Abstract
This article examines the formation of Chinese young people’s political subjectivity through exploring their everyday online political participation. Drawing on qualitative data collected from 31 Chinese young people, it identifies three dispositions apparent in their online participatory activities in different circumstances: ‘angry youth’, ‘powerless cynics’, and ‘realistic idealists’. Reflecting their accounts of these participatory activities, these dispositions as manifestations of subjectivities are shaped by the contingent participatory circumstances of the young people and are connected to their previous history of participation. Their online political participation serves as a vehicle for the formation of their subjectivity in the distinctively Chinese context. In this way, the internet facilitates the formation of the subjectivities of young people by providing a space for them to interact with other collective subjectivities, enabling a new form of engagement within which the formation of new subjectivities can develop.
Reflecting the notion of a civic deficit thesis, which argues that young people lack basic knowledge of civic and political processes and are disengaged from politics, recent studies tend to examine young people’s social and political participation through the lens of maximalist participation. This enables an inclusive examination of participation in both conventional political spheres and local communities, schools, families, and workplaces (Carpentier, 2011). The literature has documented a wide range of online political activities which are collectively constructed by the changing socio-political situation, the dynamic digital media landscape, and young people’s flexible use of digital media (Collin, 2015; Vromen, 2008; Vromen et al., 2015). These emerging forms of participation constitute an integral part of young people’s practice of an individualised and self-actualising form of citizenship (Bennett, 2008; Harris et al., 2010; Loader, 2007; Sloam, 2014).
Studies of young people’s online participation in Western societies mainly focus on how social media is used by young people when engaging in significant political and social movements (Pickerill and Krinsky, 2012) or in their everyday lives (Vromen et al., 2015). These studies tend to examine young people’s online participation as a cultural phenomenon or as socio-political expression. Fewer studies, however, have examined these online activities from young people’s own perspective. We still know little about how such activity is generated within a specific context, or what it means to young people as political subjects.
Studies of Chinese young people’s online political participation is an example of this. With over 800 million internet users who spend about 27 hours per week online on average (China Internet Network Information Centre, 2018), the Chinese internet is ‘a world of carnival, community, and contention’ created by its users (Yang, 2009: 1). Studies of Chinese internet users’ online participation are largely conducted in two contexts. First, there are studies which examine numerous cultural phenomena arising from youth online participation, such as E-gao (malicious prank) (Meng, 2011), Renrou Sousuo (cyber vigilantism) (Cheong and Gong, 2010) and Diaosi (loser) (Yang et al., 2014). Second, there are many studies which investigate significant online social protests, such as: a series of ‘Not-In-My-Backyard’ protests (Deng and Yang, 2013; Huang and Yip, 2012); participatory and protest activities in specific online communities, such as communities of gamers (Lindtner and Szablewicz, 2011), consumers (Huang, 2012) and backpackers (Zhang, 2014); and social and political events attracting considerable attention online (Fu, 2017; Jiang, 2010; Zhao, 2008).
While these two lines of inquiry shed light on how the internet is used by Chinese young people for different forms of civic and political participation, they do not sufficiently explore young people’s subjective experiences and understandings of these participatory activities, or adequately consider the formation of their political subjectivity as it is mediated by these activities. This study intends to fill this gap by spelling out young people’s subjective experiences of online participation. In so doing, it demonstrates that subjectivities are not merely static ways of being waiting to be claimed, but are reflective and contingent processes that unfold through flexible civic engagement in different contexts. In this way, Chinese young people’s experiences of online participation reveal the fluid nature of the formation of social and political subjectivities in today’s digital society.
Subjectivity and Chinese young people
Subjectivity is a process of self-construction carried out through an individual’s participation in their world (Hanafi, 2012), the result of the relationships an individual has with others and with their immediate environment (Rebughini, 2014). The formation of subjectivity involves constant negotiation between ‘social integration and disintegration’ (Hanafi, 2012: 52). Social integration refers to the process of people being socialised into social institutions and different forms of collective subjectivities. Social disintegration is often discussed as a form of agency, often manifested as resistance to and/or creative engagement with social institutions with the purpose of (partial) emancipation from their disciplinary power (Furlong, 2009; Hanafi, 2012). However, this side of subjectivity does not necessarily conflict with its socialisation aspect. On the contrary, the latter provides the ‘conditions under which embodied subjectivities are articulated and recognised’ (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014: 472).
