Reconfiguring Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Ethics in Chinese Internet Culture

Caught on the Web

Haomin Gong, Xin Yang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138951532
• eBook ISBN: 9781317360254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

New information technologies have, to an unprecedented degree, come to reshape human relations, identities and communities both online and offline. As Internet narratives including online fiction, poetry and films reflect and represent ambivalent politics in China, the Chinese state wishes to enable the formidable soft power of this new medium whilst at the same time handling the ideological uncertainties it inevitably entails.

This book investigates the ways in which class, gender, ethnicity and ethics are reconfigured, complicated and enriched by the closely intertwined online and offline realities in China. It combs through a wide range of theories on Internet culture, intellectual history, and literary, film, and cultural studies, and explores a variety of online cultural materials, including digitized spoofing, microblog fictions, micro-films, online fictions, web dramas, photographs, flash mobs, popular literature and films. These materials have played an important role in shaping the contemporary cultural scene, but have so far received little critical attention. Here, the authors demonstrate how Chinese Internet culture has provided a means to intervene in the otherwise monolithic narratives of identity and community.

Offering an important contribution to the rapidly growing field of Internet studies, this book will also be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture, literary and film studies, media and communication studies, and Chinese society.

1 Digitized parody

The politics of egao in contemporary China

In early 2006, a 20-minute video entitled “A Bloody Case Caused by a Steamed Bun” Yige mantou yinfa de xue’an (一个馒头引发的血案, hereafter “A Bloody Case”) became one of the most popular online video clips in China.¹ The video was a spoof of the 2005 blockbuster The Promise (Wuji 无极), by the world-renowned director Chen Kaige (陈凯歌). This hilarious video immediately won acclaim from netizens, spawning a flood of similar spoofs. With its rapid spread, a special subculture, coined egao (恶搞), emerged, which began to reshape the ecology of the Internet landscape.

This chapter investigates the complex politics involved in the egao phenomenon and its dialectic position between negotiation of the cultural space linking individual playfulness in virtual reality and communal transgression in social reality. To be more specific, it explores specific features of egao, the sociocultural condition under which it emerged, and the political ramification and significance of the destabilization of social structure caused by it, which coincides with the large-scale restructuring of classes taking place in postsocialist China. We believe that egao, as a new parodic practice in contemporary China, is a site where issues of power struggle, class reconsolidation, social stratification, (online) community formation, and cultural intervention, along with the transformative power of digital technologies, intersect. Through an analysis of Hu Ge’s (胡戈) “A Bloody Case,” we argue that egao provides an alternative locus of power, permitting the transgressing of existing social and cultural hierarchies, and precipitates the emergence of a group of young, technology-savvy, economically and socially marginalized, subculture-oriented, and politically inactive netizens. Satiric and ludicrous in nature, egao playfully subverts a range of authoritative discourses, be they political, commercial, or cultural ones, and provides a vehicle for both comic criticism and emotional catharsis, yet sometimes generates moral controversies. As a form of cultural expression of the new digital generation, it also offers insight into the collective attitudes of the new tribe, if not class, of netizens towards the larger social condition and transformation.

To examine egao as a new technology-enabled cultural intervention, this study situates egao both within the general paradigm of the parodic and the specific sociocultural context of contemporary China. Our critical exploration starts off from a definition of egao within these two frames, and then examines how the advances of new digital technologies reshape the phenomenon in its format and sociality. This, in turn, leads to a historical investigation of the specific social situations in which the egao culture took shape, and to a formal analysis of its distinctive discursive features. In all, this exploration, we hope, sheds some lights on the class reconsolidation as a result of the advent of the Internet in particular, and the overall social transition to the postsocialist condition at large.

