Mediating embodied protest: Performative body in social protests in the Internet age in China

Embodied protest in Chinese context

Social protests are of vital importance, both in the real world and in academia, and are the subject of much study from various perspectives (Castells, 2015; McAdam, 1982; McAdam et al., 1996; Reed, 2005; Tarrow, 1988, 1998; Tilly, 2000, 2003, 2008) However, previous studies are characterized by an overly structuralist orientation and usually focus on the macro structure of social protests. One criticism is that they disregard the agency of protestors, in particular, the way in which social protestors create their own opportunities through cultural practices (Adams, 2002; Chaffee, 1993; Fahlenbrach et al., 2016; Garrett, 2014; Jenson, 1995; Johnston, 2009). More importantly, this structuralist approach also ignores the performative potential of the body and the emotional, visual, and spatial aspects of contemporary protest practices (Butler, 2011; Jasper, 1998; Juris, 2012; Mitchell, 2012; Schram, 2013; Tapias, 2015).

More specifically in the context of China, studies in the sub-field of Chinese protest studies also focus on the macro structure with a more specific ‘state-centered’ perspective (Huang, 2011). In this sense, they focus on the particular structure of the ‘state’, placing it at the center of the structure and considering it as the decisive factor in determining the outcome of social movements (Cai, 2010; Yang, 2016). It is argued that even though China’s state reforms since 1978 have provided more space and resources for social protests and the state has also begun to domesticate, accommodate, and co-opt popular protests in an attempt to neutralize their antagonism (Chen, 2012; Lee, 2007; Nathan, 2003), Chinese protestors still face the risk of repression because the political opportunities for social movements in China is still fragile (Tai, 2015). This ‘state-centered’ perspective provides various ways to understand the logic of popular protest in China’s political landscape (Cai, 2010; Goldman, 2005; Perry and Goldman, 2009). However, previous studies tend to emphasize the notion of ‘consciousness’ and ‘ideology’ over that of the body, without recognizing the power and promise of the body in transforming the agency of protestors; there remains a theoretical vacuum in terms of the performative power of the body.

The performative body has long been a focus of research. It treats the body as a potential site of resistance (Butler, 1993; Duncan, 1996; Foucault, 1979; Rasmussen and Brown, 2005). However, there is a tendency in previous protest studies to overlook the performative constitution of body action, whereby protestors use their physical bodies to create a space from which to perform concerted actions that allow themselves to be seen and judged by an audience, through which the body becomes a ‘sphere of activity’ in which contention is staged and mediated (Rancière, 2004: 40). In other words, the embodied protest establishes a realm in which ideas, actors, and events can be seen, with irreducible autonomy, reclaiming the rights of the governed. In this sense, the embodied protest is also what Foucault (2007: 75) calls counter-conducts – ‘the will not to be governed like that, by these people, at this price’ – that are directed against authorities (Death, 2010).

More recently, Occupy Movements that have been staged around the world have also demonstrated the performative power of the body (Butler, 2011; Juris, 2012; Mitchell, 2012; Schram, 2013), which is relevant to the Chinese experience. John Mitchell (2012) argues that the act of occupation opens up an ‘empty space of contemporary revolution’ that is characterized by ‘bodily immediacy’ (p. 18) and ‘with the living bodies of individuals from every corner of the globe’ (p. 27). Contemporary occupation protest is characterized by bodies that congregate, move and speak together, and lay claim to a certain space as a public space (Butler, 2011). These embodied practices create what Hannah Arendt (1959) calls the ‘space of appearance’ and prompt questions about what the body requires, and what the body can do.

As well as the spatial potential of the performative body, other studies also highlight manifestations of emotion and image, both of which are treated as integral parts of embodied protest actions (Jasper, 1998; Delicath and Deluca, 2003; Deluca, 1999; Szasz, 1994; Yang, 2000). Jordan (1998) notes that ‘direct action is praxis, catharsis, and image all rolled into one … to engage in direct action you have to feel enough passion to put your values into practice: it is literally embodying your feelings, performing your politics’ (p. 134). As a form of bodily reaction, emotion has become a focus of social movement research and is considered to be a form of political rhetoric that is central to popular mobilization (Jasper, 1998; Piven and Cloward, 1978). More specifically, emotions such as love, hate, resentment, anger, sadness, shame, trust, and self-esteem have become a productive force in shaping protesters’ cognitive patterns and the logic of action (Goodwin et al., 2001).

