of Information.

41. Melucci, Challenging Codes.

42. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

43. Pei, China’s Trapped Transition.

44. Perry, “Trends in the Study of Chinese Politics”; O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China.

45. Local state corporatism refers to “the workings of a local government that coordinates economic enterprises in its territory as if it were a diversified business corporation,” where officials may act “as the equivalent of a board of directors.” Oi, “Fiscal Reform and the Economic Foundations of Local State Corporatism in China,” 100–101.

46. Chen, “Privatization and Its Discontents in Chinese Factories”; Lee, Against the Law.

47. Bernstein and Lü, Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China; O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China.

48. Environmental protests in rural areas manifest more defensive characteristics than environmental activism in urban areas. Led by NGOs, urban environmental activism has also been proactive in attempting to halt industrial projects that are viewed as harmful to the environment. For rural environmental protests, see Jing, “Villages Dammed, Villages Repossessed.” For urban environmental activism, see Yang and Calhoun, “Media, Civil Society, and the Rise of a Green Public Sphere in China.”

49. Hurst and O’Brien, “China’s Contentious Pensioners.”

50. Thompson, The Media and Modernity, 112–113. See also Zhou, “Unorganized Interests and Collective Action in Communist China.”

51. Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors, 158–159.

52. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 160.

53. The original Chinese character for “pushing” is ding (). It is a common way of showing support to a good posting in BBS forums. Pushing a posting keeps it on the top of a long thread and thus helps to put it in the most prominent place of the forum.

54. All three quotes are from http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/1095173.shtml. Accessed on January 17, 2008.

55. It should be noted that sometimes there is an absence of moral sensitivities in Internet interactions such as nationalistic Internet debates. I am grateful to Elizabeth Perry for raising this point in an e-mail communication.

56. Calhoun, “Social Theory and the Politics of Identity,” 20, 21.

57. Yang, “A Portrait of Martyr Jiang Qing.”

58. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 27.

59. Pan Xiao was the pen name of two individuals. The title of the letter published in the magazine China Youth, “Why is life’s road getting narrower and narrower?” conveys the sense of faith crisis. For an English translation of the letter, see Siu and Stern, eds., Mao’s Harvest, 4–9.

60. Lu Xing’er, Sheng shi zhenshi de [Life is real], 201.

61. Ibid.

62. Liu Xinwu, for example, is the author of Xinling ticao [Acrobatics for the soul].

63. Not surprisingly, Yu Dan has a Web site which carries her writings. The above quote is from her lecture on The Analects, available online at http://www.yudan.net.cn/5uwl/200732971943.html. Accessed September 8, 2007.

64. Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity, 70.

65. Ibid., 210.

66. Ibid., 214.

67. Directly, because, as some scholars have argued, China’s successful economic reform is path dependent. Its seeds were sown during the Maoist period.

68. Sun Liping, Duanlie: Ershi shiji jiushi niandai yilai the Zhongguo shehui [Fractured: Chinese society since the 1990s].

69. Calhoun, “ ‘New Social Movements’ of the Early Nineteenth Century.”

70. Zhang Wei, “Tangniao bing xuesheng tuixue yinfa ‘tangyou’ nahan: women zuocuo le shenme [Diabetes student dismissed from college, sugar friends cry out: what wrong have we done].”

71. Online at http://health.sohu.com/20071129/n253685702.shtml. Accessed December 25, 2007.

72. For arguments in support of grievance-based explanation, see Piven and Cloward, “Collective Protest.” For political opportunity and resource mobilization arguments, see Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution; McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970; Tarrow, Power in Movement.

2. The Politics of Digital Contention

1. Lessig, Control and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

2. Kluver, “The Architecture of Control”; Brady, Marketing Dictatorship.

3. O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, 2.

4. Migdal, Kohli, and Shue, “Introduction,” 1–4.

5. Weber, Economy and Society, 1:54.

6. Giddens, The Nation-state and Violence, 178.

7. Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 41.

8. Ibid.

9. Song Yongyi and Sun Dajin, eds., Wen hua da ge ming he ta di yi duan si chao [Heterodox thoughts during the Cultural Revolution].

10. Karnow, Mao and China, 177.

11. Link, The Uses of Literature, 193–197.

12. Ren Yi, Shengsi beige: “zhiqing zhi ge” yuanyu shimo [A song of life and death: The story of an unjust verdict for the author of “Song of Educated Youth].

13. Tong Huaizhou group, Weida de siwu yundong [The great April Fifth movement].

14. Dittmer and Liu, “Introduction,” 5. For a comprehensive assessment of political reforms, see Yang, Remaking the Chinese Leviathan.

15. Qian and Wu, “Transformation in China.”

16. Perry, “Studying Chinese Politics.”

17. Perry and Selden, eds., Chinese Society; Bernstein and Lü, Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China; Shi and Cai, “Disaggregating the State”; O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China; Lee, Against the Law.

18. On state adaptation to the challenges of the internet, see Deibert, Printing, Parchment, and Hypermedia; Everard, Virtual States.

19. For a complete list of Internet regulations in China, see CNNIC’s official Web site, http://www.cnnic.net.cn.

20. See http://www.cnnic.net/html/Dir/1997/12/11/0650.htm. Accessed December 15, 2007.

21. In June 2008, the Ministry of Information Industry was reorganized into the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

22. This set of regulations was replaced by “Regulations About the Management of Internet News and Information Services,” issued on September 25, 2005.

23. Kraus, The Party and the Arty, 116.

24. Braman, “The Emergent Global Information Policy Regime,” 13.

25. See “Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Regarding the Strengthening of the Party’s Ability to Govern,” at http://www.people.com.cn/GB/42410/42764/3097243.html. Accessed December 3, 2007. Some scholars have revealed a new tendency of the Chinese state to practice rule by law rather than rule of law. See Lee, Against the Law.

26. China Internet Development Report 2003–2004, p. 216.

27. http://www.cnnic.net.cn. Accessed April 8, 2008.

28. According to a story in Beijing ribao [Beijing daily] on May 14, 2007, the municipal Internet propaganda and management office hired 181 volunteers to monitor illicit information online in August 2006. Each volunteer was required to report fifty items of “harmful information” every month. See Wang Hao, “Yong fenxian jingsheng yingzao wangluo lantian: Beijing wangluo yiwu jiandu zhiyuanzhe gongzuo jishi [Constructing a blue sky in cyberspace: A report on volunteers engaged in internet monitoring in Beijing].”

29. For example, a notice issued by the propaganda department of the municipality of Jinan in Shandong province has the following instructions: “The Internet commentators throughout the city should participate in, support, and cooperate with the Internet propaganda and the emergency responses to Internet public opinion by following the contents and principles of propaganda as published everyday in Jinan Daily and by following the priorities, as determined by one’s work unit, in matters of internet public opinion during periods of extraordinary sensitivity.” See Department of Propaganda, the Municipality of Jinan [Shandong Province], “Shiwei xuanchuanbu yanjiu bushu quanshi tufa shijian hulianwang yuqing he xinwen xuanchuan gongzuo [The Department of Propaganda of the Municipal Party Committee studies and makes instructions about Internet public opinion and news propaganda during times of emergency incidents],” August 8, 2007. Available online at http://xc.e23.cn/news/534.html. Accessed August 8, 2008. My translation.

30. For a comprehensive analysis of filtering of Chinese Web sites, see OpenNet Initiative, “Internet Filtering in China in 2004–2005: A Country Study,” April 14, 2005. Available online at http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/ONI_China_Country_Study.pdf. Accessed May 24, 2005.

31. For this reason, several American companies that have helped to build China’s Internet networks have come under attack. For example, the routing technologies sold to China by Cisco reportedly have packet-filtering capability. See OpenNet Initiative, “Internet Filtering in China in 2004–2005: A Country Study,” April 14, 2005, 6–7. Available online at http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/ONI_China_Country_Study.pdf. Accessed May 24, 2005.

32. Interview with a content editor of a commercial portal site, July 8, 2007.

33. Interview with an NGO office manager, December 2004.

34. http://bbs.21jiaoshi.com/thread-9910–1-1.html. Accessed January 3, 2007.

35. Amnesty International, “People’s Republic of China: Controls Tighten as Internet Activism Grows” (January 2004). Available online at http://www.amnesty.org/en/alfresco_asset/c176cd3d-a48b-11dc-bac9–0158df32ab50/asa170012004en.pdf. Accessed February 4, 2008.

36. Zheng, Technological Empowerment.

37. Mueller and Tan, China in the Information Age, 12.

38. Interview with an editorial staff of Wangluo chuanbo [New media], July 18, 2008.

39. “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo zhengfu xinxi gongkai tiaoli [Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on government information disclosure],” available on-line at http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2007–04/24/content_592937.htm. Accessed April 3, 2008.

40. Some scholars have argued that “different parts of the social movement sector have a specific POS…. not all issues movements deal with have the same relevance within the political arena.” See Kriesi et al., New Social Movements in Western Europe, 96. As Meyer and Minkoff, “Conceptualizing Political Opportunity,” 1463, put it, “clearly, a polity that provides openness to one kind of participation may be closed to others.”

41. Hooper, “The Consumer Citizen in Contemporary China.”

42. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven, xiv.

43. Suisheng Zhao, “China’s Pragmatic Nationalism,” 132, calls the state-led nationalism a pragmatic nationalism: “pragmatic nationalism is an instrument that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses to bolster the population’s faith in a troubled political system and to hold the country together during its period of rapid and turbulent transformation into a post-Communist society.” On neonationalism in China, see Gries, China’s New Nationalism.