Defining egao

What is egao? There have been many attempts to define it. The official newspaper Guangming Daily Guangming ribao (光明日报) characterizes egao as “a popular online strategy, in the form of language, picture, and animation, which comically subverts and deconstructs the so-called normal” (Chen, Zhang, and He 2007: 24). The English-language newspaper China Daily, a mouthpiece of the Party-state, defines egao in a more complicated way:

Egao is a popular subculture that deconstructs serious themes to entertain people with comedy effects… . The two characters “e” meaning “evil” and “gao” meaning “work” combine to describe a subculture that is characterized by humor, revelry, subversion, grass-root spontaneity, defiance of authority, mass participation and multi-media high-tech.

(Huang 2006)

These definitions from official media capture some characteristics of egao, such as its subversiveness of authority. However, they also demonstrate certain ideological ambiguities and uneasiness, for instance, in interpreting egao as something detrimental to the establishment.

Egao has also attracted scholarly attention in English. Yongming Zhou and Daria Berg have addressed, respectively, in conference papers on egao, the carnivalesque and iconoclastic nature of the genre. Both affirm egao’s function as a new avenue for individual(istic) expression of Chinese netizens. Particularly, Berg (2008) approaches the issue from the sociological perspective and focuses mainly on the democratizing role played by the development of the Internet in China in shaping the egao phenomenon. Through a political-cultural approach, Zhou (2008) also sees egao as a liberating cultural practice of the individuals against “established norms and values,” though at the same time constrained by “general control mechanisms in China.” These pioneer studies of egao provide insightful overviews of the cultural phenomenon and open the ways for further discussion. Later studies of egao provides further information on the phenomenon and complicates our understanding. Discussions of them are on the way.

In our study, we see egao first and foremost as a form of parody, with a level of inevitable comic and satiric effects.² Like other parodic practices, egao usually imitates the parodied texts, or blatantly transplants parts or all of them into an entirely different text or context. By so doing, they create ironic incongruity that triggers humor and laughter and form varying kinds of polemical relationships with the texts and/or matters that they satirize.³ Secondly, egao is a particular form of parody that is specifically shaped by the sociohistorical junction of contemporary China.⁴ Contemporary cultural conditions in China determine the discursive emergence of the egao culture, which is to say, both its forms and the politics involved. It can thus serve as a locus for unraveling the underlying cultural, social, and political agendas.

To begin with, it is necessary to note that parody is an age-old cultural phenomenon around the world. One can trace it back as far as ancient Greece. It has existed throughout the course of human history in various forms. Scholarly studies of parody are abundant. For example, the French theorist Gérard Genette (1997) delimits parody by carefully studying the formal relationships between the “hypotext” and “hypertext.” Parody is differentiated from the related forms of pastiche, travesty, skit, transposition, burlesque, and forgery by its standing as a direct textual transformation (rather than an indirect imitation) in a playful (rather than a satirical) manner.⁵ Margaret A. Rose (1979, 1993) offers comprehensive analyses of the history of theories and practices of parody from ancient to contemporary times. She views parody as a self-reflective practice, which not only challenges authority but also creates a new text by mirroring itself.⁶ Linda Hutcheon (1985), on the other hand, focuses on parodic practices in the twentieth century. She also views parody as a metatext that simultaneously critiques and creates. But she refuses to see parody simply in a polemical relationship with the hypotext.⁷ Simon Dentith (2000: 9) offers a rather inclusive definition of parody, which refers to “any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice.” Dan Harris (2000: 6, original emphasis) defines parody as

the process of recontextualizing a target or source text through the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements, thus creating a new text. This conversion – through the resulting oscillation between similarity to and difference from the target – creates a level of ironic incongruity with an inevitable satiric impulse.

In view of the disparate definitions of parody and the disputes among critics on the attributes of parody, Dentith (2000: 22 and passim) thinks that a more fruitful approach to the politics involved is through an investigation of its historicity. It is only through investigations of specific situations in which certain forms of parody are demonstrated that we can have a better understanding of them. In the case of egao, we also believe that an exploration of the social and cultural scene in contemporary China will produce more insights into egao as a special form of parody. Specifically, we will look into the role digital technologies and the technology-enabled cultural form and content play in the postsocialist condition of China.

