Contesting Cyberspace in China

Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience

Rongbin Han

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780231545655
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Internet was supposed to be an antidote to authoritarianism. It can enable citizens to express themselves freely and organize outside state control. Yet while online activity has helped challenge authoritarian rule in some cases, other regimes have endured: no movement comparable to the Arab Spring has arisen in China. In Contesting Cyberspace in China, Rongbin Han offers a powerful counterintuitive explanation for the survival of the world's largest authoritarian regime in the digital age.

Han reveals the complex internal dynamics of online expression in China, showing how the state, service providers, and netizens negotiate the limits of discourse. He finds that state censorship has conditioned online expression, yet has failed to bring it under control. However, Han also finds that freer expression may work to the advantage of the regime because its critics are not the only ones empowered: the Internet has proved less threatening than expected due to the multiplicity of beliefs, identities, and values online. State-sponsored and spontaneous pro-government commenters have turned out to be a major presence on the Chinese internet, denigrating dissenters and barraging oppositional voices. Han explores the recruitment, training, and behavior of hired commenters, the "fifty-cent army," as well as group identity formation among nationalistic Internet posters who see themselves as patriots defending China against online saboteurs. Drawing on a rich set of data collected through interviews, participant observation, and long-term online ethnography, as well as official reports and state directives, Contesting Cyberspace in China interrogates our assumptions about authoritarian resilience and the democratizing power of the Internet.

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INTRODUCTION

Pluralism and Cyberpolitics in China

In 2010, the Middle East was in turmoil. The Tunisian Revolution successfully overthrew President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, triggering the start of the Arab Spring. The power of the Internet, particularly social media, garnered global attention.¹ On the other side of the world, critics of the Chinese regime, inspired by the Arab Spring, called for their own Jasmine Revolution, with the hope of disrupting the regime through online and offline mobilization.² But these calls had little visible or lasting impact. One demonstration on ­Wangfujing Street in central Beijing, which had been widely advertised online by democratic activists, turned out to be a micro–street spectacle: Literally a handful of protesters showed up, surrounded by thousands of onlookers and hundreds of policemen and foreign journalists.³ Before the protesters were finally taken away, they received little support or even sympathy from the bystanders.

As the political scientist Lisa Anderson has perceptively pointed out, the importance of the Arab Spring lies neither in how protesters were inspired by globalized norms of civic engagement nor how they used new technology, but in “how and why these ambitions and techniques resonated in their various local contexts.”⁴ Compared with regimes that were toppled in the Arab Spring, China has a stronger authoritarian state, which can more effectively control its population, and a robust economy providing more job opportunities.⁵ Moreover, the Chinese Party-state has a proven record of adapting to challenges.⁶ However, state capacity and adaptability can hardly explain the minuscule scale of mobilization in China considering the pervasiveness of social unrest⁷ and Internet-enabled mobilization.⁸ In particular, unlike offline mobilization, which tends to center on narrowly defined concrete demands,⁹ online activism in China often targets the authoritarian regime in general and poses demands for more freedom and democracy. In effect, Internet users are popularly known as “netizens” in China precisely because the term carries a sense of entitlement and citizenship that is generally absent in authoritarian regimes.

The contrast between the countries involved in the Arab Spring and a more resilient authoritarian regime like China suggests an intriguing relationship among technological development, social empowerment, and authoritarianism. Why has the Internet helped scuttle authoritarian rule in some cases, but failed to do so in others? More specifically, why has online activism not translated into an offline movement in China akin to the Arab Spring? What explains the paradoxical coexistence of an empowering Internet and resilient authoritarianism in China? By investigating the struggles over online expression—both as a cat-and-mouse censorship game and from the perspective of discourse competition—this book makes a counterintuitive twofold claim: (1) The Chinese Party-state can almost indefinitely coexist with the expansion of the emancipating Internet; but (2) the key explanation for this coexistence does not lie in the state’s capacity to control and adapt, as many have argued, but more in the pluralization of online expression, which empowers not only regime critics, but also pro-regime voices, particularly those representing pro-state nationalism.

The book questions the assumed relationship between state adaptation and authoritarian resilience. Though regimes such as China are highly adaptive to challenges—as witnessed in the highly sophisticated censorship system and various innovative propaganda tactics the state has employed—it is naïve to assume the effectiveness of state adaptation or to assume adaptability is the sole reason for its resilience. As the research in this book shows, the Chinese Party-state has encountered tremendous difficulty in translating its formidable despotic and infrastructural power into effective control over the Internet. The book also interrogates the liberalizing and democratizing power of the Internet from a new angle. Sheri Berman finds that a vigorous civil society may, under certain circumstances, scuttle democracy.¹⁰ Likewise, pluralized online expression may ironically help sustain authoritarian rule by activating and empowering regime defenders. In China, through neutralizing regime-challenging discourses and denigrating regime critics, spontaneous pro-regime groups have rendered online expression less threatening to the Party-state.

Instead of seeing the state and the Internet as single monolithic entities, the book highlights the fragmentation of both. It reveals the complex internal dynamics of Internet control by differentiating the roles of the central state, local authorities, and intermediary actors. It also captures the pluralist nature of online expression by exploring the interactions among the state, its critics, and various netizen groups. In doing so, my argument maintains that the Chinese Party-state is not as strong as it appears but also that the Internet’s threat to the regime may have been overestimated. Such findings suggest that neither the regime’s resilience nor the Internet’s power can be assumed but must be carefully analyzed, assessed, and contextualized.

