Revisiting Media Events in Web 2.0 China: A Critique of Chinese Online Activism

Jian Xu

BA, MA (Heilongjiang)

A thesis in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

Journalism and Media Research Centre Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

March 2013

Acknowledgements

I express my deepest appreciation to those who have helped me along the way in conducting my PhD research project in Australia.

I thank my two supervisors Dr Haiqing Yu and Professor Gerard Goggin for their guidance and support throughout the entire process. I would like to thank

Gerard for supporting my application for the International Postgraduate Research

Scholarship (IPRS). I could not have started and finished my PhD research project without this generous scholarship. His wisdom and knowledge always provided inspiration for my research and academic thinking. I also owe my academic growth to Haiqing. Her intellectual insights and rigorous scholarship have not only provided invaluable inspiration, but also set an example with regard to my future academic career. I am blessed to have Haiqing and Gerard as mentors and friends.

This thesis cannot be completed smoothly without their intellectual support.

I also thank Associate Professor David McKnight and Professor Catharine

Lumby in the Journalism and Media Research Centre (JMRC) for their insightful comments in my annual progress reviews and their ongoing support. I am grateful to Drs Yang Mu and Kath Albury for offering me tutoring and guest lecturing opportunities in their Chinese studies and media studies courses.

I would like to express my appreciation to my friends, Daxiong and Xinyue, who always care about me and share my happiness and unhappiness. Their companionship helped me survive stress and depression during my PhD research in Australia.

v I remain forever grateful to my mother Yuqing Wang and my father

Guaoquan Xu for their unconditional love. I am very proud to be their son. They have respected and supported all my decisions at different stages in my life. I dedicate this thesis to them.

vi Abstract

This thesis investigates how China’s online activism intervenes in and transforms

China’s conventional media events. It takes the Spring Festival Gala, the 2008

Sichuan earthquake and the Wenzhou high-speed train collision as critical contexts

to examine the interventional role of online activism in different types of media

events in China. This thesis argues that, as an alternative medium of

communication, the Internet has empowered some people to transform

conventional media events into something more open, contentious, participatory

and deliberative. The Internet hence constitutes an important interventional force

which transforms the political life of the Chinese nation.

Chapter One provides a conceptual discussion of media event theories and

their critiques. Chapter Two takes a critical review of the Internet as an alternative

media and of online activism as political communication. Chapter Three examines

culture jamming as a mode of online activism in the context of a celebratory media

event, the Spring Festival Gala. Lao Meng’s Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala becomes

a case study to examine how the shanzhai gala intervenes in CCTV’s power-money

dominated Spring Festival celebration. Chapter Four focuses on citizen journalism,

as alternative crisis communication, in a disastrous media event—the 2008

Sichuan earthquake. It examines three forms of citizen journalism in the aftermath

of the earthquake: eyewitness reporting, online discussion and networking, and

independent investigation. Chapter Five examines online weiguan as networked

collective action in scandalous media events in China, as exemplified in the

Wenzhou high-speed train crash. It discusses the concept, platform and practice of

the online weiguan phenomenon. In the concluding chapter, this thesis proposes

vii the analytical concept “Internet interventionism” as a way to summarise key arguments of the thesis. It argues that online activism provides opportunities to transform China’s conventional media events into contested platforms and intervene in such platforms with new agency, agendas and voices. The Internet thus becomes a key site for such interventionism to take place. This has significant implications for how we re-conceptualise “media events” and envisage the future of the Chinese nation.

viii Table of Contents

Thesis and Dissertation Sheet………………………………………………………..…..……..…..….i

Originality Statement………………………………………………………….………...…………….…..ii

Copyright Statement……………………………………………………………………………...……….iii

Authentity Statement………………………………………………………………………………..….…iv

Acknowledgements………………………………………..………………………………………..……….v

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………..…………..vii

List of Tables and Figures...... xiii

Chapter One

Introduction and Conceptual Discussion……………………………………………………………...1

1.1 Central Argument and Research Questions……………………………………………..……..1 1.2 Theoretical Framework………………………………………………………………………………...3 1.3 Transformation of Chinese Media Events………………………………………………..……11

1.3.1 The pre-reform era and “authoritarian” media events…………………………..11

1.3.2 The media reform era and “marketised authoritarian” media events…….13

1.3.3 The new media era and “deliberative” media events…………………………….17

1.4 Significance of the Research………………………………………………………………………..21

1.5 Approaches and Methodologies………………………………………………………………..…23

1.6 Chapter Outline and Case Studies………………………………………………………………..28

ix Chapter Two

Alternative Media and Online Activism……………………………………………………...…32

2.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………….32

2.2 Understanding Alternative Media………………………………………………………………..32

2.3 Alternative Media in China: From Big-Character Poster to Micro-blog…………..35

2.4 Online Activism in China: Themes and Modes……………………………………..……….37

2.4.1 Themes of China’s online activism……………………………………………………….38

2.4.2 Modes of China’s online activism…………………………………………………………43

2.5 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………….50

Chapter Three

Media Celebration: Shanzhai Media Culture as Media Intervention…………….53

3.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….………53

3.2 CCTV Spring Festival Gala as Media Spectacle………………………………………………56

3.3 From Shanzhai Economy to Shanzhai Media Culture………………………………….…62

3.4 Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala: A Counter-Spectacle Entrepreneurship……….…72

3.5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………….…85

Chapter Four

Media Disaster: Citizen Journalism as Alternative Crisis Communication…...90

4.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………….…90

4.2 Chinese Media in Crisis Communication: Characteristics and Turning Points...92

4.2.1 Critiques on the conventional model of crisis communication in China…93

x 4.2.2 SARS and China’s crisis communication reform……………………………………97

4.2.3 Crisis communication in the post-SARS era:

2008 Sichuan earthquake case study……………………………………...………….102

4.3 Citizen Journalism as Alternative Crisis Communication:

2008 Sichuan Earthquake Case Study……………………………………………………..…108

4.3.1 Eyewitness reporting………………………………………………………………………..110

4.3.2 Online discussion and networking………………………………………………….....112

4.3.3 Independent investigation projects……………………………………………...... 114

4.4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………..………127

Chapter Five

Media Scandal: Online Weiguan as Networked Collective Action……………….130

5.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………..130

5.2 Media and Scandal: Revisiting Investigative Journalism in China………………...131

5.3 Online Weiguan: Concept, Platform and Practice……...…………………………….…..140

5.3.1 Online weiguan: a conceptual discussion…………………………………….……..140

5.3.2 Online weiguan platforms: from BBS to weibo……………………………….…..148

5.3.3 Online weiguan practice: three case studies………………….…………….……..152

5.4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………..171

Chapter Six

Conclusion: New Media, New Interventionism and New Deliberation…….....174

6.1 Online Activism and the Transformation of Chinese Media Events……………...174

xi 6.2 Internet Interventionism and Deliberative Politics in China…………………..……175

6.3 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research………………………………..……..183

References………………….………………………………………………………………………………...186

Appendix: Glossary of Chinese Names and Terms...... …….……………………....211

xii List of Tables and Figures

Tables 1-1 Transformation of the Chinese media events post 1949 20

2-1 Themes of China’s online activism 43

2-2 Major modes of China’s online activism 51

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Figures

5-1 Mobilisation model of traditional investigative journalism 138

5-2 Mobilisation model of the Internet-mobilised investigative journalism 138

5-3 Caricature of the Hide-and-Seek Incident produced by SMD 154

5-4 Caricature of the Hide-and-Seek Incident produced by netizen 154

5-5 Photo of Zhou Jiugeng uncovered by netizen “huage” 158

5-6 Photo of Zhou Jiugeng uncovered by netizen “chengyu007” 159

5-7 “Never colliding high-speed train blueprint” designed by netizen 169

5-8 Poster of the disaster film Fatal Bullet Train designed by netizen 170

xiii Chapter One

Introduction and Conceptual Discussion

1.1 Central Argument and Research Questions

Since Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up policy in 1978, China has witnessed great structural transformations in economy, technology, culture and politics. The

Chinese media, a crossover in the economical, technological, cultural and political fields, have played a central role in representing and facilitating China’s social, cultural and political transformation while also being transformed in this process.

Since the mid-1990s, in particular, the Internet in China has developed rapidly and profoundly impacted Chinese society. According to the China Internet Network

Information Centre (CNNIC), China’s Internet population had already reached 564 million in December 2012 (CNNIC, 2013): the largest number of users in the world.

The rapid development of the Internet and other digital technologies has created new digital platforms and new communicative forms for Chinese people to express, connect and interact, which has given rise to what Manuel Castells (2000) calls the

“interactive network” and a “networked society” in China. China’s digital revolution has not only diversified and converged Chinese media culture, but also transformed traditional society, culture and politics.

This thesis examines the diversified and converged Chinese media culture, as well as its ensuing social, cultural and political transformation, through “media events”. “Media events” is a useful concept to examine the dynamics of societal changes, particularly in developmental and transformational societies. Despite various critiques and revisions, the concept continues to provide a powerful conceptual framework for scholars and students in anthropology, sociology, media

1 and cultural studies to investigate the myriad facets of contemporary societies, as I will demonstrate in section 1.2. By looking at three types of media events

(celebration, disaster and scandal) in China’s Web 2.0 era, this thesis argues that

China’s authoritarian media events controlled by the Party and the market have transformed into more open, contentious and deliberative media events in the

Internet age, due to the rise in China’s online activism. The transformation of

Chinese media events is thus taken as a key point of reference to investigate

China’s social, cultural and political transformation and the dynamic interplay among the state, media and the non-state 1 in this process.

This thesis addresses three questions. First, how are Chinese media events produced and represented by the Party-market controlled mainstream media?

Second, what are the major modes, practices, characteristics and impacts of online activism in China? Third, how have these online activism practices intervened in and transformed China’s media events? By addressing these questions, this thesis argues that Chinese media events in the Web 2.0 era have become critical moments and contested terrains, in which, the state and the non-state compete, negotiate and interact to articulate different agendas and fulfil different purposes.

Media events are no longer exclusively dominated by the Party and the market, but they have been hijacked, appropriated, and reinvented by non-state players aided by the Internet, such as ordinary citizens, social activists, marginalised groups and non-governmental organisations. By hijacking, appropriating, and reinventing media events, these non-state players are able to articulate non-official discourses,

1 The term “non-state” refers to individuals, groups or organisations that are not strictly controlled by the state. It does not belong to or exist as a state-structure or established institution of a state, but has sufficient power to influence and cause changes in politics, such as the social activists, non- governmental organisations (NGOs) and alternative media outlets. The relations between the state and the non-state actors could be confrontational or collaboratory (see Qian & Xu, 1993; Yu, 2009).

2 generate public opinions and take civic actions, and hence generate online activism that is conducive to the transformation of Chinese society and media events.

This introductory chapter aims to canvass key concepts and theoretical framework that underpin the whole thesis. It first reviews theories and critiques of media events, prior to discussing the features of media events in the Chinese context.

1.2 Theoretical Framework

The concept of media events was proposed by Dayan and Katz in their seminalwork, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. According to Dayan and Katz (1992), media events are spectacularised and mediatised events, which interrupt the normal rhythm of government, mass media and audiences by attracting much of their attention to the “hot” moments. They are “ritual celebrations”, which create “periodic social gatherings for the celebration of society” (Rothenbuhler, 1998, p. 79). Their characteristics could be understood on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels (Dayan & Katz, 1992). On the syntactic level, media events are interruptions of broadcasting routines. They monopolise media communication across different channels and programs, broadcast live, are pre-planned and organised outside the media by those within the establishment.

On the semantic level, media events are presented with ceremonial reverence, which serve to celebrate reconciliation not conflict. On the pragmatic level, they speak to mass national or international audiences and are necessarily monopolistic and hegemonic (pp. 9-14). Media events have three basic “scripts”: contest, conquest and coronation, such as the Olympics, the first human landing on the moon and the wedding of Charles and Diana (Dayan & Katz, 1992).

3 With the development of satellite television and the normalization of live news broadcasts, media events have attracted increasing empirical research in the global context. The original concept of media events has provoked streams of critiques. A de-centralized ritual view, extended typification and broader definition are proposed by scholars to revise the concept of media events in order to accommodate media events in rapidly developing communication technologies and the globalisation of media culture. Following Hepp and Couldry (2009), we can criticise and revise Dayan and Katz’s concept of media events from three main aspects: the ritual perspective, narrowness of three typified scenarios and the core definition genres.

First, as Hepp (2004) points out, Dayan and Katz take media events as rituals of affirmed values and fail to explain their conflicting and diverse characteristics in post-modern and globalised societies. In order to overcome this problem, Nick

Couldry (2003) suggests a focus on “the ritual space of media”, which is “the opposite of isolating particular moments and elevating them to special, even

‘magical’ significance”, and instead involves “tracing the antecedents of media rituals in the patterns, categories and boundaries at work everywhere” (p. 13).

Couldry (2003) does not assume an integrative role of ritual media events, but investigates them as “media rituals” that construct the “myth of the mediated centre” through various forms of media communication. In such a de-centered ritual perspective, media events are constituted by different forms of communication, which “articulate the power-related, hegemonic imagination of the media as the centre of present societies, as the expression of the important incidents within that society” (Hepp & Couldry, 2009, p. 5).

4 Second, Dayan and Katz’s three basic scripts of media events are too narrow to cover increasing media event-based representations. Scannell (1996) argues that

Dayan and Katz omit “major news events” that are unexpected, disruptive, and shock the world. Katz and Liebes (2007) point out major changes in technology, organisation of broadcasting institutions and the credibility of governments, have declined both in frequency and centrality of ceremonial media events. They suggest extending the typification of ritual media events to include conflict- oriented media events, such as disasters, wars and terrorism. The major difference between ceremonial and disruptive media events is that the latter is characterised by “an overtaking of the public domain by oppositional forces (not hegemonic ones)” (Hepp & Couldy, 2009, p. 7).

Third, the core definition of media events as genres has been thoroughly challenged. Scannell (1999; 2002) distinguishes “happenings” (such as earthquakes or plane crashes) with “events” (things that we make happen), and proposes to understand media events as mediatised performances in their historic contexts. Based on Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle (1967), Douglas Kellner

(2003) proposes the concept of “media spectacle”, a broader term than “media event”, to describe social, cultural and political dramas and conflicts represented in mass media. According to Kellner (2004, p. 1), media spectacles are all

“spectacular media events”, which interrogate contemporary politics, culture, society and everyday life. Simon Cottle (2006) suggests extending the notion of

“mediatized rituals”. He defines these rituals as “those exceptional and performative media phenomena that serve to sustain and/or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities on the basis of symbolization and a subjunctive orientation to what should or ought to be” (Cottle, 2006, p. 415). With such an

5 instructive approach, different genres of media events could be accommodated under the overarching conception of mediatised rituals and fall under six sub- classes: moral panics, celebratory media events, conflicted media events, media disasters, media scandals and mediatised public crises. Though Cottle’s categorisation seems exhaustive mapping all genres of media events, mediatised rituals can be criticised for their thin use of ritual (Couldry & Rothenbuhler, 2007).

The criticism from these three perspectives is Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China (Price & Dayan, 2008). In the conclusion, Dayan (2008) reflects upon his original approach towards ritualised media events. Based on his previous critiques and empirical studies on the Beijing Olympics, Dayan (2008) argues that the Beijing Olympics is no longer monopolised by broadcast media, but mediated in a new, volatile, global media environment. The dramatic expansion of media outlets and the growth of mobile communication technologies have changed the nature of media events, making it significantly more difficult to regulate or control their meanings.

For example, during the international torch relay of the Beijing Olympics from

March to August 2008, Western media focused on disruptive incidents during this period, such as pro-Tibet and pro-human rights protests. This perspective was quite oppositional to the theme of the torch relay, “Journey of Harmony” [Hexie zhilü 和谐之旅], pre-planned by the Chinese government and represented by the

Chinese media. Disruptive incidents in this mega-event were widely reported by international media outlets and re-mediated in cyberspace, sending alternative viewpoints towards the Beijing Olympics, which could not be controlled and regulated by the Chinese government. As Dayan (2008) puts it:

6 This kind of exclusive focusing on one event at any given time is now becoming

almost impossible. Instead, there is a ‘field’ of events in which different

candidates compete with each other for privileged status, with the help of

entrepreneurial journalists. Social and political polarization and its effect on

media mean that it is harder to achieve a broad consensus about the importance

of particular events. News and media events are no longer starkly differentiated

entities but exist rather on a continuum. This banalization of the format leads to

the emergence of an intermediate zone characterized by the proliferation of

what I would call ‘almost’ media events. (p. 396)

Dayan (2008) further concludes that the characteristics of media events in globalised societies are “disenchantment, derailment and disruption”. He argues these events do not necessarily enhance social integration or consolidate shared values. Instead, they may be “subverted (denounced)”, “diverted (derailed)” or

“perverted (hijacked)” (Dayan, 2008, p. 399). Dayan’s revisions break down the temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries of media events, taking into account multiple agents, representational channels and global audiences.

Inspired by the previous criticism on media events and Dayan’s self-reflection,

Hepp and Couldry (2009) re-conceptualise and define media events in the global age as “certain situated, thickened, centering performances of mediated communication that are focused on a specific thematic core, cross different media products and reach a wide and diverse multiplicity of audiences and participants”

(p. 12), broadening the original definition of media events through a global and transcultural perspective.

7 First, media events should be understood as “thickenings of media communication” (Hepp & Couldry, 2009). They are co-produced by media organisations across nations through different media channels, media products and communicative forms. Second, media events are “power-related articulations” and “cannot be related to just one power centre”. They open up space for multiple social actors to establish “discursive positions”. Third, the representations and meanings of media events varied “across different media cultures in its thematic core” (pp. 11-13). Therefore, they suggest a de-centred and populist approach to media events and rituals, in order to grasp the uncertain and contested process of constructing the “mediated centre” (Couldry, 2003).

These critiques and revisions in the West are even more pertinent when we consider the development and transformation of China’s media events. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, media events in China have been evolving with the social, cultural and political transformation of Chinese society. They have transformed from authoritarian media events with ritual functions and affirmed values, to more open, participatory and deliberative media events, which have multiple media channels, social actors and discursive positions involved (see section 1.3). This transformation has not only verified Chinese media events in the global context, but also posed a challenge to Western media events studies.

For example, Jack Qiu (2009) proposes the concept of “new media events” to characterise China’s increasing Internet-centred media events, in which, the marginalised social groups actively engage by making use of the new media, such as the Internet and mobile phone, to participate, express and represent. New media events depart from Dayan and Katz’s in agency, performance and political

8 impact, because they “have provided new means for cultural expression at the grassroots as well as opportunities for change, conciliations, and the reintegration of network society”, and are “relatively less manipulated as in traditional mass media channels” (Qiu, 2009, pp. 222, 223). These new media events have contributed new situations and added complexity to the study of media events in the global context.

Agianst this theoretical background, this thesis seeks to bridge the gap between

Western theories of media events and China’s by revisiting Chinese media events in the Web 2.0 era. As discussed, transnational and transcultural information flows are the most important factor in transforming media events into de-centered and contested communication platforms in the globalised media culture (Dayan, 2008;

Hepp & Couldry, 2009). However, diversified representations are predetermined by different political and ideological standpoints of global media outlets. The emphasis on diverse media representation in the global media environment fails to explore societal powers, which have also greatly contributed the transformation of media events, particularly within host communities or countries of media events. It also fails to recongise evolving government, media and societal interrelations along with the transformation of media events. In order to overcome the limitations, this thesis only examines internal factors within Chinese society that have led to the transformation of media events, instead of looking at external factors, such as international news reporting. It investigates how societal powers in China have intervened in and transformed China’s media events through alternative and activist use of the Internet. And further, how this intervention has transformed state, media and societal interrelations in media events and beyond.

9 This thesis also revises Qiu’s “new media events” [Xinmeiti shijian 新媒体事件] perspective (2009). Though his perspective takes into account the societal powers and the role of new media in studying China’s emerging media events, Qiu metaphorically uses the classical concept of media events and does not refer to the ritual view of Dayan and Katz’s original concept. In addition, Qiu has not pointed out the modes of the communicative practices, by which, societal powers participate in and create new media events. This thesis also discusses societal powers and new media. However, they are strategically situated in the traditional context of media events. New media events are taken as interventional incidents within the traditional model of media events. As Dayan commented in an interview with Jack Qiu: “New performances of media events toady could not deny the traditional model of media events… the consensus media events still exist, however, their performances evolve … we could see both consensus and conflicts in an unfolding event” (as cited in Qiu, 2011, p. 8). This thesis validates of the traditional framework while acknowledging the dominance of consensus media events in China. It takes new media events as a consequence of various online activism practices contained by and staged in these mega events. Online activism is studied here as the most important factor in intervening into and updating China’s media events in the Web 2.0 era.

By adopting but criticizing existing media events concepts and theories, this thesis not only takes into account societal powers, but also emphasises the role of new media in the transformation of media events. More importantly, it demonstrates the dynamics of interplays among the state, media and society in this transformational process. This thesis not only integrates China’s emerging media event form into global media event studies, but also makes a contribution to this

10 field by presenting unique Chinese case studies. In order to understand the features of China’s media events in different stages, the next section provides a historical overview of the transformation of Chinese media events in the context of

Chinese media reform and transformation of communication systems over the past

60 years.

1.3 Transformation of Chinese Media Events

Chinese media events post-1949 have been evolving with China’s social, cultural, and political transformation, particularly with regard to the transformation of the media and communication system in China. Media events over time have provided rich social texts to investigate the characteristics of China’s society, culture and politics as well as the state, media and societial interrelations in different historical periods. In order to historicise and contextualise the transformation of Chinese media events, I periodise China’s media events into three historical stages according to the characteristics of China’s media and communication system in different historical periods. These stages include “authoritarian” media events in the pre-reform era, “marketised authoritarian” media events in the media reform era, and “deliberative” media events in the new media era. This periodisation aims to underscore the interrelations between the structural transformation of Chinese media and the functional transformation of Chinese media events.

1.3.1 The pre-reform era and “authoritarian” media events

Before China’s modern reform and open-up in the late 1970s, the Chinese media followed a “commandist system associated with Communist ideology” (Pan, 2000, p. 73). They constitute the Party’s propaganda apparatuses, which served the

11 indoctrination, mass persuasion, propaganda and social mobilisation of the

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Schurmann, 1968; Yu, 1964). The journalistic practices of the Chinese media were guided by the “Party principle” [Dangxing yuanze 党性原则] as central rule and discipline. According to Yuezhi Zhao (1998), the Party principle emphasised three basic requirements: the news media must accept the Party’s guiding ideology as its own; they must propagate the Party’s programs, policies and directives; they must accept the Party’s leadership and stick to the Party’s organisational principles and press policies (p. 19). In order to maintain the legitimacy of the Party principle, the Chinese media were tightly controlled and strictly censored by Party propaganda departments on different levels.

The highly centralised media and communication system as well as the function of the mass media as the Party’s “propaganda machine” and “mouthpiece” in this pre-reform era created “authoritarian media events”. They were broadcast via radio and propagated via the print media and other popular media, such as political propaganda posters. Similar to those in the Eastern bloc during the Cold

War era, media events in pre-reform China were “retrospective commemorations”, which followed a “highly structural ideological discourse”. They offered displays of

“control” or “manifestations of obedience”. The performer and respondent were

“‘ideologically and scenographically interwoven” into a “choreographic oneness” and spoke “in the same voice” (Dayan & Katz, 1988, pp. 163-164).