The concept of youth subjectivity has often been employed to account for young people’s lives (Farrugia, 2011; Furlong, 2009). Two features of subjectivity are highlighted in this analysis. First is the understanding and construction of subjectivity as a participatory process enabled by the power of reflexivity (Hanafi, 2012), and the way in which subjectivity is part of the ongoing process of becoming. Subjectivity as a participatory process is evident in the constant negotiation of subjective identification and differentiation which unfolds in ‘webs of intersubjectivity’ (Nissen, 2012). This process is actualised through young people’s active and creative engagement with contexts associated with personal and social identities, as well as through systems of pre-existing power relationships (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014; Côté, 2009). In this way, subjectivity is rooted in the ‘immediacy of persons’ conduct of everyday life’ (Nissen, 2012: 247). As a process of constant negotiation and struggle (McDonald, 1999), the formation of subjectivity is based on individuals’ reflexive understanding of their social and political position (Lehmann, 2004), powered by critical reflection of the conduct, performance or creation of subjectivities (Nissen, 2012). The becoming of subjectivity involves consciousness and the willingness to take action which is fostered through young people’s negotiation of their lives, futures and meanings in the context of specific social, political and economic circumstances and processes (White and Wyn, 1998).
Second, subjectivity is not a unified condition but an ongoing process of becoming, embodied contingently in multiple versions in different circumstances. It is not simply ‘the result of subjectivation’ (Rebughini, 2014: 8) or submission to an externally imposed dominant order (Davies, 2006). The formation of subjectivity involves a reflexive and critical examining of the conditions at any given time in order to work out ways to creatively engage with the power relations as they present and the power that they can enact (Davies, 2006). In this sense, the expression of subjectivity is situated in local practices, and always has its ‘contingent and historical meaning’ (Rebughini, 2014: 8). It is related to each individual’s past experiences of intersubjective relations and affects. It should therefore be examined from an embodied and historical point of view as ‘contextualized relational subjectivities’ (Rebughini, 2014: 8).
Today’s Chinese young adults in their 20s and early 30s grew up in a period of rapid socio-cultural transformation in China driven by the economic and political reforms of the state since 1978. These young people, especially those in urban areas, have experienced a booming economy and increasing material prosperity (de Kloet, 2010; Liu, 2011). They have had access to better education and diverse cultural and information resources than did their parents’ generation (Yan, 2009). These conditions provide them with an expanded range of choices and possibilities for their formation of subjectivities (Liu, 2011).
While benefiting from these privileges, young Chinese people need to negotiate their subjectivities with both new and traditional socio-cultural and political discourses that coexist in current Chinese society. The introduction of a market economy generated discourses of responsibility and self-reliance in relation to young people’s personal development and success (Liu, 2011). Fish (2015) and Yan (2009) argue that young people are pressured to be responsible for their own welfare in an increasingly competitive, unequal, and unpredictable society where an effective social security system is still lacking. At the same time, family values continue to play a significant role in young people’s lives. Due to China’s one-child policy, a high proportion of the current generation of young people are the only children in their families, and thus tend to be the sole recipients of their families’ education resources. This places pressure on them to negotiate the often high expectations their families have for their life trajectories (Liu, 2011; Zhang et al., 2015).
While Chinese young people were educated in socialist ideologies and collectivist values in secondary school (Liu, 2008), the development of a market economy has meant that the dominant socialist ideology has lost some of its appeal, bringing diverse political and social values into their lives (Tian, 2009). Being caught in the crossfire between conflicting local and global ideologies and values, young people in China have lost the ‘spiritual support’ of mainstream ideologies and values upon which their socialisation and identity construction might normally have drawn (Clark, 2012). Limited space is allowed at school for students’ social participation due to the priority given to students’ performance in standardised tests, the highly regulated curriculum and schedule (Wang, 2013), the overprotective school systems, and a lack of democratic space for citizenship practices in and outside school (Ye, 2011). The features of the social context in which the subjectification process of Chinese young people unfolds were described by de Kloet and Fung (2016) as follows: party-ism, which manifests in young people’s ambivalent attitude toward the Party and socialist ideology; familism, which involves a nexus of long-standing traditional family values and a desire to be independent of family support and control; and the pedagogy of education, which allows limited space for citizenship learning and social participation.