WHEN THE EMPOWERING INTERNET MEETS THE AUTHORITARIAN REGIME

With its inherent “control-frustrating characteristics,”¹¹ the Internet has become the locus of debates over political liberalization and democratization in authoritarian regimes. Arguably, it provides “new tools of connectivity, information diffusion, and attention,”¹² which help citizens better connect, express ideas, organize, and mobilize.¹³ For instance, in the Arab Spring, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube played a critical role in shaping political debates, mobilizing protests on the ground, and promulgating democratic ideas.¹⁴ According to the political scientists Philip Howard and Muzammil Hussain, digital media diffusion rates and the capacity of state censorship are crucial to explain success or failure in achieving regime change.¹⁵

Though highly censored, China’s Internet has created a relatively free discursive space, which some see as an emerging public sphere.¹⁶ Chinese netizens have not only managed to circumvent and challenge state censorship in creative and artful ways, but also transformed the Internet into a platform for online activism.¹⁷ The freer flow of information in cyberspace—as compared to traditional media—has also promoted civil society by enhancing both internal communications and the interconnectedness of civil organizations,¹⁸ and it has facilitated citizen activism by enabling both domestic and overseas Chinese to mobilize against the regime.¹⁹

There is no question that the Internet has challenged the Party-state. But the state has also adapted itself to control the Internet’s disruptive effects. According to Lawrence Lessig, Internet control may operate via four mechanisms: the law, technical architecture (code), social norms, and the market.²⁰ In China, all four are subject to heavy influence from or direct control of the state. To tame the Internet, the Party-state has undergone a process of policy learning and capacity building and has constructed a complicated and subtle censorship regime over time to control both the network infrastructure and online content.²¹ Today, the censorship system allows the state to filter taboo words, block or shut down websites, suppress dissent groups and active netizens, and deter deviant expression.²² For instance, the state has not only established a nationwide “Great Firewall” to filter and track online information,²³ but it has also attempted to have all personal computer (PC) manufacturers preinstall Green Dam software, meant to filter out pornography and other undesired information from the users’ end.²⁴

To what extent, then, has the Internet empowered citizens or challenged authoritarian rule in China? To answer the question properly, it is crucial to depart from a perspective that focuses mainly on the dyad of state control versus social resistance in cyberspace.²⁵ Though the perspective is helpful, it does not account for the diverse activities that occur in Chinese cyberspace and exposes only a limited slice of the politics and role of the Internet in political communication.²⁶ In particular, it tends “to see politics only in the higher echelons of power or as its outright subversion,”²⁷ thus preventing effective examination and evaluation of the less confrontational, more creative aspects of online struggles. In effect, the state has gone beyond simple censorship and shifted toward a more subtle management of popular opinion²⁸ by employing innovative propaganda tactics such as deploying paid Internet commentators, a.k.a. the “fifty-cent army” (wumao dang, 五毛党), to fake pro-regime voices²⁹ and embracing popular cyber culture to make state propaganda appealing.³⁰ Similarly, social actors have not only fought with the repressive state in artful and creative ways,³¹ but have also engaged in practices of online activism that hardly fit neatly into the liberalization-control framework.³²

This book introduces two specific analytical concerns not fully addressed in the current literature. First, it shows that the impact of the Internet on Chinese politics is much more mixed and complicated than a dyadic model in which either the society or the state dominates. Indeed, it may have contributed more to liberalization than democratization in that it is enabling greater political involvement of Chinese citizens but failing to move China toward a democratic transition;³³ it can function as a safety valve or a vehicle for political activism, depending on whether netizens plunge in ahead of mainstream media.³⁴ Moreover, this research brings attention to understudied critical actors in Chinese cyberpolitics, including intermediary actors such as forum administrators who directly mediate censorship enforcement³⁵ and regime defenders such as the “voluntary fifty-cent army” (zidai ganliang de wumao, 自带干粮的五毛; literally “the fifty-cent army that brings its own rations”).

Second, the book highlights the necessity to disaggregate both the state and cyberspace to better understand cyberpolitics in China. Though scholars have long recognized the internal fragmentation of the Chinese Party-state and its implications for both policy making and implementation,³⁶ few have explored the horizontal and vertical cleavages within China’s Internet governance structure. Evidently, multiple state agencies are involved in content control and discourse competition. Their diverse interests and motivations have together shaped the landscape of online politics in China. Likewise, it is improper to assume a monolithic Chinese cyberspace that is inherently liberalizing and democratizing. While many observers have hailed this new technology for emancipating the society from authoritarian rule, others have emphasized its detrimental, disintegrating effects and suggest that online expression may lead to the polarization or even Balkanization of the public.³⁷ The research in this book supports such a “fragmentation thesis” through an investigation of the dynamic process of online discourse production, circulation, and interpretation in China.

PUBLIC EXPRESSION ON CHINESE INTERNET FORUMS

As the sociologist Guobin Yang has insightfully pointed out, “The Chinese Internet should not be viewed in isolation from its social, political, and cultural contents and contexts.”³⁸ Interestingly enough, though the struggle over online expression constitutes the core of many studies of cyberpolitics in China, few authors have traced the process of information production, spread, acquisition, and containment in the context of an online environment such as that of Internet forums. This book, through exploring how the state, its critics, and netizens struggle over political expression on Internet forum...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Pluralism and Cyberpolitics in China
• 2. Harmonizing the Internet: State Control Over Online Expression
• 3. To Comply or to Resist? The Intermediaries’ Dilemma
• 4. Pop Activism: Playful Netizens in Cyberpolitics
• 5. Trolling for the Party: State-Sponsored Internet Commentators
• 6. Manufacturing Distrust: Online Political Opposition and Its Backlash
• 7. Defending the Regime: The “Voluntary Fifty-Cent Army”
• 8. Authoritarian Resilience Online: Mismatched Capacity, Miscalculated Threat
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index