Staging authoritarian media events, which were commemorative, ideology- loaded and monologic, was one of the most important political tasks of the mass media in pre-reform China. In these media events, the organisers, media producers and the audiences were not “three contractual partners” (Dayan & Katz, 1992) as

12 in democratic media events in the West. Instead, media producers and audiences willingly cooperated and participated in media events under the manipulation of the organisers (usually the CCP). By organising authoritarian media events, the

Party displayed its absolute power over the media and the people. The legitimacy of the CCP and the social integration of the Communist regime were consolidated through these periodic ritual celebrations. The National Day military parades from

1950 to 1959 and Mao’s reception of the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square in 1966 were representative examples of such authoritarian media events. Though alternative media channels existed in the pre-reform era, such as underground radios and tabloids, they had very little social impact and didi not seriously challenge the gigantic Party media organisation, because of their illegal identities, limited audiences and government’s strict regulation and censorship.

With the collapse of socialism in the late 1980s, the authoritarian media events decreased in amount, frequency, scale and influence. However, they still exist today in totalitarian regimes, for example, the funeral of Kim Jong-il in North Korea in 2011. Though China is still under the dictatorship of the CCP and maintains the socialist system ideologically, the deepening market economy reform post-1978 has caused a series of media reforms, and in the meantime, has transformed authoritarian media events with market forces.

1.3.2 The media reform era and “marketised authoritarian” media events

Since 1978, China has implemented fundamental reforms in its economic system under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. The planned economy was gradually replaced by the market economy. In the field of media and communication, the government initiated a series of media reforms, such as media marketisation and

13 conglomeration. These reforms have caused not only the structural changes of

China’s media landscape but also the transformation of China’s media events.

The marketisation allowed media organisations to transit from a non-profit public institution into economic entities involved in market competition. The media started to rely on advertising, circulation and other business activities as the main sources of income. The increasingly fierce market competition forced the media to better serve the needs of audiences, and thereby enhanced its role as information and entertainment provider, and sometimes watchdog of government

(He, 1998). Media marketisation had weakened the functionalism of the Chinese media as propaganda apparatuses, activating China’s media industry, resulting in the multiplicity and diversity of China’s media culture (Harrison, 2002; Yu, 2009).

If the marketisation realised the decentralisation of Chinese media, the conglomeration aimed to re-centralise China’s expanding media and communication industries. Since the mid-1990s, the government started to encourage the state media’s cross-regional and cross-media cooperation, in order to make China’s media industry “bigger and stronger” [Zuoda zuoqiang 做大做强].

The government believed that only through conglomeration the state media could grow up and compete successfully with Western conglomerates in the post-WTO era (Lee, He & Huang, 2006). In early 2003, the government approved establishment of 69 media groups, including 38 press groups, 13 radio and television groups, 1 periodical groups, 5 distribution groups, 9 publishing groups and 3 motion picture groups (Wang, 2004). However, in contrast to media conglomeration in the West, China’s media conglomeration seldom resulted from free market competition, but rather was fostered by administrative orders, transforming Chinese media into what is popularly referred to as “Party Publicity

14 Inc” (He, 1998). The nature of the conglomeration was “more for the maximization of ideological control over media for political stability than the maximization of profits” (Zhang, 2011, p. 51). It had proven to be the most effective measure to ensure the central control of media resources while generating maximum profits for Party press and broadcast stations at the expense of local media outlets (Lee,

2003; Zhao, 2000).

The marketisation and conglomeration of Chinese media are the state’s strategic dispositions, therefore can be taken as “hallmark(s) of China’s bureaucratic-authoritarian state capitalism at work” (Lee, He & Huang, 2006, p.

586). On the one hand, the market mechanism is harnessed to stimulate the development of the media industry; on the other hand, the Party still controls personnel assignment of the top leaders in media organisations and guides the direction of important media content production, such as news, current affairs and main melody dramas, films and galas. As Haiqing Yu (2011) succinctly concludes the consequences of China’s media reforms as, “the party-state media marketized but not weakened, media control decentralized but not reduced, and the media industry commercialized but not privatized” (p. 42). China’s media reforms have established a “dual-track” system of Chinese media, which is characterised by the

“interlocking of Party control and market forces” (Y. Zhao, 1998, p.3). Chinese media have to desperately struggle between what Yuezhi Zhao (1998) calls the

“Party line” and the “bottom line” to maintain balance between ideological disciplines and market principles.

Along with these media reforms, China’s media events have transformed from

“authoritarian” to “marketised authoritarian”. In contrast to the “authoritarian” media events in pre-reform China, completely dominated by the CCP and the state

15 media, “marketised authoritarian” media events are stimulated by market profits and have diversified producers and types. For example, China Central Television

(CCTV) has started to produce media events which continue ideological propagation, but with economic benefits, such as its annual Spring Festival Gala

[Chunjie lianhuan wanhui 春节联欢晚会] since 1983. In addition, some local media groups have quickly sprung up and compete with state media in the production of media events. For example, the 2005 season of Super Girls [Chaoji nüsheng 超级女

声], a Pop-Idol-like singing contest run by Hunan Satellite TV, attracted about

120,000 participants, over 400 million viewers and nearly 100 million CNY advertisement revenue (Miao, 2005; Zhang, 2005), creating a national media event and a Chinese media spectacle. Moreover, the market mechanism has eroded the

Party’s tight control on media content and created a more open and transparent communication environment. The types of media events have extended from merely “celebratory” and “commemorative” in the pre-reform era to include more

“disruptive” media events, in order to satisfy the public’s information needs, establish media’s brand image and obtain better economic benefits. Some natural disasters, public crises and political scandals may be reported and become national media events, such as the 2003 SARS epidemic, and the 2008 snow disaster and

Sichuan earthquake. In the media reform era, media events have been “marketised” and “diversified” by market forces. However, they remain “authoritarian” in nature, because the Chinese media are still constrained by the CCP’s propaganda disciplines and administrative orders. The “Party line” is always superior to the

“bottom line”, because “only by serving the party-state’s political interest would they be granted economic privileges” (Lee, He, & Huang, 2006, p. 586).

16 The transformation of China’s media events is not only juxtaposed with China’s deepening media reforms, but it also parallels the development of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The prosperity of ICTs has further decentralised and socialised the Chinese media, and created alternative spaces for the people to participate in media events, transforming them from “marketised authoritarian” to “deliberative” media events.

1.3.3 The new media era and “deliberative” media events

Along with China’s media reforms, ICTs in China have developed rapidly over the last two decades. In an attempt to gain technological legitimacy to promote economic growth and comprehensive national strength, the government has taken a series of measures to develop ICTs. China officially came online in 1994 with only

10,000 Internet users. The online population drastically increased to 253 million by June 2008, putting it ahead of the United States as the world’s biggest Internet market (CNNIC, 2009). In the meantime, China has a remarkably rapid expansion of mobile telephony. By the end of March 2012, China’s mobile users exceeded 1 billion, the largest number of any country in the world. The number of subscribers to the third-generation (3G) services has reached 152.06 million (China Daily,

2012).

China’s great digital revolution has had a profound impact on Chinese society.

Socially, the new ICTs facilitate the free flow of information. Anyone with access to telecommunication networks could produce, distribute and receive information in a relatively free way than through traditional media (newspaper, television and radio) controlled by the Party-market. The text messaging, Bulletin Board System

17 (BBS), blogs, instant messaging, and social networking sites (SNS) have provided new ways for people to connect, communicate and interact.

Culturally, the ICTs have greatly enriched Chinese people’s cultural lives.

Online games, music, literature, videos, shopping and SNS communication have become main leisure and entertainment activities for urban and educated youths that constitute the majority of China’s Internet users (CNNIC 2012). In the meantime, with the penetration of the ICTs in everyday life, the Internet culture with Chinese characteristics has been generated and developed, such as e’gao, shanzhai, weiguan and so on, which I will examine in details in case study chapters.

The Internet culture underscores the individuals’ subjectivity, creativity, self- expression and rights consciousness, which is often oppositional to the mainstream media culture dominanted by the “power-money” hegemony.

Politically, the digital revolution has influenced the traditional ways of doing politics in China. On the one hand, the government has been implying the ICTs in governance and developing E-government in order to promote interactions with citizens, increase transparency and working efficiency, and further consolidate governing legitimacy of the CCP in the digital era (Holliday & Yep, 2005; Zhang,

2002). On the other hand, social uses of the ICTs have promoted public debate and public discussion on societal issues, contributing to the development of China’s civil society (Tai, 2006). People have transformed from passive spectators in the pre-reform era into interconnected and proactive participants in the new media era. They could establish networks, exchange ideas, give comments online, talking back to media event producers and organisers. More radically, they could use the

Internet to mobilise and organise collective action online or offline, making news events within the context of media events to hijack critical moments. The rise in

18 online activism has facilitated informal dialogue between the Party-state and

China’s civil society, creating “deliberative” media events in the Internet age.

To name media events in China’s new media era “deliberative” does not imply that the government, media and society will embark on rational-critical dialogue with each other within the framework of “deliberative democracy” (Cohen, 1989;

Habermas, 1989). In China, where genuine electoral democracy has not been fulfilled yet, and the people’s citizenry and democratic consciousness is relatively low, deliberative democracy is almost an “unrealized utopian ideal” (Fraser, 1990).

Therefore, I adopt Dahlgren’s (2009) weak and plural view on deliberation to understand the people’s political engagement in media events. Just as Dahlgren

(2009) expects:

More popular forms of deliberation are needed, and should be spread out as far

as possible within citizenry, beyond the formal decision-making centres, into

the public sphere and into as many associations and networks of civil society as

is feasible. (p. 89)

Following his argument, the term “deliberative” media events highlights those popular forms of deliberation taking outside the formal political institutions, such as various online activism practices, which increasingly intervened in media events. These could stimulate civic talk, improve citizens’ political participation and promote interaction between the Party-state and society, contributing deliberative potentials to loosen dominant forces that control China’s media events.

As discussed above, the transformation of the Chinese media over the past 60 years has transformed China’s media events from authoritarian, marketised authoritarian to deliberative. The characteristics of China’s media events in the

19 three historical periods mentioned previously are summarised in the Table 1-12.

Media events have not only revealed characteristics of the Chinese media, but also the Party, media and societial interrelations in different historical periods. This thesis focuses on “deliberative” media events in China’s new media era. It argues that online activism is the leading force, which has intervened in and transformed

China’s “marketised authoritarian” media events. It demonstrates that the alternative and activist use of the Internet has caused a deliberative turn of China’s traditional media events.

Table 1-1: Transformation of Chinese media events post-1949

Periods Types Media Media Audiences Main characteristics system involved Pre- Authoritarian Totalitarian Party- Passive Commemorative, reform media system controlled spectator ideology-loaded, era events official media monologic

Media Marketised- Dual-track Party-market Spectator Diversified, reform authoritarian system controlled and propaganda-oriented, era media events official media consumer market-oriented

New Deliberative Dual-track Party-market Proactive Contested, interactive, media media events system with controlled participant deliberative era rapid ICTs official media develop- and Internet- ment based unofficial media

2 The periodisation of Chinese media and media events reflects my personal tendencies and limitations. For example, China officially came online and entered the Internet age since 1994 against the background of China’s media commercialisation and marketisation. China’s media reform started from 1978 and is still deepening with the development of China’s new media technologies. Therefore, the media reform era and new media era do not have clear-cut boundaries and may partially overlap.

20 1.4 Significance of the Research

This thesis contributes to studies of China’s online activcism and media events. It is among the first to use the “media events” framework to examine China’s Internet activism and politics. The theoretical framework enables researchers to study

China’s online activism in specific socio-historic contexts, and explore its spatial, temporal and relational dimensions with other social agents. The contextualised analysis of online activism allows one to examine China’s Internet politics on three interrelated levels: the individual, discursive and institutional

On the individual level, media events have created opportunities for ordinary people to exercise online activism in a relatively concentrated period of time and around certain themed topics. These event contexts provide ideal occasions to study different modes of online activism practices at the same time, demonstrating the power and politics of Chinese people’s everyday online communication. On the discursive level, media events open up space for multiple social actors to establish discursive positions. This theoretical framework not only allows examining the conventional representations of the state media, but also enables to look at the interventional discourses online, providing a comparative perspective to analyse the symbolic tensions among different social actors. On the institutional level, the theretical framework enables to examine the interplays among different social agents, particularly between the state player and the non-state player. It could not only demonstrate how the alternative and activist uses of the Internet advocate institutional changes, but also leaves enough space to discuss the state player’s governance of online activism and its corresponding institutional adjustment.

Studying China’s online activism from the three levels above could provide a more relational, objective and comphrehsive perspective to understand China’s Internet

21 politics, which could avoid falling into either the pessimisim (emphasising the government’s Internet control and censorship) or the optimisim (emphasising the technological determinism) in studying China’s Internet politics.

This thesis also contributes to studies of China’s media events, a relatively small and underexplored field, by taking in the parameter of online activism. The existing research literature in English and Chinese on China’s media events mainly revolves around two typical perspectives: the “ritual critique” perspective and the

“Sino-Western” perspective. The former perspective focuses on the ritualised representations of media events and criticises their discursive and ideological hegemony, including studies on CCTV Spring Festival Gala (Lü, 2003a, 2009; Pan,

2010a; Sun, 2007; B. Zhao, 1998), China’s new millennium celebration (Yu, 2009), and CCTV’s reporting on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (Sun, 2010; Yin & Wang,

2010). However, ritual critique fails to look beyond dominant media power to examine discursive peripheries in media events. In contrast, this thesis addresses a key gap in approaching media events as contested platforms. It inherits the critical ethos of ritual critique, but shifts the focus from dominant powers (the Party- market controlled mainstream media) to counter-powers (the non-state players and online activism). It aims to explore various discursive positions of multiple social actors and their interrelations within and beyond media events.

This thesis also revises the “Sino-Western” perspective. This perspective underscores oppositional representations between Chinese and Western media on

China’s national media events, such as Hong Kong’s handover in 1997 (Lee, Chan,

Pan, & So, 2002) and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (Price & Dayan, 2008).

Compared with ritual-critique, this perspective takes discursive contestation into consideration. However, this “China-versus-West” model is still framed within the

22 now outdated and discredited Cold War ideology. Contested political and ideological stands between the socialist regime and Western democrats pre- determine their discursive contestation in representing China’s media events. This study moves beyond the Sino-Western perspective by examining China’s media events from within. Domestic politics, rather than international politics and relations, is emphasised. Discursive contestation is still the core assumption, but among the multitude of social agents in Chinese society, not between China and other societies. By taking this approach, the complex interrelations between the state and the non-state in relation to Chinese media events unfold.

This thesis adopts the media event framework to study China’s online activism, while also integrating discursive contestations and political interventions enabled by online activism in media event studies. It thus provides a new perspective on

China’s Internet politics and media events.

1.5 Approaches and Methodologies

Conceptually, the research is guided by two approaches: “media-as-practice” and

“articulation”. Nick Couldry (2004) proposes the former approach. This approach suggests researchers regard media as practice, not as texts, economy or institution, and observe what people do “in relation to media across a whole range of situations and contexts” and how media practices (production, circulation and consumption) order other social practices (Couldry, 2004, pp. 119, 128). This questions “the contributions media practices make to social practice more generally” (Couldry, 2004, p. 130). This approach, on the one hand, emphasises how media practices anchor other types of practices on the micro level; on the

23 other hand, it also addresses social, cultural and political transformations caused by mediatised social actions on the macro level.

Hence this thesis takes media events as open platforms and contested venues for multiple social actors to contest, negotiate and interact by using their privileged media resources to exercise various media practices. This enables an investigation of multiple layers of interactions among different communicative practices in media events, particularly between the state and the non-state players.

This approach connects concrete media practices with other social actions and societal transformations, resonating with the “articulation” approach (Grossberg,

1993; Hall, 1980; Pan, 2010b).

Articulation is “the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions” (Hall, 1986, p. 53). It can link “this practice to that effect, this text to that meaning, this meaning to that reality, this experience to those politics” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 54). Zhongdang Pan (2010b) adopts the theory and method of articulation to understand China’s media and societal changes. He claims that media change is one the most important social changes in China, however, media change is also a “part of the articulation of various forces in the social and cultural formation”, while also providing

“resources, both ideational and material, for the articulation to take place” (Pan,

2010b, p. 518). He suggests researchers in Chinese media studies “foreground media changes to understand the formation of a media system” and also “decentre the media by locating media changes in the process of the social and cultural changes that they both constitute and enable” (Pan, 2010b, p. 518). This research approach, according to Pan (2010b), could serve three overarching ging goals,

24 namely, “theory development”, “social and cultural criticism” and “practical instigation”.

In this thesis, media events are utilised to contextualise and address Pan’s three articulation-served goals. First, in terms of “theory development”, Pan (2010b) argues that changes in China “represent a unique case that cannot be addressed comfortably with the theoretical apparatus that is largely rooted in very different historical experiences of others” (p. 518). He reminds researchers that “most of the theoretical propositions framed in universalistic terms are abstractions from case studies of non-Chinese” (Pan, 2010b, p. 518). As discussed in the theoretical framework, the concepts and theories of media events are mainly originated in liberal and democratic societies in the West. Little research has been undertaken in non-liberal and undemocratic nations, such as China. This thesis thus tests the validity of the Western media event theories in China and revises and develops the theories by incorporating unique Chinese situations. Second, in terms of “social and cultural criticism”, Pan (2010b) proposes to criticise “the measures and steps for change that depart from such normative principles as equality, justice, and human agency”, exposing “the oppression, distortion, and hypocrisy embedded in the rhetoric for changes” (p. 518). This thesis criticises not only the state media’s dominant and hegemonic representations in media events, but also various online activism practices in the same contexts. By critically analysing both, this thesis aims to expose the domination, oppression and resistance of multiple discourses in media events. Third, in terms of “practical instigation”, Pan (2010b) advocates that researchers “address action issues and provide discursive means that could enable alternative actions and alternative voices, especially those voices that are institutionally silenced”. This empowering approach resonates with the theme of

25 this thesis, which focuses on the modes, practices and characteristics of online activism as well as its intervention in media events. By discussing these practices, this thesis aims to increase “critical media literacy” (Kellner & Share, 2007) and provide guidance for potential practitioners.

“Media-as-practice” and “articulation” approaches can be viewed as macro in orientation in my research topic. Thus concepts, theories and methodologies from multiple disciplines are adopted, such as media and communication studies, China studies, sociology, cultural studies and political sciences, to explain the research data and theorise the research findings, in order to address the research questions and verify the central argument. From the micro perspective, the thesis uses integrated qualitative research methodologies as techniques and methods to collect research date, including case study, participation observation, interviews and textual analysis. Among these methodologies, case study is the most important one.

Case study is “an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident” (Yin, 1994, p. 13). The important strength of this methodology is “the ability to undertake an investigation inot a phenomenon in its context” (Rowley, 2002, p. 18). In addition, it is useful to provide answers to “How?” and “Why?” questions, particularly in exploratory, descriptive and explanatory research (Rowley, 2002, p. 16). Case study is suitable to this research, because the thesis studies the interventions of online activism practices, an emerging phenomenon in the contexts of Chinese media events. The thesis not only examines “how” the online activism practices have intervened into the traditional media events, but also demonstrates “why” China’s media events

26 have been transformed in the Web 2.0 era. Other qualitative research methodologies, such as participatory observation, textual analysis and interviews, are used to gather a variety of evidence from different sources to enrich the case study database.

In research based around case studies, selecting cases is the first and most important step. Case selection is usually determined by the “research purpose, questions, propositions and theoretical context” (Rowley, 2002, p. 16). As discussed in section 1.1, the thesis researches the interventions of online activism in Chinese media events and tests the hypothesis that Chinese media events have been transformed into more participatory, contentious and deliberative events due to the interventions of online activism. Media events are both the research objects and contexts of the thesis. The thesis thus chooses three media events as case studies, which represent three main types of media events in the Chinese society.

They are a celebratory media event — the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, a disastrous media event — the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and a scandalous media event — the

Wenzhou high-speed train crash. There are three reasons to select the three media events as cases studies. First, all the selected media events are representative and influential in the types they stand for. They have created “hot” moments in the

Chinese society since 2008 by attracting considerable attention from the government, mass media and audiences. Second, the phenomenon of online activism is prominent in the selected cases. The alternative and activist use of the

Internet has demonstrated its interventional function and transformational role in all the three events. Third, the three selected cases could provide contextualised and historicised sites for detailed analysis of three major modes of online activism

27 respectively. They are shanzhai media culture in the celebratory media event, citizen journalism in the disastrous media event and online weiguan in the scandalous media event. I will discuss the three modes of online activism in details in Chpater Two.

Like any other case study, case selection in this research is also contrained by my personal limitations in research resources availability and accessibility, as well as the limited research time. In addition, examining one mode of online activism in a certain type of media event cannot avoid neglecting the existence of other modes of online activism in the same media event context. However, this arrangement enables a focused and detailed analysis of a specific mode of online activism in a certain type of media event. It also leaves enough room to explore the dymanic interrelations between the online activism and the practices of mainstream media in media events. Moreover, following this arrangement, three case studies tend to arrive at a similar conlusion— online activism practices, though of different modes, have intervened into and transformed main types of Chinese media events.

1.6 Chapter Outline and Case Studies

Chapter One provides a critical review of the development of media event theories in the West and examines the transformation of media events in contemporary

Chinese society. The central argument is that online activism has become an emerging interventional force in Chinese media events in the Web 2.0 era. This interventional force has transformed conventional Party-market controlled

Chinese media events into participatory, contentious and deliberative media

28 events. The significance, methodology, approach and chapter outline of this thesis are also examined.

Chapter Two first provides the literature review of alternative media in the

West and examines the historical development of alternative media in China. It argues that the Internet is the most important alternative media in present-day

China. The second part of this chapter discusses online activism generated through alternative and activist use of the Internet in the West and in China. It points out the main themes and characteristics of online activism in Chinese society. The chapter categorises China’s online activism into three major modes

(culture jamming, citizen journalism and mediated mobilisation) and discusses their historical and theoretical origins in the West and major performances in

China. These modes of online activism will be located in three different types of

Chinese media events respectively, in order to investigate their interventional functions.

Chapter Three discusses shanzhai media culture in the context of a celebratory media event, CCTV Spring Festival Gala. This chapter explores the CCTV Spring

Festival Gala as a ritualised media spectacle and criticises its ideology and market monopoly. The evolution of China’s shanzhai culture from offline to online is discussed, and shanzhai media culture as culture jamming with e’gao spirit and shanzhai ethos is theorised. This chapter takes Lao Meng’s Shanzhai Spring

Festival Gala as a case study to examine how the shanzhai gala intervenes in

CCTV’s power-money dominated Spring Festival celebration. Further, this chapter argues that shanzhai media culture is a counter-spectacular media culture, which challenges the monopoly of Chinese media spectacle in both ideology and market.

By spoofing and copycatting media spectacles, shanzhai media culture resists and

29 criticises the paradoxical neoliberal logic of China’s media reform and development through grassroots’ creativity and entrepreneurship.

