Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in China" (2010)

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln The hinC a Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012 China Beat Archive 2010 Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State- Society Relations in China Ying Zhu University of New York, College of Staten Island Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/chinabeatarchive Part of the Asian History Commons, Asian Studies Commons, Chinese Studies Commons, and the International Relations Commons Zhu, Ying, "Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in China" (2010). The China Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012. 710. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/chinabeatarchive/710 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the China Beat Archive at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in The hinC a Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012 by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in China February 17, 2010 in Media, movies by The China Beat | 4 comments This essay is based on the script of a talk Ying Zhu gave at Google’s New York offices on February 12, 2010. Sections in bold were not part of the original talk, but have been added by the authors to tease out some of the issues that were left without further elaboration due to time constraints. By Ying Zhu and Bruce Robinson Editor’s note: This piece originally ran with Ying Zhu listed as its sole author. After it appeared, Ying Zhu informed us that it should be described as a co-authored commentary, in recognition of the extraordinary contribution to it by Bruce Robinson, with whom she had collaborated closely on a related project; we have followed her wishes; and both Ying Zhu and China Beat ask that in further attributions or discussion both authors be equally credited for this work. I have recently been reading new books about China with titles like What Does China Think? and How China’s Leaders Think: The Inside Story of China’s Reform and What This Means for the Future — good books that give us genuinely valuable insight into the thinking of many of China’s leading political and intellectual lights. But what they make me think is that we may not be thinking enough about what Chinese society thinks, so I would like to take the opportunity to discuss the concept of China’s emerging “critical masses,” and the power that the critical masses have in shaping the future of China. I would like to propose that the Chinese people are more and more the masters of their own destiny, and maybe yours. As you know, sometime in 2008 China surpassed the U.S. as the country with the largest number of Internet users. That’s the same year that it became the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. It is also the United States’ leading creditor, owning, by most accounts, over 1 trillion dollars of U.S. debt, and it will soon pass Japan as the world’s second largest economy. So as Americans, as citizens of the world, and especially as Googlers, you all have something riding on China’s choices now and in the future, even without the current controversy. And speaking of that controversy, naturally, I should factor Google’s recent adventures in China into the overall scheme of my take on Chinese media and society. I want to say first that I am thrilled to be here at the reigning search engine of “Life, the Universe and Everything.” Thrilled, but I might also say “in thrall,” since in my line of work it has become nearly impossible to operate without constant resort to the little magic box that transforms keywords into the raw material of articles and books. Maybe you could get it to do the writing too, in addition todating? Once, of course, there was no Google. Back in the days before Google, say 30 years or so “BG,” communications scholars used to give too little credit to audiences, who they regarded as mostly passive recipients of messages contained in a one way flow of mass mediated communication. We are repeating the same pattern today in paying too much attention to China’s leaders and intellectuals, and to the surface content of media messages, without considering how Chinese audiences use and interpret media and produce their own mediated information. We also tend to emphasize government control and censorship of the media and the Internet, citing the “Great Firewall of China” without considering either the real extent of information available, or what people do with it. We are not alone in this. The Chinese state may also be giving audiences too little credit, persisting in a deep-rooted conviction that national unity and political stability can only be maintained through paternalistic management of culture and information. What emerges in China is a commercialized and vastly expanding information society. We’ve heard about censorship and crackdowns; but as you know much better than I do, people who want to DO find means to bypass the Great Firewall. Vigorous public discussion and networking on the Internet and via social media have become central features of contemporary Chinese society. So, for the fans ofThe X-Files, I don’t know about the “truth,” but the information is out there, even in China. And people do process information on their own terms, incorporating a variety of resources, which leads to the “Critical Masses” concept. Mao began his revolution with rhetorical paeans to the masses. The masses of Mao’s time, however, were mostly shut off from the outside world, and were entirely at the mercy of a hyper-authoritarian state. That reality has been utterly annihilated in post-Mao China by the twin detonation of colossal economic development and globalization. China’s masses are now better off, better educated and much more aware of and sophisticated about their own world and the world outside China. No longer isolated, nameless masses, they are critical masses in these three related senses: “critical” to the tenure of a one-party state that is no longer in a position to easily put down a popular rebellion; “critical” in the sense that they identify problems and demand, and indeed influence state action; and “critical” in the sense that they constitute ready networks of audience members and information consumers with the potential to be moved to collective action by a catalyzing event or issue that transforms passive association into active participation in groups of like-minded citizens expressing their passion in forums ranging from online debates to street-level demonstrations or even extended political or cultural campaigns. Originally a scientific term, critical mass doesn’t mean “mass” in the sense of huge numbers. The “critical” prefix is a qualifier. It means “just enough to achieve some certain effect in some particular situation.” So not masses in the Maoist sense of revolutionary masses. In fact, the effect of China’s development and mediatization is that China’s “masses” have been extensively de-massified into a much more pluralistic society of people divided along socio-economic lines into smaller interest groups. Local interest group actions constitute the bulk of China’s recent critical mass activities such as the taxi driver strikes and localized and short-term protests about job losses and property confiscations. A recent article in The Guardian reports that rebellious Chinese netizens have built imitation websites of both Google and YouTube as a protest against the state’s regulatory censorship of Google. As reported in this article, YouTubecn.com offers videos from the real YouTube, which is blocked in China. The Google imitation is called Goojje and includes a plea for Google not to leave China. The separate projects went up within a day of each other in mid-January, just after Google’s threat to leave China. The issue of copyright infringement aside, the sites enable access to sensitive topics in tightly controlled China. Videos on social unrest in China can be found on the YouTube imitator, which is in English. Quoted in theGuardian article, the founder of the YouTube knockoff, Li Senhe, told the Christian Science Monitor “I did this as a public service.” It was reported that some Chinese quickly welcomed the fake YouTube site but doubted that it would last long. Regardless, the appearance of the sites is a typical instance of creative and public questioning on the Internet. Writing for Financial Times, James Kynge describes “the last crazy days of Google.cn,” as Chinese netizens, in anticipation of an expected crackdown, have gone “crazy” surfing the Google China site because it has allowed, for the first time, uncensored searches in Chinese. “I’ve been doing all sorts of crazy searches, really distracting myself from my work,” one netizen as quoted by saying, “I’ve done Tiananmen Square, the love affairs of national leaders, the corruption of leaders’ children. Everything.” No doubt the surreptitious joys of this user are shared by many like-minded “netizens.” However, the most recent information I gathered from China is that some of these links are leading nowhere, as they are obviously blocked by the Chinese censors. A similar case is the odd fortune of James Cameron’s sci-fi eco-fable, Avatar. The film quickly won the hearts and minds of audiences in China, who rose to Hollywood’s defense when the state abruptly removed Avatar from 2-D screening rooms to make way for the domestic New Years blockbuster, Confucius. This has resulted in a popular anti-Confucius outcry, which is about to push Confucius, a “main-melody” film, off China’s screens.

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