Regardless of competing discourses or subjectification technologies (Liu, 2011), young people in China are engaged in multiple forms of identity work and social participation through which they (re)construct their connection with society (Kang, 2012). One of the major venues for their social participation is the internet. Compared with other formal and informal channels of social and political participation, the internet offers an easily accessible and less restrictive platform for young people’s personal expression and social participation. Their online participation hence provides a channel through which their formation of subjectivities can be examined. This article seeks to make sense of their subjectivities as expressed online by examining their own accounts of these expressions.
Methodology
The empirical data for this study comes from a project which explores the nature of online citizenship practices of Chinese young people. Qualitative data were collected from 31 Chinese young people (16 female and 15 male) recruited using snowball sampling. Participants were aged between 19 and 33 (averaging 25.6). All participants were from urban areas of mainland China (the majority located in southern and eastern regions), with 24 from metropolitan cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, four from regional cities, with the remaining three participants studying in Hong Kong, Korea and Canada respectively for their Master’s or bachelor degrees. The majority of participants have a bachelor or Master’s degree; five are college students; two have professional college degrees; and the 33-year-old participant holds a doctoral degree. The estimated time using the internet, as reported by the participants, varies from two to more than ten hours a day. All the participants are in the first few years of employment in a wide range of private or government sectors such as school, hospital, bank, government, and all sorts of private companies – apart from the five undergraduates and the two first-year PhD students. Sixteen of them live in rented accommodation, seven of them in the dormitory on campus, while eight of them live with their families.
The data in this study consists of two parts. Online data was collected from participants’ Weibo pages, which can be accessed and searched by any internet user. Like Twitter, Weibo allows users to post text (no more than 140 Chinese characters), pictures, videos, and links to external web pages. In addition to basic micro-blogging functions such as like, retweet, following, and hashtag, Weibo enables functions like commenting and private messaging between any users. It is now the largest micro-blogging service in China and one of the most influential social media platforms, functioning as a discursive public sphere to enable grassroots participation in China (Sullivan, 2014). Twenty pages (20 entries on each page) of Weibo posts were collected in reverse chronological order from the day I received the address of the Weibo homepage of each participant between August and September 2015. This method, referred by Robards (2014) as ‘scrolling back’, enabled me to excavate the digital trace in participants’ Weibo pages to capture the experiences, emotions and discourses utilised by them in the past. Using past Weibo posts also helped avoid biased responses, given that once participants know they are being researched, there is a chance they will moderate what they post on the platform. A frame of maximalist participation (Carpentier, 2011) was used to screen their Weibo posts for social and political participation.
Internet-mediated audio interviews were conducted within one to two weeks after the address of each participant’s Weibo homepage was received in order to collect the stories behind their political participation on social media. The interviews lasted 45 to 90 minutes and were recorded using a digital voice recorder, with the consent of participants. The interviews collected participants’ demographic information, information about their work/life situation, and details of their internet use habits. More importantly, the interviews sought to acquire the background information behind their posts on Weibo, including the specific context in which a post was made, their motivation in making it, and their processes in composing such posts. By combining online data with interview data, the researcher can develop a contextualised understanding of their online political participation – which is also a manifestation of their subjectivity.
Interview recordings were transcribed verbatim in Chinese, and thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998) conducted using NVivo. Under the sub-theme of political participation of their citizenship practices, three dispositions of political engagement emerged from their online posts. While the sample is not scientifically representative of Chinese youth in general, it offers a classification scheme as a heuristic device to contribute to the building of theories of subjectivity. I discuss these dispositions in the next section.