Chapter Four discusses citizen journalism as alternative crisis communication in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. This chapter first examines the characteristics and turning points of the Chinese media in crisis communication from the Mao era to the post-SARS era. This section discusses the conventional model of China’s crisis communication, SARS crisis communication reform and the characteristics of post-SARS crisis communication. The second section examines various citizen journalism practices in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, including eyewitness reporting, online discussion and networking, and the independent investigation projects. This chapter argues that citizen journalism plays a crucial role in doing alternative crisis communication from the bottom-up in times of crisis. It has facilitated agendas overlooked by government (intentionally or unintentionally) in crisis to re-enter the public vision. Crisis communication in disastrous media events has become a contested process, in which, “top-down” crisis communication dominated by the Party-state and “bottom-up” crisis communication, exercised in the form of citizen journalism, negotiate, interact and contest.

Chapter Five examines online weiguan (virtual crowd gathering) as networked collective action in scandalous media events in China. This chapter first discusses the history, practices, promises and limitations of China’s investigative journalism in exposing political scandals and supervising political power. Online weiguan is proposed as an alternative and popular way of doing citizen surveillance in the next section. By examining online weiguan cases on three major online weiguan platforms (BBS, HFS engine and micro-blog), this section argues that online

30 weiguan plays an important role in exercising public opinion supervision against scandalous events when mainstream media’s investigative journalism is conservative. This chapter argues that online weiguan has become an effective strategy for the people to establish networks, foster public opinion and generate group pressure upon the government to influence the resolution of scandalous events in China.

Chapter Six summarises the central themes of the previous chapters and provides an overall conclusion. This chapter puts forward an analytical concept

“Internet interventionism” to understand the intervention of online activism and its influence on the state and the non-state interrelations in China’s media events and beyond. It points out that Internet intervention from both bottom-up (online activism) and top-down (Internet-based governance) has greatly increased the mediation of politics in scope and degree, and has promoted Internet-mediated political communication in China. The Internet has thus become a public interventional tool that multiple social actors could make use of to pursue different political agendas. The interplays between the state and the non-state, which are oriented to the Internet, have not only created deliberative Chinese media events, but also facilitated a deliberative turn in Chinese politics.

31 Chapter Two

Alternative Media and Online Activism

2. 1 Introduction

Chapter One proposed the central argument of this thesis: the alternative and activist use of the Internet has intervened in and transformed Chinese media events in the Web 2.0 era. This chapter aims to theorise and map the Internet as an alternative media and present online activism as political communication. This chapter first discusses alternative media, the material and technological conditions of alternative and activist communicative practices, and provides a historical overview of the development of alternative media in Chinese society. It points out that the Internet has become the latest popular alternative media in China. The alternative and activist use of the Internet has generated various forms of online activism. This chapter then discusses China’s online activism by looking at its major themes, researches and characteristics. It categorises China’s online activism into three major modes: culture jamming, citizen journalism and mediated mobilisation.

2.2 Understanding Alternative Media

Alternative media—also known as “radical media” (Downing, Ford, Gil, & Stein,

2001), “citizens’ media” (Rodriguez, 2011), “tactical media” (Garcia & Lovink, 1997),

“activist media” (Waltz, 2005) or “autonomous media” (Langlois & Dubois, 2005) — are alternative to mainstream media. They play an important role in “media production that challenges, at least implicitly, actual concentrations of media power, whatever form those concentrations may take in different locations” (Couldry &

32 Curran, 2003, p. 7). They “open[ing] cracks in the mass media monolith” (Waltz,

2005, p.viii) and play a role as “unofficial opposition to mainstream media” (Kidd,

1999, p. 113).

Alternative media resist the concentration of media power by challenging the dominant forms of media production, structure, content, distribution and reception

(Fuchs, 2011, p. 298). In terms of media production, alternative media provide affordable platforms for the people to participate in symbolic production. The past passive audiences have become proactive “prosumers” (Toffler, 1980), challenging dominant symbolic production controlled by power, money and knowledge. In terms of media structure, alternative media usually belong to grassroots media organisations instead of hierarchical media corporations. They are usually non- commercial and non-profit media financed by donations, public funding or private resources, working free of the influence of corporate interests or government. In terms of the content, alternative media usually provide oppositional standpoints against mainstream media. The voices of the minority and marginalised groups, which are likely to be excluded, oppressed or misrepresented in mainstream media, are the main content in alternative media. In terms of distribution, alternative media information is usually distributed freely in an open way, which usually makes use of transformed notions of intellectual property, such as “anti-copyright” (Atton, 1999).

At the reception level, alternative media privilege involved audiences over the merely informed (Lievrouw, 1994). They encourage the readers to critically reflect upon the content of mainstream media and participate in social actions for social change.

Alternative media have a large variety of forms, such as public speech, dance, graffiti, street theatre, as well as the predictable mass media (press, radio, film,

33 television and the Internet) (Downing et al., 2001). The alternative and activist use of these alternative media has generated various media activism practices, challenging the hegemonic policies, priorities and perspectives of the dominant media culture. Among the spectrum of alternative media, development of the

Internet and other new media technologies since the 1990s has represented a new era for alternative media (Downing et al., 2001).

The Internet represents the newest, most widely discussed, and most significant manifestation of new media (Flew, 2005). It constitutes electronic networks that link people and information through computers and other digital technologies, which allow for interpersonal communication and information retrieval (DiMaggio,

Hargittai, Russell Neuman, & Robinson, 2001). The Internet has helped “facilitate the growth of massive, coordinated digital networks of engaged activities”, and allows marginalised social groups to participate in political activities, and “counter those of the more powerful, not least as expressed in the dominant mass media”

(Dahlgren, 2009, p. 190). This technology has been applied in a wide range of projects, interventions and networks, which work against media, cultural and political domination.

In the Chinese context, alternative media have taken on different forms to challenge mainstream media, either dominated by the Party logic in the pre-reform era or the complicity of the Party-market in the reform and post-reform eras. As demonstrated in the following analysis, there has been a rich repertoire of alternative media prior to the emergence of the Internet.

34 2.3 Alternative Media in China: From Big-Character Poster to Micro-blog

The history of alternative media in China can be traced back to big-character posters

[Dazibao 大字报] in the 1960s and 1970s, unofficial periodicals in the 1980s, and the Internet from the mid-1990s onward. Big-character posters are wall-mounted posters written in large Chinese characters. They are cheap, sometimes anonymous, and easily seen and read in public spaces, working as an effective means of propaganda, critique, debate, and mobilisation in political movements, such as the

Cultural Revolution (1964-1976) and the Democracy Wall Movement (1978-1979)

(Downing et al., 2001; Sheng, 1990).

From 1978 to 1989, non-governmental periodicals [Minjian kanwu 民间刊物], run by poets, liberalist college students, social activists and public intellectuals, replaced big-character posters and became the main alternative media in China, to name a few, Today [Jintian 今天], China Human Rights [Zhongguo renquan 中国人权],

Beijing Spring [Beijing zhiqun 北京之春], May Fourth Forum [Wusi luntan 五四论坛], and so on. According to unofficial statistics, there were at least 55 types of non- governmental periodicals published in Beijing from 1978 to 1989. In other provinces of China, the total types of non-governmental periodicals reached about

100 (Gu, 2008; Ran, 2007; Wen, 2009). These radical periodicals criticised current social problems, proposed critical ideas to understand the Cultural Revolution and

Chairman Mao, and advocated the government’s liberal and democratic reforms.

However, the wave of non-governmental periodicals drastically declined after the

CCP’s crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen student movement. After 1989, the CCP closed down nearly all non-governmental periodicals and enhanced censorship and regulations on open publications. These non-governmental periodicals thus quickly

35 exited the historical stage (Wen, 2009). Due to the CCP’s strict control of public opinion and heavy-handed suppression of citizen activism after 1989, alternative media practices almost ceased in China from 1989 to 1994. Since 1994, however, the emergence and development of the Internet has opened up a new era for China’s alternative media and media activism.

On April 20, 1994, the National Computing and Networking Facility of China

(NCFC) project opened a 64kbps international dedicated circuit to Internet through

Sprint Co. of the United States. Since then, China had been officially recognised as a country with full functional Internet accessibility. The rapid development of the

Internet has caused China’s digital revolution and has impacted profoundly on

Chinese society. According to Yongnian Zheng (2008), the primary purpose for the

Chinese government to develop the Internet technology is to promote China’s

“nation-state building”. The Internet is perceived not only as “a symbol of the modernity of the Chinese state”, but more importantly, as “one of the core pillars of sustainable economic growth” (p. 18). However, since 1994, nearly 20 years’ development of China’s Internet has proved that the Internet not only has accelerated China’s modernisation, globalisation, and created a burgeoning ICTs industry, but also facilitated civic engagement, political liberalisation and democratisation as alternative media.

As discussed in Chapter One, the Chinese media were tightly controlled by the

Party in the pre-reform era and were dominated by power-money hegemony in the reform era. The voices of the people, regarding policy critiques, rights defence, political reforms and other democratic issues, have long been repressed. Increasing social inequality and injustice, along with China’s rapid economic growth, require a media channel beyond mainstream media to represent the voices of vulnerable

36 individuals and disadvantaged groups. The Internet has quickly become the most popular and important alternative media in China due to its interconnectivity, interactivity, ubiquity, easy access and low cost, although it is still controlled, regulated and censored by Chinese authority (Dai, 2000; MacKinnon, 2010; Tsui,

2003; Zhang, 2006). Various online platforms have been created, such as electronic mailing lists, BBS, instant messaging software, blogs, audio-visual sites and micro- blogs, which have helped the people express, connect, and interact. BBS sites and the micro-blogs, the most popular online platforms in China, have particularly played an important role in facilitating online discussion, establishing grassroots networks, forming online public opinion and organising collective actions, which effectively enabled the people to articulate alternative agendas and impose pressure on government to improve governance. I will return to this point in Chapter Five. The alternative and activist use of online platforms for critique, resistance and dissent has generated various online activism practices in China.

2.4 Online Activism in China: Themes and Modes

Online activism is also termed “Netactivism” (Schwartz, 1996), “Cyberactivism”

(McCaughey & Ayers, 2003), or “Web activism” (Dartnell, 2006). According to Yang

(2009a), online activism refers to “contentious activities associated with the use of the Internet and other new communication technologies” (p. 3). It enables people to

“extend their social networks and interpersonal contacts, produce and share their own ‘DIY’ information, and resist, ‘talk back’ to, or otherwise critique and intervene in prevailing social, cultural, economic, and political conditions” (Lievrouw, 2011, p.

19).

37 China’s online activism appeared very soon after China officially came online in

1994, almost at the same time online activism appeared in the West. China’s online activism evolved with the development of China’s ICTs as well as the increase of

Chinese people’s media literacy. Online activism built on previous forms of popular contention in Chinese society, such as the peasant revolutions, Cultural Revolution and student movements (Yang, 2009a). By applying the Internet to traditional rituals of protests, innovative tactics and other forms of social activism have been created, generating various online activism practices with Chinese characteristics.

China’s online activism can be expressed in the following themes and modes.

2.4.1 Themes of China’s online activism

China’s online activism falls into four major themes: nationalism, cultural identities, social issues and political actions. Nationalism is the earliest theme of online activism in Chinese society. In September 1996, university students in Beijing used untitled BBS at Peking University (bbs.pku.edu.cn) to organise anti-Japanese demonstrations to defend the PRC’s territorial sovereignty over Diaoyu Island (Chen,

1996). In the following years, nationalism became the central theme of China’s online activism. The BBS sites had become major platforms to organise nationalistic protests online and offline. Defining cases includes the protest against violence committed against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1998; the protest against the

NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999; and the US-China spy plane collision in 2001. As the earliest practice and one of the most important types of online activism in China, Internet nationalism has evoked a great deal of attention from the academics in China and overseas. Scholars have examined Sino-external nationalism events to discuss how China’s nationalistic discourses have transformed

38 in the Internet era, and how Internet nationalism influences China’s bilateral relations, diplomatic policies and the formation of Chinese civil society (Chase &

Mulvenon, 2002; Qiu, 2006; Shen & Breslin, 2010; Wu, 2007).

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China’s online activism has increased in frequency, scale, scope, form, and influence, with the increase of online platforms and the penetration of the Internet in everyday life. Cultural identities, societal issues and political actions have taken priority over nationalistic discourses and have become the main themes of China’s online activism in the 21st century (Yang,

2009b).

Online activism about cultural identities concerns online expressions about identities, values and lifestyles, which challenge traditional ethics, morality, values and aesthetics in Chinese society (Yang, 2009b). In late 2003, Muzimei, a newspaper editor and column writer in Guangzhou, gained her fame by putting the details of her sexual life on her personal blog. Muzimei quickly became one of the earliest

Internet celebrities and the most famous sex blogger in China. Her sex blog evoked heated discussion and controversy in print media, BBS, blogs and online chat rooms across China. The debates on the “Muzimei phenomenon” [木子美现象] were widely reported by the New York Times, Washington Post and other international media

(Sydney Morning Herald, 2003), making Muzimei a popular culture event. Muzimei phenomenon proves that ordinary citizens in China could achieve fame, not through mainstream media, but via individualistic, opportunistic and narcissistic self- promotion in the online world of user generated blogs and forums (Roberts, 2010).

The Internet has provided the grassroots with an ideal platform to represent themselves, show personalities and form identities, which is not restrained by traditional social and cultural values.

39 In addition, the Internet is used to challenge and deconstruct established cultural products and images (blockbusters, TV programs and revolutionary heroes). Some proactive Internet users use web-based digital technologies, such as Photoshop and

Flash, to remix established cultural products and images in order to make a spoof, generating popular e’gao culture. This playful, but satirical, web-based subculture cultivates the ordinary citizens’ subjectivities and critical thinking in a non-serious and artistic way, challenging the CCP’s long-term cultural hegemony. I will return to the e’gao culture in Chapter Three.

Online activism about societal issues covers a wide range of online public critiques on official corruption, environmental pollution, social injustice and human rights violations, generating many Internet incidents [Wangluo shijian 网络事件] with national impact (Yang, 2009b). The year 2003 marks the rise in China’s

Internet incident. In 2003, public opinion generated online successfully forced the government to openly release information through the SARS epidemic and abolish administrative procedure of the custody and repatriation through the case of Sun

Zhigang3. Online public opinion for the first time in history demonstrated its great supervisory power in Chinese society. Thus 2003 is popularly dubbed as “the year of online public opinion” [Wangluo yulun nian 网络舆论年]. Since 2003, a year seldom passes without Internet incidents. In these incidents, online public opinion of grassroots netizens effectively set agendas for mainstream media’s subsequent

3 The case of Sun Zhigang is one of the earliest and most significant Internet incidents in China. Sun was a 27-year-old university graduate and fashion designer from Wuhan who worked in Guangzhou. He was thrown in detension centre because he could not show police his temporary living permit and ID card during Guangzhou police’s regular check. Three days later, on March 20, 2003, Sun died in detention centre from police violence. His death was soon reported by the Southern Metropolitan Daily [Nanfang dushibao 南方都市报] (SMD) and provoked heated online discussion. Strong public opinion was formed, appealing to government to investigate Sun’s death. Under pressure from the Internet, 12 people involved in this case received penality. More importantly, this case led to abolishment of China’s detention and repatriation system (see Zhao, 2008a; Yu, 2009). 40 reporting and the government’s further investigation to solve controversial social issues. Increasing Internet incidents have provided rich case studies to investigate

China’s online activism. By examining various Internet incidents, scholars argue that the Internet has empowered marginalised individuals and groups to establish networks, generate online public opinion and have a voice, which has contributed to the development of China’s civil society, while also promoting the interplay between the state and society (Cao, 2010; Qiu, 2009; Yang, 2009c).

Online activism about political actions refers to radical and oppositional popular protests facilitated by the Internet. It usually touches some sensitive and democractic topics, such as human rights, political reforms, Tiananmen, Tibet and

Taiwan issues. This type of online activism is often labelled as “extra-legal” by the

Ministry of Public Security, since it directly challenges the legitimacy of the CCP’s governance. Therefore, it is highly risky and likely to evoke the CCP’s heavy-handed crackdown. The 2011 Chinese Jasmine revolution is such an example. The anonymous call for a Jasmine revolution was made online, first on the Boxun.com run by overseas dissidents and Twitter, blocked in China. The call appealed for ordinary citizens to take regular Sunday strolls in 13 major cities across China to express their dissatisfaction at China’s insufficient political reform. The call was then posted in China’s cyberspace by the savvy Internet users who know how to get around the Great Fire Wall, and was widely spread on China’s social media sites. In the Chinese Jasmine revolution, the Internet was used to propagandise, organise and mobilise pro-democracy protest. However, due to the political aims of the revolution, which challenged the CCP’s one-party dictatorship, the protest was quickly shut down by the authority and ended in failure. About 35 leading Chinese activists were arrested or detained (Pierson, 2011; Ramzy, 2011a).

41 After examining four major themes of China’s online activism, it can be seen that

China’s online activism is precarious, according to the themes of struggle. The nationalistic online protest, online self-expression (promotion), and online rightful resistance are relatively safe, whereas Internet-facilitated pro-democracy social movements that have organisational bases, political aims and offline actions are highly risky. As Zheng and Wu (2005) point out, in China, safe and illegal online activism practices are mostly those “voice activities”, which do not pose a direct challenge to the state and aim to facilitate interaction between the state and society.

This thesis focuses on “voice activities” instead of the extra-legal protests, for the author believes that legal, peaceful and progressive online activism practices are more effective than the radical practices, which result in sustainable progress in

Chinese society.

The examination of these themes is helpful to understand the social functions and impact of online activism in China’s social, cultural and political domains (see Table

2-1). However, it is necessary to go further to discuss the concrete practices of online activism. The following section examines China’s online activism through a more practical and pragmatic perspective, by looking at modes of online activism.

42 Table 2-1: Themes of China’s online activism

Themes Purposes Performances CCP’s attitudes Representative cases Nationalism Defend national Online petition Supportive with NATO bombing of dignity and and protest necessary control the Chinese interests embassy in 1999; US-China spy plane collision in 2001 Cultural Challenge cultural Blogging of the Neutral with Muzimei’s sex blog; identities hegemony grassroots cyber necessary Hu Ge’s e’gao video celebrities, e’gao regulation (see Chapter culture Three) Social issues Formulate online Internet Neutral with Sun Zhigang case; public opinion and incidents about necessary control Chongqing “nail set agendas on social injustice, and regulation house” case mainstream media environmental and government pollution and official corruption Political Pro-democracy Internet- Crackdown China’s Jasmine actions facilitated social Revolution movements

2.4.2 Modes of China’s online activism

Modes of online activism refer to the common strategies and techniques used for doing online activism across different themes. Mapping these modes can set boundaries and clarify strategies, techniques, characteristics and purposes of each type of online activism. Moreover, this mapping can make online activism practices more recognisable and provide pragmatic guidance for practitioners.

This thesis follows three principles to categorise modes of China’s online activism.

First, the principle of frequency, that is, how often online activism is practiced by

Chinese Internet users in everyday life; second, the principle of social influence, that is, how online activism practices have caused apparent social, cultural, and political impacts on Chinese society, and attracted attentions form media, government and international societies; and third, the principle of similarity, that is, online activism

43 practices of a certain mode have similarities in their strategies, techniques, purposes and functions.

By referring to “typologies”, “models”, “forms” or “genres” of online activism categorised by other scholars, (Atton, 2004; Lievrouw, 2011; McCaughey & Ayers,

2003; Meikle, 2002; Waltz, 2005), as well as, considering China’s unique social, cultural and political realities, this thesis outlines three major modes of online activism in Chinese society: culture jamming, citizen journalism and mediated mobilisation. The three modes form the main body of alternative and activist uses of the Internet in China. The following subsections examine each mode by introducing its theoretical origin and historical development in the West and in China.

Culture jamming

The history of culture jamming can be traced back to the 20th century European artistic avant-gardes and the Situationist movement from the 1950s to the 1970s. As

Lasn (1999) argues, culture jamming is a “revolutionary continuum” with anarchists,

Dadaists, Situationists, the sixties hippie movement, and early punk rockers, among others (p. 99). Culture jamming is also “semiological” (Dery, 1993) or “meme” (Lasn,

1999) warfare, through which, cultural jammers “intrude on the intruders, investing ads, newscasts and other media artefacts with subversive meanings” (Dery, 1993).

One of the classic examples of culture jamming is Jonah Peretti’s “Nike Media

Adventure”. Peretti took advantage of a marketing campaign of Nike that allowed customers to order custom-made shoes by adding a word or slogan. Peretti chose the word “sweatshop” to be printed on his shoes. In subsequent email correspondence with Peretti, Nike refused to fill Peretti’s order or give any explanation. Peretti posted his correspondence with Nike on the Internet after his

44 order was rejected. His post was soon widely circulated online all over the world and reported by many mainstream media. Nike was embarrassed and had attracted adverse publicity (Cammaerts, 2007; Lievrouw, 2011; Peretti, 2001).

As Peretti (2001) concludes, culture jamming is a creative strategy, which “turns corporate power against itself by co-opting, hacking, mocking, and re- contextualizing meanings” (p. 1). It aims to “reverse and transgress the meaning of cultural codes whose primary aim is to persuade us to buy something or be someone” (Jordan, 2002, p. 102). Culture jamming promotes “anti-consumerism”

(Lasn, 1999) and can be taken as a form of “consumer boycott” (Carducci, 2006).

However, culture jamming is not only a counter technique against the dominant

“capitalist corporate brand culture”, but can also be used as an intervention “in the realm of politics” (Cammaerts, 2007, p. 72). According to Cammaerts (2007), political (culture) jamming is more overtly political and directed against political parties, government policies or political actors. By using humour, mocking, satire and parody, political jamming subverts the dominant political discourse and develops counter-hegemonic discourses. Culture jamming, either anti-consumerism or anti-politics, strives to “hack into the mainstream public sphere, controlled largely by market and state” (Cammaerts, 2007, p. 73). By analysing the current literatures on culture jamming, three main characteristics can be outlined.

First, culture jamming is counter-cultural. It subverts mainstream culture to

“reveal and criticize its fundamental inequalities, hypocrisies and absurdities”

(Lievrouw, 2011, p. 80). It is practised in the form of popular culture, such as billboard alterations, cartoons and remixing, to détourn popular ideologies in politics and everyday life. Second, culture jamming is “media-based” (Morris, 2001, p. 27). Poster, magazine, radio and television were early platforms representing

45 culture jamming. However, the rise in the Internet technologies pushed culture jamming online and turned it into a participatory and collaborative practice. The

Internet has become the most popular platform to produce, circulate and consume culture jamming projects (Cammaerts, 2007; Jordan, 2002; Lievrouw, 2011). Third, culture jamming is what Giddens (1991) calls “life politics”. As Cammaerts (2007) argues, culture jamming is inherently political for its resistance to the dominance of commodification and market monopoly. Culture jamming proves that small interventions can make a big difference and that everyday subculture is a viable path to evoke social change (Carducci, 2006; Lievrouw, 2011).

In China, the history of culture jamming can be traced back to cultural irony in the form of popular culture in the 1990s, such as Cui Jian’s rock-n-roll, Wang Shuo’s

“hooligan” novels and the T-shirt craze (Gong & Yang, 2010; Yu, 2007a). These popular culture events can be taken as origins of China’s culture jamming, because the playful and ironic use of words in popular cultural products were consistent with the basic techniques and “détournment” nature of culture jamming in the West.

