The Other Digital China

Nonconfrontational Activism on the Social Web

Jing Wang

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780674980921
• eBook ISBN: 9780674243675
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Social Sciences

A scholar and activist tells the story of change makers operating within the Chinese Communist system, whose ideas of social action necessarily differ from those dominant in Western, liberal societies.

The Chinese government has increased digital censorship under Xi Jinping. Why? Because online activism works; it is perceived as a threat in halls of power. In The Other Digital China, Jing Wang, a scholar at MIT and an activist in China, shatters the view that citizens of nonliberal societies are either brainwashed or complicit, either imprisoned for speaking out or paralyzed by fear. Instead, Wang shows the impact of a less confrontational kind of activism. Whereas Westerners tend to equate action with open criticism and street revolutions, Chinese activists are building an invisible and quiet coalition to bring incremental progress to their society.

Many Chinese change makers practice nonconfrontational activism. They prefer to walk around obstacles rather than break through them, tactfully navigating between what is lawful and what is illegitimate. The Other Digital China describes this massive gray zone where NGOs, digital entrepreneurs, university students, IT companies like Tencent and Sina, and tech communities operate. They study the policy winds in Beijing, devising ways to press their case without antagonizing a regime where taboo terms fluctuate at different moments. What emerges is an ever-expanding networked activism on a grand scale. Under extreme ideological constraints, the majority of Chinese activists opt for neither revolution nor inertia. They share a mentality common in China: rules are meant to be bent, if not resisted.

1

Nonconfrontational Activism and the Chinese “Social”

During my ten years’ journey of running NGO2.0 in China, I encountered a variety of puzzled responses from home. Sympathizers worried that an NGO founded by an American academic would be doomed because of its foreign origin; skeptics wondered about the likelihood of doing activism in modern China where authoritarianism and censorship has defined its brand for more than a hundred years. In fact, internet control has been tightened more stringently than ever after President Xi Jinping took the helm of the Communist Party. How could a “foreign” grassroots NGO specializing in ICT-powered (information and communication technology) activism survive at all in such an adverse environment?

That question is a false one. NGO2.0 was set up not as a foreign organization by design, but as a local Chinese NGO operated by a largely indigenous Chinese team from the very start. The challenges at the core of our operation were not much different from those faced by other grassroots NGOs in China. Our attention should then be focused on a different question: How have Chinese NGOs fared through the successive reigns of the oppressive regime? How do we name the kind of activism grown out of an ecosystem that runs counter to the Western ecology of nonprofits for whom activism has no other manifestation than a decisive act of resistance to the oppressor? To fare well in China requires a different mind-set and strategy—learning the art of restraint and following the centuries-old cultural logic of finding the middle ground whereby missions, however difficult, will get accomplished eventually. For Chinese activists, it means producing social good without inciting a revolution in the streets.

This chapter centers on the concept of nonconfrontational activism, and I begin with a review of its conceptual variations in the critical literature of China studies, especially works written with an analytical pivot to the changing relationship between the Chinese state and society. The literature review is undertaken for two purposes. First, all the case studies and interpretations—some implicitly and others expressly—dovetail each other around the theme of nonconfrontational activism even though they do not name it as such; second, the literature lays bare the hidden and camouflaged spaces that are germinating the “social,” understood in its most constructive sense—a habitus of spaces impregnated with the possibilities of change and traversed by change makers of multiple identities.