44. Zheng, Technological Empowerment. Another author argues, however, that Chinese popular nationalism is “an autonomous political domain that is independent of the state nationalism” and that cybernationalism “not only challenges the state monopoly over domestic nationalist discursive production, but also opens up new possibilities for performing common people’s ‘public discursive right.’ ” See Liu, “China’s Popular Nationalism on the Internet.”

45. Liu, “China’s Popular Nationalism on the Internet.”

46. On frame resonance, see Snow and Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization.” On issue resonance, see Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders.

47. Lu Jun, “The past and future of the antidiscrimination movement of hepatitis-B carriers in China.”

48. Ernkvist and Ström, “Enmeshed in Games with the Government.”

49. O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, 2.

50. Although the BBS was not shut down, there were times when the system did not seem to be operating properly, making students suspicious of what was really happening.

51. Yang, “The Internet and Civil Society in China,” 471.

52. Available online at http://www.china918.net/91807/newxp/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=3190&BigClassName=%C3%E6%B6%D4%C8%D5%B1%BE&SmallClassName=%CD%F8%D3%D1%CE%C4%D5%C2&SpecialID=38. Accessed November 26, 2007.

53. Lu Jun, “The past and future of the antidiscrimination movement of hepatitis-B carriers in China.”

54. Wang Yinjie, Shanke jianghu [The Rivers and Lakes of Flash creators].

55. Wang Yubin compiled Hong ke chu ji: Hulianwang shang meiyou xiaoyan de zhanzheng [Red hackers launch attacks: An Internet warfare without gunfire]. See also Thomas, Hacker Culture.

56. This is revealed in a post titled “The QGLT is trying to block news about the case in Beijing University. This is futile! Discussions in all other bulletin boards are about this case.” (Wo zhetou sizhou!: 05/24/00, QGLT).

57. Zhu Hongjun, “Shanxi hei zhuanyao fengbao bei ta dianran—Xin Yanhua.”

58. Laura Gurak’s work shows that rhetoric and language serve as a powerful social force in online contention. She argues that community ethos and the novel mode of delivery on computer networks sustain the community and its motive for action in the absence of physical commonality or face-to-face interactions. See Gurak, Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace.

59. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders.

60. The poem was originally posted in a Beijing University Internet forum and then crossposted at 5:18 p.m., May 26, 2000, in the Strengthening the Nation forum (bbs. peopledaily.com.cn). It is on file with the author.

61. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, xii.

62. Ibid., 14.

63. Jiang Yusheng, “Zhongguo yulun jiandu wangzhan de diaocha yu sikao [Investigations into and reflections on public opinion monitoring Web sites in China].” Available online at http://gx.people.com.cn/GB/channel71/200702/25/1327299.html. Accessed January 14, 2008.

64. Guo Zhongxiao, “Shiqida qian yanguan wangluo wangjing vs wangmin douzhi [Internet control tightened before the Seventeenth Party Congress, battle of wits between cyberpolice and netizens].”

65. Posting by “rengong shengming,” timestamped “2003–06–14 15:36:41.” Available on-line at http://www2.qglt.com.cn/wsrmlt/wyzs/2003/06/14/061403.html. Accessed March 4, 2008.

66. Liu Di, “Stainless Steel Mouse Goes Online.” Available online at http://www.dokforum.net/MyBBS/yd/mes/27234.htm. Accessed February 18, 2008. My translation.

67. Ibid.

68. Castells, The Power of Identity, 311.

69. Lee, Against the Law.

3. The Rituals and Genres of Contention

1. Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, 258: “In all literary structures we are aware of a quality that we may call the quality of a verbal personality or a speaking voice—something different from direct address, though related to it. When this quality is felt to be the voice of the author himself, we call it style.”

2. On the importance of emotions to social movements and collective action, see the essays in Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, eds., Passionate Politics; and Flam and King, eds., Emotions and Social Movements.

3. Williams, Television, 39.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 118.

6. Ibid., 119.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., xxiii.

10. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven, 312. Esherick and Wasserstam, “Acting out Democracy,” 839. Also see Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-century China.

11. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven, 312.

12. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven, 313. Esherick and Wasserstrom, “Acting out Democracy,” 854.

13. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven, 316. Esherick and Wasserstrom, “Acting out Democracy,” 856–857.

14. Esherick and Wasserstrom, “Acting out Democracy,” 852.

15. Ibid., 855.

16. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven, xiv.

17. Ibid., 314.

18. Also see Dingxin Zhao on traditionalism in the 1989 student movement. Zhao, The Power of Tiananmen.

19. Nathan, Chinese Democracy, 225.

20. Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power.

21. Nathan, Chinese Democracy, 225–226.

22. Béja, “Forbidden Memory, Unwritten History.”

23. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-century China, 323.

24. Post downloaded on November 27, 2007 from http://bbs.xnsk.com, on file with author. The message was originally posted on January 16, 2004.

25. Yang, “Contention in Cyberspace,” 140.

26. Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, 328, calls such rhetoric “inarticulateness that uses one word, generally unprintable, for the whole rhetorical ornament of the sentence, including adjectives, adverbs, epithets, and punctuation.” Sometimes, “words disappear altogether, and we are back to a primitive language of screams and gestures and sighs.” From a different perspective, what Frye refers to as “unprintable” language of “screams and gestures and sighs” may take on a different meaning. Mocking the seriousness of power, it resembles the subversive language of the marketplace.

27. Yang, “Contention in Cyberspace,” 140.

28. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-century China, 88.

29. The following three paragraphs are based on Yang, “Contention in Cyberspace,” 137–138.

30. http://qqf_19.homechinaren.com/www/c1/w31.htm.

31. The message was posted by users in the following order: cind, May 23, 2000, 02:29, Tsinghua University BBS; Rocktor, May 23, 2000, 08:40, Tsinghua University BBS; onlooker, May 23, 2000, 08:55, “Triangle” Forum.

32. Post by “Young,” May 23, 2000, “Triangle” forum. Ten photos of the scene described in the post can be viewed at http://mem.netor.com/m/photos/adindex.asp?BoardID=2309, as of December 15, 2003.

33. Benford and Hunt, “Dramaturgy and Social Movements.”

34. Some of the data used here come from Yang, “Contention in Cyberspace.”

35. Tilly, “Speaking Your Mind Without Elections, Surveys, or Social Movements.”

36. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 45.

37. Ibid., 51.

38. Gurak, Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace; Hill and Hughes, Cyberpolitics.

39. Yu, “Talking, Linking, Clicking.”

40. Leisure walks are becoming a new addition to the repertoire of contention in China. They were adopted again in January 2008 by Shanghai citizens who protested against the construction of a magnetic levitation train. See Wasserstrom, “NIMBY Comes to China.”

41. Gillmor, We the Media.

42. Lasica, “What Is Participatory Journalism?”

43. For an interesting discussion of “nail-like households” in rural areas, see Li and O’Brien, “Villagers and Popular Resistance in Contemporary China.”

44. EastSouthWestNorth, “Chinese Netizens Versus Western Media.” Available online at http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20080326_1.htm. Accessed August 12, 2008.

45. http://www.china918.net/qm/news/0510.htm.

46. Barr, “Anti-NATO Hackers Sabotage Three Web Sites.”

47. For example, see Pickowicz, “Rural Protest Letters.”

48. Esherick and Wasserstrom, “Acting out Democracy.”

49. Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution.

50. Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, 328.

51. On continuity in the repertoire of contention, see Perry, “ ‘To Rebel Is Justified.’ ”

52. Bakhtin notes that “there never was a single strictly straightforward genre, no single type of direct discourse—artistic, rhetorical, philosophical, religious, ordinary everyday—that did not have its own parodying and travestying double, its own comic-ironic contre-partie.” See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 53. This is true of Chinese literature as well. Irony and satire are common in the ancient Book of Poetry.

53. Thornton, “Insinuation, Insult, and Invective.”

54. One example is http://www.guaidou.com/shunkouliu.

55. For a collection of online postings in response to Qin’s arrest, see http://www.chinaelections.org/NewsInfo.asp?NewsID=97078. Accessed November 2, 2006. The local authorities later dropped the charge, and Qin was released and paid a sum of RMB in compensation for the time he was held in detention.

56. On blogging in China, see MacKinnon, “Flatter World and Thicker Walls?”

57. Farrer provides a cogent analysis of the Muzimei phenomenon, showing clearly the heteroglossic character of the discourses about it. See Farrer, “China’s Women Sex Bloggers and Dialogic Sexual Politics on the Chinese Internet.”

58. Wang Chen, “Weihun mama boke yinfa zhengyi tanran miandui zhiyi xuanze chanzi [Unmarried mom’s blog provokes controversy, calmly faces questioning and chooses to give birth].”

59. Wettergren, “Mobilization and the Moral Shock.”

60. The Web site was incorporated in 2003 and now has over one million registered users. See http://www.flashempire.com/corp/index.php. Accessed June 18, 2008.

61. Wang Yinjie, Shanke jianghu [The Rivers and Lakes of Flash creators].

62. Wu Se, “Hu Ge: wo ting yansu de, zhi shi zai zuo pin li gao xiao [Hu Ge: ‘I’m pretty serious. I joke only in my works’].”

63. http://it.sohu.com/7/0404/35/column219983539.shtml. Accessed October 3, 2007.

64. The script for the flash is easily available online. My version is downloaded from http://e.yesky.com/117/2273617.shtml on September 28, 2007. All quotes from it are from this version. English translations are my own.

65. Tilly, Stories, Identities, and Political Change; Polletta, It Was Like a Fever; Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest.

66. Steinberg, “The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action,” 770.

4. The Changing Style of Contention

1. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest.