With the development of the Internet in China, cultural irony and parody have been digitised. Since 2006, culture jamming has emerged in China’s cyberspace as popular Internet culture. It evolves from the original e’gao culture to the current shanzhai media culture, poking fun at professionally and industrially produced cultural products. It inherits the counterculture spirit of culture jamming in the

West, but adopts new strategies to adapt to China’s unique social, cultural and political situations, articulating critiques in a non-serious, non-conventional, artistic and entertaining way (see case studies about e’gao culture and shanzhai media culture in Chapter Three).

46 Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism is defined as “people without professional journalism training

[using] the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, argument or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others”

(Glazer, 2006). It comprises ordinary citizens’ reporting, editing, opinions, and commentaries online, which challenge the institutional practices of news production, such as editorial gatekeeping and advertisement-based business models (Deuze,

2003; Lievrouw, 2011; Ryfe & Mensing, 2008). Citizen journalism is also known as

“grassroots journalism” (Gillmor, 2006), “networked journalism” (Deuze, 2007),

“open-source journalism” (Lenard, 1999) or “participatory journalism” (Lievrouw,

2011). Each term could grasp some, but not all, characteristics of this new form of journalistic practice. However, a striking feature common among various terminologies is the growing involvement of the ordinary people in online news production.

Citizen journalism first became noticeable during and after the 9/11 tragedy in

2001 and soon became a prominent phenomenon in the South Asian Tsunami in

2004 (Outing, 2005). By using Web technologies and cyber-networking, ordinary citizens could generate self-styled reporting, which could contain first-person accounts, mobile or digital camera snapshots and camcorder video footage. The user-generated content is then posted online through blogs, personal webpages and social media and shares with professional journalists the ability to reach a large number of audiences.

In Western societies, the rise in citizen journalism is due to the current crisis in the news industry and the economic and technological challenges the news industry faces (Lievrouw, 2011). It is believed that citizen journalism challenges traditional

47 journalism as “expert culture and commodity” (Atton, 2004, p. 60) and “seeks to critique and reform the press as an institution” (Lievrouw, 2011, p. 143). The existing research literature on citizen journalism in the West mainly focuses on ordinary citizens’ crisis reporting in disasters, such as 9/11, the South Asian tsunami, Iraq War, London subway bombings, Hurricane Katrina, and so on (Allan,

2007; Gillette, Taylor, Chavez, Hodgson, & Downing, 2007; Outing, 2005; Wall, 2009), or independent media projects, such as the Indymedia movement in different countries of the world (Atton, 2003; Kidd, 2003; Morris, 2004; Pickard, 2006a;

2006b). These empirical researches have demonstrated the transformative potential of citizen journalism and its wide influence on the news industry and political participation.

In China, the rise in citizen journalism is attributed to the government’s tight control on news production. As discussed in Chapter One, mainstream media play the role as the CCP’s mouthpiece. Their investigative reporting on controversial issues is usually restricted (see Chapter Four). The highly controlled media system could not satisfy the people’s “right to know” and “right to speak”. Therefore, the watchdog function and the public nature of Chinese citizen journalism are inherently underscored in comparision to its counterpart in the West. Scholars in

Chinese citizen journalism studies are interested in examining how citizen journalism breaks through the government’s tight media control, produces alternative news information, facilitates the formation of online public opinion, and finally empowers the marginalised individuals or groups to articulate their oppressed voices (Cao, 2010; Reese & Dai, 2009; Xin, 2010, Yu; 2009). Citizen journalism in China is mainly practiced as eyewitness reporting, online discussion and independent investigation. It interacts, negotiates with and contests

48 mainstream journalism to represent China’s complex social realities, particularly in times of crisis (see case studies on citizen journalism in China’s 2008 Sichuan earthquake in Chapter Four).

Mediated mobilisation

Mediated mobilisation is a mode “relates to the domain of political/cultural organizing and social movements” (Lievrouw, 2011, p. 25). Since the 1990s, the

Internet has been employed as a vehicle for collective actions. On the one hand, the

Internet has been used in traditional forms of collective actions, making it easier to organise, coordinate and mobilise across geographic distances and social and cultural boundaries. On the other hand, the Internet has created new models of collective actions, such as hacking websites, email bombings, online petitions, virtual sit-ins, and so on. As Laer and Aelst (2010) argue, the Internet and other new media technologies have shaped and are shaping the repertoires of collective actions and social movements. By making use digital networking devices, such as email lists, weblogs, social media sites and mobile phones, the “transaction costs”

(Naughton, 2001), which groups and activists use to organise, mobilise and participate in collective actions, have been significantly reduced. Moreover, translocal and transnational networking and information flow, largely enabled by the Internet, allows collaboration and participation in collective actions beyond temporal and spatial constraints, generating new forms of translocal and transnational social movements, such as the Zapatista resistance in Mexico in early

1990s (see Chadwick, 2006), the “Battle in Seattle” in 1999 (see Juris, 2005), the

“Arab Spring” revolutionary wave in North Africa and the Middle East in late 2010

(see Cottle, 2011) and the global “Occupy Movement” in 2011 (see Mirzoeff, 2011).

49 According to Yang (2009a: 28), the Internet was first used in collective actions in

China in the 1989 Tiananmen incident. At that time, Chinese students and scholars overseas actively used “e-mail” and “newsgroup” to raise funds for student protesters, issue statement of support, and organise demonstrations around the world. With the development of ICTs, the Internet has gradually become accessible to the average urban consumers in China post-1996. It has been increasingly used to organise, mobilise and participate in collective actions, such as nationalistic events, right-defence actions, and pro-democracy protests. However, because of China’s unique social, cultural, and political environment, particularly concerning the government’s tight control on freedom of association and assembly, Internet- facilitated collective actions are different from their Western counterparts in performance and function. In the West, Internet-supported collective actions are usually large-scale mass political campaigns, which have clear political aims and corresponding offline actions, whereas in China, Internet-facilitated collective actions are usually discursive activities, which focus on the resolution of a single controversial issue and have little offline action. Internet-based collective actions in

China are usually conducted in the form of online weiguan, through which, numerous Internet users discuss a certain controversial issue in a networked and interactive way, generating strong online public opinion to influence the agendas of mainstream media and the government offline (see theoretical discussion and case studies about online weiguan in Chapter Five).

2.5 Conclusion

As discussed above, culture jamming, citizen journalism and mediated mobilisation are three major modes of online activism in China. They have been widely used in

50 different online activism themes and have intervened in mainstream culture, news production and collective action in Chinese society (see Table 2-2). However, the three major modes of online activism could not include all types of alternative and activist uses of the Internet. For example, “hacking” is also a very important mode of online activism in the West and in China, which refers to “activist technologist design, build and ‘hack’ or reconfigure systems with the purpose of resisting political, commercial, and the state restrains on open access to information and the use of information technologies” (Lievrouw, 2011, p. 98). However, in this thesis, hacking is not taken as a major mode of online activism, for its illegal nature and relatively higher technological threshold do not match the progressive, peaceful and sustainable characteristics of China’s online activism that I want to underscore, or meet the frequency principle I use to categorise modes of China’s online activism.

Table 2-2: Major modes of China’s online activism

Modes Performances Purposes

Culture jamming Digitised satires, parodies, spoofs Challenge the mainstream culture and copycats in a non-serious, parodic and playful way Citizen journalism Eyewitness reporting, online Challenge news production discussion, independent invest- dominated by the Party and tigation market Mediated moblisation Online weiguan Organise and mobilise online and offline collective actions

In addition, the three major modes of online activism are not mutually exclusive and usually co-exist in a certain event context. For example, in some Internet- facilitated collective actions, which fall into the mode of mediated mobilisation, culture jamming and citizen journalism are usually used as important strategies to

51 provide evidences, comments, critiques and mobilise online public opinion (see

Chapter 5). Therefore, these modes should be viewed as mutually supplementary and constitutive instead of being isolated and balkanised. Moreover, each mode of online activism is not fixed or static. It evolves with the development of new media technologies, people’s changing Internet usage habits, as well as changing policies and laws relating to the Internet control and censorship in China. In the following chapters, the thesis will study the interventions of three main modes of online activism in the contexts of media celeberation, disaster and scandal respectively.

52 Chapter Three

Media Celebration: Shanzhai Media Culture as Media Intervention

3.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter, I set out the concepts of alternative media and online activism, and provided a historical overview of the development of alternative media and online activism in China. The major themes and modes of China’s online activism were summarised. From this chapter on, I will locate different modes of online activism in different types of media events to explpre how they intervene in and transform Chinese media events.

This chapter examines how shanzhai media culture, a culture jamming practice with Chinese characteristics, has intervened in and transformed celebratory media events. It takes the celebration of the Chinese Spring Festival as critical context to investigate complicated interrelations between the officially sanctioned celebration

(CCTV Spring Festival Gala) and the grassroots celebration (Shanzhai Spring Festival

Gala). By undertaking a case study on the Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala, [Shanzhai chunwan 山寨春晚], run by ordinary citizen Lao Meng, this chapter argues that Lao

Meng’s shanzhai gala copycats the format of the CCTV gala, attracts grassroots participation and pursues entertainment for entertainment’s sake, which resists against the ritualised, TV-centred and elite-dominated CCTV gala that aims to entertain the Chinese for the sake of education. Though his shanzhai gala failed to directly challenge CCTV’s near-monopoly on the Spring Festival gala, it has expanded the discussion on shanzhai phenomenon from economic arena to cultural

53 sphere and evoked the rise of shanzhai media culture. The shanzhai media culture has become a popular way of doing media intervention, challenging Chinese media spectacles dominated by the Party ideology and market economy in a satirical and light-hearted way. The dynamics of interplay between shanzhai media culture and spectacular media culture has gradually made the Chinese media culture more open, contentious and diverse.

The Chinese term shanzhai literally translates as “mountain village” or “mountain stronghold”. It originally referred to the mountain stockades of regional warlords or bandits, which were against the authorities and outside the jurisdiction of the official. “Liang Shan Bo” [梁山泊], an independent and anti-government shanzhai in the popular Ming dynasty novel Outlaws of the Marshes [Shuihu zhuan 水浒传], one of China’s four great classical novels, is the most familiar shanzhai image to the

Chinese (Xi, 2009).

Since the early 2000s, the term shanzhai had gained popularity from Shenzhen,

China’s first special economic zone in Guangdong province, to most regions in China.

It refers to “a blurring of commodity and simulacra: cheap copycats, fakes, pirated goods, local versions of globally branded goods, celebrity impersonators, as well as parodies of mainstream and official culture” (Keane & Zhao, 2012). From mobile phones to notebook computers, from medicine to soft drinks, from movie stars to

New Year galas, Chinese consumers encounter shanzhai in almost every aspect of their daily lives. Consuming shanzhai products has become a lifestyle and a popular culture, which has caused the rapid development of China’s shanzhai economy as well as shanzhai media culture. I will further explain the key concepts in section 3.3.

54 This chapter is structured in three sections. The first section points out that CCTV

Spring Festival Gala is a Chinese media spectacle, which has dual monopolies in ideology and market. This section also argues that the neoliberal development of

China’s media industry has produced media spectacles with Chinese characteristics.

The Chinese media spectacles, as exemplified by CCTV Spring Festival Gala, not only fulfill the Party’s ideological thought work [Sixiang gongzuo 思想工作]4, but also pursues maximum economic benefits at the same time. The second section discusses

China’s shanzhai phenomenon in economic and cultural spheres. With a particular focus on the shanzhai media culture in the cultural sphere, this section argues that shanzhai media culture is a performative activity of culture jamming with e’gao spirit and shanzhai ethos, which combines the characteristics of both the shanzhai economic model and the parodic e’gao culture. Shanzhai media culture has thus extended the shanzhai economy into cultural realm and extended culture jamming into creative industry. It challenges the paradoxical neoliberal logic of the Chinese media development as well as the dominant ideology and cultural values represented in Chinese media spectacles. The third section presents the Shanzhai

Spring Festival Gala as a case study to examine performances, characteristics, and enabling and limiting functions of shanzhai media culture. By looking at Lao Meng’s experiences of running shanzhai galas from 2009 to 2011, the case study aims to show the contestation between shanzhai and CCTV galas, as well as their mutual adaptation and evolution.

4 “Thought work” refers to the CCP’s ideological propaganda and political persuasion in general (Lynch, 1999). It is “one of the key means for the CCP to guaranteeing the party’s ongoing legitimacy and hold on power” (Brady, 2006, p. 59), and is taken as “the very life blood of the Party-state” (Brady, 2008, p. 1) in the post-1989 era. According to Brady (2008), the CCP’s thought work has evolved along with China’s changing social, cultural, political and technological environment in order to maintain the Party’s ideological control and governing legitimacy. 55 3.2 CCTV Spring Festival Gala as Media Spectacle

Festivals are ritual activities created by human communities in a shared spatial- temporal occasion in order to maintain identity, belief, custom and culture of a community (Lü, 2003a). The Spring Festival, which is also known as Chinese New

Year or Lunar New Year, is the most important traditional Chinese festival. It begins on the first day of the first month in the Chinese calendar and ends with the Lantern

Festival on the 15th day. By celebrating the Spring Festival, all the descendants of the Yellow Emperor in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and other diasporic Chinese communities, create an imagined Chinese nation and consolidate their Chinese identities.

Among the regionally varied customs and traditions of the Spring Festival, local operas and theatrical stunts constitute essential components of the festival celebration (Lü, 2003a). Lü (2003a) argues that Chinese local operas are usually carnivals or comedies with reunion endings. The reunion theme of operas and the collective way of viewing resonate with the “family-gathering” ritual of the Spring

Festival. With the penetration of the mass media into everyday life, television has largely taken the place of traditional theatre for opera performance. Since 1983,

CCTV started to run its annual Spring Festival gala on the eve of Chinese New Year.

The continuous four-to-five-hour live broadcasting gala, comprised of singing, dancing, traditional vernacular operas, language plays (cross-talk and comedy skits) and other variety shows, offers a grand visual banquet for millions of Chinese families and soon becomes “a new fork custom” [Xin minsu 新民俗] by combining popular entertainment with traditional ritualistic forms.

56 According to Bin Zhao (1998), the gala “helps strength the family-centralism on the one hand, and to unify families into the ‘imagined community’ of the Chinese nation on the other” (p. 56), It brings the “Confucian dream of ‘great oneness’” to “an atmospheric and symbolic realization” on the eve of the Spring Festival (p. 46).

Wanning Sun (2007) further explores the ideological functions of the gala and argues the show delivers “strong messages of patriotism and national unity” packaged as “entertainment, fun and family festivity” (p. 191). She believes the gala is one of the successful experiments for the Chinese state to carry out its ideological work in the domestic sphere of private citizens, which “demonstrates the ingenuity of the Chinese state in reinventing ways of indoctrinating and educating the nation”

(Sun, 2007, p. 191).

My empirical observation of the 2009 CCTV Spring Festival Gala bears out Sun’s argument. Three hero groups were pre-arranged to appear on the gala stage in 2009.

They were the Olympic heroes who won honour for the motherland in the 2008

Beijing Olympic Games; the aerospace heroes who successfully carried out space missions on Shenzhou No.7 space flight; and the earthquake heroes who took part in the rescue and relief work in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The three most important national events in 2008 were intentionally recalled and subtly integrated into the gala show, which aimed to display China’s great achievements in

2008 under the leadership of the CCP, and more importantly, to enhance the sense of “national pride” and “patriotism” of Chinese audiences through elaborate entertainment programs.

As discussed above, it can be seen that the CCTV gala has made use of, but extended and transformed, the original “family-gathering” ritual of the Spring

57 Festival into a new ritual imposed with “officially sanctioned ideologies” (B. Zhao,

1998, p. 43). It is not simply an entertainment show for the sake of entertainment, but rather it has become an important venue for the Party-state to do thought work in China’s reform era. The significance of the gala’s ideological function makes it intimate with the state power. It is controlled and regulated by several central government institutions, including the State Administration of Radio, Film and

Television (SARFT) and the Ministry of Culture. Government’s intervention, mainly in the guiding thought, content censorship, policy and financial support, ensures the

CCTV gala runs smoothly on the correct ideological track, while also legitimising the gala’s exclusive discursive power, which could represent the Party, state and nation.

Its exclusive discursive power, as a result, has consolidated the gala’s 30 years’ monopoly in China’s media industry.

As a national media event, CCTV gala is the most profitable TV program with the highest audience rating in China’s TV history. According to national telephone surveys from the CRT market research company, from 20:30 to 24:00, on the eve of the Lunar New Year in 2009, about 95.6% of national viewers (about 710 million people) watched the TV show (Xinhuanet.com, 2009a). The high rating translates into high earning. The 2010 CCTV gala earned 650 million CNY of advertisement revenue (Ifeng.com, 2010), which was almost the annual total advertisement revenue of some provincial TV stations. The gala attracts the attention of national audiences, not only during the live broadcasting process, but also prior to and after the gala show. Various topics range from who will direct the gala to who will host the gala; from who will perform in the gala to who will leave the gala stage; from the audiences’ pre-gala expectations to the audiences’ post-gala critiques. These topics become popular news events, which are widely covered by traditional and Internet

58 media and consumed daily by national audiences. In addition to the domestic market, the gala can also be beamed into diasporic Chinese homes via satellite and high-speed Internet cable. Since 2005, the CCTV gala has been broadcast worldwide with English, French and Spanish subtitles on CCTV-9 (English channel) and CCTV-

16 (French and Spanish channel) (Xinhuanet.com, 2005), and thereby has become a truly global media spectacle.

Kellner (2003) defines media spectacles as a “phenomenon of media culture that embody contemporary society’s basic values, serve to initiate individuals into way of life, and dramatize its controversies and struggles, as well as its models of conflict resolution” (p. 11), for example, the commodity spectacle of McDonald’s, the political spectacle of the Clinton sex scandal, and the television spectacle of The X-

Files. These media spectacles are driven by profit and competition, produced and reproduced by the mass media, and consumed by global audiences, contributing to the “infotainment society” and “spectacle culture” in contemporary American society (Kellner, 2003). However, due to China’s unique social, cultural and political circumstances, media spectacles in China are different from the American context.

Chinese media spectacles are driven not only by market logics as media products, but also controlled by the Party-state as propaganda work.

The Party-market intertwined logic is a paradox (Yu, 2011; Zhao, 2008b). The

Chinese media industry seems to be regulated by the “invisible hand of the market”.

However, as Zhu Xueqin vividly put it, “the invisible hands of market force are often stepped upon by the visible feet—the government’s administrative interventions”

(as cited in Zhu, 2003). As an important part of China’s economic reform, the media industry follows the unique path of China’s economic development, which David

59 Harvey (2005, p. 120) refers to as “neoliberalism with the ‘Chinese characteristics”’.

According to Harvey (2005), this unique way of economic development refers to “a particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control” (p. 120). The neoliberal model with Chinese characteristics results from China’s economic policies, which have adopted some neoliberal principles without relinquishing the Party’s political control and socialist ideology (Yu, 2011a). Implemented by the media industry, the paradoxical neoliberal logic has created media spectacles with Chinese characteristics, which have dual monopolies in market and ideology, such as the

CCTV Spring Festival Gala.

Thus CCTV gala promotes political and ideological information through the seemingly apolitical entertainment show. It proves the Party’s capacity to carry on ideological thought work in a proactive and attractive way in the era of economic reform and market liberalisation (Sun, 2007). However, the monopoly of ideological discourses has ensured the gala’s monopoly in the media market. The gala’s ideological discourse and market monopoly support each other, maintaining and guaranteeing the longevity of the show (Lü, 2009). As Li Chang Chun, Propaganda

Chief of the CCP stated, “the more our cultural products conquer the market, the more fortified our ideological front will be, the better the social benefits” (as cited in

Zhang, 2011, p. 161). The CCTV gala is but one example of Li’s command, which maximally combines economic and social benefits. The double pursuits, realised through complicity between the Party’s ideological thought work and the market economy, could explain the myth of the gala’s 30 years’ success, and also illustrates the characteristics of China’s media spectacles.

60 The neoliberal development of the Chinese media has produced spectacles with

Chinese characteristics and created active Chinese audiences. With the deepening of media commercialisation and marketisation, Chinese mass audiences have evolved from passive into active participants (Tong, 2011; Yu, 2009). They are no longer monolithic, passively reading, watching and listening to media; instead, they have become consumers, who choose media channels and information, offer critical comments about media products or participate in media content production.

Chinese media spectacles have increasingly provoked critiques from these critical audiences.

Take the CCTV Spring Festival Gala as an example. Some audiences are not satisfied with embedded advertisements in the show. Some complain that the gala neglects audiences from the South, who do not speak Mandarin Chinese. Some actors in the gala even expose the hidden rules of the show, which usually involve bribery and corruption. In early 2008, five scholars released a New Spring Festival

Culture Plato [Xin chunjie wenhua xuanyan 新春节文化宣言] and initiated an online campaign against the CCTV gala. They criticised the show for imposing too many political functions on the traditional Spring Festival, and for simplifying the culturally rich celebration into merely watching television. They called upon

Chinese audiences to distance themselves from the gala (Ent.ynet.com, 2008).

However, the resistance remained on a symbolic level and failed to shake the

CCTV gala’s dominant status. On the contrary, increased critiques and public discussion attracted more public attention, and caused a further increase in the size of the gala’s viewing audiences. It was not until 2009 that Shanzhai Spring Festival

Gala for the first time in history, challenged the CCTV gala’s discursive and

61 economical monopolies in practice, which made it a popular counter-spectacle media event in China. Prior to analysing the shanzhai gala case in detail, the following section examines key concepts of shanzhai economy and shanzhai media culture in order to have an overall understanding of China’s popular shanzhai phenomenon.

3.3 From Shanzhai Economy to Shanzhai Media Culture

China’s shanzhai economy originated from the mobile phone industry in Shenzhen.

As China’s first special economic zone, established in 1980, Shenzhen was the inaugural area to trial complete market economy in mainland China. The central and local governments offered fiscal support to Shenzhen, such as tax discounts and support of central and local government budgets. These favourable policies promoted the local economy’s capital flexibility and have since attracted millions of investors from China and abroad (Zhu & Shi, 2010). After three decades of development, Shenzhen has become a sample of China’s reform and globalisation, as well as a frontier city for risk investment, free trade, entrepreneurship, innovation and shanzhai economy.

The development of the shanzhai handset industry started in Shenzhen and other nearby cities in the Pearl River Delta region from 2005. In that year, Taiwan’s cell phone chip solution company MediaTek (MTK) launched a new chip solution featuring “all-in-one functionality”, which combined the motherboard and software

(Tse, Ma, & Huang, 2009). MTK’s integrated circuit (IC) design solution sharply reduces the Research and Development (R&D) time and cost in the traditional

62 handset industry, and enables manufacturers to spend most of their resources on technological service and exterior design. At the same time, it transforms the traditional manufacturing process into “manufacturing networks” (Zhu & Shi, 2010, pp. 36, 37). In the network, each player of shanzhai mobile phone is specialised to focus on a specific contribution, such as the IC design, hand-model making or final assembly. The shanzhai model has greatly challenged the entire supply chain of transnational handset companies from chip R &D, manufacture to sales, lowered the criteria to enter the mobile telecommunication industry, and brought down costs and market prices. The rise in shanzhai handset companies has challenged the monopoly of international mobile phone companies from Europe, the United States and Japan. Their total market share dropped from over 90% in 2000 to under 50% in 2008, whereas the shanzhai phone market share increased to over 30% (Kao &

Lee, 2010). The low-end shanzhai mobile phones quickly occupy the mobile phone market in China’s second and third tier cities and vast rural areas, providing affordable mobile phones for low-income “information have-less” people (Qiu,

2009).

