Verse Going Viral

China's New Media Scenes

Heather Inwood

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805108
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria asiática

Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Heather Inwood sets out to unravel a paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the point of "death, " poetry activity flourishes across the country, benefiting from China's continued self-identity as a "nation of poetry" (shiguo) and from the interactive opportunities created by the internet and other forms of participatory media. Through a cultural studies approach that treats poetry as a social rather than a purely textual form, Inwood considers how meaning is created and contested both within China's media-savvy poetry scenes and by members of the public, who treat poetry with a combination of reverence and ridicule. As the first book to deal explicitly with the discourses and functioning of scenes within the Chinese cultural context, Verse Going Viral will be of value to students and scholars of Chinese literature, cultural studies, and media, as well as to general readers interested in China's dynamic cultural scenes.

CHAPTER 1

Poetry on the Web

The East is black, the sun is bad

China has given rise to a School of Rubbish

you're black I'm even blacker than you

you're bad I'm even badder than you

Born as a Rubbish person

I'll die as a Rubbish ghost

I am the School of Rubbish

the School of Rubbish is me

—XU XIANGCHOU, “Worshiping the High Is Exhausting” (Chonggao zhen lei)

Poetry has always been destined to be the extreme avant-garde and light cavalry of literature. From the very start, it sniffed out the limitless potential for growth that comes with the age of the Internet, and embraced the Internet with open arms. As expected, the Internet gave poetry wings and made poetic exchange more intimate, as if poetry has returned to the glorious age of the Tang Dynasty. In a flash, live scenes of poetry shifted from print media to the Internet, like the early bird catching the worm.

—HONG ZHU, “Why do we say the Internet has changed Chinese poetry?” (Weihe shuo wangluo gaibian le Zhongguo shige?)

Most commentators agree that the development of the Internet had the single biggest impact on Chinese poetry activity in the first decade of the twenty-first century. According to typical narratives, the web injected much-needed life into poetry, rescuing it from the wilderness years of the 1990s, a time when more commercialized forms of culture were squeezing it from public view. As the poetry critic Li Xia described in 2004, “The Internet has brought the world into a new era, and brought poetry into a new era too—or you could say, the Internet has saved poetry's life. It is almost as though the Internet exists for the sake of poetry, and only there have poets been able to find their place and their value.”¹ In the even more exuberant words of Chen Zhongyi, the love affair between poets and the Internet made it seem as though poetry had swallowed a dose of Viagra, thereby “sweeping away its impotency of the past few years and rediscovering its vitality, passion, and impulse.”²

A production-oriented approach is useful for investigating the ways that online poetry communities have responded to the growth of the Internet and the opportunities for interaction and publication that it affords, and for examining the interplay between the media dynamics of the Internet, the broader communications environment in which they are situated, and the ambitions and activities of online poetry communities. Such an approach focuses not on what cannot be written online because of government-enforced censorship but on what is created and why.³ Despite often being characterized as a unique culture or world unto its own, the Internet is inextricably entwined with the other media spaces explored in this book and its dynamics depend heavily on those of both print and face-to-face communication. The online space is, therefore, a hybrid agora that bears strong traces of the ideology of the texts at the same time as it is characterized by qualities such as contingency and real-time interaction.⁴ Since the latter half of the 2000s, the majority of poems and critical essays that have been published in print journals and books previously appeared online in some form or other. Poetry recitals, summits, and gatherings are publicized online before the event, then documented and processed on forums and blogs in the following days, weeks, and years. Perhaps most significant of all, the Internet's effectiveness as a medium for poetry publication and community formation has meant that many poets appear to have ceased caring altogether about having their works published in print.

