New Media Practices in China: Youth Patterns, Processes, and Politics
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), 406–436 1932–8036/20110406 New Media Practices in China: Youth Patterns, Processes, and Politics CARA WALLIS Texas A&M University This article examines the dynamics of new media in China with an emphasis on youth uses and practices. While much attention has been devoted to the government’s regime of censorship and control, this review takes a cultural approach, drawing from a range of academic and popular sources to examine how various practices, discourses, relationships, and representations have been articulated to new media technologies in China. After providing background on China’s demographic and telecommunications landscape, the discussion covers networked community and identity, gaming, networked public sphere and civic engagement, and new media prosumption. The review shows that diverse new media practices emerge in China within the tensions and contradictions of the government’s desire to simultaneously expand new media technologies and control what are perceived as “harmful” influences. Within a highly commercialized and more liberalized sociocultural environment, new media technologies have opened up new spaces for multiple modes of expression, and as such, they are constitutive of complex processes of social change in China. In early 2008, scandalous photos of Hong Kong star Edison Chen, posing with various actresses, flooded the Chinese Internet. Labeled “sexy photo gate,” it was followed in March by “text-message gate,” when a deluge of spam SMS flooded the inboxes of millions of China’s mobile phone customers. Preceding and following these incidents have been numerous “gates,” involving everything from a photo-shopped picture of a rare tiger, to tainted food products, to compromised news anchors, to promiscuous Chinese teenagers. These disparate events, which were discussed, debated, and—in some cases—debunked online and off, speak volumes not only about the growing pervasiveness of new media in China, but also about the dramatic changes that have taken place in the country since the government’s policy of “reform and Cara Wallis: [email protected] Date submitted: 2009–11–13 1 I am thankful to Mimi Ito and Heather Horst for giving me the opportunity to participate in the New Media and International Contexts working group sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, from which this article emerged. I also thank two anonymous reviewers at IJoC and Heather Horst for their helpful comments on this article. Copyright © 2011 (Cara Wallis). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org. International Journal of Communication 5 (2011) New Media Practices in China 407 opening” began in the late 1970s. Over the last three decades, rapid urbanization, marketization, and globalization, as well as a policy emphasis on “informatization” and a degree of media liberalization, have ushered in new values, life opportunities, and modes of being in the world for China’s 1.3 billion people. In the midst of such transformation, through a “compromise legitimacy,” the Communist Party has promised to deliver economic growth and “a relatively comfortable lifestyle” in exchange for “self discipline” by ordinary citizens in matters of social or political dissent (Lu, 2000). Since 2004, the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership has sought to construct a “socialist harmonious society,” and since 2006, to build a “socialist new countryside” to address increasing societal unrest and economic disparity (Zhao, 2008). The diffusion of new media technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones has become an important part of both realizing and upsetting these goals. The government has invested heavily in telecommunications infrastructure as a means of spurring on development and modernization, yet it is also wary of what it perceives as harmful influences—moral, political, social—that are spread through such technologies. Certain online content and Web sites have always been banned, but modes of censorship intensified at the end of 2008 and throughout 2009 and 2010, as thousands of Web sites, both foreign and domestic, were shut down for having “pornography” and “vulgarity,” which appeared to many observers to be umbrella terms for politically sensitive content. However, in contrast to many Western scholars’ focus on whether the Internet will democratize China or solidify the state’s authoritarian hold, most everyday users are not overly concerned with such issues and, in fact, support some form of censorship (Damm, 2007; Guo, 2007). And while the Internet and cell phones certainly circulate viewpoints and feelings that subvert the official discourse, the government has been quite adept at using these technologies to maintain its hegemony. In the context of such tensions and transformations, this article seeks to capture the dynamism of new media practices in China, particularly among youth and young adults. To do so, I draw from published academic work across a range of disciplines in English and Chinese, though more consideration is given to research in English, since recent meta-analyses have shown that, in much Chinese-language new media research, little attention is paid to cultural issues, and theory-based research is rare (Kluver & Yang, 2005; Wei, 2009). I also rely on Chinese government surveys, marketing analyses, and popular sources, as well as my own research over the last several years.2 This article does not purport to critique the “state of the field” of academic scholarship on new media in China. Rather, through putting these various pieces together—that is, by “mapping the assemblage” of new media use—my goal is to examine how different practices, discourses, relationships, and representations are articulated—or linked—to new media technologies within China’s contemporary sociocultural context (Slack & Wise, 2005). These articulations are at times competing and contradictory—such as when new media simultaneously invoke tradition and moral panics—and they reveal the complex, contingent, and mutually constitutive relationship between culture and technology. Until recently, much research on the Chinese Internet has focused primarily on governmental control or infrastructure development (Kluver & Yang, 2005). However, this obsession with censorship obscures investigation into many of the important social transformations 2 With the tremendously fast pace of change in Chinese society in general and new media in particular, marketers are often best informed about trends that then become areas of scholarly research. 408 Cara Wallis International Journal of Communication 5 (2011) that are occurring in China in tandem with the diffusion of new media (Damm, 2007; Tsui, 2005; Yang, 2009). In the following section, I first set the context by providing background on relevant demographic information and telecommunications development and standards. I then discuss new media practices through four broad themes: networked community and identity, gaming, networked public sphere and civic engagement, and new media prosumption. These themes provide an analytical framework for understanding new media use at the individual, peer group, and collective levels as these arise within cultural norms and institutional structures, yet clearly, various practices and discourses overlap across realms.3 I conclude by discussing implications and outlining directions for future research. At the outset, it must be noted that the field of Chinese new media scholarship is vast and continuously growing, and this article is not intended to be exhaustive. Rather, the focus is on users located primarily in urban areas, and censorship, policy, and economic issues are addressed only to the extent that they influence what appear to be key emergent social practices and discourses.4 Demographic and Telecommunications Context Demographic Data China has about 1.3 billion people, accounting for one fifth of the total world population, and those aged 29 and under comprise roughly 40% of the total population (National Bureau of Statistics, 2008). Due to China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1979, nearly all of China’s urban youth have grown up without siblings. Because they enjoy the attention of their parents, as well as doting grandparents, they are often called “little emperors” who are spoiled and do not know how to “eat bitterness” (chi ku). However, these youth also face tremendous pressure, as huge expectations are often placed on their shoulders in terms of academic performance and future professional success. Nearly all urban youth graduate from high school, and many go on to higher education. In the countryside, the situation is quite different. Many rural families are larger, and rural youth are often disadvantaged compared to their urban peers, particularly in terms of material standard of living, access to quality education, and future opportunities. Most “go out to labor” (waichu dagong) in urban areas after finishing middle school or part of high school. Because of their rural hukou, or household registration (a system that has been severely eroded but not completely eliminated as a result of the reforms), in the city, they face discrimination and exploitation. In recent years, however, even college-educated urban youth have had a hard time in the job market, particularly those who have relocated to larger cities like Beijing to find work.5 In 2009, an estimated 6 million university graduates joined the millions who were already unemployed (Rosen,