Resistance in Digital China

The Southern Weekly Incident

Sally Xiaojin Chen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501391163
• eBook ISBN: 9781501337680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Aspects in Computer Science
• Index: Social Sciences

By investigating the Southern Weekly Incident, in which censorship of the prominent Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly triggered mass online contention in Chinese society, Resistance in Digital China examines how Chinese people engage in resistance on digital networks whilst cautiously safeguarding their life under authoritarian rule.

Chen's in-depth analysis of the Southern Weekly Incident ties together overlapping debates in internet studies, Chinese studies, social movement studies, political communication, and cultural studies to discuss issues of civic connectivity, emotions, embodiment, and the construction of a public sphere in digital China. Resistance in Digital China demonstrates a valuable methodology for conducting in-depth empirical examination of an act of resistance in order to explore political, cultural, and sociological meanings of Chinese people's resistance within party limits.

Fruitfully combining 45 interviews with key players in the Southern Weekly Incident with largely Western-based communications theory, Chen develops an understanding of the ongoing formation of the Chinese public sphere as elite-led and emotional, at once invoked and rejected by Chinese citizens.

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Introduction: The 2013 Southern Weekly Incident and Resistance in Digital China

Resistance in Digital China is about political contention and activism in a digitally networked Chinese society. Studies on contentious politics in China have largely focused on Chinese people’s struggle to contest officials’ wrongdoings and negotiation with the state over certain policies (O’Brien and Li, 2006; Yu, 2006; Yang, 2009; Cai, 2010). These studies highlight the evolving strategies adopted by both the state and citizens in the negotiations of power with each other, particularly in the digital environment. As insightful and inspiring as these studies are, they are prone to create a deceptive impression that the Chinese population is struggling on a daily basis to resist the government or party authorities, with the Chinese state exercising relentless repression on them. In fact, Chinese people involved in popular political contention often do not challenge the Communist regime or their political agenda. Recent surveys have shown that a considerable number of Chinese individuals embrace guidelines and policies of the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party) (Pan and Xu, 2015).¹ With an increasing number of Chinese intellectuals and the New Leftists² (Zheng, 1999) endorsing China exclusively as the world’s economic and cultural superpower, new waves of Chinese nationalism and statism further complicate Chinese people’s perception of and relationship with the Party state. It would be a fallacy to assume ever-present confrontational incentives underpin Chinese individuals’ participation in popular resistive events.

It is in this context that Resistance in Digital China asks about how Chinese individuals make sense of the type of resistance they are involved in and the personal trajectory they take in participating in resistance. Resistance in Digital China contests the dichotomy of a top-down repression by the Chinese state and a bottom-up resistance by the Chinese people. The relations between the Party state and Chinese citizens are never one dimensional – not simply one controls and the other one resists, nor is simply cooperating, but co-habitant, co-evolving, always dynamic and at times merging. Resistance in Digital China argues for a nuanced understanding of the multifaceted state-society relationship, in which the Chinese Party state plays a dominating role in regulating the relationship. The state plays this role within the society rather than in the opposition to it. It ensures that the overall regulation is interwoven into Chinese people’s self-regulation of social relationships with others. Whilst Chinese people often are involved in collective expression of resistance, they consciously frame their action within party limits and individually pursue self-detachment for protection. Chinese people are careful about safeguarding their lives in Communist China.

To examine the complex meanings behind Chinese people’s participation in popular contention, this book unpacks meanings of three dimensions – the political, cultural and sociological meanings. Resistance in digital China is episodic, featuring occurrence and reoccurrence of contentious events. Not to understate the significance of quantitative work that endeavours to reveal the scale of Chinese contentious events through statistical analysis, this book, by contrast, gives much-needed attention to examining a single event in detail. It provides a nuanced account of the 2013 Southern Weekly Incident, examining political and cultural issues of ideologies, perceptions, emotions, memory and embodiment in-depth within the complex context of this resistive event.