Within China’s political tradition, ‘emotional work’ has long been one of the decisive factors in the outcome of revolution (Perry, 2002). Negative emotions, such as disappointment, dissatisfaction, anger, resentment, and fear, can enable protestors to achieve their goals through bodily protests (Yang, 2000). Recent studies also show that emotions inherently linked to the body of resource-less dispossessed populations who deploy their bodies to make claims are a crucial source of motivation for public compassion and action in Chinese public spheres (Yuan, 2017). Jinyan Zeng (2014) notes that there exists a politics of emotion in the grassroots protests in China, ‘since any legitimate, organized campaigns are dismissed, Chinese activists are left with only their bodies and emotions to protest’ (p. 42). In response, the state has tried to delegitimize the politics of emotion by increasingly labeling this emotional expression of anger, outrage, and sympathy as negative and irrational behavior that must be ‘civilized’, in an attempt to demobilize popular discontent and ‘kill’ emotions softly (Yang, 2017: 75).

Although these studies have begun to attach importance to the role of emotions in social protest, the analysis of the concrete process of emotional mobilization and emotional achievement remains underdeveloped. To address this issue, some studies emphasize the need for a more image-oriented approach that more concretely ‘visualizes’ the emotional process at work, wherein dramatic scenes and spectacles become the most powerful means of arousing public emotions, formulating strategies and garnering support (Delicath and Deluca, 2003; Szasz, 1994: 62–63). Especially for resource-poor protestors, they can create a spectacle for self-expression and attract media coverage in favor of their causes by staging dramatic direct action or creating disorder around the protest site (Bob, 2005; Krastev, 2014).

Existing studies also indicate that the contemporary visual culture of image ‘adds drama and force of a much greater order’ that has ‘an immediacy, a verisimilitude, and a concreteness that helps influence acceptance’ (Blair, 2004: 59). Some studies argue that ‘images are capable of operating as claims-making, reason-giving, opinion-shaping communication and are therefore instrumental to the practice of public argument’ (Delicath and Deluca, 2003: 321). Visually based argument, which delivers images as argumentative fragments that offer unstated propositions, is often deployed to generate public controversy and to ‘draw attention to the taken-for-granted means of communication’ (Olson and Goodnight, 1994: 250). Acts of protest, which often constitute an ‘image event’ for media dissemination (Delicath and Deluca, 2003: 315), are increasingly ‘put at the service of the imaginative space of the witness’ (Mitchell, 2012: 29), which expands the visibility of public grievances (Liu and Shi, 2017).

This literature review shows that the study of social protests in China should not only concern to the role of the state but also that of the performative body and its emotional, spatial, and visual manifestation. Focusing on Ye Haiyan’s practices, this article explores how Ye Haiyan turns her body into a site of struggle and a political resource and deploys her body as a weapon to evoke broader emotional and moral resonances. It determines how her bodily practices are visualized as images that give public visibility and how these bodily images provoke Internet users to spectate, interpret, and imitate, making possible a space of appearance in cyberspace. These questions allow an understanding of the body as a surface where meanings are inscribed and contested that are beyond its control.

Female celebrity as an embodied site of protest

Since the 1970s, celebrity studies have become more common in western academia (Harmon, 2005) and the celebrity has become a specific locus of formative power, discourse, and apparatuses for political government (Marshall, 1997). More specifically in China, especially in the post-Mao era, Chinese celebrity has become a particular site that an audience can read, unpack, and contest in terms of the special meanings of politics in China (Jeffreys and Edwards, 2010). In other words, compared with their western counterparts, Chinese celebrities have special resistant meanings in that they demonstrate possible practices against or in opposition to the Party-state (Jian and Liu, 2009; Yang and Bao, 2012).

