The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online

By Guobin Yang

Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has revolutionized popular expression in China, enabling users to organize, protest, and influence public opinion in unprecedented ways. Guobin Yang's pioneering study maps an innovative range of contentious forms and practices linked to Chinese cyberspace, delineating a nuanced and dynamic image of the Chinese Internet as an arena for creativity, community, conflict, and control. Like many other contemporary protest forms in China and the world, Yang argues, Chinese online activism derives its methods and vitality from multiple and intersecting forces, and state efforts to constrain it have only led to more creative acts of subversion. Transnationalism and the tradition of protest in China's incipient civil society provide cultural and social resources to online activism. Even Internet businesses have encouraged contentious activities, generating an unusual synergy between commerce and activism. Yang's book weaves these strands together to create a vivid story of immense social change, indicating a new era of informational politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780231513142

Guobin Yang

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Center on Digital Culture and Society and serves as deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016) and The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009).

Book preview

THE POWER OF THE INTERNET IN CHINA

CONTEMPORARY ASIA IN THE WORLD

CONTEMPORARY ASIA IN THE WORLD

David C. Kang and Victor D. Cha, Editors

This series aims to address a gap in the public-policy and scholarly discussion of Asia. It seeks to promote books and studies that are on the cutting edge of their respective disciplines or in the promotion of multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary research but that are also accessible to a wider readership. The editors seek to showcase the best scholarly and public-policy arguments on Asia from any field, including politics, history, economics, and cultural studies.

Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia, Victor D. Cha, 2008

∎GUOBIN YANG ∎

THE POWER OF THE INTERNET IN CHINA

∎ CITIZEN ACTIVISM ONLINE ∎

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2009 Columbia University Press

Paperback edition, 2011

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51314-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yang, Guobin.

The power of the internet in China : citizen activism online / Guobin Yang.

p. cm. — (Contemporary Asia in the world)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14420-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-14421-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-51314-2 (e-book)

1. Political participation—Technological innovations—China.

2. Internet—Political aspects—China.

3. Internet—Social aspects—China. 4. Internet—China.

I. Title. II. Series.

JQ1516.Y35  2009

303.48′330951—dc22        2008049149

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Lan and Yufeng

CONTENTS

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Online Activism in an Age of Contention

2 The Politics of Digital Contention

3 The Rituals and Genres of Contention

4 The Changing Style of Contention

5 The Business of Digital Contention

6 Civic Associations Online

7 Utopian Realism in Online Communities

8 Transnational Activism Online

Conclusion: China’s Long Revolution

Afterword to the Paperback Edition

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

TABLES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book had its origin in a conversation with Craig Calhoun on May 11, 2000. I had just defended my dissertation (on Red Guard activism), and Craig, my adviser, was taking me out for lunch. When we discussed my future research agenda, Craig noted the potential role of the Internet in social activism in China. The idea stuck with me, and the intersection of media and social activism has since been a central part of my research. Ever since he inducted me into sociology in 1994, Craig has been the most inspiring, supportive, and generous teacher and mentor. He guides and reads my writings, including this book manuscript, with utter enthusiasm and generously gives his insights and time. I owe him my deepest gratitude.

I have accumulated numerous other intellectual debts over the years. Andy Nathan read the manuscript and gave me valuable comments. Elizabeth Perry made careful and detailed comments on several chapters. Dorothy Solinger sent me pages of her notes on the introduction. Kevin O’Brien made me think hard about online activism at a workshop he organized in Berkeley in 2006. I also benefited from discussions with James Jasper, Michael Schudson, and the late Chuck Tilly. Jeff Goodwin, David Meyer, Sidney Tarrow, King-To Yeung, and Dingxin Zhao offered comments on an earlier paper.