The 2013 Southern Weekly Incident was triggered by the censorship of Southern Weekly (Nanfang Zhoumo), particularly the New Year Edition and the editorial of New Year Greeting, by the Provincial Propaganda Department in January 2013. Southern Weekly is a prominent nationally circulated newspaper belonging to Southern Media Group,³ and has been embraced by liberal intellectuals as the most outspoken newspaper in China and considered by Western media (e.g. Rosenthal, 2002; Fallows, 2013; Kaiman, 2013) as China’s most influential liberal newspaper. The incident involved contestation by Chinese journalists, citizens and activists on the long-term issues of media censorship and press freedom in China and street protests organized by citizens and activists. The incident represents popular contention led by public professionals (Stern and Hassid, 2012) online and amplified by Chinese citizens and activists. It reveals the multi-layered power relations involved in the interplay between politics, internet business, technology and civil society in digitalized China. It unveils how Chinese people’s engrained self-constraint in political contention is interwoven into the ongoing negotiation between the Chinese state and society. The political meaning of resistance in this incident is immanent in civic connectivity promoted through collective contention. The cultural meaning has to be understood through individuals’ experience of embodiment during the course of emotional expression. Embodiment in this book is concerned with individuals’ sensory experience of connecting physicality and subjectivity in the course of taking action with other people together (McDonald, 2006). The sociological meaning is inherent in Chinese people’s construction of a Chinese public sphere, which, as I will demonstrate, is elite-led, but it engages real – though circumscribed – mass participation, and the content is highly emotional rather than rational.

The analysis of the Southern Weekly Incident foregrounds Chinese people’s utilization of new technologies, particularly social media, for political contention. China’s internet population, the world’s largest since 2015, reached 802 million by June 2018. The internet penetration in China has reached 57.7 per cent (CNNIC, 2018). Chinese people are highly interactive online, regularly participating in activities such as posting to a blog or a microblog site, updating their location, uploading photos and videos, sharing files (Sullivan, 2012). Chinese people are efficiently networked through individuals’ proactive self-representation on predominant social media platforms, such as Sina Weibo⁴ (hereafter referred to as ‘Weibo’) and Tencent’s WeChat.⁵ WeChat, currently the most popular social media platform in China, had around 1.08 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs) worldwide in the third quarter of 2018 (statista, 2018). Although Weibo’s popularity has been challenged by WeChat since 2014, Weibo’s MAUs reached 431 million in June 2018 (CIW, 2018).

Whilst acknowledging the significant changes of Chinese society brought about by new technologies, particularly in the context that popular political contention in contemporary China had until this point been relatively closed, this book is by no means endorsing the ideas that the Chinese society has been democratized or Chinese people have been technologically empowered. There are multiple meanings of resistance to be unpacked in digital China, such as those I explore in this book, which may not fit within frameworks of technological empowerment or social democratization. Precisely because contention on digital networks is meaningful on various dimensions, this book also eschews generalizations made by political economists that digital activism on the internet simply contributes to strengthening the status quo in China and promoting neoliberalism. Resistance in Digital China argues that digital collective action, despite not leading to immediate policy or legitimate changes in China, is part of Chinese individuals’ subjectification in the ever-changing economic world they are facing.

Prior to my academic life, I spent several years working as a journalist in Southern Media Group. This experience helped me establish a personal network of journalists that greatly assisted my close observation and textual analysis of the Southern Weekly Incident. Having worked with journalists from both official newspapers and relatively liberal papers in China, I was also aware that journalists involved in the Southern Weekly Incident might present diversified or even contradictory perceptions of their resistance, and thus giving them opportunities to attribute the meanings of their activities was crucial in this study. The main arguments of this book, particularly those about the meanings of Chinese people’s resistance in a self-constraint scenario, emerge distinctively from semi-structured in-depth interviews. Over the course of 2013 and 2014, I made regular trips to Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, where most journalists, citizens and activists involved were based, and conducted forty-five in-depth interviews for the purposes of investigating the Southern Weekly Incident, each lasting between ninety minutes and three hours. Interviewees included thirty-two journalists, seven non-journalist citizens and six activists. Interviewees’ discursive and explanatory accounts of emotions, perceptions, ideology and memories helped me explore how they made sense of resistance.