More recently, with the proliferation and expansion of the Internet, what has been called the demotic turn of celebrity on the Internet has been witnessed (Turner, 2010). More specifically on the Chinese Internet, the rise of Internet celebrities has been interpreted as the evocation of a ‘democratic’ Internet culture (Roberts, 2010: 220) and ‘cultural contention’ that invokes resistance on the Chinese Internet (Guo, 2012). It has been argued that Chinese Internet celebrity provides a space for individual bodily resistance (Jeffreys and Edwards, 2010; Roberts, 2010), as well as feminine defiance in China (Liu, 2004). This article, therefore, regards Chinese Internet celebrity as a special embodied site of resistance and protest in China. More specifically, it focuses on Ye Haiyan, who has become an Internet celebrity as a result of a series of bold and morally controversial actions that illustrate embodied protest in China in the Internet age.

Ye, who has the nickname, Hooligan Sparrow, became an Internet user in the late 1990s and was one of the first generation of Internet users in China. Ye spent most of her time on the Tianya Forum, which was one of the most popular websites of that era. She had different jobs during that time period, most of which were low status, and she lived with marginalized sex workers in different cities. Because of this experience, Ye became concerned about oppressed women, especially sex workers, and has maintained this focus since she became a nationally renowned Internet celebrity. She has established the China Grassroots Women’s Rights Center, the China Women’s Rights Website, and the First Hotline for Sex Workers since 2005, each of which was the first in its field in China, to focus on and strive for the rights of Chinese women, especially sex workers. This type of struggle and resistance has been her forte since she became famous as an Internet celebrity and has been related to her embodied practices since the beginning.

On 14 May 2005, Ye rose to national fame after she uploaded a set of nude photos to Tianya, which attracted a huge number of Internet users and led to the server crashing (Xu, 2005; Ye, 2005). Her intention was to challenge the conventional norms of the body in China’s specific context. She stated,

I think my motivation for being nude was not for myself. I would rather regard it as a sort of challenge and provocation to others. You think I should not have gone nude, but I just did it. What the heck do you think it did to me? That’s my attitude – a challenging attitude.

Since then, Ye has begun a series of bodily campaigns about the rights of women and sex workers. The photos of dramatic bodily actions and mediatized scenes that have been staged by Ye and other volunteers from her grassroots women’s rights center have rapidly spread around the Internet and generated heated discussion. Some Internet users have followed Ye by carrying out their own actions in other cities.

With the growing influence of her activism and despite constant police harassment, Ye’s campaigns have begun to attract national and international media attention and to generate pressure on the government in recent years. In a campaign called Free Sex for Migrant Workers, Ye wrote a sign – ‘Sex Service for Free’ – on the wall of the room where grassroots sex workers in their 40s provided sex at RMB 10 (US$1.5) a time. Ye broadcasted the campaign on her five micro blogs in real time as an embodied protest against the exploitation and extortion that was occurring in police crackdowns on the sex trade. Prostitution was illegal in China, so low-paid sex workers lived a life of continual privation and fear and were vulnerable to violence and abuse.

Another high-profile case was the ‘Principal, Get a Room with Me’ campaign. On 13 May 2013, the media exposed a scandal that six schoolgirls, aged 11–14 years, from an elementary school in Wanning, Hainan province, had gone missing together, causing panic among their parents and teachers. The schoolchildren were finally found to have been taken to a hotel by their school principal and a member of government staff, who molested and sexually abused the girls. The news shocked the entire country and triggered a massive national outcry over the government’s failure to protect the schoolgirls. On 27 May 2013, Ye and other activists protested outside the Education Bureau and the school that the six victims attended to force the trial of the principal of the school. She held a sign that read ‘Principal, get a Room with Me, Leave the Pupils Alone!’, which soon sparked widespread online responses. Not surprisingly, her activism elicited threats, attacks, and arrests, which were featured in the documentary film, Hooligan Sparrow.

This article focuses on these cases to illustrate how Ye’s performative body demonstrated emotional, visual, and spatial connotations in the embodied protests. In terms of research methods, this study combines ethnographic non-participant observation and in-depth interviews. Ethnography has a unique advantage when collecting first-hand data, but ethnographic observation alone is insufficient to determine motives, stories, experiences, or emotions, so many studies have emphasized the importance of in-depth interviews in ethnographic studies (Hockey, 2002; Miller and Sinanan, 2014; Skinner, 2013). The ethnographic observation in this study spans the period from 2011 to 2017 and covers everything related to Ye Haiyan on the Internet, including all of her social media platforms, such as Twitter, Microblog, and WeChat. In-depth interviews were conducted on 11–12 August 2014. One of the authors went to Ye Haiyan’s home and stayed there for 2 days, to conduct a total of 10 hours of in-depth interviews.