2. This partly reflects the aestheticization of politics in modern China in general. See Wang, The Sublime Figures of History. To borrow David Wang’s formulation of the revolutionary poetics in modern China, the soaring styles used by protesters represent “the textual manifestation of revolution.” See Wang, The Monster That Is History, 152.

3. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven, 312.

4. For a fine collection of English translations of some of these documents, see Goodman, Beijing Street Voices.

5. Gold, “Back to the City.”

6. Published on January 9, 1979. See Ta lu ti hsia k’an wu hui pien [A collection of the mainland underground publications], 3:86. My translation.

7. Ibid., 2:218. My translation.

8. Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors.

9. On the May Fourth generation and the Chinese enlightenment, see Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment.

10. On the early development of the television in China, see Lull, China Turned on. For a study of more recent TV dramas, see Zhu, Serial Dramas, Confucian Leadership, and the Global Television Market.

11. On cultural activism in this period, see Chen Fong-ching and Jin Guantao, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy. On the production process of River Elegy, see Ma, “The Role of Power Struggle and Economic Changes in the ‘Heshang Phenomenon’ in China.”

12. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice.

13. Wasserstrom perceives the mythical elements in the narratives of the student movement and appropriately characterizes them as being either “romantic” or “tragic.” See Wasserstrom, “History, Myth, and the Tales of Tiananmen.”

14. For a collection of English translations of these documents, see Han, Cries for Democracy.

15. Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution.

16. Han, Cries for Democracy, 135.

17. Ibid., 136.

18. Ibid., 137.

19. Wang, High Culture Fever, 261.

20. Ibid., 263.

21. Barmé, In the Red, 214.

22. Ibid., 100.

23. Zhang, “The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field,” 14–15.

24. Holquist, “Glossary,” 428.

25. Habermas’s theory of communicative action is similarly based on a critique of the paradigm of consciousness.

26. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 269.

27. Ibid., 270.

28. My translation.

29. Available online at http://cache.baidu.com/c?word=%CD%F5%3B%CE%AF%D4%B1%3B%B7%C5%C6%FA%3B%D2%E9%B0%B8&url=http%3A/bbs%2Ehbvhbv%2Ecom/printpage%2Easp%3FBoardID%3D1004%26ID%3D328421&p=c366c64ad 7c01bf208e290265c41&user=baidu, downloaded January 9, 2008. The Flash movie referred to in this posting, called “Avian Flu Flash,” mocks the government’s measures in tackling the avian crisis. In the film, a chicken poses as a television news anchor and expresses the chickens’ heartfelt willingness to voluntarily enter incinerators and sacrifice for the benefits of mankind.

30. As of February 10, 2008, geocities.com archived 208 issues of the magazine, the last of which was published on December 22, 2002. See http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/5598/index.html. Accessed February 10, 2008.

31. Ibid. My translation.

32. Ibid.

33. Available online at http://cache.baidu.com/c?word=%B5%D6%D6%C6%3B%B9%BA%B7%BF%3B%2B%3B%D7%DE%3B%CC%CE&url=http%3A//bbs%2Enortheast%2Ecn/dispbbs%5F406%5F141939%5F132%2Ehtml&p=aa39c00cce934eac5df7c7710c14bb&user=baidu. Accessed January 15, 2008.

34. Liu Xujing, “Zou Tao ‘bu mai fang xing dong’ zheng zai cong Shenzhen xiang Beijing tuijin [Tou Tao’s ‘Not Buy House Campaign’ Spreads from Shenzhen to Beijing].” The movement apparently did not take off because its inaugurator Zou Tao was allegedly taken into custody by public-security authorities. This outcome is not surprising considering the well-known collusion between developers and government authorities.

35. https://www.zuola.com/weblog/?p=786. Accessed April 10, 2008.

36. Kennedy, “China: Citizen Blogger Treading New Ground?”

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Cf. Dyke, Soule, and Taylor, “The Targets of Social Movements.”

40. SEPA was reorganized into the new Ministry of Environmental Protection in March 2008.

41. Hooper, “Consumer Voices.”

42. http://www.fon.org.cn/index.php. Accessed June 3, 2002.

43. Cited in Ho, “Greening Without Conflict?” 916.

44. Yang, “Environmental NGOs and Institutional Dynamics in China”; Yang and Calhoun, “Media, Civil Society, and the Rise of a Green Public Sphere in China.”

45. All-China Environment Federation, “Survey Report on the Development of Civic Organizations in China.” Unpublished report, 2006. On file with author.

46. Environmental protests by pollution victims, however, are on the rise. See Jing, “Environmental Protests in Rural China.”

47. On the use of law for collective interest articulation, see Diamond, Lubman, and O’Brien, “Law and Society in the People’s Republic of China”; Gallagher, “Use the Law as Your Weapon!”; Lee, Against the Law. Cai, “Social Conflicts and Modes of Action in China,” notes that the use of law in disputes and protests is more common among urban residents than in rural areas.

48. Wan Xuezhong, “Re xian bang zhu le wan ming shou hai zhe [Hotline gives help to ten thousand victims].”

49. On the growing rights consciousness, see Pei, “Rights and Resistance”; O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China; and essays in Goldman and Perry, eds., Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China.

50. Cited in Lu Min, “Wuran shouhaizhe rang wo’men lai bangzhu ni [Pollution victims: We can help].”

51. http://www.fon.org.cn/content.php?aid=8788. Accessed January 14, 2008.

52. Ibid.

53. Tarrow, Power in Movement; Anderson, Imagined Communities.

54. This is what happened to the telephone in the American context. See Fischer, America Calling.

55. According to Koehn, transnational competence involves “analytic, emotional, creative, communicative, and functional skills” for operating across national borders. Some of these skills include the ability to communicate in English and knowledge about international NGO culture and practices. See Koehn, “Fitting a Vital Linkage Piece Into the Multidimensional Emissions-Reduction Puzzle,” 379.

56. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 189.

57. Bonnin, “The Threatened History and Collective Memory of the Cultural Revolution’s Lost Generation.”

58. Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, 268.

5. The Business of Digital Contention

1. As Michael Keane puts it, “edge-ball (ca bianqiu) is a term widely used in media and journalism to refer to creative compliance. The meaning comes from the game of ping-pong. Where the ball hits the edge of the table it is a winner.” See Keane, “Broadcasting Policy, Creative Compliance, and the Myth of Civil Society in China,” 796. Zhongdang Pan interprets edge-ball as meaning “playing the ball to the very edge of the ping-pong table to score legitimately.” See Pan, “Media Change Through Bounded Innovations,” 105.

2. Barmé, In the Red, 188.

3. On the use of “banned in China” as an international marketing strategy among Chinese directors, film producer Peter Loehr is quoted as saying “I actually had distributors ask me if it was OK to say our films have been banned, even though they haven’t.” See Palmer, “Taming the Dragon.”

4. Kraus, The Party and the Arty, 133.

5. That is why they offer free services such as e-mail and webpage hosting.

6. Youchai Benkler’s recent work elaborates on the theoretical basis of this new economy by emphasizing that it is an economy of nonmarket, nonproprietary social production. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.

7. China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), “Survey Report on Internet Development in China.” Available online at www.cnnic.net.cn. Accessed March 27, 2008.

8. I t was probably for this reason that the best known of these online magazines, Sixiang de jingjie [The world of ideas] was closed down in early 2001 by its owner Li Yonggang, a university professor. Li’s own explanation was that he could no longer tackle the enormous amount of work needed to run the Web site. For a case study, see Zhou, Historicizing Online Politics.

9. CNNIC defines an active blog as one that is updated at least once a month on average.

10. The tendency toward the polarization of opinions that Sunstein observes in the American blogosphere exists in Chinese cyberspace as well. Despite his criticism, Sunstein recognizes that the blogosphere “increases the range of opinions,” which is “a great virtue.” Sunstein, Infotopia, 190, 191.

11. The rest of this section is based on Yang, “The Co-evolution of the Internet and Civil Society in China,” 414–416.

12. Dieter and He, “The Future of E-commerce in China.”

13. The Chinese government announced regulations targeting bulletin boards in November 2000, stipulating that BBSs should follow a licensing procedure and that users could be held responsible for what they say online. This may have adversely affected the use of newsgroups and BBSs. For a list of Internet regulations in China, see http://www.cnnic.net.cn.

14. CNNIC, “Zhongguo hulian wangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao [Statistical report on the conditions of China’s Internet development],” January 2003. Available online at http://www.cnnic.net.cn/develst/2003-1.

15. “Zhengfu wangzhan heshi huo qilai? [When will government Web sites come to life?].” Available online at http://www.gov.cn/news/detail.asp?sort_ID=7391. Accessed April 2, 2003.

16. Zhang, “China’s ‘Government Online’ and Attempts to Gain Technical Legitimacy.” However, see Hartford, “Dear Mayor,” on Hangzhou.

17. The figures are based on data I collected in my online ethnographic research. The 100,000 daily hits are figures for May 2000. The one thousand daily posts are figures for December 2000.

18. The Chinese name for the forum is Huaxia zhiqing luntan. The “educated youth” (or zhiqing) generation is sometimes known as the Red Guard generation or the Cultural Revolution generation. It refers to the cohort that was sent down to the countryside in the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages” movement. The movement started in 1968 and was officially called off in 1980. See Liu Xiaomeng, Zhongguo zhiqing shi: da chao 1966–1980 [A history of the educated youth in China: High tide 1966–1980].

19. Hartford, “Dear Mayor.” On e-government, also see Holliday and Yep, “E-government in China.”

20. A 2007 survey finds that familiarity with e-government Web sites is very low among Chinese Internet users. See the CASS Internet Report, “Surveying Internet Usage and Impact in Seven Chinese Cities,” directed by Guo Liang, October 2007.