There are essentially a number of arguments and theoretical pay-offs demonstrated in this book. The book argues for a nuanced understanding of the meanings of Chinese people’s resistance from the political, cultural and sociological dimensions, as opposed to focusing on resisting the state or challenging the Communist regime.

From the political dimension, the book argues for a particular form of civic connectivity between Chinese people during popular contention. Following the initialization of elite-led contestation, Chinese people participate in public discourse by mostly commenting on and posting relevant materials online to exercise ‘surrounding and watching’ (weiguan) of the unfolding of particular events. On rare occasions, some of them even protest on the street. What makes the logic of connectivity in the Chinese context special is that, despite the apparently collective resistance in particular events, Chinese people pursue emotive and personalized expressions and often stay politically and ideologically disengaged with each other. People promote discussion and contention with various incentives but do not collectively aim to undermine the regime. Chinese people’s various ideological beliefs are often irreconcilable, complicated by different understandings of authoritarianism and democracy. Chinese individuals also have vastly different perceptions of whether it is politically safe to be involved in a contentious event. The particular form of civic connectivity allows collective resistive action with political subtlety or ambiguity. The end here is not collectivity but individuality. Yet, individuality is constituted through the emotive bond with others.

From the cultural dimension, this book explores the sensory experience of embodiment of Chinese people participating in popular contention, acknowledging the meanings of resistance on the personal level that are concerned with individuals’ memories and emotions. Embodiment is individual connection between physicality and subjectivity, which is promoted through taking action with other people together. The process of embodiment is self-revealing of emotions and inner vulnerability (McDonald, 2006). For Chinese people, embodiment is the process of subjectification and identity seeking in the country where modernization and globalization have taken place dramatically in a relatively short space of time. Facing the fast-changing economic world, what is even more surreal for Chinese people is the evolvement of official discourse regarding socialism and capitalism in practice that serves the nation’s economic development, hence the need for individuals to resolve the conflicting self (Touraine, 2002) through certain processes of subjectification, particularly through non-disruptive resistance that promotes embodiment.

From the sociological dimension, the meaning of resistance perceived by Chinese people derives from their construction of a Chinese public sphere. The construction of a Chinese public sphere is dynamic, with the concept of the public sphere being constantly evoked and rejected at the same time. Albeit elite-led and highly emotional, the formation of a Chinese public sphere engages real mass participation that should not be overlooked.

Resistance in digital China defined

This book focuses on popular resistance in digital China practised by a large population of Chinese people in contesting various issues in the society. Chinese people’s involvement in political contention, at the current stage, is often an urban phenomenon that involves mass discussion on Chinese social media. For the demography concerned, urban political contention is often promoted by journalists, lawyers, intellectuals, professionals and university students. Using social media for acquiring and sharing details about controversies relating to particular official figures or public policies, Chinese people are involved in expressing varying degrees of critiques or emotions around grievances, and demonstrating them to government authorities and other members of the public. Although the type of resistance concerned in this book differs from dissidence that is exercised exclusively by dissidents from the activist community,⁶ popular contention initiated by ordinary citizens (as opposed to professional activists or dissidents) has often attracted the engagement of activists, who intend to promote large-scale civic mobilization when possible. Therefore, the artificial distinction between popular resistance and dissidence is sometimes blurred.

Popular contention on party policies and government officials, in the form of radical and organized demonstrations, has been strictly controlled by the CCP, despite claims made by the CCP authorities that the right of assembly is protected by the Chinese Constitution (as is freedom of expression and publication). Through the entire propaganda apparatus that operates a total management of Chinese media (Zhao, 2001, 2008), the CCP has clearly warned Chinese citizens of the high risk of participating in mass incidents, which refers to street assemblies of various forms ranging from public speeches to protests expressing civil disobedience. Arguably, digital social networks have changed the dynamics of control of collective action on certain topics. Text messaging, online local forums and contingent social media groups have been proven efficient in maintaining and expanding online petitions and street protests in cases relating to environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and contestation of police brutality or corrupt public figures (Yang and Calhoun, 2007; Tong and Lei, 2013; Yang, 2019). This is comparable to other countries where the internet has facilitated e-tactics and e-mobilization, in which people protest merely online or are mobilized by discussions through digital networks to take action on the street (Earl and Kimport, 2011). Even in countries where control and repression by the authorities were intensively carried out, online social networks helped mobilize emotions and provide action scripts, acting as the choreographer of the assembly (Gerbaudo, 2012). At the time of writing, most Chinese cases of popular contention remain merely online, especially under the more pervasive repression of civil action by Xi Jinping’s leadership (2012 to present).