Next, this chapter argues, making the “social” in contemporary China is not the sole prerogative of grassroots agents. The other historical actor is surprisingly the Party-state. An in-depth analysis of the changing configuration of the Chinese “social” needs to reckon with two policy discourses—“the separation of government from society” (zhengshe fenkai) and the shift of the state’s governing strategy allegedly from social management to “social governance” (shehui zhili). The benefits and limits of this set of policies will be discussed in the rest of this chapter. In theory, Beijing’s new policy directive has laid the foundation for the onset of a social reform unleashed by the government to roll back the administrative state and devolve its power to “society.” However small, nonexistent, or hidden the Chinese social appears to be, there is little doubt that the CCP’s (Chinese Communist Party’s) current policy architecture is designed to legitimate the conceptual category of “society” while delimiting its boundary. Bearing in mind the discrepancy and incompatibility between what the Party is and what it claims to be (Xie 2014), we should ask if this is just another authoritarian ploy adopted by the Communist state to define the boundary of the social so as to better control it. Or, could this set of social policies entail the emergence of a bigger playing field for nonconfrontational activists to navigate? This chapter raises a number of questions that link policy making to the practice of nonconfrontationalism, shares staple nonconfrontational strategies adopted by NGOs, and ends with a discussion of the impact of social media on redrawing the boundary of the social. Many wonder what will happen after the decline of the utopian politics of weiguan—the myth that “crowd spectatorship” of contentious Weibo incidents could challenge the status quo? This book unravels the birth of a quiet, decentralized ecosystem in which do-gooders from multiple sectors are recognizing each other, converging spontaneously, and making alliances, whereby rhizome-like cross-sectoral collaborations are forming and sprouting up everywhere. Gone is the weiguan era. What is emerging is networked spectatorship on a grand scale. Is this outcome anticipated by the policymakers of social governance? I cannot tell. But the trend is here to stay.

Nonconfrontational Activism and Its Conceptual Variations: A Literature Review

Practitioners of nonconfrontational activism are anonymous as their actions purposefully attract little attention. They stay on the margin of history, if their presence is reckoned with at all. Conceptually, nonconfrontationalism is equated with nonresistance, and it remains peripheral to academic discussions of social action even though it prevails in all autocratic regimes, where activists resort to other means of serving social good rather than openly critiquing and rebelling.

It was not until 1985 when James C. Scott published Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance that the concept of invisible agents and their quiet and piecemeal tactics were given due recognition and the practice of “calculated conformity” was given credit. Scott’s peasants typically avoided direct or dramatic confrontation with authority or with elite norms. Instead of condemning such silence as “complicitous” and devoid of politics, he locates the sites of peasant action in micro, inconspicuous everyday forms of “foot dragging, dissimulations, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance and so forth” (Scott 1985, 29, 36). Scott’s book represents a significant milestone in valorizing the powerless and subjugated as political agents. And yet the ideology of resistance has taken such a tenacious hold over those schooled in the intellectual tradition of liberal democracy that despite the author’s avowal that “revolt” as a political option was precluded for those exploited groups (297), he recategorizes, with a Foucauldian stroke, the peasants’ nonconfrontational tactics into acts of “resistance” (as the subtitle of his book signifies). Such renaming reveals a contradiction: Scott’s peasants and slaves cannot be nonconfrontational and resistant to the status quo at the same time. Once again, the author seems compelled to fold nonconfrontationalism into the old conceptual frame of resistance in order to justify his argument for the “agency” of those peasants. His ultimate discomfort with the idea of passive, nonconfrontational peasant “actors” is revealing. It revalidates “resistance” as an absolute qualifier for human agency even in a framework intended to transcend it.

James Scott’s dilemma is understandable. In Western democratic societies, it is possible to rebel with impunity, and the rights culture embedded in the ideology of individualism takes contentious expression for granted. Citizens and scholars who are natives traversing in such a relatively unrestricted universe are deeply convinced of the validity of dichotomy as a universal mode of knowing the world (domination versus resistance, collective versus individual, structure versus agency, state versus society, passivity versus activity, absence versus presence, and so on). Such habitual subscription to binary epistemology renders Western liberal scholars less ready to reckon, unapologetically, with analytical tools underlying nonconfrontational ethos.