21. Interview with cctv.com editor, July 10, 2007.

22. Tang and Parish, Chinese Urban Life Under Reform.

23. Shi, Political Participation in Beijing.

24. See essays in Davis et al., eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China; Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in Urban China; and Perry and Selden, eds., Chinese Society.

25. The Chinese government promulgated several Internet regulations in November 2000, including one about BBSs. See http://www.cnnic.net.cn.

26. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

27. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 420.

28. Schudson, The Power of News, 212.

29. Fouser, “ ‘Culture,’ Computer Literacy, and the Media in Creating Public Attitudes Toward CMC in Japan and Korea,” 271.

30. When I downloaded these posts on December 20, 2000, they were archived at http://202.99.23.237/cgi-bbs/elite_list?typeid=14&whichfile=12. This address is no longer functional. The collection is on file with author.

31. SNF (http://202.99.23.237/cgi-bbs/ChangeBrd?to=14) boasted thirty thousand registered user names in May 2000, with an average of one thousand posts daily. As of April 2, 2003, the online community of which SNF is a part has 196,402 registered users. The discussions in SNF are mostly about current affairs. The forum is open on a limited basis, from 10am to 10pm daily, and has computer filters and full-time hosts to monitor posts.

32. This finding is supported by the results of an Internet survey, which shows that compared with newspapers, television, and the radio, the Internet is perceived as more conducive to expressing personal views. See Guo Liang and Bu Wei, “Huliangwang shiyong zhuangkuang ji yingxiang de diaocha baogao [Investigative report on Internet use and its impact].”

33. Message posted in SNF on April 8, 2000. On file with author.

34. Message posted in SNF on November 9, 1999. On file with author.

35. The following message is only one of many examples of such criticisms: “No one should be domineering and stand above others. People are equal: I hope the administrators and hosts [of SNF] give serious thought to this issue…. We are fed up with reading stuff with the same uniform views. We should be able to read reports of the same event from different angles (Beidou, 05/16/00).”

36. Schoenhals, ed., China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969, 214.

37. Solinger, China’s Transition from Socialism, 250.

38. York, “Chinese ‘Nader’ Uses Detective Flair to Explore Products.”

39. Rosenthal, “Finding Fakes in China, and Fame and Fortune Too.”

40. Wang reportedly was involved in disputes with his business partner about proprietary rights to the Web site’s domain name. See “Wang Hai dajia houyuan qihuo, xiri hezuo huoban kaida koushui zhan [In verbal dispute with business partner, anticounterfeiting Wang Hai’s backyard on fire],” Beijing chenbao, May 24, 2004.

41. York, “Chinese ‘Nader’ Uses Detective Flair to Explore Products.”

42. Wang Hai, Liu Yuan, and Yu Jin, Wang Hai’s Own Story.

43. Li and O’Brien, “Villagers and Popular Resistance in Contemporary China,” 31.

44. Wang Yubin, comp., Hong ke chu ji: Hulianwang shang meiyou xiaoyan de zhanzheng [Red hackers launch attacks: An Internet warfare without gunfire], 242.

45. Peng Su, “Wangluo zaoxing de muhou tuishou,” 25.

46. Gluckman, “Ahead of the Curve.”

47. Lin Mu, ed., Wang shi shi nian [Ten years of Internet stories], 141.

48. Quoted in Farrer, “China’s Women Sex Bloggers and Dialogic Sexual Politics on the Chinese Internet,” 24.

49. Yardley, “Internet Sex Column Thrills, and Inflames, China.”

50. E-mail interview with content editor of a major portal site, January 22, 2008. My translation.

51. Ibid.

52. Netease.com is a leading Internet portal site in China.

53. Tan Renwei, “Zhi laohu lu yuanxing [Paper tiger reveals its true face].”

54. Zhou Butong, “Wangyi jieli ‘Huanahu shijian’ shixian xinwen caibian tupo [Netease achieve breakthrough in news reporting by virtue of the “South China Tiger Incident].”

55. Fang elaborated on these functions in a speech he delivered at a new media forum in Beijing on June 29, 2007. The summary here is based on the notes I took at the forum.

56. http://comment.news.163.com/reply/post.jsp?type=main&board=news_guonei6_bbs&threadid=3T7O5BOC0001124J&showdistrict=&pagex=9. Accessed February 15, 2008.

57. http://comment.news.163.com/reply/post.jsp?type=main&board=news_guonei6_bbs&threadid=3T7O5BOC0001124J&showdistrict=&pagex=52. Accessed February 15, 2008.

58. http://comment.news.163.com/reply/post.jsp?type=main&board=news_guonei6_bbs&threadid=3T7O5BOC0001124J&showdistrict=&pagex=56. Accessed February 15, 2008.

59. http://comment.news.163.com/reply/post.jsp?type=main&board=news_guonei6_bbs&threadid=3T7O5BOC0001124J&showdistrict=&pagex=12. Accessed February 15, 2008.

60. http://comment.news.163.com/news_guonei6_bbs/4448K2NV0001124J.html. Accessed February 15, 2008.

61. http://comment.news.163.com/news_guonei6_bbs/main/3T7O5BOC0001124J.html. Accessed November 26, 2007.

62. A review of the literature on online activism in Western societies suggests that most cases of online activism involve the use of the Internet by existing social-movement organizations. See Garrett, “Protest in an Information Society.” Also see Earl, “Pursuing Social Change Online”; Earl and Schussman, “The New Site of Activism.”

63. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 194.

64. Ibid., 164.

65. Sister Hibiscus is another Internet-manufactured celebrity. Her case differs from Sister Celestial Goddess in that she is a savvy Internet user herself. She made a name for herself by persistently posting her own not-so-handsome photos online and making endless narcissistic comments about her beauty and intelligence, thus coming across as a comic figure.

66. Peng Su, “Wangluo zaoxing de muhou tuishou [The pushing hands behind the star-making business on the internet],” 24.

67. Ferry, “Marketing Chinese Women Writers in the 1990s, or the Politics of Self- Fashioning.”

68. McDougall, “Discourse on Privacy by Women Writers in Late Twentieth-Century China,” 111.

69. Ibid., 113.

70. Ibid., 111.

71. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. See also Sunstein, Infotopia.

72. The gay publics are an example. See Ho, “The Gay Space in Chinese Cyberspace.”

73. For an excellent historical study of the activation of a moral public in the early years of the mass media in China, see Lean, Public Passions.

74. One case in my collection involves the online petition of a coalition of gaming communities. See http://bbs.boxbbs.com/articles/2024965.html. Accessed December 21, 2007.

75. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 63.

76. Ibid., 57–58.

77. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 49, 48.

78. Ibid., 48.

79. Sunstein, Infotopia, 195.

80. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, 57.

81. Williams, The Long Revolution, 121.

6. Civic Associations Online

1. Some historians argue that civil-society organizations were active in late imperial China. See Rankin, “Some Observations on a Chinese Public Sphere”; Rowe, “The Problem of ‘Civil Society’ in Late Imperial China.”

2. Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors.

3. By comparing SRI and the Unirule Economic Research Institute (Beijing tianze jingji yanjiusuo), Keyser, Professionalizing Research in Post-Mao China, 119, argues insightfully that “the focus of the 1980s on getting within to gain autonomy was replaced in the 1990s by a focus on struggling to remain outside to claim autonomy.”

4. Such as those studied by Jonathan Ungar and Anita Chan, Margaret Pearson, and White, Howell, and Shang. See White et al., In Search of Civil Society.

5. Keith et al., “The Making of a Chinese NGO.” Similarly, Xin Zhang and Richard Baum argue that unlike organizations in the “state corporatism” model, the rural NGO they studied “is not a creature of either the central or local government” but “a genuine minjian association, created by and operated for the benefit of the local community.” Zhang and Baum, “Civil Society and the Anatomy of a Rural NGO,” 106.

6. Pei, “Chinese Civic Associations.”

7. Ibid., 294.

8. Howell, “New Directions in Civil Society,” 145. Several other studies have similarly drawn attention to the rise of new types of grassroots organizations since the 1990s. See Shang, “Looking for a Better Way to Care for Children”; Keith et al., “The Making of a Chinese NGO”; and Zhang and Baum, “Civil Society and the Anatomy of a Rural NGO.”

9. Howell, “New Directions in Civil Society,” 163.

10. Keith et al., “The Making of a Chinese NGO.”

11. Zhang and Baum, “Civil Society and the Anatomy of a Rural NGO.”

12. Yang, “Environmental NGOs and Institutional Dynamics in China.”

13. Wang and He, “Associational Revolution in China.”

14. Whaley, “Human Rights NGOs,” 34.

15. Edwards, “NGOs in the Age of Information.”

16. Burt and Taylor, “Information and Communication Technologies”; Burt and Taylor, “When ‘Virtual’ Meets Values.”

17. Bach and Stark, “Innovative Ambiguities”; Bruszt, Vedres, and Stark, “Shaping the Web of Civic Participation.”

18. See McNutt and Boland, “Electronic Advocacy by Non-profit Organizations in Social Welfare Policy”; Mele, “Cyberspace and Disadvantaged Communities”; Friedman, “The Reality of Virtual Reality.”

19. Schmitter, “Still a Century of Corporatism?”

20. Unger and Chan, “China, Corporatism, and the East Asian Model.”

21. Howell, “New Directions in Civil Society.”

22. Dittmer, “Chinese Informal Politics.”

23. Migdal, Kohli, and Shue, “Introduction: Developing a State-in-society Perspective,” 2.

24. Fligstein, “Social Skill and the Theory of Fields,” 117.

25. Saich, “Negotiating the State.”

26. I use “civic association” as a generic term to refer to voluntary and nonprofit organizations. Other similar terms in the social-science literature are civil-society organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and nonprofit organizations (NPOs).