The body as a weapon

In recent years, although there have been more studies that address the centrality of body in protest movements (Butler, 2011; Juris, 2012; Mitchell, 2012; Nelson, 1999; Schram, 2013), none has adequately dealt with the Chinese experience. In the context of China, bodily presence – especially that of the disenfranchised – can be deployed as a means of protest to impose a degree of moral pressure on the authorities. For Ye Haiyan, bodily presence is crucial to her campaigns, as she stated during an interview:

I always ensure that I am physically present in the protest. I must be there at the scene of the protest and only in this way can the protest be more influential. It is useless if you stay at home to protest. The protest is only meaningful if you go to the scene of the incident and do something.

Therefore, when Ye wanted to protest on behalf of sex workers, she first decided to step into the world of shadows to become one of them and to bodily experience the cheapest sex service in China. Only in this way, could Ye bodily experience the terrible working conditions and the police punishment. This was a dramatic embodied protest that garnered widespread attention and controversy. Similarly, for the ‘Principal, Get a Room with Me’ protest, Ye could easily have held her poster at home and then uploaded it to the Internet, as other protestors usually did, but she insisted on going to the scene of the incident, which finally made the protest a national story.

Her experience shows that the deployment of body can serve as a means to attract public attention and generate a degree of moral pressure on the authorities. James Scott (1987) introduced the concept of ‘weapons of the weak’ to explain the circumspect and constant struggle that is waged by peasants and slaves materially and ideologically against their oppressors. However, the use of these weapons and techniques of evasion and resistance, such as foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, and sabotage, as everyday forms of resistance are not a significant and effective means of social protests for the weak in China. Therefore, Ye went one step further and used the bodies of the weak as weapons for social protest, by using distinct activist ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss, 1973). As Ye explained during the interview,

This is the power of the body. I think it is a very unique weapon for fighting and struggling … It has become a practical tool, because I know I can get what I want – the attention of the public. So, the body is deliberately presented and my own purpose is to seize the courage of the public. It is no longer an individual behavior, but a social behavior: a social protest.

In this sense, Ye consciously, purposively, and deliberately employed the body of the weak, and women in particular, as weapons for protest. Xiaoming (Ai, 2013) states that the body of a woman in China ‘is too much defined as a passive object of desire, and too little as a body that can resist and a body that has power’. As some scholars argue, women may have particular advantages to created ‘gendered opportunity structure’ in social protest (McCammon et al., 2001: 49). However, Ye’s campaigns are intent on overturning the passive status of the female body and turning it into a rebellious resource for the struggle for rights. She further explained,

I believe that for women, the body may be the most powerful and the most convenient weapon for protest and resistance. I believe that my weakness as a woman is a rebellious resource, to some extent, and that this type of resource gives women a particular superiority. This is why much of our resistant performance art uses the body.

Growing up in a poor family in a village, she had previous experience with oppressed people, so Ye was empathetic toward those who faced unfair treatment and injustice: notably disadvantaged women, children, migrant workers, and sex workers. Her bodily protests have also addressed the rights and status of these subjects. The ‘Free Sex Service’ campaign was launched because one of her ‘sisters’, who earned money to support her family, was arrested by police when planning to return home for the Chinese New Year. She announced that she would start providing free sex to migrant workers on her microblog, in the hope of gaining the attention of the government and the public. In another campaign involving the schoolgirls in Hainan, a dramatic appeal that read ‘Principal, Get a Room with Me’ successfully attracted broad public attention and transformed public anger into moral pressure on the government.