Three dispositions of online participation
The online posts of participants showed their engagement with a wide range of social and political issues in Chinese society, representing a highly diversified and fluid picture of subjectivity. These posts illustrate their experiences of being and their process of becoming a political subject. These posts generally fall into three categories driven by three dispositions of participation, namely, angry youth, powerless cynics, and realistic idealists. Among the 31 participants, 23 (74%) of them made posts representing, reflecting and/or stating a disposition of ‘angry youth’; 22 (71%) of ‘powerless cynics’, and 25 (81%) of ‘realistic idealists’. This section elaborates on these three dispositions as illustrated by both the online posts and the authors’ accounts of them.
Angry youth
The first type of online participation represents a fenqing disposition (literally means angry youth). Fenqing is usually translated as ‘angry/extreme nationalist’ in Chinese internet studies, referring to the young, enthusiastic patriots who tend to support China and the Chinese government unconditionally. They can be easily enraged by critics, or even by apparently reasonable reflections on China and the Chinese government, and will attack these critics aggressively in defence of China. The word is used by participants in this study in a loose and expansive way to describe those opinionated people who are driven by partial knowledge of certain social issues, who can become enraged by different opinions, and who are willing to defend their opinions aggressively. This disposition is demonstrated in expression of strong opinions about political and social issues in harsh or even extreme language. Xiaoyu, who has worked as a Chinese teacher at a primary school in Ningbo for two years, talked about her experience of being a fenqing: It goes back to the posts I sent during my postgraduate study, I do not even want to see them myself, because those posts were too aggressive.. . . I was affected by those extreme opinions and emotions, and I tended to criticise some people and issues using acerbic and harsh language. But in retrospect, I still think that stage is meaningful, because, after that drastic time, I started to notice the existence of different opinions, and tried to avoid being too subjective or partial when analysing things, so actually, that stage has its value.
Xianyu, a sophomore at a university in Shandong Province, talked about a similar experience: When I started to use Weibo, I posted my views about social news frequently, I wrote a lot on Weibo during my second year in high school,
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I was reading Han Han
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at that time, so I was like a fenqing.
These two comments demonstrate the historical dimension of young Chinese people’s subjectivity. In reflecting on their experiences of being a fenqing, Xiaoyu and Xianyu contextualised their frequent and ‘aggressive’ comments on social issues, referring to the relatively narrow and isolated social milieus (university and high school) in which they were living, and the media on which they drew to understand Chinese society. Their relatively narrow realm of social participation as students, and the social and political issues such as corruption, social inequality, and injustice represented in the media they accessed, shaped their understanding of Chinese society, engendering a feeling of anger out of their desire for justice.
On the other hand, they were in an early stage of using Weibo. Easy access to a media platform for self-expression coincided with their urge for social participation, providing an ideal outlet for expressing their anger. Their active participation on Weibo was also viewed by them as a celebration of their right to have a voice and of the power of this social media-enabled voice. This view of their relationship with technology also shows the significance of the relationship between technological objects and human subjects in shaping one’s subjectivity (Rebughini, 2014). The historical meaning of being a fenqing was epitomised in Xiaoyu’s comment about the value of this experience. The ‘drastic time’ enabled her to become aware of diverse opinions and her own partiality in understanding social issues. This participatory process, powered by her own critical reflection, represents an essential element in the becoming of her political subjectivity.
Aside from its historical meaning, the ‘angry youth’ disposition also has an element of affect. One example is that of Zhuotu who re-posted a news report by The Beijing News which stated: After Typhoon Rammasun, hundreds of thousands of affected people in the provinces of Hainan, Guangdong and Guangxi are suffering from water and electricity breakdown, waiting for emergency assistance in 35-degree high temperatures, 2000 quilts allocated by the Red Cross have already been sent to the affected area.
She asked, ‘Where did their brain go?’ as she re-posted the news to express her anger at the seemingly inappropriate material the Red Cross had allocated to assist the affected people.
Although Zhuotu clearly stated in the interview that, after a few years of work as a news editor, she was way beyond the stage of ‘angry youth’, such angry expressions still appeared in her Weibo posts. She explained that: It was summer, so I felt quilts were not necessary for the people affected by the typhoon, moreover, I was in a period of unstable emotion, so I wrote like that. I feel I rarely use strong language like that. And I thought about it later, quilts are actually useful after a typhoon, but I did not think about this at that moment.