When we turn to a country like modern China or other illiberal societies where open resistance is not the norm but an exception, researchers are called upon to conceptualize beyond the dichotomous mode of thinking to solve the puzzle—why do the exploited in those countries accept their situation as a normal, or even a justifiable, part of social order? Are they fatalistic, actively complicitous, or perhaps paralyzed by fear and cowardice? Surely, if the Chinese government can hire “as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts” (King, Pan et al. 2017), shouldn’t we have good reasons to believe that the Chinese censorship program has penetrated every corner of society and that the censors have sent truthful reporting to the wind and manipulated public opinions effortlessly? That is the conventional reading of the muted consensus of the Chinese people on maintaining the status quo. This neat formulation relegates the entire population of China into the category of the brainwashed, which hardly squares with the fact that NGO activists, academic and public intellectuals, the millennials, and other commoners are not only busy debating policies and politics with each other at dinner table and other social gatherings, but they take opportunities and risks here and there to post biting political commentaries on social media platforms. Truly, as James Scott argues, what’s missing in scholarly research is the “massive middle ground in which conformity is often a self-conscious strategy” and that “it might be possible to think of a continuum of situations ranging from the free dialogue between equals that is close to what Habermas has called the ‘ideal speech situation’ all the way to the concentration camp” (Scott 1985, 285–287, italics mine). The Other Digital China documents this massive middle ground—China’s gray zone.

Mapping the Gray Zone

The “massive middle ground” scholarship, which is reportedly missing in Western academic writings, found a home in China studies, not surprisingly. That is because the majority of Chinese people are living in a gray zone that spans across two binary poles of existence—being brainwashed dummies or becoming Spartan warriors. In real life, the average Wang’s and Zhang’s have more choices than becoming puppets or rebel-martyrs; neither are desirable options for these clear-eyed people with strong survival instincts. The majority of Chinese citizens are camping in the fuzzy middle ground, which I argue is where the “Chinese social”—the utopian space of change—can be located. Social action unfolded in that gray terrain is by default nonconfrontational, and the change occurring there is by definition incremental. Coming to grips with that gray reality dictates that scholars explore a state-society model unrestricted by the dichotomous mode of thinking deeply embedded in the normative Western civil society paradigm.

Not surprisingly, mainland China–based researchers are quite active in challenging that paradigm. That said, it is the scholars outside of China who enjoy the natural advantage of undermining the Western paradigm without having to worry that their critique might be mistaken for CCP propaganda. But first, they have to overcome the methodological limits embedded in binary epistemology. The scholars cited below have all skirted that analytical pitfall. Together, their observations and interpretations conjure up a social ecology where nonconfrontational practices carry sociopolitical value in unforeseen terms.

The late 2000s and 2010s saw the emergence of a rapidly growing literature on the forms of social contention that routinely receive blessings or even support from the state because they occur “within the official discourse of deference.” Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li proposed the term “rightful resistance” (O’Brien and Li 2006); Peter Ho and Richard L. Edmonds named it “embedded activism” (Ho and Edmonds 2007); Jessica Teets called it “consultative authoritarianism” (Teets 2014); and Cole Carnesecca introduced a similar concept of “responsive authoritarianism” to characterize regimes that “alternatively use repressive and conciliatory tactics” to manage social discontent (Carnesecca 2015, 118). What those arguments share in common is the urgent call for scholars to reevaluate Chinese nonconfrontational politics from both ends of the spectrum.

Sitting on one end of the spectrum are NGOs, whose noncontentious and piecemeal measures, previously belittled as guilt-ridden collusion with power elites, are seen, under this critical lens, as constructive strategies that lead to incremental change on the ground. Sitting on the other side of the spectrum is the authoritarian state. Formerly stereotyped as a “forbidding monolith” (Herbst 1989, 199), the state is now reconceptualized as an entity with multiple identities, conflicting interests, and contradictory ruling tactics, a riven entity, which grassroots actors can exploit to their advantage. However oppressive an authoritarian regime appears, it affords resisters opportunities to build fruitful alliances and “make authorities work for them rather than against them” (Klandermans 1997, 194). Operating within the official framing of “harmonious society,” bottom-up pressure and top-down openings are in fact working together to produce change in China. Implicitly, all those scholars contend, in one way or another, that nonconfrontational activism can be productive.

