Abstract
In this ambitious book Shaohua Guo sets out to provide a nuanced analysis of the development of the Chinese Internet over the past 30 years. Against the background of a large body of research focusing primarily on the struggles between Chinese netizens and the state, she prefers to talk about ‘the dynamic process of negotiation’ between different state and non-state actors and agencies that has led to ‘an ingenious Internet culture’ (p. 3). Instead of a focus on either the power of the state and its censorship apparatus or the inventiveness of Internet users in evading it, the study ‘investigates the cultural dimension of Internet use’ in four applications, namely, BBS, blogs, microblogs, and WeChat in which these ‘diverse agents [. . .] compete for discursive legitimacy’ (p. 4).
The author employs an approach based in the concept of ‘the network of visibility’ (p. 10) that combines ‘user attention’ with ‘content authority’, the former of which is linked to the potential for monetization or influencing of Internet contents through the attraction of large numbers of Internet users, while the latter is a mixture of official regulations and the reputation of different entities providing contents online. The four applications or platforms are used as historical scaffolding providing a timeline for the study that is outlined in Chapter 2 and they serve as an approximate structure for the remainder of the book, with Chapter 3 looking at BBS, Chapters 4 and 5 discussing blogs, Chapter 6 devoted to microblogs and Chapter 7 analyzing WeChat.
The outline of the evolution of the Internet during the past 30 years offered in Chapter 2 contains a lot of materials of varying depth and quality. Some developments like Internet cafes, online gaming, QQ, or Internet regulations are barely mentioned, while others are discussed at length, such as the development of Blogchina or Sina Weibo. Timelines are confusing throughout the chapter such as in the discussion of government provisions for the infrastructure of the Internet that jumps from 1996 to 1994–2004, to ‘mobile Internet, iCloud and new technologies’, to 2009, to 2013, to 1995 (p. 25–26). While the chapter asserts that government investment into Internet infrastructure promoted the rapid growth of the Internet (p. 27), it also portrays officials as merely reacting to Internet developments that keep surprising them (p. 25, 29).
The chapter contains a misrepresentation of how China was connected to the Internet (pp. 24–25) that mostly credits US authorities and institutions with getting China online and that contains numerous mistakes, such as crediting Qian Tianbai with China’s first email instead of Wang Yunfeng collaborating with Prof. Werner Zorn from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany (Hauben, 2005, 2010; Zorn, 2007). Similarly, the first .cn domain name server was not set up in 1994, but in November 1990, again with the help of Werner Zorn, while a full connection to the worldwide Internet was not achieved with the help of the US government and NSFNET, but only became possible via the Sprint corporation after the Internet in the United States had been privatized. The accounts by Hauben and Zorn agree that the connection to China was established against the wishes of successive US governments with the help of US and German academics and Internet pioneers.
The best part of Chapter 2 is its discussion of the history of Sina Weibo, which should have been turned into a separate chapter as it doesn’t fit in with the other materials in the chapter. The depth and breadth of this portrayal of Sina Weibo, its development, contents, controversies, celebrities, and so on is very interesting and contains many starting points for further research into the complex interplay of different agents within the author’s network of visibility.
Chapter 3 presents an overview over self-representations on the Internet in China since the mid-1990s, drawing a line from re-edited movie clips on online forums (BBS) to Furong Jiejie to Papi Jiang and today’s Internet celebrities. The chapter argues that Chinese Internet users above all display a ‘collective spirit of seeking fun, for which they created their own entertainment stars [. . .] and actively engaged in self-publishing’ (p. 96). Much of the presentation is very interesting and offers fascinating details on discussions on early BBSs, as well as on the careers of Furong Jiejie or of Papi Jiang drawing a developmental line from the late 1990s and early 2000s to the present. The discussion shows how user attention or popularity influences content authority and vice versa on the Chinese Internet and how this is reflected in the decisions and actions of state and non-state actors. The presentation is marred, though, by dating mistakes, such as claiming VCDs were only available at the end of 1996 (p. 68), when they were already widely available in 1994, or the focus on a single movie (A Chinese Odyssey) while excluding all other cultural influences. This presentation completely ignores the widespread and long-lasting impact of Michael Jackson’s or Celine Dion’s songs, or the movie Titanic, which were almost ubiquitous in China at the time, or of Taiwanese and Chinese TV series such as Taiji Master (太极宗师 – 1997), Water Margin (水浒传 – 1997), or Meteor Garden (流星花园 – 2001). Similarly, there are curious leaps in the logic of the argument, such as citing the size of China’s Internet population in 2017 as proof for the ‘opening up of a novel discursive space on BBSs’ in the late 1990s (p. 69).
The next chapter builds on the discussion of the careers of Furong Jiejie and Papi Jiang and develops these ideas further by taking a closer look at four Internet celebrities who planned and engineered their online careers, taking advantage of different media and various platforms to turn themselves into models and products for ‘the rising middle class [who] represents their primary target audience’ (p. 116). These celebrities revel in ‘an obsession with luxury brands and other trappings of upper-class lifestyles’ (p. 119) while refusing to ‘shoulder social responsibilities’ (p. 123), thus breaking the much-described patterns of contention in Chinese cyberspace between government and Internet users. The discussion of Yang Lan’s often challenged complex contribution to a Feminist agenda in China and Guo Jingming’s more androgynous enactment of masculinity in relation to their profiting from these presentations provides new insights into the dynamics of online China, though again they are spoiled by tenuous arguments, in this case an attempt to link these to neoliberalism (p. 123).
In Chapter 5, the author turns to the self-declared anti-heroes or taboo-breakers of the Chinese Internet. She discusses the career of Mu Zimei whose ‘explicit sexual expressions and alternative lifestyle’ (p. 129) attracted the attention of the national and international press (p. 131), which turned her into an Internet superstar. Next, the author discusses Han Han who ‘started out as an alternative youth idol’ and became ‘a distinctive online opinion leader’ (p. 143) by refusing to follow the expectations for young Chinese to study hard, find a good job, get married, have children. Han Han published novels, raced cars, wrote irreverent blog posts about famous people, politics, society in general, and became successful by outwardly disdaining success. Both cases are good examples of the author’s network of visibility, though the importance of the Internet for their careers seems over- and the influence of traditional media under-appreciated. Both Mu Zimei and Han Han became famous Internet personalities, but their careers would have floundered without the attention of both national and international traditional media, which spread their fame and increased their online followers through their reporting. This set them apart from many other online celebrities who were not noticed by traditional media and thus failed to become Internet superstars.
Chapter 6 takes a different approach from the other chapters and presents a familiar overview over the impact of Weibo on China. Instead of a focus on individuals and a detailed analysis of their online careers the chapter rehashes well-known arguments and cases while also following a strict dichotomous logic of an emerging public sphere based on Weibo users fighting against the monolithic Chinese state. The vocabulary used is slightly different from previous accounts of the importance of Weibo, but the discussion of the US concept of ‘witnessing’ is not very convincing when compared with the similar Chinese notion of the ‘surrounding gaze’ (围观) popularized by Hu Yong (Bandurski, 2011).
Chapter 7, the last data chapter of the book turns to micro-blogging and returns to the detailed discussion of an individual with a discussion of the rise and fall of Mi Meng, a former journalist turned Internet celebrity who used a public account on WeChat to reach her followers. The author emphasizes the economic success of Mi Meng over her political impact, but stresses that Mi Meng had to shut down her business because of concerns by officials. The chapter offers a nuanced discussion of the interplay between political and economic concerns of an important Internet user that supports the network of visibility approach of Shaohua Guo’s book with many details.
The book’s strength lies in the collection of large amounts of data into representative snapshots of specific developments of the Internet in China. In particular, the sections on Furong Jiejie, Mu Zimei, Han Han and Mi Meng are worth reading for the breadth and depth of materials presented. The book is let down, though, by the many mistakes and omissions it contains. User statistics are quoted without dates, historical developments are presented with mixed up timelines, the text contains numerous factual errors, ultimately rendering it unreliable as a source of knowledge about the general evolution of the Internet in China.