These embodied campaigns contained a mix of shock, anger, boldness, and creativity and were full of what Randall Collins (2001) calls ‘emotional energy’, which, once mediatized on the Internet, aroused the emotions of Internet users who prepared their bodies for possible collective actions or to induce pressure on the government. In this sense, Ye successfully turned her body into a site of struggle and a political resource and deployed her body as a weapon to evoke broader emotional and moral resonances. Her embodied emotional energy contributed to an ‘affective solidarity’ (Juris, 2008a, 2008b) among supporters and followers. During the contentious process, Ye and the participants obtained a sense of ‘emotional achievement’ (Yang, 2000: 596) through active and creative actions that had profound moral implications. In other words, Ye’s embodied protests and emotional mobilization were not necessarily irrational, as traditional studies presume (McAdam, 1982; Tilly, 2000, 2003, 2008) this was a very active, creative, tactical, and innovative action that was based on Ye’s rational, purposive, deliberate, and strategic consideration of body as weapon.

The body image as a political stage

Turning the body into weapon, Ye’s embodied protests are intertwined with her emotional energy and emotional achievement. This integration is usually concretely realized in the visualization of the embodied performance. As Ye explained during the interview, she became an Internet celebrity because of her nude photos, so she knew the power of the image from the beginning. To some extent, the image was the root and route of her embodied protests, which focused on herself as a ‘visual icon’ (Hochberg, 2015). This root and route, to some extent, guaranteed the body as weapon. Chiara Bottici (2014) argues, ‘the creation of images is central to our capacity for action’ (p. 103) and ‘the repetition and indefinite duplication of images seems to have become a crucial political weapon’ (p. 120). Ye admitted during the interview that she became an Internet celebrity mainly because of the impact of her nude photos, which made her fully aware of the power of image:

A picture is worth a thousand words. No picture; no truth. In the era of reading pictures, an activist’s first and foremost strategy is to produce images. If a protest is not visualized as an image, it is a protest that never actually exists. What the government fears most is never the bodily performance itself, but the images of protests that go viral on the Internet.

The influence of the embodied protest itself may be quite limited because actions such as ‘Principal, Get a Room with Me’ can only reach a very limited audience at the scene and may not really influence the public and the government. However, Ye’s purpose has never been just the embodied performance itself, but the visualization of the embodied performance that can emotionally influence the public – there was always a professional photographer and even a documentary film team with her during the protest to produce images that immediately went viral on the Internet. In this sense, Ye targeted the complex and dynamic interrelationship between the body, emotion, and image, all of which combined to produce what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘realm of perception, visibility and audibility’ (Davis, 2010: 3) in the embodied protest. For the resource-poor protestors, the image of embodied protests is usually the only raw material and resource that they own and the Internet is usually the first and foremost channel for mediated spectacles, to provoke public indignation and to increase public sympathy for protesters (Krastev, 2014). In other words, the mediatized images of embodied protests guarantee the visibility of the protests (D’Arcus, 2013) and this visibility guarantees the protestor’s ‘right to be seen’ and the public’s ‘right to look’ (Mirzoeff, 2006). In this sense, images ‘are no longer only the medium by which we communicate our political activities, but have also become an end in themselves: the very stuff that politics is made of’ (Bottici, 2014: 106).

More specifically in the Chinese context, visibility involves not only whether and how the event is perceived by the public but also the degree to which pressure is exerted on the government. Because there is tight censorship, the more visible the protest, the more pressure is exerted on the government, so if a protest reaches beyond a limited audience at the scene and influences a wider public, it must be mediated by images and be part of a network of image flows. In the case of ‘Principal, Get a Room with Me’, Ye’s image successfully initiated and amplified public outrage at the incident and transformed public emotions and actions into public pressure on the government. In the face of such detrimental public opinion online, on 29 May, the Supreme People’s Court quickly ordered the local courts to mete out harsher sentences and death penalties were served on child abusers who abused the rights of the under-aged.

The visualization of the embodied protest as a particular image is also a tactic in bypassing government censorship and avoiding violent crackdowns. Because of China’s particular context of ‘contentious authoritarianism’ (Chen, 2012: 189), although the Party-state has begun to accommodate, adapt, and adjust to tackle increasingly widespread and conventional social protest, in order to demonstrate its ‘authoritarian resilience’ (Lee, 2007; Nathan, 2003), most protests are still subject to rigid and violent repression by the Party-state (Tai, 2015), so Ye has resorted to more tactical, pragmatic, flexible, and cunning embodied actions, which produce mediated spectacles that increase the visibility of her protests, on one hand, and guaranteed her own safety, on the other. Ye explained during the interview that

I do not want to be a radical activist or a hero, who could go to prison, or even die as a martyr. I think that is terrible and worthless: it is not my style … If I sacrifice myself and become a prisoner, nothing can be done. The power machine is just over there; you cannot beat it.