27. I drew my sample from four sources. The two main sources are 250 Chinese NGOs: Civil Society in the Making, edited by China Development Brief; and 500 NGOs, edited by the NGO Research Center at Tsinghua University. These are the two most recent directories of civic associations in China. Although neither comprehensive nor representative, they offer the best available sample for a study of urban grassroots organizations in contemporary China. Practically, because these two sources are quite recent, they are likely to contain up-to-date contact information. Both directories contain some government-organized NGOs (GONGOs) such as the Chinese Women’s Federation. I excluded these from the sample because they are more like state agencies than nongovernmental organizations. The third source of sampling is an organizational directory of the Beijing Federated Association of Industry and Commerce. Finally, in selecting organizations based in Sichuan province, I relied on information provided by two local informants in the city of Chengdu. The final sample consisted of 141 organizations in Beijing, twenty-eight in Sichuan, and 381 organizations elsewhere, totaling 550. It covered all provinces, autonomous regions, and “directly-governed municipalities” (, zhixia shi) in mainland China. Most questionnaires were returned in or before December 2003, a few in January 2004. Thus I consider December 2003 as the cut-off point of my data. A main challenge for conducting the survey was sampling. There are no comprehensive and up-to-date directories of civic associations for drawing a random sample. Minxin Pei’s study is based on A Comprehensive Handbook of Chinese Civic Associations edited by Fan Bojun, a handbook limited to organizations registered before 1992. See Pei, “Chinese Civic Associations.” Another similar directory confined mostly to organizations formed before 1990 is Chen Dongdong, ed., Zhongguo shehui tuanti daquan [A compendium of social organizations in China]. On issues and challenges of doing survey research in China, see Manion, “Survey Research in the Study of Contemporary China.” For sampled organizations in Beijing and Sichuan, trained interviewers were sent to conduct a questionnaire survey with each organization’s office manager. Forty of the 141 sampled organizations in Beijing turned down the survey request; twenty-seven organizations could not be located. Altogether, seventy-four valid questionnaires were collected. Of the twenty-eight organizations in Sichuan, five turned down the interview request, nine could not be located, and fourteen valid questionnaires were obtained. For the 381 sampled organizations elsewhere, standardized questionnaires were sent by regular mail on October 6, 2003. By the end of January 2004, fifty valid questionnaires had been returned. No questionnaires were returned by sampled organizations in Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Jiangsu, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hainan, Qinghai, and Tibet. Organizations in these regions are not represented in this study.

28. International Telecommunication Union, Yearbook of Statistics.

29. Following the definition used by the International Telecommunication Union, I define computer hosts as computers directly connected to the worldwide Internet network. See International Telecommunication Union, Yearbook of Statistics.

30. What I refer to as Internet capacity may be called “information technology capacity” more generally (as is consistent with the language of the International Telecommunication Union). My emphasis, however, is on the Internet.

31. Three cases are over ninety-two in organizational age, while the median organizational age of the data set is ten. Another three report full-time staff members of 150, 180, and 219 respectively, when the median number of full-time staff members is seven. The final three outliers respectively have 180, 150, and 200 computers, while the median number of computers in our sample is only four.

32. Pei, “Chinese Civic Associations.”

33. Wang and He, “Associational Revolution in China.”

34. As Pei notes, however, the increase in the number of civic associations in 1989 in his sample is surprising, given the political conservatism after the crackdown of the student movement. This trend is not discernible in my sample, where compared with 1988, 1989 marked a visible decline in the number of civic associations founded.

35. Pei, “Chinese Civic Associations,” 294.

36. Howell, “New Directions in Civil Society,” 145.

37. Howell, “Post-Beijing Reflections”; Hsiung and Wong, “Jie Gui—Connecting the Tracks.”

38. Howell, “New Directions in Civil Society,” 165.

39. Keith et al., “The Making of a Chinese NGO,” 39. On the role of international NGOs in the growth of Chinese environmental organizations, see Yang, “Environmental NGOs and Institutional Dynamics in China”; Morton, “Transnational Advocacy at the Grassroots.”

40. Howell, “New Directions in Civil Society,” 147.

41. Surman, “From Access to Applications.”

42. Harwit, China’s Telecommunications Revolution.

43. In December 2003, there were 30.89 million computer hosts and 79.5 million Internet users in China, with a proportion of 0.39. See CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) survey report, January 2004. Available online at www.cnnic.net.cn.

44. Surman, “From Access to Applications.”

45. Ibid., 10.

46. Friedman, “The Reality of Virtual Reality.”

47. Finquelievich, “Electronic Democracy: Buenos Aires and Montevideo.”

48. OneWorld International and the Open Society Institute, “The Use of Information and Communication Technologies by Nongovernmental Organizations in Southeast Europe.”

49. CNNIC, “Fifteenth Statistical Report of the Development of Chinese Internet,” 2005. Available online at http://www.cnnic.net.cn.

50. Surman, “From Access to Applications,” 15.

51. Burt, e-mail to author on March 7, 2005.

52. An example is the debate in the first half of 2005 between Fang Zhouzi and Chinese environmentalists on the practices of environmental protection in China. See special features on the debate in Fang Zhouzi’s web site New Threads (www.xys.org) and the BBS forums run by Friends of Nature (www.fon.org.cn).

53. On a scale of 1 to 5, with five indicating the most important, e-mail scores 4.63, fax 4.03, telephone 3.87, and regular mail 2.76.

54. On a scale of 1 to 5, with five indicating the most important, telephone scores 4.44, e-mail 4.06, fax 3.80, and regular mail 3.03.

55. The similarity between older organizations and business associations may be due to some degree of correlation between the two types. On average, business associations are older than others. Their average age is 11.3 (n=53) in 2003, while the mean age of all sampled organizations is 9.5.

56. CNNIC, “Statistical Report on the Development of the Internet in China,” January 2004. Available online at http://www.cnnic.net.cn.

57. Hannan and Freeman, “Structural Inertia and Organizational Change.”

58. Henderson and Clark, “Architectural Innovations.”

59. Guthrie, “A Sociological Perspective on the Use of Technology,” 586.

60. The figures do not include ENGOs founded in or after 2003, student environmental associations, or GONGOs. There are no fixed and objective criteria for judging whether an organization is or is not a GONGO, but as a rule, I have excluded the environmental organizations contained in Chen Dongdong, ed., Zhongguo shehui tuanti daquan [A compendium of social organizations in China], which are all traditional GONGOs. The statistics on student environmental associations come from a survey conducted by Lu Hongyan and her associates in Sichuan University in April 2001. Note that my counting yields seventy-three nonstudent ENGOs, but because the founding dates of two of them are unknown, figure 3 shows only seventy-one. Lu’s survey comes up with 184 student organizations, yet the data set has information on the founding dates of seventy-five only.

61. I first studied these groups in summer 2002, when I interviewed their leaders. The results were reported in Yang, “Weaving a Green Web.” Since then, I have followed their developments through these contacts, by receiving and reading their e-newsletters and regularly visiting their Web sites.

62. The registered members in its BBS forums increased from 2,700 in 2002 to 7,229 by February 10, 2008. When I opened the BBS forum on February 10 (February 11 Beijing time), the system showed seventy-four people online in the forum. Its annual volunteer-based tree-planting event has continued since 2001, and it launched new projects aimed at promoting a green Olympics.

63. This is reminiscent of the environmental activism of everyday behaviors studied by American sociologists. See Almanzar, Sullivan-Catlin, and Deane, “Is the Political Personal?”

64. http://bbs.green-web.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11741. Accessed February 18, 2008.

65. Green-Web 2003–2004 annual report. Available online at http://www.green-web.org/infocenter/show.php?id=17230. Accessed May 3, 2005.

66. http://www.green-web.org/blog/?p=7. Accessed June 1, 2007.

67. http://www.green-web.org/blog/?p=44. Accessed June 1, 2007.

68. Elisabeth Jay Friedman’s study of civil-society organizations in Latin America confirms this finding. See Friedman, “The Reality of Virtual Reality.”

69. Bissio, “The Network Society, 1990–2000; Whaley, “Human Rights NGOs.”

70. Warkentin, Reshaping World Politics, 144.

7. Utopian Realism in Online Communities

1. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 3.

2. Ibid., 175.

3. Ibid., 197.

4. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 1991.

5. In formulating this concept, Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen discuss such cases of digital formations as electronic markets, Internet-based large-scale conversations, and knowledge spaces arising out of NGO networks. They propose that digital formations are identifiable to the extent that “a coherent configuration of organization, space, and interaction” can be identified. See Latham and Sassen, “Introduction: Digital Formations,” 9. I use “online community” instead “virtual community” to avoid giving the impression that virtual means unreal. As Wellman and Gulia, in “Net-surfers Don’t Ride Alone,” put it, computer networks are social networks. Virtual communities are real communities. On virtual community, see Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 5.

6. Appadurai, Modernity at Large.

7. Wellman and Gulia, “Net-surfers Don’t Ride Alone,” 331.

8. Ibid.

9. Hockx, “Links with the Past.”

10. Liu Huaqin, Tianya Shequ: Hulianwang shang jiyu wenben de shehui hudong yanjiu [Tianya communities: A study of text-based social interaction on the Internet].

11. Anthropologists and literary theorists have produced some of the best works demonstrating the political significance of play. See Turner, From Ritual to Theatre. Also see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Scholars are beginning to take Internet play seriously as a complex social and political phenomenon. See Ernkvist and Ström, “Enmeshed in Games with the Government.”