An examination of the Internet-based textual interactions of a particularly controversial poetry group, the School of Rubbish (Laji pai), suggests that China's online poetry communities demonstrate the robustness of the social form of modern Chinese poetry and the collective potential of literary activity in an era dominated by capitalist economics, individualization, and the commercialization of culture. They also embody the tension between the discourses of the poetry arena and live scenes: while Internet-based poets derive their sense of poetry citizenship first and foremost through presence and real-time participation in live scenes such as online forums and blogs, they also demonstrate a keen awareness of poetry hierarchies and the influence of text-based literary histories by engaging in debates with rival poetry groups. The School of Rubbish and the Low Poetry Movement to which its members belong offer a compelling case study of how cultural communities make creative use of the Internet to further their own aesthetic and ideological agendas, ignoring—if not flagrantly defying—the government agencies responsible for policing Internet content and promoting “harmonious society” online. Viewed from the perspective of cultural contention developed by Guobin Yang, Low Poetry's fixation on defecation, sex, and the dirty side of human existence not only stands in contrast to orthodox narratives of economically productive middle-class lifestyles promoted by the party-state but also implies a form of online activism aimed primarily at the gatekeeping authority of China's print-based poetry arena and at the “harmonizing” efforts of the country's media censorship schemes.

COMMUNICATION AND CONTENTION ONLINE

The development of the Internet has been the biggest factor in the expansion of space for public expression in China. Writing in 2008, Yuezhi Zhao states quite simply that the Internet has essentially become the public in Chinese public communication but notes that it is constituted of an unusual mix of people that includes “old lefts,” humanistic intellectuals, university professors, white-collar workers, grassroots commentators, and a category of young people often subsumed under the label “angry youths” (fenqing).⁵ China's Internet users, a population that in July 2013 stood at 591 million or approximately 44.1 percent of China's overall population and is expected to exceed 800 million by 2015, demonstrate a combination of social and political engagement and the need to communicate with each other and be entertained.⁶ The diversity of cultural and social expression that exists online is not surprising; given the ever-growing proportion of the population that has access to the web, it makes sense that almost every facet of contemporary life is reflected online in some way.

A central theme in scholarship on the Chinese Internet is the tensions between various forms of power, especially political power, and netizen interests and concerns, tensions that are often conceptualized in terms of struggles or activism. Guobin Yang examines the complex nature of online activism, which he defines as any kind of contentious activity that involves the use of new communication technologies such as the Internet. Online activism, he argues, emerged after the revolutionary spirit of the 1989 student movement had died down in the 1990s and has since situated itself within a wide spectrum of “converging and contending forces” that are not just political but also social, economic, technological, and cultural.⁷ Issues of contention are diverse but generally fall into seven categories: popular nationalism, rights defense, corruption and power abuse, the environment, muckraking, online charity, and cultural contention. Contention often takes place within online communities, which Yang conceptualizes as “spatial havens” and sites of resistance in which Internet users can create new identities for themselves while experimenting with new forms of organization and imagining new worlds.⁸

Attempts to limit the circulation of information online can often feel like a game of cat and mouse, whereby the government agencies responsible for policing Internet content and the companies who comply via self-regulation are forced to react on a minute-by-minute basis to the latest developments in Internet discourse, censoring “sensitive words” (min'ganci) and phrases almost as quickly as they appear. There are at least twelve government agencies that play a part in China's Internet content control regime, ranging from the State Council Information Office and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to entities such as the State Food and Drug Administration and the Ministry of Education. The array of regulations that they are expected to implement is vast, issued and amended periodically by the CCP's Propaganda Department as well as by lower-level organizations. A list of Internet content regulations assembled by Yang dates back to the “Regulation on Protecting Computer Information System Security of the People's Republic of China” released in 1994; more recent additions include provisions on administering Internet games and culture announced in 2011.⁹

Despite the best efforts of the Chinese party-state, limiting online discourse is considerably less feasible than controlling communication that takes place in print or through the broadcast media of radio, film, and television. Indeed, this may well be part of the government's overarching media strategy, in which the Internet is intentionally granted a greater degree of freedom than other media in order to allow Chinese citizens space to let off steam in a relatively contained environment.¹⁰ Not only are netizens acutely aware, moreover, of the existence of censorship and the government's attempts to shape online public opinion, they also discuss them openly and make fun of them through subversive puns and other parodic practices.¹¹ The most well-known of these converts the characters for harmony (hexie, a stand-in for censorship) into the characters for river crab (hexie) and pits the crab in a battle against another mythological creature of the web, the “grass mud horse” (cao ni ma), whose name offers a tonal variant on a mother-related profanity that has come to symbolize the resistance of netizens against the government's attempts to sanitize Internet culture and society.