Digital technologies, alternative space, and netizens

For the emergence of the parodic form of egao, one important social determinant was the advent of digital technologies in China at the turn of the twenty-first century. Digital technologies, especially the technologies of digital processing and the Internet, became widely accessible to common Chinese people, particularly to the young, urban generation. Egao, in a sense, is a cultural product of these digital technologies.

First, egao products are predominantly made by individuals using digital technologies. The availability of these technologies to the masses and spoofsters’ knowledge of and skills in textual, audio, and video editing are prerequisites for the egao culture. Most egao videos are produced entirely by using digital technologies on personal computers. On the one hand, these technologies offer the egao culture some unique textual features rarely seen previously. In twentieth-century China, practices of parody could be found in every decade.⁸ However, special effects created by digital technologies, especially in the audio and visual aspects, are totally new to Chinese people, a point on which we will elaborate when we discuss “A Bloody Case.” On the other hand, individual access to these technologies, previously only available to a small group, greatly shapes the contextual features of egao. Most manifestly, it makes individual participation and creation in the field of audio-visual processing possible and brings grassroots street wisdom and popular voices into an area hitherto the exclusive province of specialists and elitists.

Second, the virtual world of the Internet is the space where egao takes shape, spreads, and flourishes. Many studies have been done on the development of the Internet in Chinese society. Scholars have paid special attention to such issues as democratization, liberalization, public space, civil society, and state control in regard to the rapid growth of the Internet in contemporary China.⁹ For egao, the Internet offers a space other than that of traditional media for individual expression, and it provides an imagined empowerment for netizens, who can, for the first time, intervene in the formation of an institutionalized narrative. This space – which does not simply refer to the physical cyberspace but also to the social space created thereby – is marked by a rising level of social tolerance and freedom and, simultaneously, an increasing level of constraint.¹⁰ Virtual reality inevitably produces a new sense of temporal and spatial relationships among participants of egao practices.

The Internet plays a catalytic role in the formation of new social groups in contemporary China. With respect to egao, we see a paradoxical process of social formation modeled by the decentralized and instantaneous features of the Internet: on the one hand, egao is a highly individual activity, but on the other, the collection of spoofsters is an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991).¹¹ These spoofsters share many characteristics in terms of demography and social behavior. A predominant portion of the spoofsters, as well as other egao participants, are young netizens, most of whom live in urban areas. Another fact provides additional support for this hypothesis. In 2006, when a larger number of egao works appeared, the population of Chinese netizens just reached a new high of 137 million, 82.5 percent of whom were aged below thirty-five, and the majority of whom lived in cities rather than in the countryside; yet 72.4 percent had an income of less than RMB 2,000 (approximately US$250) per month, which was not considered high in China then (CNNIC 2007: 30, 47, 50).¹² In addition, these spoofsters and other egao participants are familiar with digital technologies to varying degrees. As most of them belong to the younger generation, they are open to new technologies and ideas. Spoofsters also have their own spaces: BBS (Bulletin Board System), blogs, and video-sharing platforms on various websites, including China’s portal websites Sina.com and Sohu.com, where they exchange their ideas, share their experiences, and disseminate their products. New digital technologies provide the means through which such interactions take place, and thus help form communities and a new class that eventually exert social impacts.

“Post-” society, social stratification, age of irony

Besides technological transformation, the “post-” condition of China, social (re)stratification, and the attitude of irony have also played a vital role in the emergence of the egao culture.

When exploring the question of the contours of “particular social and historical situations in which parody is especially likely to flourish,” Dentith (2000: 28–32) proposes two main criteria: (1) parody ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: cyberspace, heterotopia, and postsocialism in China
• 1 Digitized parody: the politics of egao in contemporary China
• 2 Circulating smallness: the dialectics of micro-narratives
• 3 Constructing gendered desire in online fiction and web dramas
• 4 Performing ethnicity: media, identity, and nationalism
• 5 Caught in the web: ethics of chinese cyberspace
• Postscript: challenges and prospects
• Index