I was fortunate to have begun my teaching career in the sociology department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where Hagen Koo, Patricia Steinhoff, and Eldon Wegner were most kind and supportive. Roger Ames, Ron Brown, Richard Dubanoski, Dru Gladney, Kiyoshi Ikeda, David Johnson, Reg Kwok, Fred Lau, Cindy Ning, Britt Robillard, Daniel Tschudi, Bill Wood, Stephen Yeh, and Ming-Bao Yue gave me generous support. Among the graduate students, David Blythe, Jin-young Choi, Jinzhao Li, Jane Yamashiro, Ryoko Yamamoto, and Heng-hao Chang cheered me on.

A summer faculty fellowship in 2001 from the Social Science Research Council ushered me into an intellectual community of experts on global governance and new information technologies. Jonathan Bach, Robert Keohane, Robert Latham, Saskia Sassen, and Ernest Wilson III, among others, offered guidance.

I gratefully acknowledge the support of a Writing and Research Grant (No. 02-76177-000-GSS) from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2003 and 2004. At the Wilson Center, I benefited enormously from the enthusiastic support of Bob Hathaway, Jennifer Turner, Joe Brinkley, and Ching Kwan Lee. The numerous conversations I had with Ching Kwan shaped the focus of this book.

This project took me on many research journeys to China. Dai Jianzhong introduced me to many Chinese sociologists and gave me indispensable help. I am also indebted to Han Heng, Li Junhui, Lu Hongyan, Li Lulu, Min Dahong, Shen Yuan, Shi Zengzhi, Wang Rui, Wang Yongchen, Wu Jing, Yang Hao, Yuan Ruijun, Zhang Jing (Rona), Zhang Kangkang, and Zhang Zhe. I am most grateful to all the interviewees who shared their time and experience.

Jeff Goodwin, Doug Guthrie, Edward Lehman, and Hyun Ok Park have supported my work since my graduate student days at NYU. Judith Blau, Deborah Davis, Judith Farquhar, Tom Gold, James Hevia, Andrew Walder, Jeffrey Wassertrom, Ban Wang, and Gang Yue gave me encouragement along the way. Helena Flam, Kelly Moore, Steven Pfaff, Francesco Polletta, and Gilda Zwerman helped in many ways.

The various workshops and conferences I attended at many different institutions have been sources of inspiration. For their invitation and hospitality, I thank Sandra Braman, Cynthia Brokaw, Katherine Carlitz, Joseph Chan, Rodney Chu, Robert Culp, Deborah Gould, Eddie Kuo, Peter Hayes, You-tien Hsing, Ching Kwan Lee, Cheng Li, Xinmin Liu, Lü Xinyu, Thomas Malaby, John Markoff, Garret McCormick, Kevin O’Brien, Monroe Price, Jack Qiu, Christopher Reed, Shi-xu, Nicolai Volland, Cindy Wong, Ming Xia, Xu Lanjun, Yang Boxu, Yongnian Zheng, and Yongming Zhou. Fellow participants offered comments and other forms of support, including Yongshun Cai, Paul DiMaggio, Leopoldina Fortunati, Randy Kluver, Patrick Law, Bingchun Meng, Zhongdang Pan, Wanning Sun, Stefaan Verhulst, Guoguang Wu, Xiaoling Zhang, and Yuezhi Zhao.

A sabbatical leave from Barnard College in the 2007–2008 academic year gave me the time to complete the book. During the leave, I spent several months as a senior visiting research fellow at the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore. I thank the support of Wang Gungwu, John Wong, Dali Yang, and Lian Wee Li, and the fellowship of Bo Zhiyue, Chen Gang, Michael Heng, Jing Huang, Lam Peng Er, Li He, Sarah Tong, Fei-ling Wang, Yang Mu, and Zhao Litao. A Lee Hysan Visiting Scholarship took me to the University Services Center of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the summer of 2008, where, outside the archives, I enjoyed conversations with Ai Xiaoming, Deng Yanhua, Baogang Guo, Li Lianjiang, Li Yonggang, Stanely Rosen, Sun Peidong, Wu Fengshi, Xiao Jin, Xu Jianniu, and Zhao Yufang.

I gratefully acknowledge funding support from Barnard College and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University. Collegial support at Barnard and Columbia has been essential. Rachel McDermott provides guidance with unparalleled kindness. Special thanks are due to Myron Cohen, Wiebke Denecke, Carol Gluck, Bob Hymes, Dorothy Ko, Eugenia Lean, Lydia Liu, Xiaobo Lü, Debra Minkoff, Max Moerman, Andy Nathan, Wei Shang, Tomi Suzuki, and Matti Zelin for their kindness and support. I am also grateful to Peter Bearman, Tom DiPrete, Gil Eyal, Dana Fisher, Priscilla Ferguson, and Jonathan Rieder. Waichi Ho and Mary Missirian gave me superb professional help. Among the many inspiring students I have worked with are Nick Frisch, Wei Wei Hsing, Lauren Hou, Qiuyun Song, Teddes Tsang, Pin Wang, Xianghong Wang, Jing Yu, Enhua Zhang, and Diana Xiaojie Zhou.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Anne Routon, my editor at the Columbia University Press, for her enthusiastic support, encouragement, and sound advice.

All these individuals and institutions have helped in the writing and research of this book. I am deeply indebted. I alone am responsible for any shortcomings.

Chapter 6 incorporates my article How Do Chinese Civic Associations Respond to the Internet: Findings from a Survey, which appeared in The China Quarterly, no. 189 (2007): 122–43. I thank the Cambridge University Press for permission to use it.

I am blessed with having two extended families. In Beijing, my parents, sisters Hongbin and Libin, and brother Xinbin are always there for me. In Jilin, my wife Lan’s family is always supportive. Above all, I owe most profoundly to the unconditional love, understanding, and support of Lan and my son Yufeng. They are my sunshine. I apologize to them for my absent-mindedness and frequent and long absences and thank them for their good humor and loving hearts. To Lan and Yufeng, with gratitude and love, I dedicate this book.

∎INTRODUCTION ∎

Of all the aspects of Chinese Internet culture, the most important and yet least understood is its contentious character. Media stories and survey reports have perpetuated two misleading images of the Chinese Internet: one of control and the other of entertainment. These two images create the misconception that because of governmental Internet control, Chinese Internet users do nothing but play. The real struggles of the Chinese people are thus ignored, and the radical nature of Chinese Internet culture is dismissed. Yet, not only is Internet entertainment not apolitical, but political control itself is an arena of struggle. Contention about all other domains of Chinese life fills the Chinese cyberspace and surges out of it. Is it still possible to understand social change in China without understanding the popular struggles linked to the Internet?

This book is about these Internet-related struggles, which I will call online activism. My thesis is that online activism derives its forms and dynamics from a broad spectrum of converging and contending forces, technological, cultural, social, and economic, as well as political. It must therefore be understood as the result of the interaction of multiple forces. The dynamics are multidimensional. For this reason, analyzing online activism will both reveal the new forms, dynamics, and consequences of popular contention in the age of the Internet and will shed light on general patterns and dynamics of change in contemporary China. I show how Chinese people have created a world of carnival, community, and contention in and through cyberspace and how in this process they have transformed personhood, society, and politics. This book is about people’s power in the Internet age.

China achieved full-function connectivity to the Internet in 1994. By June 2008, the number of Internet users had reached 253 million. In over ten years, about a quarter of the urban population had gained Internet access. In both work and leisure, people depend on it more and more. The result is the rise of a dynamic Chinese Internet culture. This is a creative culture full of humor, play, and irreverence. It is also participatory and contentious. Its bulletin-board systems (BBSs), online communities, and blogs are among the most active in the global cybersphere. Fully a quarter of all Chinese Internet users frequent BBS forums. The most unorthodox, imaginative, and subversive ideas can be found in Chinese cyberspace. Authority of all kinds is subject to doubt and ridicule. Ordinary people engage in a broad range of political action and find a new sense of self, community, and empowerment. All this forms a sharp contrast to the official newspapers and television channels, where power and authority continue to be narrated in drab tones and visualized in pompous images, so as to be worshipped. And all this Internet culture is burgeoning under conditions of increasing political control.

Scholarly works have explored many aspects of this Internet culture. There are important studies of Internet control, e-government, cybernationalism, and online participation. Some analysts have argued, for example, that Internet control has been tightening in China. Others have studied the formation of online literary communities. Still others have explored Internet-based political action. Yet these different aspects remain disconnected in current studies. The power, dynamics, and contradictions of Chinese Internet culture remain clouded. Why is popular contention occurring under conditions of growing control? How do netizens and civil-society groups resist and challenge Internet control? What cultural forms do online activism take on? How do people build online communities? What is the role of Internet businesses in all this? What is the power of online activism as a force of social change?

These questions cannot be answered separately and in isolation from broader social and historical processes. The creativity, community, contention, and control in Chinese cyberspace are interrelated features. Online community is both a social basis and an outcome of contention. Contention challenges control and adapts to it. Popular contention and the search for community are processes of human agency and creativity. And of course, Chinese Internet culture is not just about the Internet. It mirrors larger trends. The creativity, community, contention, and control in Chinese cyberspace are evident in other areas of contemporary life. The Internet revolution parallels the expansion of culture, community, and citizen activism beyond cyberspace. I show how Chinese citizens, within the limits of objective social conditions, have expanded culture, community, and political participation in the information age. Collectively, these efforts make up China’s new citizen activism. The story I tell is about the interfacing of this new citizen activism with the Internet. It is a story of social change told through the lens of online activism.

Online Activism: A Tale of Identity and Contention

Online activism refers to contentious activities associated with the use of the Internet and other new communication technologies. It can be based more or less on the Internet. On the one hand, the Internet is increasingly integrated with conventional forms of locality-specific protest. For example, it is used to mobilize offline protest events. In many cases, however, contention takes place in cyberspace. It may spill offline, but its central stage of action is the Internet. Contention is a matter of degree. Among the less contentious activities are the social and political discussions and debates that take place online daily. More contentious action includes Web campaigns, signature petitions, outright verbal protests, and online direct action such as virtual sit-ins and hacktivism.

Activism is often taken to mean contentious political activities. Yet contention is not limited to the political realm. Activism can take cultural and social forms without being any less contentious.¹ Many cultural and social activities in modern Chinese history were just as political as political movements were. The misty poetry movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a literary movement, yet it was politically subversive. Such is also the case with Cui Jian’s rock-and-roll music.² Nor does activism necessarily have explicitly political goals. Often, people engage in cultural contention to express or oppose values, morality, lifestyles, and identities.

One of the fascinating aspects about online activism in China is precisely its ambiguous nature. Sometimes it takes the form of protest; at other times, it borders on dissent but is not clearly so. In the words of Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, it is boundary spanning.³ It crosses between the legitimate and the illegitimate. At still other times, online discussions are not meant to be political but may be interpreted as such by government authorities. Thus, following the broad conceptualization of activism in recent social-movement scholarship, I understand online activism to be any form of Internet-based collective action that promotes, contests, or resists change.

Online activism in China touches on all imaginable issues, from consumer-rights defense to sexual orientation, from protests against harms inflicted on vulnerable individuals and disadvantaged groups to the expression and assertion of new lifestyles and identities. These issues fall roughly into two types. One consists of struggles for recognition and against discrimination. As I will discuss in detail in chapter 1, this type is about identity politics. The other type involves struggles against oppression and exploitation rooted in grave material grievances. These two types of struggles resemble the protests against discrimination and protests of desperation among the workers studied by Ching Kwan Lee.⁴ Yet while for Lee, the protests against discrimination are mainly rooted in material grievances about wage nonpayment, the struggles for recognition in online activism also focus significantly on nonmaterial concerns. Of course, this is an analytical distinction. In reality, most cases of activism involve overlapping concerns and claims, both material and nonmaterial. There is no pure division between material interests and nonmaterial concerns.

The story of Zhang Xianzhu and other hepatitis-B carriers is emblematic of Chinese online struggles for recognition.⁵ On November 10, 2003, Zhang Xianzhu, a member of a BBS forum run by hepatitis-B carriers, sued the Human Resources Department of Wuhu’s municipal government in the province of Anhui for discrimination in its recruitment of civil servants. Aged twenty-five, Zhang was first out of thirty candidates competing for one civil-service position. But on September 20, 2003, after three months of ordeal, Zhang received a notice from the Human Resources Department that he was not eligible for hiring because his physical exam results showed that he was a hepatitis-B carrier. Devastated, Zhang shared his story with members of the hepatitis-B forum. He received immediate emotional and moral support. He took forum members’ advice and took his case to court. The BBS forum launched a campaign to aid Zhang’s cause. The moderator of its newly opened rights-defense forum found a well-known professor of law from Sichuan University to appear as Zhang’s defense lawyer. Other members contacted newspapers and television stations to seek media coverage of Zhang’s case. The forum also set up a bank account for people to donate money for Zhang. On April 2, 2004, the local court ruled that the Human Resources Department did not have cause to cancel Zhang’s candidacy. On April 19, 2004, the intermediate court rejected the appeal of the Human Resources Department. This court ruling marked the victory of the first-ever legal action against hepatitis-B discrimination in job placement, and it had far-reaching reverberations. In August 2004, the Ministry of Personnel and Ministry of Health removed articles about hepatitis-B from the national Physical Exam Criteria for Civil Servants Recruitment, making hepatitis-B carriers eligible for civil-service jobs. The victory of the case showed that people could use the Internet not only to provide and seek social support but also to mobilize and organize collective action. Since then, the hepatitis-B carriers’ antidiscrimination campaign has grown into a full-blown national movement. The movement still relies heavily on the Internet, but the social networks that have evolved from the Internet forums have become an important social basis.

The exposure and contention about slave labor in the illegally operating kilns in the province of Shanxi is a story of struggles against oppression.⁶ On May 19, 2007, the Henan television station aired a short program about the kidnapping of young boys for slave labor in the illegally operating brick kilns in Shanxi and the horrible experiences of parents trying to find their missing children. The program received attention in the province of Henan, and follow-up stories were aired in the following weeks. In Shanxi, newspapers covered the story too. Yet it was not until early June that the issue gained national media publicity, leading to the direct intervention of the central government. The transformation of this story from local news to a national issue happened because of an open letter a woman published anonymously online. The letter appeared on June 6 in the Great River Net (dahe wang), the official Web hub of Henan. By June 18, it had attracted 300,000 hits. As soon as it appeared, the letter was crossposted to Tianya.cn, one of the most popular and influential online communities in China. There it attracted an even larger number of hits for the same period: 580,000. Numerous responses were posted. Netizens expressed shock at this case of twenty-first-century slavery. They demanded the punishment of both local kiln owners and the police and government personnel who helped them cover up the case. Many people proposed specific avenues of action: building QQ-based mass-mailing lists to keep the communication going,⁷ establishing emergency citizen organizations to raise funds to help the parents and their abducted children, contacting international media and religious organizations to expose the affair, calling for government intervention, and so forth. In the middle of these protestations and mobilization, national newspapers, television stations, and Web hubs began to cover the case extensively, and the central government dispatched officials to Shanxi to investigate. The wave of popular contention subsided in early July with the prosecution of the key suspects.

These are just two of the many stories I will tell in the following pages. These stories are about real people and their experiences. Their experiences hinge one way or another on the Internet and other new information technologies, but they are not confined there: they often spill offline into the streets. These people are an extremely diverse and motley crowd. They are activists, dissidents, lurkers, gamers, hackers, and bloggers. They are environmentalists, nationalists, whistleblowers, feminists, and idealistic utopians. They are high-school students, college graduates, white-collar professionals, homeowners, pet owners, consumer activists, and just plain and simple wangmin—netizens. Although there are significantly fewer active participants from the rural population, rural representation cannot be summarily dismissed. As of December 2007, over 52 million (7.1 percent) members of the rural population were online. The increase in the number of Internet users in rural areas far outpaces that in urban areas, indicating that the Internet is undergoing rapid diffusion in rural China.⁸ Moreover, rural representation sometimes happens in other ways too, such as through the mediation of wired urbanites, many of whom join online activism about rural social issues. Readers may still remember the touching image of the eighty-year-old peasant woman Feng Zhen in the village of Taishi, which was widely circulated on the Internet in 2005. Holding a megaphone and with an upraised fist, Feng was pictured delivering a speech to fellow villagers who were petitioning to impeach their village head.⁹ Like powerful television images, these indirect representations have direct consequences in mobilizing online publics when they enter circulation in the Internet networks.

Multi-Interactionism: An Analytical Approach

Why has online activism been on the rise? What are its main forms and dynamics?

Existing work contains many useful insights. Many studies reveal the institutions, practices, and architecture of the political control of the Internet in China.¹⁰ Others have explored the practices of e-government, namely, the use of the Internet and other new information technologies to promote transparency and enhance governance.¹¹ Many have examined different aspects of the political, social, and cultural uses of the Internet, SMS (short message service), and mobile phones, revealing the expansion of intellectual and public discourse,¹² the formation of online literary communities,¹³ the expression of social conflicts and the empowering of marginalized groups such as migrant workers,¹⁴ the rise of cybernationalism,¹⁵ and the effect of political liberalization.¹⁶ Although many of these works touch on various issues related to online activism such as Internet control and public expression, a systematic, in-depth study focusing specifically on online activism is still lacking. Online activism has not been subject to theoretical explanation.

Online activism is a topic of great interest in the social sciences, yet most social science studies are attempts to extend established theoretical frameworks to the analysis of online activism. The typical research question is about the role of the Internet in various aspects of social movements (such as mobilization or the framing of issues). For example, one author finds from a review of existing studies that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enhanced movement mobilization by reducing costs, promoting collective identity, and creating new opportunities. ICTs have also accelerated and extended the diffusion of protest, enlarged the repertoire of contention, and facilitated the adoption of decentralized, nonhierarchical organizational forms.¹⁷ This line of research has the virtue of linking online activism to a well-established theoretical literature. Yet arguments about how ICTs have changed or not changed this or that aspect of social movements can only go so far, because they are handicapped by the unexamined assumption of technological determinism. To argue that the Internet has changed certain aspects of popular contention is to assume that technology produces its own effects.

In short, current scholarship has touched on many aspects of the Chinese Internet. Although it contains many insights, these are often isolated and disconnected. For an analysis of online activism (and of the Chinese Internet more broadly), what is needed is an approach that can capture its multidimensional dynamics. This is the approach I will propose for my study. I will call it the multi-interactionism model of online activism.

Multi-interactionism refers to the multidimensional interactions that both enable and constrain online activism. Multidimensional interaction is an increasingly important condition of social dynamics in the age of information and globalization. It involves multiple parties, and the influences go in multiple directions. For example, state political power both shapes and adjusts to online activism.

Specifically, my analytical framework will foreground online activism in interaction with (1) state power, (2) culture, (3) the market, (4) civil society, and (5) transnationalism. Online activism is a response to the grievances, injustices, and anxieties caused by the structural transformation of Chinese society. State power constrains the forms and issues of contention, but instead of preventing it from happening, it forces activists to be more creative and artful. Culture, understood as symbolic forms and practices,¹⁸ informs and constitutes online contention through the tradition and innovation of rituals and genres of contention. Business interests favor contention despite the dangers of manipulation. Civic organizations and online communities, the main force of civil society, strategically use the Internet for social change. Transnationalization expands the scale and radicalizes the forms of online activism. All this adds up to a complex picture of online activism as a central locus of social conflict and social transformation in contemporary China. The complex interactive relations may be represented as shown in figure 0.1.

This multi-interactionist perspective draws directly from recent developments in social-movement theory. Reflecting the broader intellectual trend of understanding interrelations in a complex society, social-movement theorists have begun to give more attention to relational dynamics.¹⁹ Even famed structuralists have rejected narrowly structural approaches in favor of relational and interactional dynamics. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly write:

---

FIGURE 0.1 The Multidimensional Dynamics of Online Activism

We come from a structuralist tradition. But in the course of our work on a wide variety of contentious politics in Europe and North America, we discovered the necessity of taking strategic interaction, consciousness, and historically accumulated culture into account…. We have come to think of interpersonal networks, interpersonal communication, and various forms of continuous negotiation—including the negotiation of identities—as figuring centrally in the dynamics of contention.²⁰

Whereas the relational persuasion in this articulation stresses intra-movement and interpersonal interactions, other scholars emphasize multi-institutional interactions. Elizabeth Armstrong and Mary Bernstein have proposed such a multi-institutional politics approach.²¹ They argue that the influential political-process theory, which explains social movements as the outcome of political opportunities, the mobilization of resources, and strategic framing,²² exaggerates the role of the state and underestimates other institutional factors, especially culture. They note that a multi-institutional politics approach may be particularly helpful in explaining transnational social movements, precisely because the nation-state becomes only one of multiple actors in these movements.

This new attention to multiple institutional factors is more than just a critical response to the political process model of social movement theory. Perhaps more importantly, it reflects and captures the new conditions of complexity in contemporary society. In the field of international relations, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye have characterized these new conditions with their theory of complex interdependence. The concept refers to the mutual influences among multiple actors in international transactions, such as the flow of money, goods, people, and messages across international boundaries. The emphasis is on the interactions and interdependence among multiple actors and the increased role of civil-society actors rather than the dominance of the nation-state.²³ In an update of their theory, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye take into consideration the new conditions of the information revolution. They argue that in the information age, the influence of states depends increasingly on their ability to remain credible, and nonstate actors can now challenge this ability more easily because new communication technologies give citizens better means to transmit critical information.²⁴

If international societies are becoming more complex, so is Chinese society. Indeed, the concept of multi-interactionism is useful for analyzing Chinese online activism precisely because it captures the growing complexity of contemporary Chinese society. Online activism in China is unrivalled by any other contemporary social phenomenon in that it is constituted by and constitutive of numerous political, social, cultural, economic, technological, and demographic forces at multiple levels—structural, institutional, and individual; transnational, translocal, and local. It is the point of convergence, conflict, and contestation. Online activism epitomizes these dynamic interactions.

Below, I will elaborate on the five dynamics of online activism, as shown in figure 0.1, and situate them in the main currents of theoretical literature. I start with a general discussion of the relationship between technology and society in order to clarify my basic assumptions about the study of the Internet.

Technological Determinism and Determined Technology

Assumptions of technological determinism often underlie both media stories and scholarly work about the Internet in China. Take two oft-repeated statements. For some time, it was fashionable to consider the Internet as a force of democratization. Then the tide changed and it became even more fashionable to claim that the Internet does not lead to democratization. Both statements are misguided because both draw a simple line between technology and society, omitting all the rich human experiences and institutions in between. The second, currently more fashionable statement that the Internet does not lead to democratization is in a sense even more problematic, because it both fails to see the real changes that are taking place at the grassroots level and dismisses too easily the daily experiences of millions of people in their actual engagement and encounters with the Internet.