Having examined a range of forms of contention on the Chinese Internet, Guobin Yang concludes that online activism represents a “palpable revival of the revolutionary spirit” in China and a response to the condition of Chinese modernity. His research highlights the cultural nature of such activism: contention on the Internet relies on existing cultural tools and symbols at the same time as it demonstrates a high level of innovation and creativity.¹² If the Internet has given rise to a communication revolution then it is equally a social revolution and a cultural revolution, not least because the people involved in online creativity extend far beyond the intellectual elites who dominated cultural production in the 1980s to include “common people” and, increasingly, socially and economically disenfranchised groups such as migrant workers and the rural poor; this trend will continue as Internet access and literacy expand in the countryside and among older and less educated populations.¹³

Judging by their poetry alone, the School of Rubbish is about as far removed from the traditional image of China's intellectual elites as one could possibly imagine. Rather than an explicit means of “worrying about the nation and the people” (youguo youmin), writing poetry is a way of expressing belonging first and foremost to the online community that is the School of Rubbish. It is important to note that the kinds of poems produced by Rubbish poets would be highly unlikely to find their way into print publications, especially those legally available for sale through China's book and magazine distribution channels. In order to understand the school's poetics and approach to poetic interaction, we need to consider both the unique media dynamics of online communication and the historical conjuncture in which the School of Rubbish is situated. By turning poetry norms upside down and challenging the power of print gatekeepers to determine what writings are worthy of designation as “poems,” communities such as the School of Rubbish can be considered an example of the “cultural revolution” that Yang suggests has been facilitated by the Chinese Internet, but one that is also inseparable from the historical consciousness and strong sense of communal belonging held by modern Chinese poets.

SITES OF POETRY

A large variety of website formats play host to the publication and discussion of poetry and poetry criticism on the Chinese Internet. They include portal sites dedicated solely to poetry such as the long-running website Poemlife (Shi shenghuo, www.poemlife.com); poetry-themed sections of larger culturally or literary-themed sites (for example, the poetry sections of www.hongxiu.com); poetry forums (luntan) or BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) hosted by commercial web portals as well as by educational, political, and media organizations; blogs (boke) and weibo such as those hosted by Sina (Xinlang) and Sohu (Souhu); video-sharing sites (like Youku, www.youku.com); news sites; and poetry-themed webzines or e-zines (wangkan), which can sometimes be downloaded and read offline. Of these, the most significant in the development of online poetry scenes are poetry forums, poetry-dedicated websites, blogs, and weibo. Together, these sites comprise the main stomping grounds, or live scenes, of online Chinese poetry.

As one of the earliest online communication tools, forums offer an open space for public discussion of clearly labeled topics, categorized according to subject matter, interest group, or theme and usually organized in order of most recent response. They are distinguished by the communal nature of their content management and authorship, functioning as a space in which registered members and guests alike can begin new conversations or “threads,” respond to existing topics, seek and offer help or advice, interact and form new relationships, and browse for general interest or information-seeking purposes. As Guobin Yang shows, forums are also one of the main spaces in which contention occurs on the Chinese Internet, making them a powerful medium for online activism and a central space in which online communities take shape.¹⁴ Literary forums have played a key role in the history of Chinese Internet literature and were the first types of website to emerge in the mid-1990s as spaces for literary production. By the mid-2000s there were over three hundred websites dedicated to poetry on the mainland Chinese Internet, the vast majority of which were forums. Their ubiquity led Wang Pu to comment in 2005 that they represent a whole way of life for poetry on the Internet.¹⁵

By 2008, however, activity levels on poetry forums were on the wane. Reasons for this include a heightening of Internet censorship in the lead-up to and duration of the summer 2008 Beijing Olympic Games as well as a gradual shift in interest toward individually authored blogs, social networking sites, and other community...