In Zhuotu’s case, the ‘angry youth’ disposition was mainly powered by the emotion she felt at the moment of participation rather than her reflections on past social engagement experience. As Papacharissi (2015) argues, online participation powered by participants’ emotionality or affect constitute a significant part of political participation. This aspect of participation hovers beyond rational debate, formalised expression of opinion, and balancing the ‘art of politics’ (Dahlgren, 2014: 265). Affect provides the intensity with which participants feel their way into social events and feel the urgency to act (Papacharissi, 2015). It is ‘the drive or sense of movement experienced before we have cognitively identified a reaction’ (Papacharissi, 2015: 10) and works as a bridge to ‘would-be reactions’ (Papacharissi, 2015: 5). This form of affective participation highlights the contextual and contingent nature of subjectivity which goes beyond the idea of rational subject. At a practical level, this affective participation can play a role in bringing certain social issues on to the public agenda and keeping them there, thus increasing public consciousness of these issues (Fu, 2017), though this affective feature of participation can sometimes be misappropriated or taken advantage of, with some users fabricating information to gain online exposure for political and commercial purposes.
Powerless cynics
The second disposition identifiable from participants’ online engagement is that of the powerless cynic. This disposition is reflected in participants’ expression of cynicism in their Weibo posts. Xiaomeng, who works at a state-owned company in Shenzhen, once re-posted a news report on Weibo entitled, ‘The political bureau of the CPC [Communist Party of China] central committee meeting decided 42,000 billion Yuan investment to the development of the pan Beijing region in next 6 years’ and commented, ‘they do have a lot of money’. When asked why he made this comment, he said: This is a huge amount of money, the number is unimaginable for an individual to earn for his whole life, but it’s just a matter of issuing a document for our government, and we know little about how this money will be used, what change will it make.. . . I made this comment to express my critical view on this issue.
Xiaomeng’s cynical comment indicated his sense of powerlessness with regard to changing political institutions based on his assessment of his relationship with the state. Social media did not significantly change this relationship, but he still managed to express his critical views in an indirect and cynical way. Moreover, by performing this political identity and implying a collective subjectivity of ‘they’ and ‘we’ in his post, he also seeks recognition from those who share this experience of powerlessness, while deriving power from connecting with them (Davies, 2006). Xiaomeng’s action demonstrates a subjectivity based on his reflexive and critical examination of his conditions of possibility, in which he eclipses the powers that act on him and derives power he could enact (Davies, 2006).
This orientation is also demonstrated in young people’s reflections of their lives on a social level. Duanyi, a public relations manager at Sassoon in Beijing, wrote on her Weibo page: ‘Thought I could bring this world a bit of difference.’ When I asked why she posted this, she said: Because before, I thought that I would do something special and interesting. I can show people different possibilities of life and can bring happiness to people around me, but it turned out that I am just another ordinary person who is doing an ordinary job, and too busy to think about my life. So I wrote this to express my helpless feeling about my current status, a status that I am not happy about or reconciled with, but which it seems I can do nothing about.
This feeling was also shared by Zhuotu who works as an editor of a government website in Guangdong province: I recently worked at a government institution for a while, and feel that things like equality and freedom are like Fuyun.
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I call it Fuyun not because I think it is impossible or not achievable, but because I just do not know what I can do to realise it, it is too big an ideal for a small individual like me, and it seems I can hardly have any impact on its realisation, or maybe I cannot live to the day of its realisation.
The feeling of powerlessness articulated by Duanyi and Zhuotu is based on reflections of their engagement with the broader Chinese society through work. Their understandings of the social structures, political institutions and cultural discourses of their society, generated from this reflection, enabled an (re)evaluation of their relationship with it, leading to their conscious view that there was little chance of their individual efforts producing the change they want for that society. The very fact that they expressed this struggle on Weibo, however, suggests the beginning of the emergence of a new subjectivity based on the mastery of the power relations in their situation, which serve as the precondition of this new subjectivity (Butler, 2013).