In order to pressure the government, Ye visualized and dramatized her embodied protests to gain netizens’ support and media attention, using her own practical strategies and routes. First, she used the Internet, especially social media such as Sina Microblog, which is the Chinese version of Twitter, at the scene to broadcast the embodied protests live. When these live broadcasts were banned online by the government, the event had already attracted the attention of the public and the media. When the state-controlled mass media was banned from reporting the event, Ye turned to the international media to gain international exposure for the event. In the ‘Free Sex Service’ campaign, Ye broadcast every detail of the protests live online for three days, attracting the attention of traditional media such as Southern Weekly and Phoenix Television for the event. Ye then began participating in various TV shows to talk about her appeal. Ye also used her blog to recruit volunteers to translate the appeal into English, so that it would be covered by the media overseas. Apple Daily, SCMP, BBC, and VOA reporters arrived to report on the event and increased the international visibility of the campaign, which Ye believed was crucial to preventing outright government repression.

Therefore, Ye’s visualization of her embodied protests created ‘image events’ that staked claims and encouraged media dissemination, and created ‘image politics’ in China’s political landscape that reconfigured the ways in which subjects are seen (Delicath and Deluca, 2003; Deluca, 1999). In this sense, Ye’s body image as a political stage essentially represents ‘the landscape of the visible’ (Rancière, 2004) and ‘the imaginative space of the witness’ (Mitchell, 2012: 29) for embodied protests. This political stage provides a forum for the ‘politics of in/visibility’ (Woodward, 2015) in China, which demonstrates ‘the power to see’ (Haraway, 1988) through which politics are played out visibly in alternative ways.

Bodies in alliance in cyberspace

An embodied protest produces images and leads to ‘the configuration of its own space’ (Rancière, 2015: 37). Ye’s actions have also appropriated different spaces, such as public squares, business districts, government buildings, and the Internet, and configured these as temporary sites of embodied struggle. Jacques Rancière (2015) notes that genuine political activities ‘involve forms of innovation that tear bodies from their assigned places and free speech and expression from all reduction to functionality’ (p. 1). Ye Haiyan was originally ‘assigned’ in her workshop, far from the scene of the sexual abuse of the schoolgirls, but she made the long journey to the scene to raise the poster and photograph the act, making the ordinary place an iconic site in the embodied process. This process resonates with what Rancière (2015) calls the re-figuring of space, which re-figures the space in terms of what is to be done, to be seen, and to be named in it.

This re-figuring process creates a concrete geographical space of protests and a bodily space of resistance. From the spatial perspective, the body creates space and becomes the space itself. Henri Lefebvre (1974) argues that

there is an immediate relationship between the body and its space, between the body’s development in space and its occupation of space. Before producing effects in the material realm (tools and objects), before producing itself by drawing nourishment from that realm, and before reproducing itself by generating other bodies, each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space. (p. 170)

Ye felt that her body belonged not only to herself but also to the public, especially the weak and the oppressed of society, and she wished to transform the body, which was the space that was used to sustain pressure, bear pain, and suffer repression, into a space of protest where society must face and encounter resistance.

As well as the concrete geographical space and bodily space, Ye’s embodied protests also imply the possibility of political space, in a Chinese context, through which individuals can force political change by reconfiguring the relationship between the body and space and the forms of presence and appearance. Butler (2011) notes that when bodies congregate and speak, they can produce unpredictable effects. However, Butler (2011) emphasized concrete spaces, such as squares and streets, and not virtual cyberspace. Ye Haiyan’s actions demonstrate that the performative body, especially when it is relayed to an extended social space using social media and is amplified by mass media (Mitchell, 2012), can draw overwhelming support through the circulation of Internet memes (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2015; Szablewicz, 2014). The images of Ye holding of a sign that read ‘Principal, Get a Room with Me’ went viral online. Within 1 week, there were more than 700,000 related search results on Sina’s microblog platform, 2,780,000 on Google, and 7,300,000 on Baidu. Many Internet users expressed their support by imitating Ye’s protest style and showing a variety of bodily postures, formulating a particular ‘Internet meme’ that became a type of contested cultural capital for a larger scale of protest (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2015; Szablewicz, 2014). Although Internet users’ protests were not exactly bodily allied in the same time and space, they represented a type of ‘bodies in alliance in cyberspace’ because they shared the same concerns and conditions by sharing the same ‘meme’. Individuals posted on their own individual social media within the same ‘meme’ and in particular communities. ‘#Get a Room with Me’ had become an ‘Hot Topic’, like a popular Twitter ‘hashtag’, on the Sina microblog, which allowed Internet users in virtual communities to share their images of their own creative embodied protests. In this sense, they allied bodies in cyberspace and transformed cyberspace into a public sphere using their bodies in alliance. They claimed and created this public sphere, rather waiting to be given it (Butler, 2011).

Internet memes enabled participants to come together and enlarge what Arendt (1959) calls the space of appearance, which is a demand in its own right, a demand for presence in the political regime. Later, the arrest of Ye also prompted a new wave of protests and dozens of lawyers from around China immediately came to her rescue Ye protested and others imitated Ye’s embodied protest by holding a banner that said, ‘Protect Schoolchildren, Release Haiyan’ offline and online. As well as the original protest against sexual abuse, Internet users began to add ‘Release Ye Haiyan’ to their cardboard placards and uploaded these to their own social media and Internet platforms. The Chinese scholar-activist Ai Xiaoming staged a dramatic protest and wrote the slogan ‘Get a room with me. Release Ye Haiyan!’ on her naked breasts and held the scissors to express outrage at the sexual abuse and the silencing of social criticism.

In this follow-up protest to release Ye Haiyan, Internet users again made the appearance space by allying bodies in cyberspace using the same Internet meme and the same public appeal to release Ye Haiyan. In this sense, Ye Haiyan’s body did not act alone; the entire embodied protest emerged in her bodily alliance with other Internet users’ bodies. She appeared to others as others appeared to her. They established a particular relationality during the construction of the space of appearance, in what Rancière calls ‘the construction of a common space or “scene” of relationality which did not exist previously’ (Davis, 2010: 87). The body’s openness to inscription provides an important resource that allows isolated individuals to articulate themselves within the campaign and to ‘reproduce’ itself by mobilizing other bodies to produce the space of appearance.

Concluding remarks

This study uses Ye Haiyan as a particular case to illustrate the root and routes of the embodied protests in China, to determine why it is reasonable and possible, how it operates and its political implications. By examining Ye’s use of the body as weapon, the body image as a political stage and bodies in alliance in cyberspace, this article contributes to the academic argument in many ways.

By strategically focusing on Ye Haiyan as a case study for the holistic actions of embodied protests, this study gives a specific, singular, and unique insight into the politics of contention in China. Traditional protest studies usually focus on the macro political opportunity structure, but this study focuses on the micro bodily opportunity structure, which is a surface where meanings are inscribed and contested beyond its control. Traditional protest studies also usually focus on the collective dimension of protests, but this study demonstrates a new dynamic model for protests that are initiated by individuals, but which invoke the enthusiasm of the public and result in participation in collective protest. This demonstrates a route from the individual and personal protest to a collective and public protest.

Ye’s embodied protest seems absurd and hopeless in the particular context of China. It echoes the story of Sisyphus, who repeats forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. When Albert Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus, he argued that when we struggle with the absurd life, the struggle itself is enough to fulfill us and make us happy. Later in The Rebel, Albert Camus (1956) identifies rebellion as a basis for human solidarity: ‘When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself … But for the moment we are only talking of the kind of solidarity that is born in chains’ (p. 17). Ye Haiyan said in an interview that although she often feels frustrated and her actions have been repeatedly banned and punished, she still has a glimmer of hope: ‘Although it is very dark now, we will not be lonely on the road where we wait for the dawn. We talk, we laugh, we go forward and then the daylight will appear’.