Regular message exchange through digital networks nurtures individuals’ engagement in public conversation by enabling them to effortlessly and immediately communicate their own observations (Benkler, 2006). Being able to attain information from sources beyond official Chinese media and interact with diverging views in political discourse is novel in China. Chinese people’s frequent adoption of creative tactics to circumvent censorship in their interactions about both political and apolitical topics shapes the distinctive form of contentious politics and online activism in digital China (Yang, 2009, 2014). The type of online activism that involves virtual demonstrations, such as bombarding a specific computer network, virtual sit-ins and so on, loosely referred to as hacktivism in democratic societies,⁷ has not been widely discovered in China. But online interaction and contestation already imply a remarkable collectivity of resistance in contemporary China. Events that involve issues of social unfairness, injustice, corruption and power abuse often trigger an emotional outpouring that demonstrates anger, hatred, compassion, outrage and sympathy, forming a sentimental dimension on the internet in China (Tong, 2015). The new term mass online incidents or internet mass incident, drawing upon the previous term mass incidents, has been adopted by the state in policies of controlling online activism (Yang, 2009; Ren, 2011).

A decade ago, Yang’s (2009) work theorizes forms of Chinese people’s online activism as rightful resistance, artful contention and digital hidden transcripts, which resort to official policies and rely on creative strategies to promote online mass communication around controversial issues whilst circumventing censorship and thus avoiding immediate repression. Staying non-disruptive, Chinese people online have effectively demonstrated mockery, satire and sarcasm aimed at the authorities. Through commenting and reposting on social media to demonstrate surrounding and watching (weiguan) (CDT, 2012; Tong and Lei, 2013), Chinese people exercise ‘citizen witnessing’ (Ellis, 2000; Peters, 2001; Allan, 2013) of controversial individuals and their response to the issue at stake. Here, citizens avoid openly challenging party officials whilst quietly imposing pressure through their collective activities.

The CCP’s censoring has not always been efficient enough to control information being spread during sensitive events, particularly when messages were well hidden and circulation was too vast to monitor fully. The gap of a few seconds or minutes needed for post deletion to take place allows some information to be released. Policies for regulating the internet are created and updated frequently by Chinese party authorities, particularly responding to emergence of new digital platforms and online tactics that may undermine existing control of political discourse. Yet, the lag of control on a particular internet application after it has already become popular has inspired Chinese people to play with unwritten rules of what may be regarded as permissible by the authorities. In addition, many Chinese citizens have learned to use proxy servers and anti-blocking software to access information that has been censored. They may even rewrite computer programs to defuse the filtering system (Yang, 2009; Sullivan, 2012). In cases where websites are shut down by censors, some Chinese internet users manage to open new ones under creative guises (Sullivan, 2012). News stories on overseas websites...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The 2013 Southern Weekly Incident and Resistance in Digital China
• 2 Meanings of Resistance in Digital China: Connectivity, Embodiment and the Construction of a Chinese Public Sphere
• 3 The Southern Weekly Incident: Timeline, Investigation and Political Milieu
• 4 The Southern Weekly Incident Unfolds: From Mobilization to Division
• 5 Mechanisms of Connectivity and Experience of Embodiment: Identity, Individuality and Memory
• 6 Implications of the Southern Weekly Incident: Institutional Boundaries, Self-Restriction and Complex Ideologies in China
• 7 Resistance in Digital China and an Elite-Led, Emotional Chinese Public Sphere: Conclusion and Discussion
• Appendix A: List of Interviewees
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint