Monthly Archives: November 2011

This week I am working on a model to map out civic actions in China. I borrowed models on social movements in the field of political science and added one dimension, the level of centralization of the media involved in the civic actions, to understand various types of civic actions in China. I do not intend to include all forms of participations but to provide an analytical method when categorizing them.

1. Hierarchy of Media

Newspapers/Broadcasting: State-owned national newspapers (People’s Daily), State-owned TV (CCTV), provincial party owned newspapers/TV, Southern Newspapers (South Weekend Newspaper, which is ideologically liberal in contrast with pro-party media).

Weibo,SNS, Portal Websites,Blogs: Sina Weibo, RenRen SNS, Kaixin SNS, Sina News, Sohu News, Netease News, Sina Blogging, Sohu Blogging. They are owned by large private corporations such as Sina and Sohu which adopts sensitive words filtering. It is a compromise between the urge of the development of information technology sector and traditionally rigorous censorship. On theone hand, the commercial interests drive the growth of micro-blogging, social networking, and blogging services provided by these companies, which boost the general economy. One the other hand, in comparison with various competing small companies (eg. the shutdown of Fanfou), the contents from the centralized service providers are easier to control by the state, specifically, the Party Ministry of Propaganda, Press and Publication Administration, Radio Film Television Administration.

Can your voices be heard from Weibo(it fails to address daily issues)?:–commercial interest comes first;elites domination;retweeting ( less original contents);topic disappears quickly;

The other category is described as community tools in this chart. It addresses common concern regarding both geographically aggregated communities and dispersedmembers but with shared aspects of identity with communities. Traditional communication forms such as face to face communication, flyers, and posters can still effectively generate information flow between these actors. At the same time, community members using emailing lists, local BBS, online forums and texting through mobile phones form the online networks that enable discussions on issues ofcommon concern, and have the potentiality to generate collective actions.

2. Civic Actions in China

Figure 2 Dimensions of Civic Actions in China

In the above table, I do not intend to exhaust all types of civic actions in China (more comprehensive categories of political participation can be found in Shi’s work, and Yang also demonstrated many forms of activism), but rather I would like to list some dimensions that are useful to describe the differences of these types. The indicators, to what extend the actions are organized, how institutionalized the actions are, and how strong the advocacy of the actions are, are traditionally used in political science theories when categorizing varied social movements (Dingxin Zhao, 2005). The numbers in this table ranging from 1 to 5 are only meaningful in ordinal scale, not in interval and ratio scales (numbers can only be compared within columns, but no plus or minus within numbers in a same column). In the column of centralization of media used in actions, routine politics such as voting and party meetings, can only attract attention from local newspapers, and if it is voting for district congress representative among college students, university newspapers might cover the story, while national newspapers will neglect these political actions. Routine politics are highly institutionalized in Chinese political system in contrast with radical social movements that happen spontaneously, which explains the numbers 5 and 1 in the two categories. The ability of generating discourse is another factor that defines the types of civic actions, the economic reform led by Central Communist Party, for example, the entry to WTO, comes with a discourse of neoliberal economy generated through wide coverage from national media, while in contrast, daily practices of online activism are hard to find voices in a larger scale. The last indicator, the class reflects the social reality of current China that the social inequity and stratification has impacted almost all aspects of people’s life. Regarding civic actions, the class classification is still significant as those participating in pro-democratic activism are more likely to be elites. I have to admit here that most of the conclusions come from my subjective observations, and I hope in the future or in my master thesis I might adopt cases studies, and survey reports to support my speculations.

It is also worth noting that the actions are not in their static forms, but rather they changes with time. Routine politics used to barely receive attention from individuals or the coverage from local newspapers is not of ordinary people’s concern in the early 1990s, and in 1998 since the election law that permits direct election at lowest administrative level was passed by the national congress, some routine politics such as voting for local villages have captured the public’s attention. In the past decade the fact that more independent candidates have stood out also changes the voting behaviors. A recent news (need to confirm) from Tianya BBS saying college students from Fudan University filled out names of movie actors or left blank on the vote paper. In short, the types summarized in the tables are not comprehensive and in reality there are far more nuances than researchers can imagine. If we examine the civic actions diachronically even more complexities will bring about into our scope.

In the article “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flow During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions”, Gilad Lotan, Erhardt Graeff and others use the term ecosystem by referring to the relationships between different actors in a networked online environment. Providing snapshots of the information flow in 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, they point out that the nature of news work is experiencing the shift from the era of mass media to the networked digital media. Traditionally the news organizations are considered as the agency of professionalism, but in networked news environments, the production of news is described in terms of connected actors including non-professionals in various geographic locations, which challenges the normative models of journalism. Within the context of Twitter information flows during Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, they demonstrate a recurring pattern that professionals interacted with bloggers, media organizations, non-media groups, activists, researchers and many other actors through commenting, retweeting, and hashtagging. In Tunisia revolution, bloggers played an important role in disseminating news while in Egypt data, journalists and activists served as the main sources of flows. The networked environment in Twitter is more of a site where people without previously existing relationships gather around a particular topic and the individual personality is more likely to influence audiences to participate than the organizational identity. In short, their findings portray a dynamic network in Twitter where a variety of actors share news information and interact with each other and offer details of the contemporary journalistic practices.