12. Davis et al., eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China.

13. Kraus, “Public Monuments and Private Pleasures in the Parks of Nanjing.”

14. Chen, “Urban Spaces and Experiences of Qigong.” See also Chen, Breathing Spaces.

15. Liu Xin, “Urban Anthropology and the ‘Urban Question’ in China,” 123, 124.

16. Zhang Li, “Contesting Spatial Modernity in Late Socialist China,” 464.

17. Yang, “Spatial Struggles,” 750.

18. In 1994, when I had just started graduate school in the United States, a minute-long telephone call to China cost between one to two dollars. Now, if people still use the telephone at all, they can purchase a thousand-minute phone card for ten dollars.

19. The World Wide Web still did not exist then, and people used ftp servers to download online magazines to read.

20. http://www.wenxue.com/mediakit.htm. Accessed August 4, 2001.

21. Yi mei er, here translated as “e-sisters,” is a popular Chinese transliteration of “e-mail.” Yi mei er, literally meaning “that sister,” has a cute and romantic flavor to it.

22. ZWDOS was a small software program for reading Chinese characters before Chinese-character encoding became common in Web browsing systems.

23. “Hua Xia Wen Zhai bianji diannao ‘jian’ tan hui [Hua Xia Wen Zhai editors ‘talk’ with keyboards].”

24. http://www.sohu.com/Education/CHat_BBS/University_bbs/index.html. Accessed November 30, 2000.

25. The Web sites were, respectively, http://bbs.pku.edu.cn and http://bbs.xjtu.edu.cn/cgi-bin/bbsall.

26. Peng Lan, Zhongguo wangluo meiti de diyige shi nian [The first decade of China’s Internet media], 38.

27. Wilson, The Information Revolution and Developing Countries, 236.

28. Ibid.

29. Lin Mu, ed., Wang shi shi nian [Ten years of Internet stories], 140. My translation.

30. Lu Qun, Zhongguo wangchong chuanqi [Legendary tales of Chinese net worms], 354.

31. Wang and He, “Associational Revolution in China.”

32. Dong Xiaochang, “Dasui jiu shijie [Shatter the old world].”

33. Ibid.

34. Message in bbs6.sina.com.cn, posted on February 21, 1999. Accessed April 6, 2006.

35. Collection of postings from SNF, on file with author.

36. http://ago99.51.net/ago/ago-7/index.htm. Accessed February 25, 2001.

37. I.e., Microsoft’s FrontPage 2000 for Web and graphics design.

38. http://vinci2000.home.chinaren.com/diary.html. Accessed February 25, 2001.

39. Ibid.

40. Tieba, or message boards, is Baidu’s online community, reportedly the largest online community in the world.

41. “Watering,” or guanshui, is an online slang term meaning to endlessly post messages.

42. “River water [user name],” “Shang wang san yue zhi tihui [Three months after going online: Personal reflections].”

43. Yang Lien-sheng, “The Concept of ‘Pao’ as a Basis for Social Relations in China,” 294.

44. Hamm, Paper Swordsmen, 17.

45. Ibid., 138.

46. Wang Yinjie, Shanke jianghu [The Rivers and Lakes of Flash creators].

47. In Chinese online parlance, a “brick” is a post that criticizes another post.

48. “Ten Years of Rivers and Lakes: A Letter to the Netfriends in Sina’s Forums.” Available online at http://forum.service.sina.com.cn/cgi-bin/viewone.cgi=79&fid=4260 &itemid=28568. Accessed November 2, 2006.

49. Oeeee.com is a Web company based in Shenzhen. As of January 31, 2008, its BBSs (http://webbbs1.oeeee.com/index.html) had 1,136,384 registered users, with an average of over twenty thousand posts daily.

50. http://webbbs1.oeeee.com/bin/content.asp?artno=6218086&board=1035. Accessed January 31, 2008.

51. http://www.d9cn.com/d9info/2/2415.htm. Accessed February 20, 2008.

52. Yu Yang, Jianghu zhongguo [China as Rivers and Lakes].

53. http://www.tianya.cn/New/PublicForum/Content.asp?flag=1&idWriter=1744000&Key=521562. Accessed March 8, 2006.

54. All the above quotes are from http://www.tianya.cn/New/PublicForum/Content.asp?idArticle=339532&strItem=free. Accessed January 31, 2008.

55. Tan Renwei, “ ‘Mai shen jiu mu’ yin fa wangluo fengbao [‘Selling myself to save mom’ triggered Internet storm].”

56. Of this amount, RMB 42,707.06 was spent on her mother’s surgery. The remaining 71,842.94 was turned over to a local foundation for children suffering from leukemia. See below. See also http://www.tianya.cn/new/Publicforum/Content.asp?idWriter=0&Key=0&strItem=free&idArticle=377210&flag=1. Accessed March 8, 2006.

57. http://www9.tianya.cn/publicforum/Content/free/1/341118.shtml. Accessed March 8, 2006.

58. “insmile,” 2005-9-30 12:27:33. See http://www.tianya.cn/New/PublicForum/Content.asp?idArticle=339532&strItem=free. Accessed January 31, 2008.

59. http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/360494.shtml. Accessed October 8, 2007.

60. For example, XY reportedly revealed only a small amount of the money she received through the post office or from overseas. See Tan Renwei, “ ‘Mai shen jiu mu’ yin fa wangluo fengbao [‘Selling myself to save mom’ triggered Internet storm].”

61. The following quotes are from http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/360494.shtml and http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/361650.shtml. Downloaded October 8, 2007.

62. Message posted by “internet without control,” 2005-10-21 17:17:09. See http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/361650.shtml. Downloaded October 8, 2007.

63. Timestamped 2005-10-22 13:13:58. See http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/361650.shtml. Accessed October 8, 2007.

64. “zhongyu bu dong [still don’t understand],” 2005-10-24 14:20:01. See http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/363730.shtml. Accessed October 8, 2007.

65. “qiu ning shui [autumn still water],” 2005-10-24 12:01:49. See http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/363730.shtml. Accessed October 8, 2007.

66. http://www.tianya.cn/new/Publicforum/Content.asp?idWriter=0&Key=0&strItem=free&idArticle=377210&flag=1. Accessed October 8, 2006.

67. “mai na mai nei,” 2005-10-24 16:24:43. See http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/363730.shtml. Accessed October 8, 2006.

68. “yeah_luo,” 2005-10-26 17:53:05. See http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/363730.shtml. Accessed October 8, 2006.

69. The violations of XY’s privacy strained the moral community but at the same time expanded the scope of the debates to the balance between justice and privacy, self-serving motives and community.

70. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 167.

71. Ibid., 169.

72. Yang, “China’s Zhiqing Generation.”

73. See the article “Wo shi dai [Generation me].”

74. Orgad, “The Internet as a Moral Space.”

75. Social-science studies of flaming in English-language newsgroups in Western societies have also shown that flaming is not as prevalent as is often believed. See Kayany, “Contexts of Uninhibited Online Behavior.”

76. Hence the popularity of books comparing Chinese society to the Rivers and Lakes of the martial-arts world. See Yu Yang, Jianghu zhongguo [China as Rivers and Lakes]. Also see Xia, “Organizational Formations of Organized Crime in China.”

77. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 8.

8. Transnational Activism Online

1. This definition is built on Tarrow’s work. For Tarrow, transnational contention is “conflicts that link transnational activists to one another, to states, and to international institutions.” He defines transnational activists as “people and groups who are rooted in specific national contexts but who engage in contentious political activities that involve them in transnational networks of contacts and conflicts.” Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, 25, 29. I emphasize nonstate actors because when state actors are involved, it becomes international politics.

2. See, for example, Zito, “Secularizing the Pain of Footbinding in China.”

3. Smith, “Exploring Connections Between Global Integration and Political Mobilization,” 258.

4. Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, 60, defines global framing as “the use of external symbols to orient local or national claims.”

5. Quoted in Goodman, Beijing Street Voices, 65. Besides being an early example of transnational aspirations, these open letters were among the first to explicitly raise human-rights issues in China.

6. Calhoun, “Tiananmen, Television, and the Public Sphere,” 55.

7. David Zweig uses the term “linkage agents” to refer to the main actors behind China’s internationalization, “the leaders of local territorial governments, semipublic companies, development zones, enterprises, universities, laboratories, bureaucratic agencies, as well as overseas Chinese and local Chinese with overseas networks.” See Zweig, Internationalizing China, 39.

8. Howell, “New Directions in Civil Society.”

9. Wu Guo, “Wang shang you jian ‘Huangjin shu wu’ [There is a ‘Golden Book Cottage’ on the Internet].”

10. Morton, “Transnational Advocacy at the Grassroots,” 200.

11. Presentation by Greenpeace media officer from its Beijing office, July 12, 2007, Beijing University. Personal notes.

12. http://www.chinadevelopmentbrief.com/dingo/Sector/Environment/2-12-0-76-0-0.html. Accessed March 8, 2007.

13. “ About China Development Brief.” Available online at http://www.chinadevelopmentbrief.com/node/260. Accessed February 4, 2008.

14. http://www.chinadevelopmentbrief.com/node/508. Accessed February 4, 2008.

15. http://www.greengrants.org/grantsdisplay.php?country[]=China&year=2001. Accessed February 4, 2008.

16. http://www.greengrants.org/grantsdisplay.php?country[]=China&year=2002. Accessed February 4, 2008.

17. http://www.greengrants.org/grantsdisplay.php?country[]=China&year=2006. Accessed February 4, 2008.

18. http://www.amnesty.org/en/alfresco_asset/c176cd3d-a48b-11dc-bac9-0158df32ab50/asa170012004en.pdf. Accessed February 4, 2008.

19. http://www.ir2008.org/about.php. Accessed February 5, 2008.

20. http://china.hrw.org/action. Accessed February 5, 2008.