Young people’s experience of being powerless cynics also reflected their experience with social media, demonstrating the role of the relationship between subject and technology in shaping subjectivity (Rebughini, 2014). Shihou, a senior at a university in Guangzhou, told an embarrassing story about his participation in the 2013 Southern Weekly incident. In this incident the staff of the Southern Weekly (a weekly newspaper based in Guangzhou, China) protested about the interference and censorship of the Guangdong Propaganda Department in the first issue of the newspaper in 2013, beyond the normal process of publication, interference which caused several mistakes in the published newspaper. The incident received widespread attention from global media and Chinese social media, the focus of which was protesting media censorship in mainland China and seeking news freedom. In retrospect, regarding his online participation in this incident, Shihou said: When this incident happened, I said on my Weibo page that if the minister of Guangdong Propaganda Department does not stand up to apologise, I will never use my Weibo account to say anything. And it turned out that the minister did not apologise, and I started to post things to my Weibo page after I’d stopped using it for a while (laughs).
It is apparent that the powerlessness felt by Shihou was partly due to his disillusionment about the power of social media. This disillusionment with its power was also mentioned in interviews with other participants. Xiakuan (an investment consultant at a bank in Shenzhen) said that all he could do was follow the news online to get updated information about political and economic issues in China since he could not play any role in the decision-making processes. Lingzi (a reporter at a local newspaper in Guangzhou) said: ‘People have their right to express views online, but it does not mean that what they say will change anything. All the policies are just made by the government.’ Zixun, a PhD candidate in Guangzhou, describes his participation in public discussions on Weibo as ‘peripheral participation’, showing his perception of the trivial or even negligible power that his participation has in influencing social and political issues.
This feeling of powerlessness resonates with Zhao’s (2008) observation about internet events in China. She argues that it takes a significant amount of internet users’ collective effort to put a social issue on the public agenda. Moreover, there are several structural limitations and contingencies in the way, limiting the capacity of online public opinion to generate institutional change. The sense of being a powerless cynic is identified by Bruter et al. (2016) as one prototypical model of the youth participation crisis. This model reflects the struggle of young people who have a desire to affect political outcomes through engaging with crucial social and political issues, but who have no effective channels of participation at their disposal to do so. The cynicism of young people can be understood as a result of the mismatch between their desire for social change and the participatory channels at their disposal which can effectively lead to such change (Loader, 2007).
It worth noting, however, that young people’s disillusionment with the power of social media does not discourage them from using it. This testifies to their resilience in continuing their online participation. It is an expression of their consciousness of their powerlessness, but with a degree of reluctance to acknowledge it. It suggests their distancing from the existing social order alongside a sense of reluctance to fully acknowledge the powerlessness of individuals in effecting social change. In this sense, their expressions of powerlessness can also be understood as de-politicised or infra-political expression (Scott, 1990; Yang et al., 2014), through which the weaker side expresses its dissatisfaction in an unobtrusive way and constructs a collective subjectivity.
Realistic idealists
The third palpable disposition manifested in participants’ online participation is referred to by them as xianshi de lixiang zhuyizhe (realistic idealist). It is characterised by a more realistic attitude in dealing with social issues and effecting social change. It is expressed as a determination to focus more on doing one’s job well, becoming a better self, and doing whatever is feasible to improve their society. This disposition is epitomised in a Weibo post by Shenqi, who works at an investment bank in Guangzhou, in response to a heated public discussion about air pollution in China triggered by the online release of an independent documentary Under the Dome. The documentary, filmed by a former journalist at China Central Television, featured an in-depth investigation of China’s air pollution. It was released online in February 2015 preceding the meetings of the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The documentary received 300 million views within four days, triggering an extensive online discussion about China’s air pollution. His post offered positive advice: Those who have watched Under the Dome, please do not be so agitated, and do not talk too much about your ideal, just do your garbage classification more carefully, stop spitting, use a towel instead of a tissue when possible, and drive smoothly with less sudden braking or acceleration, that’s it!
