An Overview of the Book
This book assesses the gender-politics axis established in China’s digital public sphere.1 Following Habermas’ (1991) notion of the public sphere and Castells (2009) and van Dijk’s (2006) conceptualisation of the network(ed) society, the digital public sphere describes an abstract venue where Internet users are assembled by their use of digital communication technologies, which provides them with the opportunities to engage with public affairs (Rod and Weidmann 2015). Studies of socio-political trends in the digital public sphere enable us to integrate a wide range of issues associated with imbalanced power relations in our society (van Dijk 2013; Castells 2009). A better understanding of China’s digital public sphere is needed for both academics and the international community, if they are to fully appreciate how issues of identity, liberal values, equality, and diversity shape Chinese society in the digital age (Thussu 2018). In an increasingly globalised world, China has become one of the most important trading partners with Western countries, and cultural trade is a key area of exchange. Given the worldwide reach of digital communication technologies, an enhanced understanding of China’s public cultures on the Internet have the potential to influence a wide range of sectors outside China. Both academics and practitioners in the media, cultural, and the creative industries need to fully account for transnational connections between Chinese people and the world, the cultural exchange of liberal ideas on diversity and equality, and the negotiation of conflicting media, cultural, and Internet policies.
Existing studies of China’s digital public sphere have provided relatively comprehensive discussions of how the Chinese government’s political control influences Chinese people’s access to Internet services (Lei 2017; Roberts 2018; King et al. 2017). These studies particularly focus on digital nationalist activist protests against foreign governments in international political and trade disputes (R. Han 2015; Schneider 2018), and political dissident criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)2 domestic governance policies on the Internet (Tong and Zuo 2014). Yet, limited scholarly attention has been paid to the intersection of gender and politics therein (Wallis 2015). This is a major omission because global evidence confirms that politics has always been dominated by men, and thereafter intersected with imbalanced gender power relations (Ross et al. 2018; Lansdall-Welfare et al. 2016). Reflecting the male-dominance of politics, research shows that there is a wide range of gendered discourses accepted in both China and the West, which promote normative gender norms that require women to adhere to (Baxter 2017; Dolan 2014; Liu 2014). The acceptance of these gendered discourses has led to the rise of patriarchal values and misogynistic voices in the digital public sphere across the whole world (Wallis 2015; Boyle and Rathnayake 2019).
Focusing on China as a case study, a handful of studies have discovered how gendered discourses are invoked by both Chinese nationalist activists and political dissidents in debates with their fellow citizens inhabiting the opposite end of the political spectrum (Wallis 2015; Fang and Repnikova 2018). This scholarship reveals the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere, which represents the alignment of misogynist voices, anti-feminism campaigns, and political forces. Such an alignment is not only applicable in the Chinese context (Huang 2016) but also reflects a global phenomenon in a recent wave of hostility against feminist scholars and gender studies in Europe, the US, and Latin America (Koulouris 2018; Banet-Weiser 2018). The implications of the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere are grave and wide-ranging. It has greatly influenced how public opinion is expressed by Chinese Internet users (Wallis 2015). Given that the digital public sphere has been utilised by the CCP to test public opinion (Tong and Zuo 2014), this gender-politics axis potentially reshapes China’s policymaking, thereafter influencing the wellbeing of Chinese women and the progress of gender equality in Chinese society.
An understanding of the gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere also helps us to unfold both the socio-political trends and gender values in the rising power. It ensures that the international community’s perspective on the creative and digital power in China is futuristic, by drawing from a critical appreciation of the intersectionality of politics and gender in China’s cultural and media landscape today. Thus, this book emerges from a feminist perspective and addresses the need for scholarship that facilitates the development of transcultural understandings. This is a much-needed intellectual intervention required to internationalise culture research in the present digital age in which patriarchal values and misogynist voices are on the rise across the globe. Contextualised against this backdrop, the book places the gendered cultural practice of Chinese Internet users at the heart of a ‘connected world approach’ to the male-dominance of China’s digital public sphere. In doing so, it scrutinises Chinese Internet users’ digital civic engagement with public affairs, which has prompted recent, intensified discussions about gender equality, gender norms, and the power relations between women and men in the Chinese context. It is a hope that this book will contribute to a better understanding of the nexus of gender and politics that matters for both Chinese people and the international community. The outcomes of the book shed light on a feminist cultural studies approach to the digital transformations of patriarchal orders, sexist values, and misogynist voices in China, and their relations to on the outside world.
Feminist Scrutiny of Digital Cultures
Today, with the widespread penetration of participatory digital platforms, people can easily contribute to the content circulated on the Internet (boyd 2014). This has a great impact on Internet users’ everyday communications, facilitating the inception of the digital public sphere in which the spread of information is no longer completely controlled by institutions (van Dijk 2006; Castells 2009). An optimistic view suggests that traditional power structures have collapsed in the digita...