In an initially healthy but ultimately uncritical move away from technological determinism, some scholars go to the opposite end. Rejecting technological determinism, they opt for a simple contextualism where all that matters is context and, consequently, technology itself becomes an epiphenomenon.²⁵ Raymond Williams calls this fallacy determined technology. In this view, technology becomes an effect just as simple as the cause it is assumed to be in technological determinism. Williams distinguishes between two types of technological determinism. In pure technological determinism, technology is viewed as a self-acting force which creates new ways of life. In symptomatic technological determinism, technology is a self-acting force which provides materials for new ways of life.²⁶ The first view exaggerates the role of technology, whereas the second considers technology only as accidental and marginal. Both ignore human intention, purpose, and practice.

Williams subtly joins a recognition of the centrality of technological and cultural forms in shaping reality with an emphasis on the role of real people and institutions. At a time when television was not viewed as serious culture, his pioneering study of it articulated a democratic vision about popular cultural forms. In academic studies—if not in everyday life—today’s Internet culture, including forms of online activism, is in a marginal position similar to that of television culture in the early 1970s. Although Williams retains a degree of ambivalence about television culture, he celebrates the creativity of the common people in his study of popular television forms. This is directly relevant for studies of Internet culture today.

Outside the fledgling field of Internet studies, there is thriving new historical scholarship on the development of the print media in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century China. Some scholars stress human intention rather than technological function. Joan Judge’s study of the political press in the late Qing period stresses the role of journalists and other cultural entrepreneurs, as well as the importance of discourse in promoting social change.²⁷ Christopher Reed’s work shows that entrepreneurial personalities decisively shaped the rise of a Chinese print capitalism in the late Qing and Republican Shanghai periods.²⁸ Kai-Wing Chow argues, it is not printing itself that determines how it will be used, but rather the specific attitudes of the group who come to use that technology as well as the ecological, economic, social, and political conditions under which a specific technology is developed, introduced, marketed, used, and resisted.²⁹

Whereas this perspective stresses the role of people, another focuses on texts, conventions, and cultural forms. This line of research is directly informed by Michael Schudson’s work on the American news, where he argues that the power of the media lies mainly in its power to provide the forms and conventions of expression.³⁰ In her study of the newspaper Shenbao, Barbara Mittler focuses on text rather than context, treating the newspaper as a cultural phenomenon, as a novel form and collection of writings introduced to the Chinese during the nineteenth century.³¹ She argues, as a text, the press acquired considerable symbolic power by adapting to Chinese styles of writing, by speaking ‘in the words of the sages’ and in the pose of the remonstrating official, and by exploiting the authority of the Chinese court gazette.³² For her, Shenbao is a polyphonic text in the Bakhtinian sense: a phenomenon multiform in style and in speech and voice, an accumulation of several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often situated on different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls.³³

If a single newspaper one hundred years ago produced polyphonic texts and Bakhtinian heteroglossia, what does this mean for understanding the endless flow of multimedia discourse on the Internet today? How does Williams’s democratic vision about popular cultural forms inform studies of the Internet? Part of the project of this book is to reveal the democratic aspirations of the common people in the ways in which they produce, receive, and respond to critical, contentious discourses on the Internet. A central argument I will develop in chapter 3 is that online contention is constituted in the process of the creative use of contentious rituals, practices, and speech genres. Internet activism draws upon the traditions of popular contention in modern China while developing its own cultural characteristics.

The Dialectics of Power and Resistance

In the wake of the 1989 student movement, studies of popular protests flourished and then subsided as scholars turned their attention to the dazzling array of new developments since the 1990s. It is only in the recent few years that, with the rise of new waves of protests, there has been a strong revival of interest in this area. New works have revealed the new mosaic of popular contention in China.³⁴ There have appeared studies of rural protests,