21. Kennedy, “China: Nation’s First Citizen Reporter?”

22. http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/03/30/china-nations-first-citizen-reporter. Accessed February 4, 2008.

23. http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org. Accessed February 4, 2008.

24. http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2008/01/30/china-hu-jias-state-secrets/#more-193. Accessed February 4, 2008.

25. For a debate on this protest event, see Lu Suping, “Nationalistic Feelings and Sports”; and Friedman, “Comments on ‘Nationalistic Feelings and Sports.’ ”

26. The following two paragraphs are from Yang, “The Internet and the Rise of a Transnational Chinese Cultural Sphere,” 482.

27. The Strait Times (August 20, 1998).

28. Arnold, “Chinese Diaspora Using Internet To Aid Plight of Brethren Abroad.”

29. I retrieved the message containing Wee’s letter from http://www.nacb.com/bbs/pub/yourvoice/messages/3.html on July 13, 2001.

30. For example, Chase and Mulvenon mention an online petition launched by Wang Dan on the tenth anniversary of the 1989 student movement calling for the reversal of the official verdict on the movement. See Chase and Mulvenon, You’ve Got Dissent!, 20. On Falun Gong in transnational activism, see Thornton, “Manufacturing Dissent in Transnational China.”

31. One example is the “Signature Web” hosted by the Twenty-first Century Foundation, which is affiliated with democracy activists (www.qian-ming.net). When I accessed it on February 6, 2008, it had several active signature campaigns and an archive of completed ones.

32. Farley, “Dissidents Hack Holes in China’s New Wall.”

33. Chase and Mulvenon, You’ve Got Dissent! On hacktivism, see Denning, “Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism.”

34. Zhao, “Falun Gong, Identity, and the Struggle Over Meaning Inside and Outside China.”

35. bid., 216–217.

36. A report carried in the August 10, 2001, issue of Science covers Fang’s story. See Xiong Lei, “Biochemist Wages Online War Against Ethical Lapses,” 1039.

37. Fang Zhouzi, “In the Name of ‘Science’ and ‘Patriotism.’ ”

38. Nanfang renwu zhoukan [Southern people weekly], “Yingxiang zhongguo gonggong zhishi fenzi 50 ren [Fifty public intellectuals who have influenced China],” 37.

39. This section draws on Yang, “A Portrait of Martyr Jiang Qing.”

40. CCP Central Committee, “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China.” Harding, China’s Second Revolution, 64–65, suggests that this “document marked the Party’s formal acceptance of Deng’s political and economic program. It repudiated the Cultural Revolution and the ideological tenets connected with the later years of Mao Zedong.”

41. CCP Central Propaganda Department and State Press and Publication Administration, “Guanyu chuban ‘wenhua dageming’ tushu wenti de ruogan guiding [Regulations governing the publication of books about the ‘Great Cultural Revolution’].” For an English translation, see Schoenhals, ed., China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966– 1969, 310–312.

42. The English translation of the document is reprinted in Barme, Shades of Mao, 237.

43. Xinwen chubanshu [State press and publishing administration], “Tushu, qikan, yinxiang zhipin, dianzi chubanwu zhongda xuanti bei an banfa [Measures for reporting major projects in the publication of books, magazines, audiovisual and digital publications],” 238.

44. Wagner-Pacifici, “Memories in the Making,” 310.

45. Ba Jin proposed the idea in an essay published in his memoir. See Ba Jin, Ba Jin suixiang lu [Ba Jin’s random thoughts], 134–138.

46. E-mail communication with its editor, Hua Xinmin, June 3, 2006.

47. CND Editorial Office, “Rang wo men xieshou zai wangshang gongjian yizuo wenge bowuguan [Let’s join hands to build a cultural revolution museum on the Web].”

48. Lao Tian, “Liuba nian hanban Mao Zedong sixiang wansui banci shuoming [About the 1968 Wuhan edition of Long Live Mao Zedong Thought].”

49. Web sites about the Cultural Revolution exist in China, but they are small projects with a surreptitious character, due to Internet censorship. One case is the well-known academic portal site Yannan Web, which ran an online archive and BBS forum on the CR. On September 30, 2005, the entire Yannan Web was closed down due to its open discussions of the ongoing peasant riots in the village of Taishi, Guangdong Province.

50. Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, 158.

51. I was on several such mailing lists for years.

52. “Chinese AIDS Activist Honoured Despite Ongoing Detention” (September 12, 2002). Available online at http://www.aidslaw.ca/publications/interfaces/downloadDocumentFile.php?ref=430. Accessed February 8, 2008.

53. See chapters in Arquilla and Ronfeldt, eds., Networks and Netwars, 239–288.

54. Min Dahong, “Gaobie zhongguo heike de jiqing niandai—xie zai ‘zhongguo hongke lianmeng’ jiesan zhiji [Farewell to Chinese hackers’ era of passion—On the occasion of the disbanding of the Honker Union of China].”

55. For example, see a Washington Post report about Chinese hacker attacks in May 1999. Barr, “Anti-NATO Hackers Sabotage 3 Web Sites.”

56. Jackie Smith finds that “human rights remains the major issue around which the largest numbers of TSMOs organize, and a consistent quarter of all groups work principally on this issue.” See Smith, “Exploring Connections Between Global Integration and Political Mobilization,” 296.

57. Amnesty International, “China: Human Rights Defenders at Risk: Update.”

58. Teresa Wright’s study of members of the China Democracy Party shows the diversity of its membership. See Wright, “The China Democracy Party and the Politics of Protest in the 1980s–1990s.”

59. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/5598/97/sd9706a.txt. Accessed February 10, 2008.

60. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/5598/index.html. Accessed February 10, 2008.

61. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/5598/97/sd9707e.txt. Accessed February 10, 2008.

62. Ibid.

63. Liu Xiaobo, “Wu yu hulianwang [Me and the Internet].” My translation.

64. Liu Xiaobo and “ninety-nine others,” “One Hundred Intellectuals’ Letter of Appeal on the Shutdown of Century China.”

65. Yang, “Weaving a Green Web.”

66. Watts, “China Arrests Dissident Six Months Ahead of Olympics.”

67. Tarrow and della Porta, “Conclusion: ‘Globalization,’ Complex Internationalism, and Transnational Contention.”

68. Yang, “Environmental NGOs and Institutional Dynamics in China.” See also Morton, “Transnational Advocacy at the Grassroots.”

69. On the transformative effect of social-movement experience, see the last chapter in Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors.

70. Smith, “Exploring Connections Between Global Integration and Political Mobilization.”

71. Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion.

72. McAdam, “The Biographical Consequences of Activism.”

73. The sociologist Ann Swidler argues that culture influences action “not by providing the ends people seek, but by giving them the vocabulary of meanings, the expressive symbols, and the emotional repertoire with which they can seek anything at all.” Swidler, “Cultural Power and Social Movements,” 27.

74. This repertoire, however, is simply that. Cultural traditions have been built into it, but they guide action not by providing common goals. The goals of the Chinese diaspora in North America are not the same as the goals of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. And yet, at times of crisis, these two groups can reach out to each other online and offline.

75. Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center,” 25.

76. Nonini and Ong, “Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity.”

77. This pattern does not fit the broader landscape of popular contention in China, where radical, confrontational forms of street protests happen frequently.

78. Smith, “Exploring Connections Between Global Integration and Political Mobilization.” See also Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism.

79. Abrams, Historical Sociology, 296.

80. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 331.

81. See Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism.”

Conclusion: China’s Long Revolution

1. See, for example, Ming Xia’s work on the collusion between government and organized crime. See Xia, “Organizational Formations of Organized Crime in China.”

2. Sewell, “A Theory of Structure.”

3. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 470.

4. This pattern does not fit the broader landscape of popular contention in China, where radical, confrontational forms of street protests happen frequently.

5. Williams, The Long Revolution, 121.

6. Kong, Consuming Literature.

7. Harwit, China’s Telecommunications Revolution.

8. Zhao Jinqiu and Hao Xiaoming, “Zhongguo xibu nongcun hulianwang jishu de kuosan moshi [Diffusion of the Internet in villages in western China].”

9. CNNIC, “Survey of the Internet in Rural Areas.”

10. Chu and Yang, “Mobile Phones and New Migrant Workers in a South China Village”; Qiu, “The Accidental Accomplishment of Little Smart.”

11. Interview with Chinese Internet researcher, July 23, 2007.

12. On social movement and knowledge producers, see Escobar, “Actors, Networks, and New Knowledge Producers.”

13. According to Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 50, “a public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself.”

14. The concept of public sphere was first introduced in the late 1980s, but only in recent years has it become incorporated into everyday language.

15. Blecher, “The Mass Line and Leader-Mass Relations and Communication in Basic-level Rural Communities.”

16. Hu Chuanji, “Wangluo gongmin de jueqi: shui du bie xiang meng wangmin [The rise of Internet citizens: Don’t think about deceiving netizens].”

17. John Dewey believes that communication is about building a common community. A common community is where people share aims, beliefs, aspirations, and so forth. “There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common … are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding.” Dewey, Democracy and Education, 5–6. Raymond Williams wrote in Culture and Society that real communication is not about the transmission of ideas but about reception, understanding, and community.

18. Shi Zengzhi and Yang Boxu, “Civicness as Reflected in Recent ‘Internet Incidents’ and Its Significance.”

19. Gao Bingzhong and Yuan Ruijun, “Introduction.”

20. Wang and He, “Associational Revolution in China.”

21. Williams, Culture and Society, 315.

22. Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience,” 6–17; Harding, “Will China Democratize?”; Perry, “Studying Chinese Politics.”