In O’Brien and Li’s definition, “rightful resisters” game the system by appealing to receptive Party or government officials who champion policies of social justice that have been abused elsewhere in the hierarchy. Such resistance is “a form of popular contention that operates near the boundary of authorized channels” and utilizes the regime’s own “policies and legitimating myths to justify their challenge” (O’Brien and Li 2006, 3). In the name of serving the people, those unlikely alliances between political elites and grassroots actors often break down “simple dominant-subordinate distinctions” (1) (see my story about Mao Gangqiang in the Introduction), prompting the two authors to consider it analytically unwise to disentangle the state and social actors. In fact, I would argue that activists operating by utilizing guanxi—pulling the strings of influential relationships within the system to facilitate a deal—are already practicing nonconfrontational action. It is an act taken for granted by those navigating in a society that is ruled by relationships rather than by law.

Published a year apart, Ho and Edmonds’ edited volume Embedded Activism treads a similar narrative path to Rightful Resistance. Rather than devalue Chinese NGOs as passive codependents of the authoritarian state, they make a case for asserting the impact of the NGOs’ advocacy work on social and policy change in China. In their view, the operational success of grassroots organizations belies the conventional point of view that state and society in China are antagonistically positioned against each other. Like O’Brien and Li, these two authors highlight the complex ties and symbiotic relationship between NGO workers and state agencies /personnel, a liaison that constitutes what they call “embedded activism.” The concept redeems not only the NGOs, who are now seen as agents of change, but also the Chinese state, which is seen to play out not just a restrictive role but an enabling one in producing social good (Ho and Edmonds 2007). Since it takes a working partnership of the state and the NGOs to perform “embedded activism,” it entails that the state, like the NGOs themselves, contains within itself the motivation and capability for nonconfrontationalism—an implication that I will flesh out later in my analysis of the twin policy discourse of “social governance” and the “separation of government from society.”

Succeeding years saw fewer groundbreaking works pursuing this line of argument until 2014 when Jessica Teets proposed the conceptual model of “consultative authoritarianism.” Challenging the “victim narratives” predominant in the Western scholarship on civil society in authoritarian polities, Teets characterizes the relationship between social organizations and the state as a potentially productive one. In her view, even the weak can produce value for the powerful, and she defines that value in terms of policy feedback sent by civil society actors to the state so that the latter can learn how to govern better and more effectively (i.e., meeting goals, reflecting on poor policy implementations, and learning about public-private partnerships that work in other locales). The implicit sender-receiver and teacher-student analytical framing provides a much-needed communication angle to scholarship on state and society. Reframing the oppressor-oppressed relationship in terms of meaningful policy feedback on the one hand and mutual learning as a form of cooperation on the other, Teets equalizes the lopsided power relationship between the two and in so doing, she finds that “civil society needs less autonomy from the state to accomplish goals of advocacy” than one might expect and that “[NGOs’] increasing channels of interaction with the state might help these groups have more impact on policy making” (Teets 2014, 4). In short, civil society plays a crucial “role in good governance especially under authoritarianism” (5). Most significant, Teets’ conclusion is built on a latent assumption that the authoritarian state is an eager learner capable of making self-improvement and “ ‘endogenous’ institutional change,” a perspective that paves the way for my following analysis of the rise of “social governance” (shehui zhili) and its underlying logic—“consultative politics” (xieshang zhengzhi) as a ruling theoretical paradigm of governance in China today.

Teets and her fellow travelers have come a long way from the earlier generation of China scholars who felt the need to challenge Western civil society theories but stopped short of cutting to the chase. Timothy Hildebrandt’s early statements that “making changes at the margins is not only possible but important” and that the “agency of social organizations does matter” (Hildebrandt 2013, 163) have now been vindicated and fleshed out in a rich variety of case studies. Later variations of the revisionist take on the state-society relationship in China, such ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Walking Around the Obstacles
• 1. Nonconfrontational Activism and the Chinese “Social”
• 2. NGO2.0 and Social Media Activism: Activist as Researcher
• 3. WeChat versus Weibo: Microblogging and Peer-to-Peer Philanthropy
• 4. Millennials as Change Agents on the Social Web
• 5. Makers and Tech4Good Culture
• 6. Participatory Action Research and the Chinese Challenge
• Conclusion: Between Star Trek and Brave New World?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index