In the interview, he further accounted for the post: I am not attempting to change the world, because to me it is just a by-product, a thing that does not need to be done on purpose. First of all, you need to change yourself, because only after you changed yourself, well, like what I said just now about self-discipline, if you are not happy with the deterioration of the environment, then you should start with sorting your garbage at your home more carefully, do whatever you are capable of. The thing I am trying to do now is to enrich my knowledge and view about the world, then form my own system in engaging with society and dealing with different things, after this system was established, I may be able to affect other people through my behaviour or views.
Xihe is a 28-year-old teacher and entrepreneur in Beijing. She identifies herself as a realistic idealist in her Weibo profile, explaining her position: It [realistic idealist position] tells me that things need to be done step by step, but I have an idealistic expectation in my mind and feel that things will get better. I am not one of those who just keeps complaining and doing nothing.
Apart from taking practical and feasible steps to generate social change, participants are also realistic about the possible effect of these activities. Panpan, a 29-year-old small business entrepreneur in Beijing, often interacts with official accounts of local government institutions on Weibo by tagging them in her Weibo posts. In one of her posts, she expressed her dissatisfaction with the inefficiency of the Industry and Commerce Bureau of Chaoyang District (in Beijing), tagging its official Weibo account. When asked about the responses she received from the government institutions she tagged, she said that only a few responded to her on Weibo. She further explained why she kept doing it when she knew the response rate would be very low: It [tagging the Weibo account of government institutions] can at least test which ones are just mummies [Chinese internet slang for inactive social media accounts] and which ones are seriously maintained by the institution as a channel to communicate with the public.
Other participants also admitted that they did not think their positive activities would have any significant effect, but they still thought there was a chance that they would. As one participant said: ‘What if all the internet users could use Weibo properly, and try to post meaningful stuff? You can never imagine.’
Like the powerless cynic, the disposition of the realistic idealist reflects young people’s conscious reflections on the power relationships they experience through their online and offline social engagement, with a clear understanding of the limited influence their individual initiatives could have. Unlike the powerless cynic disposition, this one reflects participants’ sensitive efforts to connect the change they want for their society with the available opportunities in their everyday lives by using the tools and resources at their disposal. It underpins young people’s practical efforts to effect social change. As Ash (2013) maintains, despite the general impression that Chinese young people apparently fail to care about politics, their pursuit of individual forms of participation in their everyday lives is not because they do not care or dare; they are “simply being realistic”’ (Ash, 2013: 43).
This individualised form of social engagement can be understood as the practice of prefigurative politics (Fu, 2019; Jeffrey and Dyson, 2016) which involves young people prefiguring the future in the present moment or simply choosing to be the change they want to see for society. This form of participation, powered by the realistic idealist disposition, is underpinned by a political identity shaped by their reflection on past experiences of social participation on the one hand, and rooted in young people’s proactive initiatives in utilising personal power and resources in specific participatory circumstances and doing what is feasible in effecting social change on the other.
Discussion
As discussed above, younger generations in China have grown up in a period of dramatic social change. New subjectivities among China’s younger generations are therefore being formed in a social context characterised by competing ‘subjectification technologies’ (Liu, 2011: 15). The formation of their subjectivities is constituted and mediated by their engagement with these subjectification technologies and is powered by their reflection on their experience of them. This individualistic form of subjectivity based on self-reflection on past experience of participation resonates with the subjectivity of ‘reflexive individualism’ (Hanafi, 2012), a new subjectivity among Arab youth ushered in by the Arab revolutions since 2010. This subjectivity, formed in the negotiation between young people’s actions and their family and environment, is not simply motivated by anti-dictatorship or democratic ideology, but aspires to a new form of citizenship which is committed to ‘real claims to freedom, social justice and secularism’ (Hanafi, 2012: 58). It illustrates young people’s understanding of their social position and what this means for their participation in their society (Wyn, 1995) while informing their consciousness of, and willingness to take action in response to the specific social, political and economic circumstances and processes of their time (White and Wyn, 1998).