However, shanzhai mobiles phones, similar to the other shanzhai products, are usually taken as “piracy”, “counterfeit”, “copycat” or “imitation” (Leng & Zhang,

2011), because most shanzhai mobile phone companies initiated their business by copycatting the products of famous brands, such as Nokia, Samsung and Sony-

Ericsson. They call their brands as Nokir, Samsing and Suny-Ericsson, similar to the world-famous brands, and copycat established brands in appearance. In addition, the large amount of consumer complaints caused by insufficient after-sales service also makes shanzhai handsets low quality and imitation (Zhu & Shi, 2010). However, copycatting is not necessarily negative. It could be an effective marketing strategy

63 for shanzhai manufacturers to build and develop brands in the start-up period (Leng

& Zhang, 2011). By copycatting names, appearances and functions of the famous brands, the shanzhai manufacturers could realise original capital accumulation and initial building of their own brands (Yin Li, Cheng, & Qiu, 2010). When shanzhai brands are widely recognised by consumers and shanzhai firms have grown to a certain size, shanzhai manufacturers often try to get rid of their initial shanzhai colours and enhance their innovativeness and competitiveness (Leng & Zhang,

2011). For example, mobile phone manufacturer Tianyu has successfully transformed into a leading local brand from an initial shanzhai maker. In the third season in 2008, the market share of Tianyu mobile had reached 8.1% in China’s mobile phone market, which made it China’s fourth largest mobile phone manufacturer after the three world-leading brands including Nokia, Samsung and

Motorola (Tech.qq.com, 2009).

By analysing the business models of shanzhai mobile phone manufacturers and other shanzhai makers in soft drinks and online products, Tse, Ma and Huang (2009) conclude with five common characteristics of the shanzhai model:

Focus on the domestic market (at least initially)…target mostly mass

consumers…strive for very short cycle time on product introduction…focus on

cost (but often offer lower quality too)…tailor product features and functions

specifically to local requirement.

The shanzhai model effectively lowers the technological and capital threshold for small independent entrepreneurs and makes possible the rapid production cycle,

64 adaption and indigenous innovation. Its “imitation-plus-innovation” or “innovative copycatting” nature has transformed many shanzhai manufacturers from initial imitators into emerging indigenous adaptors and innovators (Zhu & Shi, 2010).

Following this model, many small shanzhai companies have quickly expanded with the capability to compete with national or international brands. Some shanzhai brands even have even dominated the local market, or moved aggressively into overseas markets.

However, the Chinese government officially discourages the shanzhai model and tries to control shanzhai products, because the government worries that the explosion of shanzhai products will infringe intellectual property rights, disrupt the market order and destroy genuine Chinese innovation (Ho, 2010). Nevertheless, the immense material benefits from making shanzhai products means pragmatism outweighs ethical standards (Ho, 2010). The shanzhai manufacturers believe that imitation is the first step towards genuine innovation and legitimise the shanzhai model as “primary innovation” (Kao & Lee, 2010), corresponding with President Hu

Jintao’s pledge to build China into “an innovation-oriented country” (Keane & Zhao,

2012). The shanzhai model has become a practical and effective path for China’s small local companies to compete with Western capital in the globalised market economy, contributing to the increase of gross domestic product (GDP) for both local and central governments. Therefore, the government turns a blind eye to shanzhai manufacturing in reality, which has caused the rapid development of

China’s shanzhai economy.

The rapid development of shanzhai economy means the shanzhai ethos goes beyond its original economic realm and expands into the social and cultural sphere

65 (Wu, 2006). As Ho (2010) argues, “the spirit of shanzhai did not stop with commodities or consumption or material profits”, and “continue to rise and claim their own space in the cultural realm where various forms of performative activities reach for self-affirming plays”. These shanzhai performative activities usually take the media, particularly the Internet, as the main platform for production, circulation and consumption, forming a popular shanzhai media culture.

Shanzhai media culture inherits the main characteristics of shanzhai economy, such as imitation, adaptation, innovation and anti-monopoly. However, as performative activities, shanzhai has much more rich discursive and cultural meaning. It challenges not only monopoly capital in the media market, but also the

“highly centralized Chinese political context” (Ho, 2010) represented in established media products. Shanzhai media culture also inherits key characteristics of culture jamming, such as playful, poradic and counter-hegemonic, and is taken as “counter- mainstream cultural activities” that embody “a sense of play” (Keane & Zhao, 2012).

However, as an extended form of shanzhai economy in the cultural sphere, it is market-driven and more related to the creative industry than ordinary culture jamming practices.

Combining the characteristics of shanzhai economy and culture jamming, shanzhai media culture could be taken as an extension of shanzhai economy into the cultural realm, as well as an extension of culture jamming into creative industries. It is a new performative activity of culture jamming with shanzhai ethos, which challenges the paradoxical neoliberal development of the Chinese media industry and pokes fun at dominant ideology and cultural values represented by the Chinese media, put simply, Chinese media spectacles.

66 As discussed in Chapter Two, the history of China’s culture jamming can be traced back to cultural irony in the form of popular culture in the 1990s. These popular culture events could be taken as origins of China’s culture jamming, because their playful uses and ironic meanings of words in the popular cultural products were consistent with the basic techniques and “détournment” nature of culture jamming in the West. However, culture jamming in China’s 1990s did not promote “anti- consumerism”. Instead, the rise in cultural irony per se could be taken as a celebration of consumerism. Through consuming the popular culture in the form of rock music, bestsellers and fashion costumes, the Chinese people started to construct the consumer-citizenship, which had long been oppressed by the planned economy. Consumer-citizenship underlines selfhood, identity and rights consciousness, which is oppositional to the comrade-citizenship centred on class, collectivism and obligation in the Mao era.

With the deepening of China’s economic reform and the rapid development of the market economy, China has become an important member of the world economic community and has integrated into the global neoliberal order. The argument that

“commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life” (Debord, 1967), criticised by the Situationists movement in Europe in the late 1960s, has appeared in Chinese society in the space of four decades. The embrace of consumerism in the early stage of economic reform was gradually replaced by reflections and critiques on China’s rapid marketisation without democratisation. The intimacy and alienation of China’s economic reform with Western capitalism, as well as the ideological continuity and discontinuity of China’s post-socialism (socialism with Chinese characteristics) with the Maoist socialist tradition, have caused “cognitive dissonance” (Festinger, 1957) in their political, economical and cultural lives of Chinese people. Due to China’s

67 strict control of the media, it is difficult to express the anxieties, disagreements, grievances and dissent of ordinary people, who are largely underrepresented.

Cultural jamming thus provides a strategic means for these people to mediate their oppression through alternative media channels in a non-serious, playful and satirical way.

Among the alternative media channels, the Internet has thus far provided the most ideal platform for the production, circulation and consumption of culture jamming projects. With the penetration of the Internet in everyday life, online networking and commerce and gaming have become the most important everyday activities of Chinese Internet users (CNNIC, 2009). This “entertainment-and- consumption pattern” (Yu, 2007a) of the Internet use to a certain degree has promoted the digitisation of culture jamming practices. These practices inherit the counterculture spirit of culture jamming in the West but adopt new strategies to adapt to China’s unique social, cultural and political context, generating innovative forms of culture jamming practices with Chinese characteristics, such as e’gao culture and shanzhai media culture.

E’gao literally translates into “wicked fun”, which has emerged in China’s cyberspace as popular culture since 2006. It refers to a “popular subculture that deconstructs serious themes to entertain people with comedy effects” (Huang,

2006), and covers “all types of audiovisual spoofs, oft-times by taking advantages of the transformative capability of digital technology as well as distribution power of the Internet” (Meng, 2009, p. 52). As Gong and Yang (2010) succinctly put it, e’gao is

“a new technology-enabled cultural intervention” (p. 4). By using Photoshop, Flash and other digital remixing technologies, e’gao-makers poke fun at professionally and

68 industrially produced cultural products, including the blockbusters, Red classics

(revolutionary films, literature, and heroes), and media celebrities, in a parodic style.

Through remixing parts of the original parodied texts with other texts, e’gao works

“create ironic incongruity that triggers humor and laughter” (Gong & Yang, 2010, p.

5). They articulate social criticism and grievances, enlightening the public to critically understand the social realities in a non-serious, non-conventional, artistic and entertaining way.

Among the plethora of e’gao works in China’s cyberspace, Hu Ge’s spoof video,

The Bloody Case of a Steamed Bun[一个馒头引发的血案], is one of the cases most frequently studied (Gong & Yang, 2010; Li, 2011; Meng, 2009; Voci, 2010; Yu,

2007a). In December 2005, China’s famous film director Chen Kaige released his blockbuster The Promise [Wu Ji 无极]. The film was the most expensive blockbuster in China’s film history with a budget of 300 million CNY, which attracted huge attention from media outlets and the public. However, Chen’s film disappointed millions of viewers and evoked overwhelming criticism. He Ge, a 31-year-old sound engineer and freelancer based in Shanghai, produced a spoof video to mock Chen’s film. Hu edited the scenes taken from a pirated copy of Chen’s film and re-organised them in the format of a popular TV program China Legal Reports [Zhongguo fazhi baodao 中国法制报道] from CCTV. The love story in Chen’s film was re-mediated into a murder case reported in a TV program. The two irrelevant hypotexts were re- edited, remixed and re-dubbed in a new context, poking fun at each other to cause humorous and satirical effects. In January 2006, Hu’s spoof video instantly became the hottest hit on the Internet. It was widely circulated on major audiovisual portals, weblogs and BBS forums. The grassroots’ playful and public critique over the

69 cultural elite soon became a popular culture event and was enthusiastically covered by mainstream media. Hu Ge was named by the netizens as “master of the steamed bun” [Mantou jiaozhu 馒头教主] and “the father of e’gao” [E’gao zhifu 恶搞之父], and

He Ge established his fame and reputation as a cyber hero overnight.

By examining e’gao works on the Internet, particularly with a focus on Hu Ge’s work, scholars propose various ways to understand e’gao culture. Meng (2009) argues that e’gao is a decentralised form of communication, which deconstructs authorship and decentralises cultural production and distribution, though it is constantly being regulated by the state’s various recentralising rules and policies.

Voci (2010, p. 122) takes e’gao as a form of participatory culture and enlightenment.

She argues that e’gao parodies develop a contemplative humour that does not ask its participants to act, but invites them to see and understand realities differently from conventional media. These critiques, in my view, resonate with the characteristics of the broader culture jamming practice. E’gao culture can therefore be seen as a digitised and localised culture jamming practice in China.

In 2008, proclaimed by the Chinese mass media as the “Year of Shanzhai”

[Shanzhai nian 山寨年] (X. Wang, 2009), e’gao culture started to integrate with the popular shanzhai economy, generating shanzhai media culture. As a mixed culture, shanzhai media culture expands the territory of the shanzhai economy from the manufacturing industry into cultural production. At the same time, it absorbs the e’gao spirit in its discursive practices, producing various shanzhai media products.

In terms of content, shanzhai media products differ from former e’gao works. The e’gao works highly rely on remixing of original media texts, whereas shanzhai media products are more innovative and original with little copy-and-paste editing work.

70 They sometimes look funny and parodic as e’gao works, but these effects are usually unintentionally created by low-quality production and great contrast to the original high-quality production.

In terms of format, shanzhai media products use the strategies of genre imitation and appropriation, rather than remixing genres as e’gao works. Most shanzhai media products simply copycat the brand programs of CCTV, such as the Spring

Festival Gala, News Broadcasting[Xinwen lianbo 新闻联播], and Lecture Room [Baijia jiangtan 百家讲坛]. The main purpose of the shanzhai programs is to challenge

CCTV brand, monopolies in discourse and market, rather than produce parodic effects.

In terms of production and distribution, shanzhai media products are similar to e’gao works. First, both are usually produced by ambitious grassroots entrepreneurs, who intend to establish fame or make a profit by spoofing or copycatting established cultural products. Second, both shanzhai and e’gao are

Internet based. The Internet is the main platform to promote and distribute shanzhai and e’gao works, though they are usually produced in offline studios or theatres by using professional TV-film recording and editing equipment.

As discussed above, it can be seen that shanzhai media culture has both continuity and discontinuity with e’gao culture and offline shanzhai economy. It could be perceived as a new culture jamming practice with e’gao spirit and shanzhai ethos. The following section studies a representative case of shanzhai media culture,

Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala, a copycat of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. By looking at Lao Meng’s experiences of running the shanzhai gala from 2009 to 2011, the case study intends to show how the shanzhai gala speciafically challenges, intervenes and

71 interplays with the CCTV gala, as well as promises, limitations and evolution of

China’s shanzhai media culture generally.

3.4 Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala: A Counter-Spectacle Entrepreneurship

Hello, everyone, Happy Spring Festival...The year 2008 has flown away. The year

2009 has already come. No matter how serious the global economic crises are,

ordinary people’s lives are still the most important. If you want to cry, just cry out;

if you want to laugh, just laugh out. Pour all your complaints from the heart,

otherwise you cannot afford expensive medicines if you are depressed or sick…If

you buy a car, don’t drive it so often. The increasing petrol price is

unaffordable…Wish ordinary people’s lives become better and better (Shanzhai

chunwan, January 28, 2009).

The Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala was first run by an ordinary citizen Lao Meng in 2009. Lao Meng, whose full name is Shi Mengqi, was born in 1972. He is an IT worker, event planner and producer of wedding videos. In 2002, Lao Meng moved to

Beijing from the Sichuan province. As a migrant, he often spent his Spring Festival in

Beijing alone. Watching the CCTV Spring Festival Gala had become a habit on New

Year’s Eve. For him, the gala was an extravaganza hosted by a national TV station, performed by famous stars and sponsored by big corporations, leaving few opportunities for the people to take part. Therefore, he came up with an idea to make a grassroots gala to entertain rural migrant workers and students who could not return home for family gatherings during the Spring Festival (People’s Daily,

72 2010). Against the backdrop of the popularity of e’gao culture and shanzhai economy, Lao Meng started to prepare his shanzhai gala at the end of 2008 with his friends. He wanted to make an unpolished and relaxed grassroots show with a little bit of satirical fun.

On November 23, 2008, Lao Meng posted a “call for programs” on the shanzhai gala’s official blog (Lao Meng’s blog, November 23, 2008). He addressed the nation’s netizen friends as follows:

The purpose to run this gala is to entertain the people for the sake of

entertainment. Though we are not as rich as the CCTV, but we can collect the best

creative ideas and the most excellent programs from the nation’s people.

Welcome all the friends with talents to join us. This will be a Spring Festival Gala

for us ordinary people.

In this blog entry, the slogan of his shanzhai gala was proposed, that is, “People’s

Gala Held by the People, Run a Good Gala for the People” [Renmin chunwan renmin ban, banhao chunwan wei renmin 人民春晚人民办，办好春晚为人民]. This slogan easily reminded people of one of the most well-known Maoist slogans, “Serve the

People” [Wei renmin fuwu 为人民服务]. In addition, the slogan was written in big

Chinese characters. The font intentionally imitated the handwriting of Mao Zedong, creating an imagination that the people could become the real masters of the country as in the Mao era, at least in his shanzhai gala.

On the car he drove across Beijing to promote the gala, he printed materials with the words, “Challenge CCTV and wish all Chinese People a Happy Spring Festival”

73 [Jiaoban yangshi, gei quanguo renmin bainian 叫板央视，给全国人民拜年]. Lao

Meng printed the logo CCSTV on microphones, banners and cars, which added a letter S into the English abbreviation of China Central Television, CCTV. According to

Lao Meng, CCSTV was short for China Countryside Television [Zhongguo shanzhai dianshitai 中国山寨电视台], and had nothing to do with CCTV. However, audiences who were used to seeing the CCTV logo found CCSTV quite amusing, with enormous e’gao implications.

Lao Meng’s public challenge immediately caught the media’s attention. On

November 29, 2008, Beijing Times, first reported Lao Meng’s gala in an article with the headline “Ordinary citizen intends to run shanzhai version of Spring Festival

Gala and challenge CCTV” [Shimin yuban shanzhaiban chunwan jiaoban yangshi 市民

欲办山寨版春晚叫板央视] (Jiang, 2009). When the audience and the media were preparing to watch the 2009 CCTV gala in two months’ time, Lao Meng’s counter-

CCTV gala show definitely became eye-catching news. People were eager to witness the fight between an ant and an elephant. Many traditional media and Internet media interviewed Lao Meng and reported on his plans for the gala. Lao Meng soon became a media celebrity for his revolutionary entrepreneurship. The shanzhai gala had thus become a popular news event and upcoming media event.

As an IT worker, Lao Meng was savvy about the functions of the Internet in modern societies. He made use of the Internet to promote, organise and broadcast his gala. He established an official portal site (www.ccstv.net) to promote the gala and to post updates. Through the official website, Lao Meng could interact with netizens and understand the real needs of the ordinary audiences. The netizens could recommend their favourite grassroots stars to perform in the gala, make

74 comments and offer suggestions. Post the announcement of Lao Meng’s show, more than 300 people expressed interest to be volunteers for the show. About 300 original programs were recommended by netizens. Six enterprises also wanted to sponsor Lao Meng’s show (People.com.cn, 2008).

The shanzhai gala not only caught the traditional media’s attention as a news event, but also attracted its participation and cooperation. Guizhou Satellite

Television, a provincial satellite TV channel with a signal capable of reaching all regions in China as CCTV, intended to cooperate with Lao Meng and provide a live broadcasting platform. The two parties quickly signed a contract for mutual benefits.

For the shanzhai gala, a satellite TV channel could provide an equal platform that could compete with the CCTV gala. Potential audiences for the shanzhai gala are not limited to the Internet users and include millions of TV viewers. For Guizhou

Satellite Television, a TV station in the less-developed region of Western China with a yearly advertisement revenue of only 500 million CNY in 2008 (less than the CCTV gala’s revenue for one night) (Baoye.net, 2009), this presented an opportunity to increase its national market share by means of the shanzhai gala’s social influence.

The support from the local TV station and the high degree of attention from the cyberspace community meant the shanzhai gala became a competitive rival, which the CCTV gala had not had to compete with. When the dominant position of CCTV was challenged, the State Adminstration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) and other related governmental departments intervened through administrative policies and orders to protect the interests of the national television station.

In late December 2008, SARFT issued an informal notice, ordering all television stations not to participate in, broadcast or report the shanzhai gala (Jiang, 2009).

75 Under SARFT pressure, Guizhou Satellite Television backed off at the last minute.

The contract between the shanzhai gala and Guizhou Satellite Television thus became invalid overnight. Hence competition with the CCTV gala on the television platform could not be realised. This was similar to the fate of Hunan Satellite TV’s reality show, Super Girls, in 2005. When the show’s high national audience rating overtook CCTV’s News Broadcasting, SARFT immediately issued orders to regulate reality shows on local televisions by adjusting their broadcasting times and setting restrictions on length, content, participants and judges (Cohiba.blogcn.com, 2005), which aimed to crack down on competitive local rivals and maintain CCTV’s dominant position in China’s television industry. This phenomenon shows the irreconcilable tensions between China’s central and local media groups, brought about by the neoliberal development of Chinese media. On the one hand, the government encourages local media groups to become bigger and stronger through market competition. On the other hand, the media market is not transparent and state-controlled. Thus, market principles could easily be violated by the government’s administrative orders. Any challenge to state media monopoly would be stopped in order to maintain its media power.

In addition, the portal site that had cooperated with Lao Meng and had promised to broadcast his show live online suddenly ceased cooperative relations with Lao

Meng (Ido.3mt.com.cn, 2009). The shanzhai gala had therefore lost its most important broadcasting platform. Lao Meng also received a warning from the government that his gala did not have “performance approval” from the Bureau of

Cultural Affairs to host a public gala (Lin, 2011, p. 59). The venue booking for the gala show was subsequently cancelled by the venue provider for some unknown reason.

76 Under pressure from the SARFT and other governmental bureaus, Lao Meng was forced to give up his original plan and look for new allies. Finally, Macau Asia

Satellite Television (MASTV) agreed to broadcast the shanzhai gala live. As a private media company in the Macau Special Administrative Region, MASTV was free from

SARFT regulations in mainland China. However, the signal of private TV stations in

China’s Special Administrative Regions, such as Hong Kong’s Phoenix Satellite

Television and Macau’s MASTV, only covers the star-rated hotels, news agencies and research institutions. Without a national broadcasting platform, the shanzhai gala failed to compete with the CCTV gala at the same starting level. In order to avoid government intervention Lao Meng relinquished the idea of broadcasting live and instead held the gala, publicisied as a rehearsal on January 22, in a hot spring resort in suburban Beijing. The rehearsal was recorded as the formal show, and broadcast by MASTV on the Chinese New Year’s Eve (Jiang & Ma, 2009). Only a very limited audience watched the shanzhai gala through MASTV.

Failing to broadcast the show live via television and the Internet, Lao Meng and his gala group intended to upload the recorded gala online and allow more audiences to view his show. However, they could not upload the videos to nearly 60

Chinese video-hosting websites as long as the clips were tagged as “shanzhai chunwan” (Lam, 2009). If “shanzhai chunwan” was accessed through search engines on major audio-visual content websites, the result would be the message, “the content you search may be related to illegal issues according to laws, principles and policies, and therefore could not be found” (Jiang & Ma, 2009). In interview, Lao

Meng said the biggest difficulty in preparing the gala was not financial or technological problems; instead, it was some “invisible resistance force” from the above (Jiang & Ma, 2009). Just as Lao Meng expected, major audio-visual websites

77 received a notice from the China Internet Audio-Visual Program Service and Self-

Discipline Alliance (CIAPSSA) around January 20, 2009, ordering all members to boycott the shanzhai gala (Jiang & Ma, 2009).

CIAPSSA was initiated by several Internet media on the national level, such as

CCTV.com, People.com.cn and Xinhuanet.com, and was established in February 2008.

By July 2008, more than 150 websites that provided audio-visual content services had joined the alliance. CIAPSSA is not simply a business organisation, but a government-supported association, jointly led by SARFT and the Ministry of

Information Industry. It can be seen that the administrative power of SARFT is not limited to television, radio, and film industries, but also covers audio-visual content services on the Internet. The television and the Internet audio-visual industries in

China are not mutually independent; however, they are sometimes intertwined by the nexus of SARFT’s administrative power. Any attempt to challenge SARFT- supported television content through alternative Internet channels is doomed to failure, due to SARFT’s strategic regulations (in the name of CIAPSSA’s self- discipline) and conventional self-censorship. This could well explain why Lao

Meng’s Internet allies abandoned the mutually beneficial live broadcasting plan at the last minute, and why video clips of the shanzhai gala were not uploaded online later.

Although the shanzhai gala could not realise its aim to challenge the CCTV gala, under pressure from SARFT, it had become an important cultural icon, pushing

China’s shanzhai media culture to a climax. It had sparked an entire genre of grassroots and Internet-based copycat galas, such as the College Students’ Spring

Festival Gala, South China Spring Festival Gala, Senior People’s Spring Festival Gala

78 and Migrant Workers’ Spring Festival Gala. However, learning the lessons from Lao

Meng’s shanzhai gala, these shanzhai galas neither challenged the market monopoly nor ideological discourses of the CCTV gala, therefore, they could be broadcast online without restriction.