23. Hartford, “Dear Mayor.”

24. “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo zhengfu xinxi gongkai tiaoli [Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on government information disclosure].” Available on-line at http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2007-04/24/content_592937.htm. Accessed April 3, 2008.

25. “China Holds Environment Hearing Over Disputed Project in Imperial Garden” (April 14, 2005). Available online at http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200504/14/eng20050414_181007.html. Accessed April 3, 2008.

26. On biopower in contemporary Chinese urban life, see Farquhar and Zhang, “Biopolitical Beijing.”

27. Li Xiguang, “ICT and the Demise of Propaganda in China.”

28. Wang, High Culture Fever.

29. The government had kept the information about the project a secret until it was disclosed by a chemistry professor in Xiamen University. See Xie Liangbing, “Xiamen PX shijian: xin meiti shidai de minyi biaoda [The Xiamen PX incident: The expression of public opinion in the age of new media].”

30. Zhao, ed., Political Reform in China.

Afterword to the Paperback Edition

1. Michael Wines, “A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors,” New York Times, March 11, 2009.

2. Li Yuantao and Wu Xiaochen, “Yunnan Invites Netizens to Investigate ‘Eluding the Cat,’ ” [in Chinese] Nanfang dushi bao, February 20, 2009, AA10.

3. Nanfang zhoumo, “Authorities Release Results of Investigation—Li Qiaoming Dies of Beating by Prison Bullies,” February 27, 2009, http://www.infzm.com/content/24573 (accessed August 26, 2010); Jane Macartney, “Angry Web Users Force China U-Turn Over ‘Hide-and-Seek’ Death in Police Custody,” Times, February 21, 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5772317.ece (accessed August 26, 2010).

4. I thank Deborah Davis and Elizabeth Perry for alerting me to trends that may contradict my assessment of the crisis of government credibility, such as a robust leadership, a high level of patriotism and national pride, and new developments in e-government. The existence of conflicting signs and diverging trends attests to the complex and contradictory nature of social transformation in China. Whether this crisis conceals a more serious issue of regime legitimacy is another important question, but beyond the scope of this afterword. For recent studies of state legitimacy, see John James Kennedy, “Legitimation with Chinese Characteristics: ‘Two Increases, One Reduction.’ ” Journal of Contemporary China 18, no. 60 (2009): 391–395; Heike Holbig and Bruce Gilley, “Reclaiming Legitimacy in China,” Politics and Policy 38, no. 3 (2010): 395–422; Vivienne Shue, “Legitimacy Crisis in China?” in Chinese Politics: State, Society and the Market, ed. Peter Hays Gries and Stanely Rosen, 41–68 (London: Routledge, 2010).

5. Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

6. Kenji Minemura, “Japanese Firms Targeted in China Strikes,” Asahi Shimbun, July 31, 2010, http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201007300467.html.

7. David Barboza and Keith Bradsher, “In China, Labor Movement Aided by Modern Technology,” New York Times, June 16, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/business/global/17strike.html (accessed August 31, 2010).

8. Ibid.

9. Jack Qiu, Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).

10. Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009).

11. For a few examples, see Zheng Wang, “Feminist Networks,” in Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism, ed. You-tien Hsing and Ching Kwan Lee, 101–118 (London: Routledge, 2010); Emily C. Dunn, “Netizens of Heaven: Contesting Orthodoxies on the Chinese Protestant Web,” Asian Studies Review 31, no. 4 (2007): 447–458; and Simon Shen and Shawn Breslin, eds., Online Chinese Nationalism and China’s Bilateral Relations (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010).

12. Chris King-Chi Chan and Pun Ngai, “The Making of a New Working Class? A Study of Collective Actions of Migrant Workers in South China,” China Quarterly 198 (2009): 287–303.

13. Fanfou.com was launched in May 2007 and closed by the Chinese government two years later.

14. I followed these events as they were happening, and on August 27, 2010, I retrieved tweets about this case using Google’s real time function.

15. “Microblog Message Discloses Decision to Commit Suicide, Loving Netizens Save Life in Qingdao” [in Chinese], http://www.qdjimo.com/html/2010/03/170927454674.htm (accessed August 27, 2010).

16. It is transborder in two senses: activists in the network not only span geographical and territorial borders, they also cross the virtual borders of Internet censorship erected by the Great Fire Wall by “scaling the wall.”

17. “Post bar” is the name of Baidu’s online bulletin boards. Through this feature, Baidu has built a gigantic, multilayered online community that is an important consumer base for its search engine and a contributing factor to its huge success.

18. Guo Baofeng, “How Did I Break Out of the Jail?” August 11, 2009, http://amoiist.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-i-broke-jail.html (accessed July 25, 2010).

19. For a story on tightening control of microblogs in China, see Jonathan Ansfield, “China Tests New Controls on Twitter-Style Services,” New York Times, July 16, 2010.

20. As I discuss on page 195, Fang, the relentless muckraking writer and blogger, has been doing this for many years. On August 30, 2010, when he was on his way to his Beijing home, two men ambushed and attacked him, causing him slight injuries. His wife issued a statement on her microblog that Fang Zhouzi is never scared of exposing social evils.

21. Interview with a marketing executive of a major Internet firm, July 9, 2010, Beijing. All interviews were conducted in confidentiality, and the names of interviewees are withheld to protect anonymity.

22. Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, “The Internet in China” (white paper, Beijing, June 8, 2010), http://www.china.org.cn/government/whitepaper/node_7093508.htm.

23. For two responses to the document, see Rebecca MacKinnon, “China’s Internet White Paper: Networked Authoritarianism in Action,” RConversation, July 15, 2010, http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2010/06/chinas-internet-white-paper-networked-authoritarianism.html; and Monroe Price, “The Battle Over Internet Regulatory Paradigms: An Intensifying Area for Public Diplomacy,” Center for Public Diplomacy, August 3, 2010, http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/the_battle_over_internet_regulatory_paradigms_an_ intensifying_area_for/.

24. Information Office of the State Council of the PRC, “The Internet in China.”

25. Xiaoling Zhang, “From ‘Foreign Propaganda’ to ‘International Communication’: China’s Promotion of Soft Power in the Age of Information and Communication Technologies,” in China’s Information and Communication Technology Revolution: Social Changes and State Responses, ed. Xiaoling Zhang and Yongnian Zheng, 103– 120 (London: Routledge, 2009).

26. Interview with former chief editor of major official news Web site, July 10, 2007.

27. Yang Lu and Zhang Meng, “Xinwen wangzhan de shangshi chongdong wei xin meiti jiawen” [New media heating up as news Web sites rush to be listed in the stock market], Zhongguo shangbao [China commercial news], June 4, 2010, http://www.cb-h.com/news/wh/2010/63/106337HGI4FC2I6J29804.html (accessed August 30, 2010).

28. Media Opinion Monitoring Office of People’s Daily Online, “Rankings of Local Governments’ Capacity to Respond to Internet Public Opinion in the First Half of 2009,” July 23, 2009, http://yq.people.com.cn/zt/dz3/%E4%BA%BA%E6%B0%91%E7%BD%91%E8%88%86%E6%83%85%E7%9B%91%E6%B5%8B%E5%AE%A4%E2%80%9C2009%E5%B9%B4%E4%B8%8A%E5%8D%8A%E5%B9%B4%E5%9C%B0%E6%96%B9%E5%BA%94%E5%AF%B9%E7%BD%91%E7%BB%9C%E8%88%86%E6%83%85%E8%83%BD%E5%8A%9B%E6%8E%92%E8%A1%8C%E6%A6%9C%E2%80%9D.pdf

29. CNNIC, “Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Plan on Further Implementation of the Verification of the Filing Information about Web Sites,” http://www.cnnic.net.cn/html/Dir/2010/02/23/5785.htm (accessed September 25, 2010).

30. Peter Foster, “China to Force Internet Users to Register Real Names,” Telegraph, May 5, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7681709/ China-to-force-internet-users-to-register-real-names.html (accessed September 1, 2010).

31. These numbers are from surveys conducted by the China Internet Network Center. See survey reports listed at http://research.cnnic.cn/.

32. Ding Yiyi and Zhou Yuanying, “Who Is Manipulating Online Public Opinion?” [in Chinese] IT Weekly, January 5, 2010, 33–38; Zhang Yixuan, “Thousands of Internet Pushing Hand Firms Form a Market of ‘Internet Reputation’ ” [in Chinese], People’s Daily, June 8, 2010.

33. Ding and Zhou, “Who Is Manipulating Online Public Opinion?”

34. Ibid.

35. Cited in Ibid.

36. Ibid; Zhang, “Thousands of Internet Pushing Hand Firms Form a Market of ‘Internet Reputation.’ ”

37. To protect anonymity, no Web citation is provided here.

38. Ibid.

39. Shai Oster and Loretta Chao, “China Arrests 2 in Milk Scandal as Number of Sick Infants Rises,” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122147061860735851.html (accessed September 15, 2010).

40. Interview with marketing executive of an Internet firm, July 9, 2010, Beijing.

41. Ibid.

42. Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet,” Wired, August 17, 2010, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1 (accessed September 26, 2010).

43. Choy Dick Wan, “The Shi Tao Case: Its Development in Mainland China.” Journal of Contemporary China 18, no. 61 (2009): 517–539.

44. Ronald J. Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, “Good for Liberty, Bad for Security? Global Civil Society and the Securitization of the Internet,” in Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, ed. Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, 123–150 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

45. Scholars have begun to study forms of uncivil activism such as online Han supremacism. See James Leibold, “More Than a Category: Han Supremacism on the Chinese Internet,” China Quarterly 203 (2010): 539–559.

46. Thanks to Mayfair Yang and Alan Hunter for directing my attention to the importance of online feminist activism and online religious practices.