Social Media in Industrial China

SOCIAL MEDIA Described as the biggest migration in human history, Xinyuan Wang an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the IN migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’. SOCIAL I NDU Wang’s fascinating study explores the full range of preconceptions commonly held about Chinese people – S MEDIA their relationship with education, with family, with politics, TRIAL with ‘home’ – and argues why, for this vast population, it is time to reassess what we think we know about contemporary China and the evolving role of social media. C HINA XINYUAN WANG is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology at UCL. She obtained her MSc from IN UCL’s Digital Anthropology Programme. She is an artist in Chinese traditional painting and calligraphy. She translated (Horst and Miller Eds.) Digital Anthropology into Chinese and contributed a piece on Digital Anthropology in China. INDUSTRIAL Wang CHINA COVER DESIGN: Rawshock design Free open access versions available from www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press £35.00 Social Media in Industrial China Social Media in Industrial China Xinyuan Wang First published in 2016 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Xinyuan Wang, 2016 Images © Xinyuan Wang, 2016 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ ISBN: 978– 1– 910634– 62– 2 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 910634– 63– 9 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 910634– 64– 6 (PDF) ISBN: 978– 1– 910634– 65– 3 (epub) ISBN: 978– 1– 910634– 66– 0 (mobi) ISBN: 978–1–911307–30–3 (html) DOI: 10.14324/ 111.9781910634646 Introduction to the series Why We Post This book is one of a series of 11 titles. Nine are monographs devoted to specific field sites (including this one) in Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey – they will be published in 2016– 17. The series also includes a comparative book about all our findings, published to accompany this title, and a book which contrasts the visuals that people post on Facebook in the English field site with those on our Trinidadian field site. When we tell people that we have written nine monographs about social media around the world, all using the same chapter headings (apart from Chapter 5), they are concerned about potential repetition. However, if you decide to read several of these books (and we very much hope you do), you will see that this device has been helpful in showing the precise opposite. Each book is as individual and distinct as if it were on an entirely different topic. This is perhaps our single most important finding. Most studies of the internet and social media are based on research methods that assume we can generalise across different groups. We look at tweets in one place and write about ‘Twitter’. We conduct tests about social media and friendship in one population, and then write on this topic as if friendship means the same thing for all populations. By presenting nine books with the same chapter headings, you can judge for yourselves what kinds of generalisations are, or are not, possible. Our intention is not to evaluate social media, either positively or negatively. Instead the purpose is educational, providing detailed evi- dence of what social media has become in each place and the local con- sequences, including local evaluations. Each book is based on 15 months of research during which time the anthropologists lived, worked and interacted with people in the local language. Yet they differ from the dominant tradition of writing social science books. Firstly they do not engage with the academic literatures on social media. It would be highly repetitive to have the same v discussions in all nine books. Instead discussions of these literatures are to be found in our comparative book, How the World Changed Social Media. Secondly these monographs are not comparative, which again is the primary function of this other volume. Thirdly, given the immense interest in social media from the general public, we have tried to write in an accessible and open style. This means we have adopted a mode more common in historical writing of keeping all citations and the discussion of all wider academic issues to endnotes. We hope you enjoy the results and that you will also read our comparative book – and perhaps some of the other monographs – in addition to this one. vi INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES WHY WE POST Acknowledgements This book could not have been possible without the generosity, insights and friendship of many people or without the support of several organisations. A big thank you goes to my PhD supervisor Professor Daniel Miller. He gave me immensely helpful guidance and most generous support throughout my field work and the writing of this book, encouraging me to try different approaches during my research and to apply my painting and calligraphy skills to document my ethnography. In many ways he pushed me to exploit my potential fully, enabling me to see, and be a better person. I was also fortunate to be part of a highly competent and friendly research team from which I not only received helpful feedback at each stage of the research and chapter drafts, but also gained family- like companionship and support. Thank you also to Lara Speicher, Chris Penfold, Jaimee Biggins and Alison Major at UCL Press. The wonderful team guided me through a long process of peer review, copy-editing and marketing, and have always been very encouraging and helpful. I am also very grateful to two anonymous reviewers who read the book carefully; the book evolved considerably through this period. I also feel it’s a great honour to publish this book as Open Access at UCL Press. The free knowledge online provided by Open Access allows the possibility of a significantly extended readership, which is extremely important for a book focusing on how the digital can possibly change the lives of a marginalised population. Many wonderful individuals in China helped to facilitate this research. Special thanks go to Rui Zhong, who generously helped me with the filming in my field site, and to Jingwen Fan, who helped me carry out the interviews in Shanghai and provided me with many insightful observations and great interview material. I also want to thank my parents, Zhengting Wang and Yun Chen, for believing in me and supporting me in all of my endeavours. A special thank you to my mum, a brave, kind, joyful and wonderful woman, who vii supported me in the most dedicated way, as only a mother can do. I am grateful to Marcus Fedder for his unfailing belief in me and commit- ment to helping me succeed and keep my work in perspective within life’s amazing journey. To all my informants, both in the factory town field site and in Shanghai, I owe sincere appreciation for their great trust and friendship, and for the generous way in which they shared their happiness, sadness and the incidents of their lives. Finally I would like to acknowledge and thank the following insti- tutions for financial support: The China Scholarship Council (CSC), the Wenner- Gren Foundation (Wadsworth International Fellowship) and the European Research Council grant 2011- AdG- 295486 Socnet. viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Contents List of figures x List of charts xiii 1. Introduction 1 2. The social media landscape in China 25 3. Visual material on social media 57 4. Social media and social relationships 97 5. Social media, politics and gender 127 6. The wider world: Beyond social relationships 156 7. Conclusion: The dual migration 183 Notes 189 References 207 Index 219 ix List of figures Fig. 1.1 The varied scenes of a freight parking area, farmland and a modern shopping mall in GoodPath 12 Fig. 1.2 A map of GoodPath town 13 Fig. 1.3 The Old Street in Zhao village, GoodPath town 15 Fig. 1.4 Peasant flats in the new villages 16 Fig. 1.5 The local digital centre 17 Fig. 1.6 Mobile phones for elderly citizens 18 Fig. 1.7 Scene from the assembly line in a factory plant 19 Fig. 1.8 (a) Wang driving a forklift truck at a factory; (b) Wang eating one of several breakfasts that she had in one morning at local breakfast booths as part of a plan to get to know more people; (c) Wang conducting a survey of workers from a temporary bed made of protective netting on a building site 23 Fig. 2.1 The timeline of internet applications, both inside and outside China 26 Fig. 2.2 The mascot of QQ 28 Fig. 2.3 The main body of the QQ menu bar 30 Fig.

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