The social discussion on shanzhai phenomenon started in late 2007. However, early shanzhai discussion was mainly conducted in the economic sphere among private entrepreneurs, lawyers and policy makers. Notably, it was Lao Meng’s shanzhai gala that expanded shanzhai discussion from economic to cultural sphere.

As an emerging media and cultural phenomenon, shanzhai had become more relevant to the creativity, consumption and identity of ordinary people in everyday life, therefore attracting and evoking more public and media discussion. The previous debate on shanzhai economy in the business circle had developed into a national debate on broader shanzhai culture among government, public intellectuals and the grassroots.

In the intellectual circle, shanzhai debate is conducted around whether shanzhai culture is innovation or piracy. Some people hold very positive attitudes to shanzhai culture. They believe it embodies the wisdom and creativity of the grassroots. It has promoted the multicultural development of Chinese society and has created a more open and dynamic cultural environment. As art critic Xie Yuxi (Beijingreview.com.cn,

2009) argued:

Cultural resources are distributed and occupied unequally and unfairly in China.

A small group of people dominate the cultural production and manipulate the

national people’s habit of cultural consumption. The emergence of shanzhai

culture marks marginalized culture’s challenge to the mainstream culture. The

79 mass people are not satisfied with being passive culture consumers. They start to

participate in cultural production and show their subjectivity and creativity.

Whereas, some people criticise shanzhai culture as piracy and infringement, they argue that shanzhai culture disobeys the ethics of the market economy and impinges on intellectual property. Professor Ge Jianxiong from Fudan University argued, “if we tolerate shanzhai, the real cultural innovation will never be realised”

(Beijingreview.com.cn, 2009). Ni Ping, well-known anchorwoman from CCTV and a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), submitted a proposal, calling for the legal means to ban the shanzhai culture in order to support the original cultural work at the CPPCC in March 2009 (X. Wang,

2009). Ni’s anti-shanzhai law proposal immediately sparked debate on the Internet.

Most of the netizens criticised Ni’s elite and conservative view on cultural production and supported shanzhai culture, which they believed could represent the grassroots’ spirit and the people’s real needs. Ni’s proposal was not adopted by the

CPPCC. The government did not state its position on the shanzhai culture publicly either. However, the government responded to the rise in shanzhai culture in actions.

On January 5, 2009, seven different government institutions, including the SARFT, the Ministry of Public Security and the State Council Information Office, launched a crackdown on the Internet smut. The anti-smut campaign aimed to clean up the vulgar content online, labeled by the government as “immoral” and “tasteless”.

These content was accused of violating public morality and harming the physical and mental health of young people (Lam, 2009), and these institutions proposed

80 deleting content and shutting down websites. Though this campaign actually focused on the politically sensitive online content, most shanzhai and e’gao content, which embodied political implications through playful uses of apolitical discourses, also became a target. The real purpose of the anti-smut campaign, as Rebecca

Mackinnon succinctly put it, is that “the technology used to censor porn has ended up being used more vigorously to censor political content than smut” (as cited in

Lam, 2009).

From the anti-smut campaign, it can be seen that even though the government did not ban shanzhai cultural production formally, it intensified the Internet censorship to control the distribution and circulation of the shanzhai cultural products, which had led to the decline of shanzhai culture. Compared with the offline shanzhai economy, the government imposes more regulation and control on shanzhai cultural products, which challenge the state-sanctioned mainstream ideology and cultural values.

Due to interventions from government institutions, Lao Meng had to adjust his strategy to continue his gala dream. Learning lessons from his 2009 gala, Lao Meng completely gave up his ambition of challenging CCTV. In 2010, he changed “shanzhai chunwan” to “Folk Spring Festival Gala” [Minjian chunwan 民间春晚]. Compared with the original title, which was full of cynical spirit, the folk gala was a neutral title without any grassroots or revolutionary spirit. In the promotion of the folk gala, he gave up the previous year’s radical slogan against CCTV; instead, he proposed to promote China’s folk culture. By removing the radical colours of the 2009 shanzhai gala, the 2010 folk gala smoothly obtained performance approval from the Bureau of Cultural Affairs. As a legal gala show with permission from the government, in

81 addition to Lao Meng’s fame established through running the shanzhai gala, the folk gala attracted more sponsors and was able to be broadcast live online. Compared with the shanzhai gala, the folk gala’s commercial nature was obvious. By viewing the videos of the folk gala online (Minjian chunwan, February 17, 2010), it can be seen that in the first five minutes of the gala, about 10 enterprises advertised by greeting the audiences with “Happy Spring Festival”, which was a conventional way for the CCTV gala to embed advertisements. Lao Meng’s self-adaptation to the government’s regulations and the commercialisation of his gala had successfully resolved contentious relations between both galas, which ensured the safety and profit of Lao Meng’s gala entrepreneurship. However, independence, which was the core spirit of shanzhai culture, had totally disappeared.

In 2011, Lao Meng prepared to run his third gala show. However, due to a business dispute between Lao Meng and his gala partner, Lao Meng became a defendant in a legal case, and the 2011 gala died on the vine. In November 2011, Lao

Meng expressed that he would not run any form of Spring Festival gala in future. He would prepare a Valentine’s Day Gala in 2012 insterad (Ent.qq.com, 2011). After three years of entrepreneurship in running the grassroots Spring Festival gala, Lao

Meng has completely avoided controversy, and had started to explore new business opportunities.

As some cultural critics commented, Lao Meng’s shanzhai gala had accepted the authority’s amnesty and had been “bought off” by capital since 2010. The shanzhai gala was not a movement that represented the grassroots spirit and culture any more, but instead had been turned into a real commercial performance. The Spring

Festival had thus become a “cash cow” for CCTV but also the show against CCTV

82 (Xinhuanet.com, 2010). This phenomenon resonated with Lin’s (2011, p. 62) argument that, “once popular culture is commoditized, however, its potential to be a liberating form of expression is lost”. The power-money hegemony, which protects the longevity of CCTV’s media spectacles, has thus become the main force for causing counter-spectacle power to collapse. Trapped between the forces of authority and market, the shanzhai gala was not able to keep its independence and revolutionary spirit, and ultimately had to compromise.

If the CCTV gala can be perceived as a media spectacle, co-produced by the Party- market, Lao Meng’s and other versions of shanzhai galas could be taken as grassroots media carnivals. According to Bakhtin (1984), carnival “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established” and

“marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions”

(p. 10). When audiences are fed up with the CCTV gala, which serves the Party and the market in the name of entertaining the people, they start to produce their own carnivalesque galas to serve the people’s real entertainment needs.

Bakhtin (1984) argues, “carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people” (p. 7).

The shanzhai galas are such carnivals that go beyond the authoritarian media spectacle. They recruit creative ideas from the grassroots and are open to all people, particularly the lower levels of social strata in the post-reform era, such as migrants, laid-off workers and senior retirees. The great contrast between both galas is discursive styles and themes, but their similarity in format (shanzhai galas copycat the CCTV gala) gives shanzhai galas “grotesque imagery” (Bakhtin, 1984).

83 According to Bakhtin (1984), the central principle of grotesque imagery is

“degradation”, which aims to lower “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract” and this transfers to “the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (pp. 19, 20). By degrading the privileged status of the CCTV gala, shanzhai carnivals have deconstructed the myth of the official celebration, and they have shown that everyone can make a cultural choice about entertainment. The parodic effects and laughter, caused by either deliberate or non-deliberate degradation in the shanzhai carnivals, have produced “free and critical historical consciousness” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 73), which has the potential to overthrow official ideologies embedded in the CCTV media spectacle.

However, the shanzhai carnivals have limitations because of the government’s long-term control of the media and cultural practices. The grassroots spirit and cynicism of these carnivals have been gradually incorporated by mainstream ideological discourses and the market, such as Lao Meng’s shanzhai gala. This phenomenon resonates with the “incorporation” theory of Hebdige (1979).

According to Hebdige, incorporation refers to the process through which a subculture or a tactic that is different from the dominant one is naturalised and absorbed by mainstream hegemonic culture, deprived of its forces as an oppositional constitution, and integrated into the existing social cultural order (as cited in Dai, 2007). Hebdige (1979) suggests there are two forms of incorporation: commodity and ideology. The evolution of Lao Meng’s shanzhai gala shows that shanzhai media culture, as a subculture, has already been co-opted into mainstream media culture through both commodity form of incorporation (commercialisation) and ideological form of incorporation (regulation and censorship). The former has transformed the independent shanzhai gala with public nature into a profitable

84 show, while the latter has weakened the cynical spirit of the gala and pulled it back on to the “politically correct” track. Lao Meng, who established his reputation by challenging the domination of CCTV and became famous as a grassroots hero, has turned into a successful entrepreneur in commercial gala planning. Similarly, Hu Ge, the father of the e’gao culture, told me he was not interested in making e’gao works any longer. He planned to turn to the big screen and become a film director. Some film companies contacted him with a view to investing in him to direct commercial comedy films (Personal communication A 5 ). The two representative cultural activists, in e’gao culture and shanzhai media culture, ultimately gave up their attempts to confront the established media centre from the periphery, and instead were incorporated into the power-money hegemony which dominates the media centre.

3.5 Conclusion

By examining the case of Lao Meng’s shanzhai gala as well as the shanzhai media culture it represents, it can be concluded that shanzhai media culture has become a popular way of doing media intervention into Chinese media spectalces, such as the

CCTV Spring Festival Gala. This culture can be seen as a culture jamming practice with Chinese charactersitics, which can challenge both the ideological dominantion and market monopoly of China’s state media. Though the challenge is usually indirect, which more emphasises symbolic resistance in a humorous, satirical and light-hearted way and with little offline action, it could gradually cultivate ordinary

5 The interview was with Hu Ge on July 22, 2010 in Shanghai, China. The interview was done in Hu Ge’s home by appointment. 85 people’s critical reflections upon the media spectacles dominating their everyday entertainment and media consumption. The rise of shanzhai media culture is an inevitable result of the paradoxical neoliberal logic of China’s media reform and media development, and can be taken as a sincere form of rebellion against this logic from the consumers’ perspective. Ordinary audience members, who have realised the political and ideological purposes behind the seemingly entertainment show, but have no way to change the reality, use their creativity to produce alternative shows in the online world to resist against the long-term ideological domination of the media spectacle. This resistance is not unlike guerrillia struggles. They contest the power centre from peripheries with tactical actions and in hit-and-run way. Though the guerrillas sometimes fail and their effects are not dramatic, they open up a space for negotiation, interaction, and mutual constitution between the dominant media power and interventional media force. In the process of dynamic interplays, Chinese media spectacles have gradually adjusted their content, business models and technology in order to absorb the advantages of their shanzhai competitors, satisfy the audiences’ increasing demands and better fulfil the functions of doing “thought work”.

For example, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala started to expand its broadcasting channels from television to the Internet and mobile media. In 2010, over 78.5 million people watched the 2010 CCTV gala via China Network Television (CNTV,

CCTV’s official online broadcasting platform established in December 2009) and other portal websites. About 8.21 million domestic viewers watched the show on the screens of mobile phones via CNTV’s mobile TV and 3.87 million overseas viewers watched it via iPhone (CCTV.com. 2010). CNTV also cooperated with 15 other websites, and organised an interactive activity, “Greet the Motherland Happy

86 Spring Festival” [Gei zuguo muqin baidanian 给祖国母亲拜大年], during the four- hour gala show. Over 300 million people took part in the interactive activity through the Internet (CCTV.com. 2010). Another example is when the CCTV gala started to invite more grassroots talent to perform in the show in order to increase its appeal to ordinary people. Since 2011, CCTV and CNTV have produced a reality TV series called, “I Want to Perform on the Spring Festival Gala” [Woyao shang chunwan 我要

上春晚]. Grassroots artists were encouraged to upload their performance videos online. The applicant whose performance video got high vote through netizens’ online voting would have an opportunity to perform on the CCTV gala. Through this reality show, a migrant worker duo “xuri yanggang” [旭日阳刚]and a subway female singer “xidan girl” [西单女孩] performed on the stage at the 2011 CCTV gala with the support of millions of netizens. Finally, the CCTV gala started to weaken its commercial nature and enhance its public service nature. The 2012 CCTV gala, for the first time, rejected any form of advertising, and aimed to make a satisfactory gala for the people (Venturedata.org, 2013).

From the abovementioned reforms and transformations, it can be seen that the

CCTV gala has absorbed major characteristics of the shanzhai galas, such as grassroots participation, online interaction and broadcasting, and public service nature. By taking in the merits of its competitors, this gala has adjusted to China’s changing media culture and environment, in order to maintain its monopoly in the media market, as well as, to better fulfill its “entertainment for the sake of education” function.

As discussed in 1.3.1, China’s celebratory media events are usually “authoritarian”, which celebrate reconcilations and enhance the exisiting social order. In celebratory

87 media events, audiences are passive viewers with few opportunities to participate in.

Though the market force has slightly weakened the functionalism of the Chinese media as propaganda apparatuses to better serve the audiences’ information and entertainment needs since the reform era, the Party and the state media still tightly control the production of national celebratory media events. Moreover, the market force has transformed the celebratory media events into media spetacles with

Chinese characteristics, which pursue maximum market benefits and realise ideological functions at the same time. However, with the evolution of Chinese audiences from passive to critical, these media spectacles have evoked more and more critiques. Ordinary people start to use the Internet to produce, circulate and view alternative media content to temporarily escape from dominant media spectacles, forming interventional media culture like shanzhai.

This chapter studies the interventional shanzhai media culture by examining Lao

Meng’s Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala. It can be seen that the privileged status of the

CCTV Spring Festival Gala in both ideology and market has been challenged by the grassroots shanzhai galas. Though the interventional shanzhai force is restricted and limited, which could not impose direct and effective challenges upon the CCTV gala, it has created possibilities for ordinary people to criticially understand and resist against the dominant media power. The interventions from the grassroots have gradually transformed China’s celebratory media events into what Kellner (2003) calls a “contested terrain”, in which different social forces compete to represent different interests and agendas through their own ways of making celebratoration.

In this process, spectacular media power and interventional media force mutually shape and constitute each other to create a more open, dynamic, diversified and converged Chinese media culture. In Chapter Four, I will locate another important

88 mode of online activism—citizen journalism in the context of a disastrous media event—the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. I will examine how various citizen journalistic practices have intervened in and transformed China’s Party-state controlled crisis communication.

89 Chapter Four

Media Disaster: Citizen Journalism as Alternative Crisis Communication

4.1 Introduction

In Chapter Three, I examined the shanzhai media culture—a culture jamming practice with e’gao spirit and shanzhai ethos. By analysing interplays between the

Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala and the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, I have shown how the shanzhai media culture has intervened in and transformed China’s power- money dominated media spectacle. In Chapter Four, I will shift my research context from the celebratory to the disruptive. This chapter will locate the second mode of online activism, that is, citizen journalism in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. This chapter argues that citizen journalism has become an alternative way of doing crisis communication from bottom-up, which has challenged the convention of representing and managing crisis in Chinese society. The intervention of citizen journalism has made the representation of China’s disruptive media events even more diverse and contentious.

This chapter is structured in two main sections. Section one focuses on key turning points in China’s crisis communication post-1949: the 2003 SARS epidemic and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It examines the characteristics of crisis communication in China in three historical phases divided by these turning points.

In the pre-SARS era, crisis communication in China was characterised by its lack of transparency, timeliness, and accountability. The media’s crisis reporting was highly

90 controlled by the government in order to guide the public opinion and maintain social and political stability. This conventional model of crisis communication has reformed since the 2003 SARS epidemic. During the SARS campaign, investigative reporting of the liberal media 6 and the rise in online communication pushed the government to reform its conventional crisis communication. An ideal model of crisis communication has been established by the government through various regulations and laws, which emphasises openness, timeliness and transparency of information release. In the post-SARS era, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake was the first national disaster, which tested the effectiveness of China’s reformed crisis communication system. By taking the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as an example, I identify the characteristics of China’s post-SARS crisis communication. The government has combined the conventional and ideal models of crisis communication, adopting both proactive and repressive measures. However, the people have actively participated in crisis communication through various citizen journalistic practices.

The second section examines how these citizen journalistic practices intervene in disruptive media events as alternative crisis communication by analysing three forms of citizen journalism in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake: eyewitness reporting, online discussion and networking and independent investigation project. I argue that citizen journalism has become an important means for the marginalised social

6 Liberal media in China refer to media outlets, which are greatly influenced by professionalism of journalism as well as liberal and democratic thoughts in the West. This liberal media have an investigative journalism tradition and underscore their role in doing public opinion supervision. To call these media outlets “liberal” does not mean they are free from the Party’s regulation and censorship. The term emphasises their difference in content and function with other traditional mainstream media that function as apparatus for propaganda. The most famous liberal media in China are the Southern Weekend [Nanfang zhoumo 南方周末] and SMD, which both belong to the Southern Daily Group based in Guangdong province.

91 groups in disasters, social activists and ordinary people to participate in crisis communication. The proactive reporting, discussion and investigation by ordinary citizens have constituted an alternative crisis communication from the bottom-up, which has challenged and transformed the Party-state controlled crisis communication.

4.2 Chinese Media in Crisis Communication: Characteristics and Turning

Points

Crisis communication is “the communication between the organization and its publics prior to, during, and after the negative occurrence”, which is “designed to minimize damage to the image of the organization” (Fearn-Banks, 1996, p. 2).

Effective crisis communication should create a positive reputation for the organisation involved and also create positive public opinion (Sellnow, Seeger, &

Ulmer, 2002; Sturges, 1994). According to Gonzales-Herrero and Pratt (1996), crisis communication should target particular audiences, obtain third-party support, implement internal and external communication, and avoid rumour mongering. In addition, such communication should be a two-way information exchange, rather than, one-way information transmission, in order to “reach[ing] a common understanding of issues” (Shrivastava, 1987) in times of crisis.

Academic consensus believes that crisis communication is a vital component in managing various outbreaks, crises and disasters (Coombs, 2007; Coppola, 2011;

Haddow, Bullock, & Coppala, 2007). As Mara (1998) succinctly puts it, “excellent crisis management cannot exist without excellent crisis communication” (p. 7). In times of disaster, when the social fabric is disrupted, and people’s life and property

92 are threatened, the government’s crisis communication plays an important role in releasing timely and accurate crisis information, reducing social panic, and maintaining social and political stability.

4.2.1 Critiques on the conventional model of crisis communication in China

China’s crisis communication has over time been characterised by its lack of transparency, timeliness, and accountability (Liu, 1971; Su, 1994). Against all useful principles of excellent crisis communication, such as active communication, transparency and openness, the Chinese government conventionally conceals, minimises and delays the release of crisis information (Qian, 1986; Chen, 2008). The assumption behind these routine practices is that the government believes such crises may evoke social chaos. The control of crisis information is therefore perceived to maintain social stability and consolidate the legitimacy of the CCP. This conventional model is evident in various disastrous events.

For example, in the aftermath of the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, the Chinese government refused to release timely and accurate disaster information to domestic and international societies. It was not until November 1979 that China’s official media, Xinhua News Agency, reported that the deadly earthquake had killed about

240,000 people (Xu, 2006). Similarly, in the early stage of the SARS epidemic in

2002, the government refused to release the exact number of infected people and cracked down on media coverage of the epidemic (Chen, 2008). These examples show that the government’s tight information control is the main characteristics of

China’s crisis communication.

These characteristics are largely determined by China’s media and communication system. As discussed in Chapter One, Chinese media work as an

93 instrument for the Party’s propaganda, indoctrination and mass persuasion. Even though media reform since 1978 has marketised and commercialised the Chinese media, creating a relatively open and free media environment, journalistic practices of the Chinese media are still controlled by the Party and are required to follow the

“Marxist view of journalism”, [Makesi zhuyi xinwenguan 马克思主义新闻观], particularly in times of crisis.

The Marxist view of journalism advocates that the “Party principle” is a fundamental principle of the socialist news work (Tong, 2002). Following this principle, the media’s crisis reporting should first serve the Party’s political needs, that is, to maintain social and political stability. In order to maintain the superiority of the Party principle in times of crisis, the State Council and the Publicity

Department of the CCP have issued various announcements [Tongzhi 通知] and regulations [Tiaoli 条例] to control the media’s crisis reporting.

According to the “Announcement on Improving Emergent Incident Reporting”, issued by the State Council and the Publicity Department of the CCP in January 1989, local media outlets are not allowed to reports important crisis events without approval from the senior officials in the State Council. All media outlets are required to use the unitary manuscript [Tonggao 通稿] released by Xinhua News Agency. In

August 1994, the “Announcement on the Reporting of Domestic Emergent Incidents to Foreign Countries”, issued by the CCP Central Committee and State Council

General Office, commanded all public crisis reports to foreign countries must be approved by the foreign affairs office of the Publicity Department of the CCP, and the news reports released by Xinhua News Agency were required (Chen, 2008, p.42). As

Chen (2008) succinctly concludes, whether, when and how to report crisis in China

94 is not at all about the dissemination of information, but rather a “political statement”.

By manipulating media’s crisis reporting, the government aims to realise its information control over Chinese society. Significantly, this control during times of crisis has influenced not only the media’s crisis reporting, but also the orientation of academic research in crisis communication in China.

In published research on crisis communication by media and communication scholars in mainland China, the dominant view appears to be that the media should work closely with the government. The media should propagandise the Party’s agendas and “guide the public opinion” [Yindao yulun 引导舆论] to the right track in order to maintain social and political stability during crisis. To take a representative instance, Jia Li (2009), in a journal article entitled ‘Media’s Function and

Responsibility in Public Crisis’, suggests that:

Public crisis tests not only the media’s news sensitivity, but also their political

sensitivity… In crisis reporting, the media should not emphasize the disastrous

atmosphere, but needs to have ‘ideas of overall situation’ [Daju yishi 大局意识] to

reassure the people, promote social stability, and reduce negative reporting that

may cause psychological panics of the audiences… The media should help (the

government) rather than to make troubles (for the government).

Li’s comment not only suggests what good crisis reporting should be in China, but also shows the Party’s expectation on the media’s role in crisis communication. The media’s crisis reporting is essentially consistent with mainstream thoughts about crisis communication in the academic field. They are both greatly influenced by the

Party’s conventional propaganda thinking in doing crisis communication. However,

95 the media’s role in crisis has evolved with the transformation of the China’s media structure as well as the government’s social and political reforms.

Since 1978, China’s authoritarian media system has been gradually transformed into a “propagandist/commercial model” (Zhao, 1997). The Chinese media not only serve the political superstructure as propaganda machinery but also work as independent entities in the market. Accordingly, the Chinese media not only need to propagandise the Party’s stability agendas in crisis, but also need to provide more timely and accurate information to satisfy the audiences’ information needs.

By analysing the media’s crisis reporting on major disaster events post the 1960s,

Sun (2001) points out that since the 1980s the crisis reporting focus has gradually shifted from those who participate in rescue and relief work, such as government officials, soldiers and volunteers, to objective crisis information, such as the death toll and victims. Xie, Cao and Wang (2009), by examining crisis management policies in China from 1949 to 2003, reveal that the highly controlled model of crisis communication has been loosened, due to a series of economic and political reforms since 1978. Thus crisis communication reform is regarded as an urgent task by the

Chinese government in its reform agenda and as such has been prioritised.

These micro adjustments and reforms on crisis reporting and crisis management do not really challenge and change the conventional model of crisis communication.

