Abstract
The ascendance of the People’s Republic of China to first place in the number of internet users in spite of its heavy use of censorship should cause some media critics to reconsider what they believe is the intrinsic power of the technology. In 2008, China became number one in the world for fixed broadband subscriptions, and now has far outstripped the next three countries (ITU, 2011). This connectivity is not without its contradictions, however. According to the World Bank (2011), China lags behind in contracted international internet bits. In 2009, China contracted for 651 bits per second per capita, at two orders of magnitude lower than Germany and the United States. Given the fact that China’s international traffic is so low, what is it that internet users do, if they are not seeking easy access to international information?
These three books suggest that there is plenty for netizens to do, and two tie their activities to a project of freedom by using the lens of the medieval carnival. As analysed by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, the term ‘carnivalesque’ describes the intermingling of speech patterns one encounters both at a carnival and in a novel. For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is not just a place where common people laugh in the face of authority. The ‘grotesque’ and ‘unfinished’ language of the carnival to which Bakhtin calls our attention is complex and multifaceted, allowing for new associations to break forth. Thinking of this commercial space for hawking vendors, browsing shoppers, and the curiosity-seekers, one can imagine an analogy to the experience of the netizen of China. In the same way that Bakhtin suggests that encountering these multiple dialects helps a reader exercise his or her individuality and resist official language, one can see through these three studies how the netizen might be able in the carnival of the internet to think differently.
Guobin Yang’s book The Power of the Internet in China is one of the first studies to consider how Chinese consumers, businesses and activists have adapted the internet to their own purposes in this sort of carnival. Yang states in his Introduction that it is not the case that the control of the information space forces netizens to do nothing but play. Throughout his book, he shows how individuals have transformed the regime of control into a ‘world of carnival, community and contention’ (p. 1). Yang is astute in making a connection to Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, showing how netizens use a full range of satire, irony, doggerel and parody against the state. Yang explains how bloggers in China employ a wide variety of genres. Hu Ge, for instance, made his own version of the extravagant romantic fantasy The Promise. After uploading the satire to a BBS forum and sharing it with friends, Hu became somewhat notorious. Netizens were commenting about him on bulletin boards, while mainstream media drew attention to his work, making the parody ‘the top Internet incident of 2006’ (p. 81). Yang points out that, according to Bakhtin, official language is unitary and unauthored, while the common language of the people is heteroglossic and written by an individual. Here we can see that the use of new media is not just an outlet for criticism, but a way of injecting impressions of real people into the flow of sanctioned information.
One of the most interesting aspects of this study is the metaphors that Yang says capture the ideals of netizen life. These are images of openness and freedom, which are likened to the public square, coffee shops and marketplace; family and home, which emphasize the feeling of collegiality, friendship and solidarity that one associates with family members; and rivers and lakes, which remind users of the feelings of adventure, betrayal and justice associated with martial arts films. Inspired by these new visions of the society as China comes online, Yang offers new reasons beyond the typical recourse to the public sphere of why the internet is important to its users. The use of the internet to practise and experience contention is dependent on the ‘cultural tools and symbolic resources’ that users bring to cyberspace (p. 210). Yang suggests that there is a recursive process: the community’s values of openness, solidarity and justice find expression online, and the more netizens see them online, the more these values are reaffirmed among citizens.
As Yang points out, China’s connection to the internet must be seen in this context of liberalizing mass media policy. The anthology Changing Media, Changing China puts the internet revolution into a longer perspective that includes the story of the commercialization of the media. While it is not expressly a book about the internet, several of the authors refer to the internet while studying China’s information ecology. Studying this anthology leads the reader to understand that today’s internet experience must be appreciated in the context of 30 years of increased access to information. The anthology takes us back to 1979, only three years after the Cultural Revolution had ended, when the Chinese Communist Party allowed newspapers, magazines, television and radio to sell advertising as part of a larger programme to help modernize the Chinese economy. At the time, there were only 69 newspapers in the country, all run by the party and government.
The people’s hunger for information led to a veritable explosion of media services. By 2005, there were more than 2000 newspapers and 9000 magazines, all of which had to vie for readers in a competitive media environment. In terms of broadcasting, China increased the number of television stations nine-fold between 1978 and 2007. The anthology then covers the kind of content this policy has provoked in various media: Quian Gang and David Bandurski describe the conflict between control and commercialization of the media that follows the decision to cut print media free, while Miao Di describes the similar result in the world of television programming.
The most notable contribution to Changing Media, Changing China comes from Daniela Stockmann, who draws from her research and an upcoming book project explaining how the members of the Chinese media audience navigate the censored news, outright propaganda and sensational news that the commercial media environment has brought. During the Chinese protests against Japan in 2005, propaganda ministers heightened their control of the media, and so Stockmann seeks an understanding of why users did not attempt to defeat the firewall and instead read domestic information that they knew was propagandistic. When living in an ‘authoritarian regime’ where ‘individuals tend to be subject to state intervention in their private lives’ (p. 181), Stockmann writes, the people who are likely to do business with state officials need to know state opinion on current events that they can find in newspapers. This helps to explain why citizens turn to newspapers just as often during times of heightened restrictions, and do not necessarily turn to online sources during these crises.