Searching for the network analysis of Chinese online environments in scholarly articles, I found two of them are worthy of attention. “What Trends in Chinese Social Media” by Louis Yu, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman discusses the differences of the functions and topic trends between Twitter and a Chinese popular micro-blogging Weibo. Weibo enables embedded videos and pictures in tweets while Twitter only has plain texts. Through analyzing randomly sampled tweets they discovered that people tend to share jokes, images, and videos in Weibo, while in Twitter most retweeted users are news sources such as CNN, the New York Times and ESPN. They explain that the trends that are formed in Weibo are almost due to the repeated retweets of jokes, images, and videos. I think this article indeed captured one of the important features of Weibo, that is, heavy retweeting, and it is the first step to understand the complex network of the information flow in Chinese online environment though in comparison with the aforementioned analysis on Twitter network it is still not developed. Repeatedly retweeting might be true on Weibo and this article only focuses on the retweeting of content of entertainment. However, we should also be aware that the sampled tweets are not in specific times when social events happen, which makes it difficult to directly respond to the study of the network analysis during political crisis. If they could do a network analysis of tweets on some social events, they might not easily reach their conclusion that the characteristics of Weibo is about sharing jokes.

The other study on Chinese online network analysis is from a younger scholar Liu Yusi’s master thesis “Homophily and Proximity of Network Links in Forming Chinese Journalists’ Online Professional Group by Micro-blogging”. She sampled 295 journalists who have accounts on Weibo and she visualized the network of the journalists in Weibo and in blogs.

The figures clearly show that the adoption of micro-blogging by Chinese journalists helps them form a closer and more intricate network. In the following analysis, she pointed out that these journalists’ offline networks ( geographic locations and work unit) are still strong predictors of the online networks in Weibo. What is similar to the conclusion of the article on Twitter is that Weibo also enables the formation of new online networks based on shared topics among Chinese journalists. I think she effectively complicates our understanding of the ecosystem in Chinese online environments though she did not include more actors and trace the information flow in her analysis. Her demonstration on the connected journalists is a more stable network where information flows not only when the social crisis happens, but it comes from the institutionalized professional practices. Based on existing works on trending topics and networks of journalists, further future researches can focus on questions such as the flow of information among various actors, the centralization or decentralization of the network of information exchange, and the cultural factors that shape the network in Weibo in comparison with Twitter.

Coombe draws on interdisciplinary approach to discuss the complexity of relationships among property, law and culture. She points out the problem that intellectual property laws are based on individual or corporate economic interests in consumer society, and policies and laws tend to prioritize the commercial interests rather than cultural reproduction and individual freedom of expression. She criticizes the overemphasis on cultural production as property, and she argues attributes of social and cultural formation processes should not be neglected. I find in her work she draws on great deal of literature on postmodern theorists and I hope during the class we could discuss a little bit about it. How does she position herself among these scholars? Does she just use cases in intellectual property laws to attest Foucault’s “power and knowledge”, Derrida, Gramsci and Baudrillard? Does she simply attack the legal philosophy that is based on the idea of liberty, which is fundamental to ownership of property, contract and market, formed through period of enlightenment and modernity? Does she specifically react to anyone within the field of postmodern critiques?

The case in China is a little bit different because there is not a very strong tradition of intellectual laws especially in cultural industry(movies, literary works and music). Also, the other two articles touch on how the decentralized technology changes the way of collaboration and labor. How can the IP law adjust to the technologies in a decentralized virtual world where limited restrictions are imposed on the circulation of copyrighted works? A well-known Chinese writer, Han Han, requested a major document-sharing site Baidu Wenku to remove his works. The giant Internet companies have more power in the negotiation and we can still easily read Han Han’s work online for free. On the other hand, even though it means that netizens need to pay more if Han Han’s work is protected, many netizens support Han Han because his is a figure of pro-democracy in China. So in this case, the emergence of the technology makes it even more difficult to establish a copyright system in China, and sometimes elites’(at least it is still the elite that dominates Chinese online sphere, eg, in weibo) political interests are prioritized before commercial interests. Another example addresses the Chinese “Counterfeit Culture” originating from cheap cellphones for rural market copying designs and functions from multinational brands. The reason that people buy the phone does not only because they want to consume the symbolic meaning (eg, Nokia has been changed into Fokia), but also because the price serves the lower end market. In this case, the fact that IP law is challenged does not come from consuming brands without paying, but actually comes from the failure of multi-national corporates catering to the needs of lower end market. Speaking of “Counterfeit Culture” in terms of economic factors in developing countries, how can the global economy influence the practices of intellectual property laws?