However, they have laid the foundation for further crisis communication reform in the 21st century. In China, the first real crisis communication reform was triggered by the outbreak of SARS in 2003. As the first turning point of China’s crisis communication, this epidemic transformed the role and function of the media, citizens and government as well as their interrelations in times of crisis. The

96 following subsection examines the SARS epidemic and China’s crisis communication reform.

4.2.2 SARS and China’s crisis communication reform

The epidemic started in Guangdong province, China, in November 2002. SARS soon spread to Hong Kong and then to Hanoi, Singapore and Toronto with rapid increases in the number of cases. According to statistics from the World Health Organization

(WHO), by December 31, 2003, the total number of SARS cases had reached 8,096.

In China, the total number had reached 5,327 and 349 of those infected died

(CNN.com, 2004). As a global public health crisis, SARS has been widely examined by scholars in the fields of crisis communication, crisis management, health communication and public relations, with a particular interest in the Chinese context (Chen, 2008; Jin, Pang, & Cameron 2004; Meng & Berger, 2008; Xue & Liang,

2004). Academic consensus is that the SARS epidemic marks a turning point in

China’s crisis communication reform and concludes that three major factors have contributed to this reform. They are: pressures from domestic and international societies, investigative reporting by liberal media outlets, and the rise in online communication.

At the beginning of the SARS outbreak, Guangdong province and the central government dealt with this severe infectious disease in a conventional way, covering up the truth and minimising exposure of negative information. Guangdong provincial officials imposed restrictions on local media from reporting the epidemic.

However, the Publicity Department of the CCP also issued an internal document on

February 7, 2003 to both central and local media organisations, ordering them to

97 use identical news perspectives and statistics, emphasising that SARS had already

been controlled (Chen, 2008, p. 39). According to Brady (2008, p. 70), the

government’s initial mishandling of the SARS crisis was deliberate, due to the need

to maintain political stability during the leadership confirmation period.7 However,

as the situation was getting out of control, the political leadership of the CCP was

challenged by pressures from both domestic and international communities.

Domestically, in Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong province, and some

other major cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, the rumours about the virus spread

swiftly via unofficial channels. The fears of SARS finally developed into widespread

panic shopping. Millions of people rushed to supermarkets and drugstores to

purchase vinegar, masks, antibiotics and other necessities assumed to be

preventative (Yu, 2009, p. 83). Internationally, WHO and foreign governments

exerted pressure on the Chinese government to take effective measures to control

SARS. About 127 countries boycotted Chinese personnel and goods and temporarily

stopped diplomatic, cultural and business activities with China (Chen, 2008, p. 41).

The internal SARS-caused social instability tested the governance capability of the

CCP. These external pressures questioned China’s self-claimed status as being a

“responsible great power”. In order to maintain social stability and regain trust and

its international reputation, the Chinese government started to change its

conventional model of crisis communication.

7 In March 2003, Hu Jintao, the President of the PRC (2002-2012), succeeded Jiang Zemin as the chief of the fourth generation of leadership of the CCP. During the leadership confirmation period, the government aimed to maintain social stability and create a harmonious environment for the leadership handover. Therefore, reporting on the SARS epidemic in early 2003 was banned.

98 The liberal media’s investigative reporting is another important factor that pushed the government’s crisis communication reform. Since the late 1980s, the

Chinese media had obtained limited autonomy from marketisation and commercialisation, particularly local commercial media outlets. These media outlets were not tightly controlled by the government as they had been before, and they could express critical voices beyond the Party line. SMD, China’s most liberal media outlet, based in Guangdong province, first broke the government’s propaganda discipline and reported the real situation of SARS. Following SMD, other commercial media outlets in Guangdong, such as Yangcheng Evening, Xinkuai Daily and Southern

Daily, started to report SARS and questioned the official claim that the virus had been effectively controlled. In the North, Caijing magazine in Beijing followed up and covered an investigative report about SARS in February 2003 (Tong, 2011).

Investigative reporting of liberal media outlets greatly challenged the government’s tight information control and informed the public about the real situation, pushing the crisis communication reform in the second phase of SARS.

In addition, the rise in online communication is also a crucial factor in contributing to crisis communication reform. When official SARS information was surppressed, unofficial SARS information was rapidly circulated via the Internet and mobile media, such as e-mail, online chat rooms, BBS, and the short message service

(SMS) (Yu, 2007b; 2009). These alternative ways of producing, circulating and consuming SARS information could be perceived as “mass self-communication”

(Castells, 2007). According to Manuel Castelles (2007), mass self-communication has two layers of meaning. On the one hand, the diffusion of the Internet, mobile and digital media makes self-generated content possible. On the other hand, the self- generated content could also potentially reach global audiences through networked

99 Internet communication (pp. 246-248). When the government’s emergency response was slow, and mainstream media’s crisis reporting was absent, mass self- communication on the Internet became an alternative way for ordinary people to take spontaneous crisis communication. Such online communication empowered the passive audiences to “build their autonomy” (Castells, 2007, p. 249), and minimised the “power gap” (Coombs, 1998) between the state and society in crisis communication. This greatly challenged imbalanced power relations institutionalised by the conventional mode of crisis communication.

Facing such pressures, the government started to adjust its crisis communication practice and attempted to establish an open information system. From April 1, 2003,

China has provided daily updates to the WHO about the epidemic. On April 11 and

April 18, 2003, the State Council of the Central Government and the CCP Central

Committee issued commands respectively, requiring local governments to report accurate and timely information to the State Council about the SARS cases (Chen,

2008, p. 41). From April 20, the Information Office of the State Council held eight live press conferences to release SARS information and fielded questions from domestic and foreign journalists. From mid-April to mid-May, 2003, mainstream media’s SARS reportages greatly increased. The People’s Daily, China’s most influential official newspaper, released 143 pieces of SARS-related news from April

18 to April 28. This was nearly twice as much as the previous coverage from March

27 to April 17 (Zhu, 2005). From May 1 to May 11, CCTV conducted a two-week live broadcast on SARS (Yu, 2009, p. 85). In addition, the press conference model and the spokesman system were set up in both central and some local governments

(Sohu.com, 2003; Xinhuanet.com, 2003). On May 9, 2003, the State Council released

“Regulation over Emergent Public Health Events”, ordering local governments to

100 report timely and accurate information about emergent public health events to the

State Council. The reformed crisis communication, in the second phase of the SARS epidemic, was accepted by local and international societies, and finally the anti-

SARS campaign was successful in China.

Learning lessons from the SARS epidemic, increasing the capability of managing crisis has became one of the most important agendas for the Chinese government. In

January 8, 2006, the State Council released “National Overall Emergency Response

Plan for Emergent Public Events” (NOERPEPE). The plan categorises emergent public events into four types: natural disasters, industry incidents, public health and social security events. According to the nature, severity, controllability and influence of these events, each type is categorised on scales ranging from ordinary to devastating. The plan clarifies the working principles, organisational system and operational mechanism to deal with different types of emergent public events. It also requires that the government should release timely, accurate and complete information in times of crisis (Xinhuanet.com, 2006). The release of NOERPEPE marked the primary establishment of China’s new crisis management system and open information system in dealing with various crises. Based on NOERPEPE, the

Emergent Response Law was passed on August 30, 2007. This Law offers a comprehensive guidance for government institutions at different levels to deal with public crises, marking the institutionalisation of crisis management and crisis communication in Chinese society.

After a series of reforms, triggered by the SARS epidemic, an ideal model of crisis communication has been established at the institutional level. The application of the new model has changed the government’s approach to crisis management as well as

101 media’s crisis reporting in the post-SARS era. However, in real practice, has the conventional model of crisis communication with a long historical and political tradition completely lost its validity? Can the newly established ideal model of crisis communication be fully realised? The following subsection takes the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the most severe disaster event in the post-SARS era, as a case study to examine the characteristics of China’s post-SARS crisis communication. Innovative crisis communication practices during the Sichuan earthquake mark the second turning point in China’s crisis communication.

4.2.3 Crisis communication in the post-SARS era: 2008 Sichuan earthquake case study

On the afternoon of May 12, 2008, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit Sichuan province, a mountainous region in Western China, killing at least 6, 8000 people and leaving over 18,000 missing. The earthquake provided a critical context in which to test

China’s reformed crisis communication system. Following the basic principles of the

NOEREPE and the Emergent Response Law released in 2006 and 2007 respectively, the Chinese government responded openly, immediately and positively after the earthquake.

Only 18 minutes after the first earthquake, Xinhua News Agency released the first piece of official news through Xihua.net (He, Li, & Wu, 2009). Just 23 minutes after the quake, CCTV News Channel orally reported the first TV news. From 15: 20, about

50 minutes after the quake, CCTV’s Channel I and CCTV’s News Channel broke programming arrangement with a live broadcast of a special program, Focusing on the Wenchuan Earthquake [Guanzhu wenchuan dizhen 关注汶川地震]. By examining

102 CCTV’s live coverage, it could be seen that the latest death toll, the number of injured, missing and homeless, appeared at the bottom of the screen, in CNN style, updating the latest information about the quake. In the following two weeks, CCTV sent to more than 150 journalists to the earthquake zones, and covered rescue and relief work continuously, 24 hours a day (X. B. Wang, 2009). In addition, the State

Council held a daily press conference from May 13, 2008 for more than two weeks.

The government and the state media’s proactive crisis communication assured a transparent flow of timely and accurate crisis information. As Wanning Sun (2010) put it, the coverage of the Sichuan earthquake was “innovative” and “impressive”.

The Associate Press commented on the coverage of the earthquake as “a major departure from China’s past tendency to conceal crises” (Tran, 2008). The

Washington Post said that China’s “normally timid news media” had followed the earthquake with “unprecedented openness and intensity” (as cited in Fan, 2008).

From crisis reporting, it would seem that the government applied the new model of crisis communication in the Sichuan earthquake, because the state media gained more autonomy in reporting crisis than ever before. However, the Chinese journalists, who work at the front-line in the field and thus have informed insights into the rules of China’s news, held different perspectives about the government’s so-called proactive measures in dealing with the earthquake. Most journalists believed the state media’s open, timely and transparent coverage on the quake could not prove the Chinese government had totally abandoned conventional information control in times of crisis. Instead, it showed the government’s innovative approach in dealing with crisis in the post-SARS era.

103 For example, Li Datong, one of China’s most famous liberal journalists and former editor-in-chief of Freezing Point, argued it was misleading to consider the seemingly transparent earthquake coverage would lead to a free and democratic media environment in China. In an interview with Spencer (2008) a few weeks after the quake, Li said:

During the first week or so, the central propaganda department didn’t have time

to prepare guidance, so Chinese news media covered the quake by instinct. Now

media coverage of the earthquake has returned to its old ways. From now on, we

can’t expect to get much from reading newspapers or watching television apart

from all those heroic deeds.

In my interview with a journalist from a provincial TV station, who was sent by the TV station to the disaster area to report the earthquake, he believed the most important reason for the government to take proactive actions after the earthquake was the timing of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. He said:

The earthquake happened less than three months before the Olympics. If the

government could not handle the Sichuan earthquake well, China’s international

image would be damaged. This will affect the coming Olympic Games. The 2003

SARS epidemic has already taught the Chinese government a vivid lesson

(Personal communication B8).

8 The interview was done on July 30, 2010 in Shanghai, China. The interviewee was a journalist from a provincial TV station and introduced by a friend. The interview was done in a coffee shop. The identitly of the interviewee cannot be disclosed without the permission form the interviewee. 104 He also mentioned that although the local media was allowed to report the disaster from the scene, the state media, such as CCTV and Xinhua News Agency, still dominated crisis reporting. Many news spots were only open for the journalists from the state media. Some important government officials only accepted interviews from the state media. In addition, he complained that many of his news manuscripts relayed back to the TV station, were either deleted or abandoned by the editor, and could not be seen by TV audiences, because they were believed too “different” from

CCTV news or too “tragic” for TV audiences. He further argued that:

The audiences may find the coverage about the earthquake is more timely and

transparent than before. However, they cannot realize what news could be

reported openly and timely and what could not. As a journalist working inside the

journalistic field, what I find out is the government’s information control and the

media’s self-censorship are still there. However, the government has started to

use a softer and a more strategic way to regulate the media, and talk to the public

in times of crisis (Personal communication B).

As Li Datong anticipated, the government's information control soon became much more visible. The initial proactive crisis communication was soon replaced by propaganda disciplines. Alarmed by the widespread discussion on the number of students who died in sub-standard school buildings in the quake zone, the Publicity

Department issued orders to rein in local media, and demanded that they focus instead on uplifting tales of heroic rescue and relief work (Spencer, 2008). China’s most famous liberal press, SMD, which first disclosed the government’s cover-up in

SRAS epidemic, was recalled from the disaster area and restrained from covering

105 the schoolhouse scandal. Since June 15, 2008, more liberal media outlets were forced to withdraw from the disaster area, in case they further investigated the schoolhouse scandal (Zhang, 2010). The government’s proactive crisis communication had thus given way to conventional media control.

In light of this critical examination on crisis reporting in the Sichuan earthquake, it can be seen that post-SARS crisis communication has shown a moderate openness and selective control. The ideal model of crisis communication has hence been applied, but not fully realised. The conventional mode of crisis communication has been changed, but not abandoned. The interplays between proactive and repressive approaches in dealing with crisis have generated innovative crisis communication in the post-SARS era.

On the one hand, the government realised that the state media’s proactive crisis reporting, to a certain degree, could set the tone for media coverage and influence public opinion. The state media, particularly CCTV and Xinhua News Agency, are therefore encouraged and supported to increase their communicative capacities, in order to send out timely and authoritarian news information in the times of crisis.

This was evident in a speech delivered by the Chinese President Hu Jintao in April

2008. In this speech concerning media, Hu summarised China’s experience with disaster reporting over the last five years. He said for “public incidents” in the future, defined as natural disasters, production accidents and epidemic situations, reporters from CCTV and Xinhua News Agency must be allowed to report from the scene. He demanded the Chinese media to report crises “at the first available moment” and to “increase the transparency of news” (Wang, 2008). On another

106 occasion, Li Changchun, the propaganda chief of the CCP, demanded, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of CCTV in December 2008, that:

In reporting important events inside and outside China, we must aim to be timely,

open, and transparent. We want to adopt a proactive approach, trying to be the

first to get our voice out and communicating our own perspectives. We must

work hard to enhance the authoritativeness and impact of our mainstream media

(as cited in Sun, 2010, p. 55)

On the other hand, the government repressed the liberal media’s crisis reporting.

After the liberal media’s victories in the SARS epidemic and the Sun Zhigang case in

2003, political authorities worried that the overwhelming revelation of the negative sides of social reality would impair the image of the nation and pose a threat to the rule of the CCP. Therefore, the liberal media’s crisis and investigative reporting have been stymied with various restrictions since 2004. That could explain why liberal media outlets played a much weaker supervisory role in the Sichuan earthquake than in the SARS epidemic.

It can be concluded that the government’s crisis communication in the post-SARS era, as exemplified by the Sichuan earthquake, is characterised by its co-existence of openness and control. The timeliness, authoritativeness and impact of the state media in crisis reporting are more enhanced; however, the liberal media’s critical reporting is more restricted. Apart from innovative “top-down” crisis communication, the rise in “bottom-up” crisis communication is another prominent feature in the post-SARS era. The “bottom-up” crisis communication refers to crisis communication practices initiated by the people. By using the Internet and other

107 digital media technologies, ordinary people are able to contribute to the production, circulation and consumption of crisis information beyond the Party-state controlled

“top-down” crisis communication.

The “bottom-up” crisis communication is not a new phenomenon in the post-

SARS era. As discussed earlier, in the 2003 SARS epidemic, the rise in online communication imposed effective pressures on the government to open up SARS reporting. This for the first time in history showed the power of “bottom-up” crisis communication. However, by mid-June in 2003, the number of the Internet users in

China was only 68 million (CNNIC, 2003). This represented only a limited number and constituted those who lived mainly in urban and coastal areas. These people could participate in online communication in the SARS epidemic, whereas the number of Chinese netizens had drastically increased to 253 million by the end of

June 2008 (CNNIC, 2008). The number of mobile phone users had also significantly increased from 268.7 million in 2003 to 574.6 million in 2008 (Askci.com, 2009).

The rapid development of the ICTs had made it possible for more people to take part in crisis communication in the Sichuan earthquake via citizen journalistic practices, thus forming alternative crisis communication from the bottom-up.

4.3 Citizen Journalism as Alternative Crisis Communication: 2008 Sichuan

Earthquake Case Study

As discussed in Chapter Two, citizen journalism first appeared during and after the

9/11 tragedy in 2001, and became a prominent phenomenon in the South Asian

Tsunami in 2004 (Outing, 2005). Citizen journalism sprung from crisis communication. In China, because of the government’s tight control over news production, the watchdog function of Chinese citizen journalism is more prominent

108 than its counterpart in the West, particularly in the times of crisis, when the mainstream media’s crisis reporting is restricted. When the people’s “right to know and speak” cannot be satisfied, citizen journalism tends to fill the vacuum by providing alternative crisis information from below. Thus the “bottom-up” and “top- down” crisis communication compete, negotiate, interact and constitute with each other, making crisis communication in China’s post-SARS era a contentious process, with interventions from both the Party-state and civil society.

In the following subsection, I continue to use the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as critical context to examine how citizen journalism intervenes in crisis communication. Three forms of citizen journalism will be studied: eyewitness reporting, online discussion and networking and independent investigation.

Eyewitness reporting is undertaken by residents and volunteers who are physically present at the scene. Online discussion and networking mean participants do not need to be physically present. They discuss the earthquake-related issues and become networked via online communication. Independent investigation is more radical, political and risky because the investigation usually touches on sensitive topics that the government intentionally represses. The practitioners are usually established citizen journalists, social activists and public intellectuals, as independent investigation is often embedded in human rights defence actions, and requires more experience, techniques, fieldwork and collaboration. By analysing these three forms of citizen journalism in the Sichuan earthquake, with a particular focus on independent investigation, I will discuss how the citizen journalism has intervened in and transformed China’s crisis communication, as well as institutionalised power relations among the state, media and society in times of crisis.

109

4.3.1 Eyewitness reporting

In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, Chinese citizen journalist relayed the first news of the disaster around the world. YouKu (www.youku.com), one of China’s main portal sites for audio-visual programs, claimed to have the first video of the quake uploaded at 14: 30, two minutes after the earthquake happened. The video was posted online 16 minutes earlier than the first piece of official news dispatched by Xinhua net (Nip, 2009). A blogger, named “shua lai hua chang”, from Yunnan province (partially affected by the Sichuan earthquake), wrote a blog entry to claim a great earthquake had happened immediately after the earthquake. His blog article came out three minutes earlier than Xinhua news (He, Li & Wu, 2009). Post the earthquake, citizen journalism sites in China were overwhelmed, including Tianya forum, China’s most influential BBS, YouKu and Toudou, China’s largest audio-visual websites and blogging sites, based on major portals (www.sina.com, www.sohu.com, www.163.com). On sina.com, the number of blogger videos about the quake increased from 170 on May 13 to 13,170 by 16:40 on May 31, viewed 6 588 986 times (Nip, 2009).

Most of the eyewitness reporters were residents in the earthquake zones and the volunteers who came to the disaster areas to take part in rescue and relief work.

According to incomplete statistics, more than three million volunteers from governmental and non-governmental organisations went to the earthquake zones to attend rescue and relief work (Xinhuanet.com, 2009b). Most volunteers were urban young people equipped with digital devices. They worked not only as volunteers, but also as citizen reporters at the scene. Among them, Zhou Shuguang is such an example.

110 Zhou Shuguang is one of China’s most famous bloggers. He writes under the name

“Zola” and is hailed as “China’s first citizen journalist”. Zhou became well-known in

2007 for his reporting on “the coolest nail-house” [Zuiniu dingzihu 最牛钉子户] story. He used a digital camera and blog to record the plight of a married couple’s defiance of developers in Chongqing. His blogging soon caught the attention of the traditional media and the nail-house story became a national news event (Xin, 2010).

As an established citizen journalist, Zola travelled to Sichuan to take part in rescue and relief work as a volunteer and citizen reporter three days after the quake. He kept updating his personal blog with eyewitness reporting (words, photos and videos), including the volunteers’ daily rescue and relief work and his interviews with victims (Zhou Shuguang’s blog, 2008, May 15-21). Similarly, a large number of volunteers and local residents, equipped with digital devices (mobile phones with cameras, digital cameras or digital videos), recorded what happened on the scene and uploaded their recordings online to inform the outside world the real crisis situation. This self-styled eyewitness reporting has greatly challenged the timeliness and objectivity of mainstream media’s crisis reporting.

When crisis events occur, mainstream media outlets usually have no journalists on the scene. It usually takes some time to send journalists and cameramen to the site. In China, mainstream media also need approval from the Publicity Department or wait for the Publicity Department to set up the tone prior to covering the crisis.

The delay usually causes mainstream media to fall short of reporting the most newsworthy moments in crisis events. On the contrary, citizens’ eyewitness reporting is free from such restrictions, recording newsworthy moments with portable digital devices. Disseminated online, the self-styled eyewitness reporting has the potential to reach as many audiences as mainstream media. The rise in

111 citizens’ eyewitness reporting has challenged the long-term privilege of mainstream media in crisis reporting, and has provided alternative information resources to allow audiences to fully understand the real crisis situation.

Realising the advantages of eyewitness reporting, the mainstream media has since absorbed this self-styled reporting into their everyday journalistic practice, particularly in crisis reporting. In the aftermath of the tsunami in 2004, BBC news online solicited citizen reporting by opening several columns: eyewitness tales, readers’ stories of reunions, photos from survivors and survivor amateur videos.

The Guardian in the UK aggregated some of the best tsunami blogging and published a page of highlights on its website (Outing, 2005). The 2005 London terrorist bombing was the first time citizen reporting entered the mainstream news media.

The photos of bomb blasts captured by citizens on their mobile phones, and later published on blogs and photo-sharing sites, appeared in national newspapers and television newscasts around the world the next day (Good, 2006). In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, citizen reporting likewise entered the state media for the first time. CCTV used the video clip recorded by a student from Sichuan University on his mobile phone and other snapshots widely circulated in QQ chat groups in news programs (Nip, 2009). The adoption of amateurs’ eyewitness reporting in

CCTV’s crisis reporting has enhanced the objectivity and reliability of the “top-down” crisis communication. Though the adoption is not regular, but rather accidental, it has shown the converging tendency between citizen and mainstream journalism.

4.3.2 Online discussion and networking

Apart from eyewitness reporting, online discussion and networking are also important in relation to citizen journalism in the Sichuan earthquake. Participants in

112 online discussion and networking are not necessary at the crisis scene; instead, they are scattered all over the world. They are not “the people formerly known as audience” (Rosen, 2006), who passively wait to be informed by the media. Instead, they actively look for, circulate, compare, check and discuss the crisis information on the Internet, generating networked citizen journalism.