The constituted and reflexive nature of this subjectivity refers to participation experiences in the past, demonstrating an historical dimension to subjectivity in the reflections of Xianyu and Xiaoyu on once being ‘angry youth’. This historical dimension does not imply a linear or developmental trajectory of subjectivity formation, however. The three dispositions reflected in participants’ online participation do not occur in chronological order in the formation of subjectivities of Chinese young people; rather, they come into play in participants’ everyday online participation quite contingently, indicating an ongoing and dynamic process of personal affective action, and negotiation between subjective understanding and assessment of personal capacity and what is contextually possible and feasible. Moreover, the three dispositions, as analytical distinctions, are not mutually exclusive, but vary in salience in young people’s online participation in different circumstances. A cynical online expression of powerlessness can also work as an experience of infra-political action (Scott, 1990), which could be the only feasible action a realistic idealist can take in circumstances where they are absolutely powerless. These dispositions are also not exhaustive representations; rather, they showcase the highly diversified landscape of online political participation in which new subjectivities are constantly being performed and produced. Hence, the formation of new subjectivities lies in the dynamic interaction between continuity and change across different times and contexts (Andersson, 2019). It is rooted in the past but also resides in new temporalities (Leccardi, 2017).
The fluidity of subjectivity is also demonstrated by the contingency of the online activities of participants. These activities, as the manifestations of the performative production of subjectivity, are subject to both the structural and subjective parameters of online political participation. The structural parameters comprise factors such as platform ownership, censorship, and the technical architecture of the internet, which render the internet an unlevel playing field. The subjective parameters involve the ‘inner realities of the actors’ (Dahlgren, 2014: 261), such as emotion and affect, and their perceptions of personal resources and possibilities for making a difference, which varies considerably in specific contexts. It is a contingent process in which subjects respond to external power either unconsciously or reflexively in order to work out the possibilities of both subverting or eclipsing the powers that act on them and on which they can enact (Davies, 2006). It is necessary to take into account young people’s personal experience of and response to the structural and social parameters apparent in specific circumstances, because it is the dynamics of their political action in specific contexts that are central to understanding the subjectivity of political actors (Dahlgren, 2014).
The formation of Chinese young people’s new subjectivity is also enabled by digital media. It constitutes an accessible space in which their creative engagement is generated and reflected, and new meanings of subjectivity created (Andersson, 2019). This effect was epitomised by Xiaoyu’s reflection on her experience of being a fenqing and Shihou’s reflection of his disillusionment with his individual power on Weibo. With an online population of more than 400 million under the age of 30, and the increasing rate of penetration of digital technology among young people, the internet has become an inclusive space for social engagement, citizenship learning, and subjectivity formation for Chinese young people. This space is particularly valuable for Chinese young people considering that other formal avenues of participation in China are relatively limited and strictly under the supervision of government institutions.
Conclusion
This article explored the formation of Chinese young people’s political subjectivity by examining their online participatory activity within its social context and from their own perspective. It depicts the formation of a reflexive, individualistic subjectivity mediated by online political participation in the past and contingent present. The three dispositions identified from young people’s online participatory activities illustrate the ongoing and constantly changing character of the formation and expression of the subjectivities of young people across time and contexts. Their political subjectivity is no longer merely a product of existing social and political contexts, but an ongoing process of meaning-making based on the negotiation between individual agency and the conditions in which this agency can be enacted. It is shaped by young people’s reflection on engagement with cultural and political relations in the past, while also pointing to purposive and significant reconfiguration of these relations (Butler, 2013).
The formation of subjectivity manifested in Chinese young people’s online political action demonstrates the necessity of a move away from the monolithic, essentialist vision of subjectivity (Rebughini, 2014). This nature of political subjectivity calls for a new methodology for understanding how new meanings of being a political subject emerge from the dynamic interaction between young people as political subjects, different subjectivation technologies and participatory circumstances, as well as the continuity and changing nature of these meanings. At this point, an action-oriented approach proposed by Andersson (2019) tends to be an appropriate one. This approach acknowledges young people as political subjects in their own right, while social contexts are viewed as the conditions under which subjectivities are negotiated, articulated and recognised, as opposed to objects to resist. It allows researchers to examine the embodied subjectivity in response to a specific time and social context (Evans, 2002). The formation and expression of political subjectivities are therefore examined through the dynamic process of political participation.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was supported by the Melbourne Research Scholarships provided by the University of Melbourne.