The editors of Changing Media, Changing China have placed some of the current controversies about the Chinese internet into a longer historical context. A legacy of the Mao Zedong era is that central party leaders know that loyalty and conformity can be best enforced in peer groups. Instead of authorities, the best method of control is ‘criticism and self-criticism in small groups of classmates or coworkers’ (p. 14). In continuation of this insight, the Chinese Communist Party’s legion of paid internet commentators, known as the Fifty Cent Army, receive approximately 50 cents in Chinese currency for every anonymous post in support of the government’s position. Deibert et al. note that there are approximately 280,000 commentators who ‘zealously support’ the party line (p. 413). This use of propaganda is in line with past practices, and Chinese netizens know that they must take what they read under careful consideration.
Peter Marolt, whose essay is included in the anthology Online Society in China, also takes up the case of the Fifty Cent Army (perhaps better called the Fifty Mao Army). According to Marolt, this infiltration of the public sphere is not as debilitating as one might think. Explicit denunciations of official policy remain rare, of course, but there are netizens who do express their opinions. When doing so, a netizen is aware that it is ‘virtually impossible’ to avoid being ‘controlled or influenced by the state’ (p. 58). The opinionated netizens, Marolt writes, ‘are not particularly bothered by this interference’ (p. 58) and instead use the discussion board to find reliable partners with whom to exchange their opinions and thoughts. In this way, censorship and surveillance activities, Marolt writes, have become meaningless.
One alarming development in China is known as the human flesh search engine (renrou sousuo, or RRSS). This hybrid of cyberspace and real space allows people to seek out individuals who are thought to overstep the bounds of the harmonious society. According to Diebert et al., they started in 2001 when a man posted a model’s picture as his girlfriend and other users sought him out. David Kurt Herold’s contribution regarding RRSS seeks to explore the ways in which they represent a ‘legitimate form of political discourse in China’ (p. 130). However, the examples he provides sometimes lead one to wonder. For example, an online game player made a bulletin board post accusing his wife of infidelity with another game player. The post quoted from logs and email messages and asked netizens to help find the offline identity of the user ‘Bronze Moustache’. The result was that his identity was found, along with his address and phone number, and great numbers of netizens sought retribution. It is hard to see how this counts as political engagement.
Sometimes RRSS is used to criticize the government indirectly. In 2009, a university student Gao Ye reported that pornography was readily available online and described how a fellow student ‘had been drawn deeper into an addiction to pornography because of Google’ (p. 138). Netizens formed RRSSs to find out his identity, and it was discovered that Gao Ye was an intern working for the news programme that interviewed him, leading some to believe that the show’s producers had scripted the statement. In this way, Herold states, this form of online activity seeks to collect information about the government and its policies, ‘thus providing a new form of checks and balances previously missing from Chinese politics’ (p. 139). The topic of RRSS is the occasion for a fairly serious misunderstanding perpetrated by another contribution by Herold and Kenneth Farrall, however. In their essay ‘Identity vs. Anonymity’, they state that the importance of RRSS in China is proved by Google’s effort to develop such a service. Herold and Farrall provide a link, but it is dead. Searching the web for the URL, however, reveals that it was an April Fool’s hoax (Urgo, 2008).
One of the best insights one receives from Online Society in China is how netizens have employed subterfuge to communicate. While one sometimes hears that wary internet posters use sound-alike words as a periphrasis for sensitive topics, this requires knowledge of the Chinese language. Hongmei Li, thankfully, details how netizens use homophones to create imaginary creatures that express abusive or indecent words. The widespread ‘cao ni ma’ (grass-mud horse), a mythical beast that resembles an alpaca, is a Chinese pun for the swear word that means someone who has sex with his or her mother. This figure, Hongmei Li writes, rose to fight the ‘he xie’ (river crab) – a homophone for the ‘harmony’ referred to in the plan for the ‘harmonious society’. This creature has become ‘a code word, an adjective and also a transitive verb in Chinese to describe censors who constantly “harmonize” Internet blogs and forums’ (p. 79). Here, Hongmei Li writes, we see the carnival in full force: netizens laugh at something the government takes very seriously. Hongmei Li points out the power of parody to bring attention to the living body, freeing the netizen from official language and providing an escape from piousness.
At a carnival, a visitor is attracted to seemingly disconnected events. Passing from scene to scene, perhaps with some goal in mind but perhaps not, the user of the carnival is treated to the unexpected. Because no one stays for too long, and the hawker has no way of knowing which approach will interest any particular customer, the speech in the carnival is exceedingly pleonastic. Containing everything, it finds a space for everyone. This, for Bakhtin, is the curiously liberating power of the carnivalesque that extends beyond the idea of sanctioned dissent. By associating evidence of the world with the mental principles and concepts he or she holds dear, one is able to augment one’s personality and strengthen one’s convictions. These three studies demonstrate the potential for new media to replicate the free-form multiplicities of the carnivalesque.