This week I examined several books on the political implications of the Internet in China and all of them called for studies on the intricate complexity of the relations between the Internet and political sphere. Factors such as market, state-society, culture, civil society, public opinion and international relations more or less are included in the discussion. There seems to be a consensus from the current literature that the great dynamics and complexity of social conditions should be taken into consideration rather than simply to adopt a technological determinism view that assumes the use of Internet will automatically lead to democratization. It does not sound like a profound discovery, but actually it is one of the most difficult tasks for current scholars to reveal the complexity of various relations in this field. Scholars situate themselves to different levels of interventions, some touching on political backgrounds(Tang, 2005), some historicizing the Internet (Zhou, 2005), some on policy advocacy(Kalathil, 2003). All of the books provide vivid and substantial evidence such as case studies, interviews, and surveys, but not all of them are theoretically coherent. From the books I touched on this week, I particularly recommend Zhao Yuezhi’s Communication in China and Yang Guobin’s The Power of the Internet in China.

Zhao focuses on the role of accelerated market reform and global economic integration, and she adapts the dynamics of communication system, the formation of class, social contention to a framework of “neoliberalism” in Chinese context. She does not simply transplant the western concept of neoliberalism into eastern soil, but rather she incorporates socialist legacy and promises of the state into her larger framework. It does not suggest that she expresses her optimistic attitude toward the party-state, and she spends large portion of the book stressing the problems of unequal distribution of power, social conflicts and ideological tensions. She portrays a contradictory entity in which “competing bureaucratic interests, divergent social forces, and different visions of Chinese modernity” struggle with each other.(P11). She opens debates on the relationship between market and democracy, and specifically for the Internet industry, the commercialization might contribute to open environment but also provides opportunities of control and monopoly.

The primary reason that makes Zhao’s and Yang’s works distinctive to other books is that they have a consistent framework or key concept to address the complexity and dynamics of Chinese online sphere. Zhao locates herself in market economy of China as mentioned above, and Yang examines the contentious character of Chinese online sphere through “muti-interactionism”. He foregrounds online activism in interaction with state power, culture, the market, civil society and transnationalism. His approach moves beyond the structured analysis of different factors in social science studies, and what draws me great interest is that he expands his argument to cultural characteristics of contentious discourses on the Internet. His analysis on the processes of symbolic use of rituals, practices, and power of narratives is another feature that distinguishes from other works.

Other forces that are shaping our understanding of the Chinese political online sphere and are frequently analyzed in scholarly books include the informationalizaion as economic gain(Tai, 2006), the concept of civil society in China (Tai, 2006), the fractured control on the Internet (Kalathil, 2003), e-governance (Kalathil, 2003), historical forces (Zhou, 2005) and so on. Kalathil’s Open Network, Closed Regimes was not specifically written on China but there is one chapter that captured many interesting and important aspects of Chinese politics in relation with democracy. For example he argues that our understanding of the role of government in the online sphere should not be simplified to suppression of the opposite opinions, and he points out the actions of building up a transparent government through the Internet can increase the accountability of the authoritarian regime. At the end, he proposes that the over use of “conventional wisdom” might result in improper international policy. Zhou also criticizes the taken for granted paradigm that the Internet democratizes society, but he made an interesting intervention to support his argument. He compares the different historical periods when the telegraph and the Internet emerged. In the beginning of these two mediums, their potentialities are not fully adopted or regulated, so it creates opportunities of political participation, and also anxieties from the regime. He mentioned the nationalism in both periods legitimized the political engagement. Tai discusses what the concept of civil society is like in Chinese context, and he also embraced a full dimensional view, but it is hard to follow the linkage between his equilibrium analysis and concrete empirical cases. Tang starts his book from reviewing social backgrounds such as Confucius thinking in modern China, communist tradition, open up market, and current mixture of these traditions. He tries to locate the implications of the Internet use into these social environments, but it seems to be an ambitious plan which requires more in-depth analysis and consistent framework.

Kalathil, S., & Boas, T. C. (2003). Open networks, closed regimes: the impact of the Internet on authoritarian rule. Carnegie Endowment.
Tang, W. (2005). Public opinion and political change in China. Stanford University Press.
Zhou, Y. (2006). Historicizing online politics: telegraphy, the Internet, and political participation in China. Stanford University Press.
Tai, Z. (2006). The Internet in China: cyberspace and civil society. CRC Press.
Zhao, Y. (2008). Communication in China: political economy, power, and conflict. Rowman & Littlefield.
Yang, G. (2009). The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. Columbia University Press.