By observing the Tianya forum in the aftermath of the earthquake, Nip (2009) found that people raised concerned issues, which were not answered by mainstream media in online forums, and instead discussed them with other Internet users. Most issues were critical and beyond mainstream media’s agendas, for example, whether the forecast of the earthquake was covered up and whether the collapsed school buildings were tofu-dreg projects. Reese and Dai (2009) also discovered that some citizen postings in online forums criticised, supplemented, commented, checked or challenged the accountability of mainstream journalism, evoking heated discussion on the objectivity and authority of mainstream media’s crisis reporting. In addition, there were many citizen postings, which aimed at organising, mobilising and networking non-governmental rescue and relief work, such as online donations, mourning and volunteer recruitment (Qu, Wei, & Wang,

2009). Online discussion and networking had become the most important means for the majority to participate in crisis communication. On the one hand, it reflected public concerns, needs and opinions. On the other hand, it shared the government’s pressure in rescue and relief work by drawing in non-governmental forces.

Eyewitness reporting and online discussion and networking represent spontaneous citizen journalism. They are usually open, unplanned and unorganised, which could be executed by ordinary people with digital devices and Internet access.

They mainly exist in online forums and audio-visual sites, and constitute the most

113 important part of the “bottom-up” crisis communication. The following subsection discusses independent investigation. Compared with the first two forms, independent investigation is more planned, organised, elite-based and transformative. These projects usually aim at investigating sensitive topics that the government intends to repress and forget in crisis, which can best embody the watchdog function of Chinese citizen journalism.

4.3.3 Independent investigation projects

As previously discussed, the school construction scandal was a sensitive topic in crisis reporting in the Sichuan earthquake. Independent investigation focuses on this topic and aims to uncover the truth. In the earthquake, over 7,000 schoolrooms collapsed (BBC News, 2008). Their collapse killed about 5,335 students

(Huffingtonpost.com, 2009). The large number of student casualties led to wide discussion about the quality of the school buildings. This, in turn, led to allegations of corruption against government officials and contractors, who were said to be complicit in constructing sub-standard school buildings while pocketing the remaining surplus. The school construction scandal soon became a focal point of earthquake reporting. But contrary to the initial openness to the media, the Chinese government downplayed the scandal and suppressed the media’s critical and investigative reporting.

When investigative journalism was restricted, citizen journalism tended to fill the vacuum. Social activists, public intellectuals, and activist bloggers participated in the scandal investigation as independent citizen journalists. They made use of the

Internet and other digital media to expose, investigate and report the scandals from

114 independent perspectives, forming the most radical, political and risky alternative crisis communication in the Sichuan earthquake.

Among these independent investigation projects, Tao Zuoren’s investigation caused the greatest social influence in China and overseas. Tan Zuoren is an environmental activist and liberal writer in Sichuan province. After the 2008

Sichuan earthquake, Tan came up with a proposal called the “5.12 Student Archive”

[5.12 学生档案], which aimed to set up a database for the student victims in the earthquake. Tan travelled to the disaster areas to collect the names of these student victims, and at the same time, called on more volunteers to participate in his investigation. On March 28, 2009, when Tan was ready to release his database, he was detained by the police. He was formally accused of defaming the CCP in email exchanges with overseas dissidents regarding the 1989 Tiananmen student movement. On February 9, 2010, Tan was sentenced to five years in prison for

“inciting subversion of the state power” (Wang, 2010).

As a result, Tan Zuoren’s investigation could not be released publicly. Because there was not enough information to take his investigation as a case study, this chapter uses two other independent investigations initiated by Tan’s close friends as examples to discuss the performance and function of independent investigation in the Sichuan earthquake. These projects are inspired by Tan Zuoren’s “5. 12 Student

Archive” project and aim to support Tan Zuoren’s investigation. One is Ai

Xiaoming’s citizen documentary project. The other is Ai Weiwei’s citizen investigation project.

Ai Xiaoming’s citizen documentary project

115 Ai Xiaoming, born in December 1953, is a professor from Sun Yet-sen University. She is a documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. She has dedicated her life to making rights defence documentaries on women’s rights, HIV victims and other controversial social issues in China. In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, Ai

Xiaoming focused her camera on the school construction scandal. In an interview with Asia Weekly, Ai Xiaoming said that several weeks after the earthquake, one of her friends, who worked as a volunteer in Sichuan, gave her a call and told her many media outlets had been forced to withdraw from the quake zones since June 15,

2008 (in case they reported the school construction scandal). Ai’s long-term focus and China’s women and children motivated her to go to the disastrous area to investigate the surpressed scandal (Zhang, 2010).

In June and August 2008, Ai Xiaoming went to the quake zones twice with volunteers and visited most of the severely destroyed counties. She successfully reached the ruins of collapsed school buildings and interviewed parents of student victims under various restrictions from the local government. She recorded what she saw and heard by DV, and also collected visual materials filmed by local people.

In early 2009, Ai finished her first documentary about the school construction scandal, Our Children [Women de wawa我们的娃娃]. It is a 73-minute documentary that focuses on student casualties in the collapse of the tofu-dreg schoolhouses in the earthquake. In the documentary, she interviewed the parents of student victims, independent scholars, Internet writers, geologists, environmentalists and human rights lawyers, trying to draw in as many unofficial voices as possible about the quality of the school buildings (Women de wawa, May 12, 2010).

From the perspective of film studies, Ai’s documentary could be included in

China’s “New Documentary Movement” [Xin jilupian yundong 新纪录片运动] (Lü,

116 2003b) or “Independent Documentary Movement” [Duli jilupian yundong 独立纪录

片运动] (Berry, 2007). This movement refers to a wave of artistic film practice initiated by a group of professional or semi-professional filmmakers in the early

1990s, which represents China’s marginalised social groups and advocates social justice and equality through documentation (Berry, 2007; Lü, 2003b). However, Ai

Xiaoming prefers to define her documentaries as journalistic practice. In an interview with Viviani (2010), Ai said she is not interested in film style or technique.

What concerns her is whether her documentary can effectively pass newsworthy information to her audiences. As she once argued in academic dialogue:

The problem of the Chinese media is their insufficient power in supervising the

government. Many social groups are under-represented. Here, we need various

theoretical supports to solve this problem, including how to use media, expand

media, and develop citizen journalism (as cited in Ma & Zhou, 2009, p. 207)

Ai’s documentation is her personal way to contribute to solving the problem in the Chinese media. From her point of view, documentary cinema is an example of citizen media. Making documentaries per se is a strategy to represent oppressed voices. Ai’s documentaries have important characteristics of investigative journalism, such as the watchdog function and the public service nature. This can be seen from her expectations of her earthquake documentary, Our Children.

I hope this documentary plays a role of doing social work. After seeing the

documentary, the audiences’ original understanding about the Sichuan

earthquake might be challenged. They will discuss the issues my documentary

represents, and ask why these issues exist. During the process of discussion,

117 some invisible issues could become visible … Our Children does not answer if the

collapsed schoolhouses are tofu-dreg projects in a direct way. It leaves the

question to the audiences. It encourages the audiences to think about: why is it

difficult to make clear if the schoolhouses are substandard or not? Do we need to

make it clear? If yes, what is the greatest resistant force that prevents us from

approaching the truth? (as cited in Zhang, 2010)

From textual analysis of Our Children, it can be seen that the documentary seeks aesthetics, which “involves a give and take and ongoing moral dialogue between persons” (Denzin, 2002, p. 485). This orientation is evident from Ai’s interviews with various social groups in the documentary, including the parents of student victims, public intellectuals and social activists. In Our Children, Ai gives ample space to her subjects to express their different opinions on the schoolhouse scandal, and allows them to speak directly to audiences. The voices from different social groups represent an under-represented situation from multiple perspectives. Ai’s documentation not only facilitates dialogue among the marginalised social groups, but also initiates an ongoing dialogue among these oppressed social groups, the public and the government.

In addition, Ai’s documentary is a collaborative project, which combines visual materials from multiple sources. In Our Children, audiences can see not only Ai’s DV recording at the scene, but also other visual materials contributed, such as mobile phone camera recording from the parents, and videos and photos from anonymous citizen journalists. Ai collected these visual materials and re-organised them systematically in her story. Ai’s documentation could be seen as a more

118 comprehensive and advanced citizen journalism, which embodies the collective intelligence of multiple social groups.

Because of the sensitive topic Our Children features, it could not be released officially or displayed publicly, particularly in 2009 (the 60th anniversary of the funding of the PRC and the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen student movement). Ai Xiaoming was blacklisted by the government for her bold investigation of this forbidden topic. Her personal blog, based on sina.com, has also been blocked since October 19, 2009. In mid-October, Ai was restricted from going to Hong Kong to attend the 7th Social Movement Film Festival with Our Children

(Radio Free Asia, 2009).

Having no public and legal channel to disseminate her documentary, Ai Xiaoming

(2010) concluded three alternative ways to disseminate her works. First, the volunteers and interviewees who participated in the documentary will be offered free copies. They are encouraged to reproduce copies and distribute them to friends.

The second channel is through domestic and overseas libraries. Collected by libraries as visual archieves, her documentaries could be seen by a large amount of library readers, particularly university students. In the interim, she could get some royalties to support her future works or the projects of other independent documentary makers. The third and the most important channel is the Internet. Ai and some other proactive audiences who have the documentary copy have uploaded the video online for free viewing, circulating and downloading. Though the uploaded videos and shared links in domestic cyberspace keep being removed or blocked by the Internet police, they are also widely shared and circulated in cyberspace beyond control of the authoritites, such as Twitter and YouTube. The transnational

119 circulation of Ai’s documentary on the Internet has ensured that domestically banned scandals are more widely known by international media agencies and human rights advocacy groups, turning domestic scandal into global news events.

As previously discussed, it can be seen that Ai Xiaoming’s post-earthquake documentary has developed what Chris Berry (2003) calls the “socially engaged” mode of independent documentary making, by adding strong journalistic features.

As Ai (2008) commented about her own documentaries, they are “not as art but as propaganda and as agent for change”. Our Children is not merely a documentary film work. More accurately it is investigative citizen journalism represented in the form of documentary. Ai Xiaoming’s citizen documentary represents a strategic and creative way to expand the functions of citizen media investigative journalism and citizen journalism, while mainstream media are thought to be non-objective and biased on certain sensitive issues in crisis. In the following case study, Ai Weiwei uses blogging to conduct his citizen investigation.

Ai Weiwei’s citizen investigation project

Ai Weiwei, born in May 1957, is a Chinese contemporary artist. He is active in sculpture, architecture, photography, social, cultural and political criticism. He is also an intellectual activist, who has been highly and openly critical of China’s human rights and democracy issues. After the Sichuan quake, the government refused to release the number and names of student victims, in order to cover the tofu-dreg schoolhouse scandal. Ai Weiwei and his volunteers initiated a citizen

120 investigation project, which aimed to compile a list of names of student victims by

May 12, 2009, the first anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake.

In an interview, Ai Weiwei criticised the government’s deliberative omission of student victims and the school construction scandal. He said the main purpose of his project was to show respect to every individual victim’s life and he refused to forget this tragedy. He argued that all citizens have the right to interrogate and supervise the government, and have a responsibility to explore the truth when the government is silent (Boxun.com, 2009).

On December 15, 2008, the Citizen Investigation Group (CIG) was set up. The CIG started collecting the profiles of student casualties through available online information, such as mourning websites and reports from NGOs. Due to limited online information; on January 17, 2009, CIG sent the first batch of volunteers (4 people) to Sichuan to collect the profiles of student victims. After two months’ fieldwork, on March 15, Ai Weiwei released the first report of his citizen investigation on his three personal blogs based on sina.com, sohu.com and 163.com.

On March 19, the Tianya forum reposted this report from Ai Weiwei’s blog, which immediately aroused heated online discussion about this scandal. This repressed topic in mainstream media got entered the public discursive sphere through alternative online communication.

Ai Weiwei’s blogs soon became reliable information sources for those who wanted to know about the scandal. Having attracted great attention from the public,

Ai began to use his blogs to mobilise the public to participate in his investigation project. On March 20, his postings on his blogs recruited CIG volunteers. His online recruitment received considerable feedback from the audiences. From March 25 to

121 April 21, another three batches of volunteers (18 people, 9 people and 11 people respectively) were sent to the disaster areas. Ai Weiwei kept updating his blogs with first-hand information provided by the volunteers from the front-line. From March

21 to May 29, Ai Weiwei posted 202 blog articles to release the investigation report and 115 entries to share the volunteers’ investigation experiences. His three blogs were visited more than 10 million times in total. His blog articles were widely reposted and circulated on BBS, other blogs and social media sites in domestic and overseas cyberspace. 9

Because of the great social influence Ai Weiwei had, his three blogs were all shut down by the government on May 29. However, the circulation of his blog articles was difficult to stop. Millions of netizens reposted and circulated these articles online to support his investigation and oppose the government’s Internet censorship. Losing the publishing platforms in domestic cyberspace, Ai Weiwei moved his blog overseas. He reposted all his blog articles on bullogger.com [Niubo wang, 牛博网], a Chinese political website with its server in the US and blocked in mainland China, and continued his blogging. In this way, the information restricted domestically caused a “boomerang effect” by diffusing this information abroad first

(Keck & Sikkink, 1998). Some skillful Chinese netizens, who know how to circumvent the “Great Firewall”, could access his overseas blog and repost his articles in China’s domestic cyberspace. In addition, as an experienced transnational activist, Ai Weiwei is also good at seeking “institutional path” (Tarrow, 2005) offline.

He accepted considerable interviews from international media outlets and

9 The schedule of Ai Weiwei’s citizen investigation project is summarised based on Ai Weiwei’s personal blog article on bullogger.com, updated 10:00pm, 5 August 2009. (See: http://www.bullogger.com/blogs/aiww/archives/312046.aspx).

122 advocated for international societies to pay attention to this scandal. By May 8, 2009, he had accepted nearly 70 interviews from established media outlets including NBC,

BBC, Reuters and NHK, which effectively exerted pressure on the Chinese government from overseas.

In Ai Weiwei’s citizen investigation project, blogging has become the most important means to organise, mobilise and represent his investigation. His strategic use of blogging corresponds to the main characteristics of global networked social activism. As Jeffrey Juris (2005) points out, in current networked social movements,

“activists have used new digital technologies to coordinate actions, build networks, practice media activism, and physically manifest their emerging political ideas” (p.

192). In Ai Weiwei’s project, new media’s role can be clearly seen. Blogs are the central platforms to record and disseminate the CIG’s investigation report, recruit participants, interact with audiences and mobilise public opinion. Blogging has become a strategic means to connect the offline and online actions, and promote their interaction. In this sense, the function of blogging in Ai Weiwei’s project is similar to other forms of engagement via new media in global social movements, which is both “symbolic and material” (Lievrouw, 2011, p.158). It not only produces alternative information beyond mainstream media, but also makes and enacts citizen actions in a new mode of interaction and engagement.

The characteristics of the independent investigation projects

By examining Ai Xiaming’s documentary and Ai Weiwei’s investigation, the characteristics of investigative citizen journalism can be concluded. First,

123 investigative citizen journalism has a higher threshold than eyewitness reporting and online discussion and networking. It is usually initiated and organised by experienced social activists and public intellectuals. Their professional knowledge and experiences in organising civil activities ensure they discover the topics with the most “public commitment” for investigation. Their established reputation and social influence increase the credibility of their projects and gain more support from national and international civil societies.

From their projects, it can be seen that Ai Xiaoming and Ai Weiwei represent the new public intellectuals in China’s Internet era. Departing from public intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s, who spoke only in their specialised knowledge communities as legislators, Ai Xiaoming and Ai Weiwei speak as the agents for the marginalised social groups and aim to “translate[ing] their community’s language into a public language” (as cited in Cheek, 2006, p. 414). Their investigations on the schoolhouse scandal resonate with Xu Jilin’s expectations of the role of public intellectuals in China’s fragmented and pluralistic society. Xu encourages Chinese public intellectuals to “create a public by devising a language of translations—a discourse”, which “reflects, acknowledges and engages in this diversity” (as cited in

Cheek, 2006, p. 414). From these two projects, it can be seen that both Ai Xiaoming and Ai Weiwei use investigative citizen journalism as an effective means to translate the community’s language into public discourse. Through documenting and blogging, they represent the oppressed voices and try to make them heard by the public. These mediated forms of advocating social change by using new media technologies resonate with Douglas Kellner’s suggestion directed to new public intellectuals in the West (1997):

124 To be an intellectual today involves use of the most advanced forces of

production to develop and circulate ideas, to do research and involve oneself in

political debate and discussion, and to intervene in the new public spheres

produced by broadcasting and computing technologies. New public intellectuals

should attempt to develop strategies that will use these technologies to attack

domination and to promote education, democracy and political struggle.

Second, investigative citizen journalism is a collaborative project, which requires public participation. Ai Xiaoming’s Our Children includes many interviews with parents of student victims and eyewitness recordings from anonymous citizen journalists. Ai Weiwei’s field could not be finished without the support of more than

40 volunteers. Both projects could not be widely known without numerous netizens’ sharing, reposting and commenting. Therefore, doing investigative citizen journalism is not a simple task completed by a single activist. It is usually a process of collaboration, in which, various social groups need to participate and cooperate in order to expose and uncover the truth. Thus, citizen’s right is not institutionalised and territorialised concept, discussed only among public intellectuals and social activists. Rather, it has become an open, plural, collective and participatory practice, through which people of different social classes and hence statuses advocate social justice and social and political changes through networked communication.

Third, investigative citizen journalism is a long-term task, which is likely to take years. For Ai Xiaoming, after her first post-earthquake documentary Our Children, she made another three documentaries related to the scandal investigation. In

December 2009 and April, 2010, she finished Citizen Investigation [Gongmin diaocha

125 公民调查] and Why Are the Flowers So Red? [Huaer weishenme zheyang hong 花儿为

什么这样红]. In these two documentaries, she focuses on Tan Zuoren’s investigation and Ai Weiwei’s citizen investigation project respectively. In September, 2010, Ai

Xiaoming finished her fourth documentary about the Sichuan earthquake, Forgetting

Sichuan [Wangchuan 忘川], in which she records memorial activities on the first anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, and tells stories about how the parents of student victims have gradually accepted the reality and restarted new lives. These four documentaries, produced from 2008 to 2010, constitute Ai Xiaoming’s series documentaries on the school construction scandal.

For Ai Weiwei, after his citizen investigation project, he started to use documentary and other artistic forms to follow up on the school construction scandal. In September, 2009, he released a documentary [Lao Ma Ti Hua 老妈蹄花].

It tells stories about his sufferings when he attempted to testify during the trial of

Tan Zuoren in August 2009. In 2010, Ai Weiwei released two artistic audio-visual works, 4851 and Read [念]. 4851 is a long name list of student casualties in the

Sichuan earthquake with background music only. Read is a sound work, co- produced by thousands of volunteers. Each participant reads out the name of a student victim. Their readings were collected and edited as a collaborative sound work.

Interestingly, Ai Xiaoming and Ai Weiwei’s projects are interconnected. Ai

Weiwei’s citizen investigation project is the main content of Ai Xiaoming’s documentary Why Are the Flowers So Red? Ai Weiwei’s Lao Ma Ti Hua could be taken as a sequel of Ai Xiaoming’s Citizen Investigation, both of which focus on the Tan

Zuoren case. These projects work together to investigate the school construction

126 scandal from different perspectives, which facilitates a cross-textual reading of

China’s human rights defence actions and generates the collaborative power of activism.

Finally, chief investigators in the investigation projects are often in dangerous situations. As Ai Xiaoming said, no matter who you are in China, “as long as you stand on the side of the marginalised groups, your social status will be quickly marginalised” (Ma & Zhou, 2010). Ai Xiaoming was refused her passport renewal and restricted from going abroad (Hutzler, 2010). Ai Weiwei was arrested by the police at Beijing International Airport, when he was about to board a flight to Hong

Kong in April 2011 (Richburg, 2011). Such unfair treatment is due to their outspoken criticism on the schoolhouse scandal. It can be seen that even though

China’s post-SARS crisis communication looks more open and transparent than before, there are still minefields. There is a red line in the citizens’ participation in crisis communication. And anyone who strides over that line will be punished.

4.4 Conclusion

By examining three forms of citizen journalism in the Sichuan earthquake, this chapter has shown that citizen journalism has become an alternative crisis communication in times of crisis, which has intervened in and transformed crisis communication in Chinese society. Citizen journalism means that ordinary citizens, marginalised groups, public intellectuals and social activists can participate in crisis communication through reporting, discussing and investigating crisis-related topics, online or offline. This alternative approach has redressed the information gap of the

127 “top-down” crisis communication, and has challenged the power relations institutionalised in China’s conventional crisis communication.

By taking the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as a case study, the characteristics of

China’s post-SARS crisis communication can be concluded. First, “top-down” crisis communication has been reformed in order to adapt to China’s changing social, political and technological environment. However, the enhancement of the open information system in crisis communication has not yet changed the conventional

“top-down” model, which aims to legitimise institutional power, symbolise social cohesion, and produce and preserve the Party-state preferred social memories.

Second, the threshold to participate in crisis communication has been lowered.

Various social groups have been able to take part in crisis communication via citizen journalism, forming an alternative from the bottom-up. The “top-down” and

“bottom-up” models negotiate, interact and contest, making the representations of crises more diverse and contentious. The dynamics of interplay between these two models can be regarded as the most prominent characteristics of China’s post-SARS crisis communication.

Due to the interventions of citizen journalistic practices, the representations of disasters are no longer dominantly selected by national broadcasters and scripted under the Party’s propaganda disciplines. In addition, the crisis communication in disasters is no longer absolutely controlled by the government. The disastrous media events have become what Fisk (1994) calls “discursive events” or Levi-

Strauss (1966) calls “hot moments”, which may draw different symbolic resources and discursive communities to interpret according to their political, cultural and ideological stands, as to exert critical influences on the dynamics of struggle over the

128 privilege of representing disaster. These disaster events have provided rich contexts to examine not only how the CCP strategically deal with disaster crises to maintain governing legitimacy and dictatorship, but also how citizen powers struggle for social and political change by making use of such crisis opportunities.

129 Chapter Five

Media Scandal: Online Weiguan as Networked Collective Action

5.1 Introduction

In Chapter Four, I examined how citizen journalism intervened in and transformed

China’s Party-state controlled crisis communication. The intervention of citizen journalism has made China’s crisis communication both a dynamic and contentious process, in which the state power and citizen power compete for the privilege of representing newsworthy disasters. In this chapter, disruptive social events are still used as critical context to examine the interventional force of China’s online activism. However, I will shift my research context from natural disasters to everyday scandalous events. This chapter discusses how online weiguan, a networked collective action in China’s Internet age, has intervened in and transformed China’s investigative journalism in relation to everday everyday scandals and how the government deals with them.

This chapter is structured in two main sections. The first section discusses the rise and fall of China’s investigative journalism in the post-reform era. This section points out that networked online communication has become an alternative means beyond restricted investigative journalism to expose, report, disseminate and discuss scandalous events in China’s Internet era. Online public opinion, generated in the process of networked online communication, could effectively set scandal agendas for both mainstream media and government, and force the resolution of scandalous events. The second section examines online weiguan, major networked

130 communicative actions against scandalous issues in China’s cyberspace. This section discusses online weiguan by examining its concept, platform and practice. It takes a conceptual discussion of online weiguan by exploring its cultural and political origins in contemporary Chinese society. It then moves from concept to introduce three major weiguan platforms in China’s cyberspace: BBS, HSF engine and micro- blog. Three case studies based on each platform will be analysed in detail. This section argues that online weiguan is a mediated form of political participation for the Chinese people to fight official power abuses in China’s Internet age. Online weiguan demonstrates the power of Chinese netizens’ collective intelligence and the effectiveness of crowd politics, and has created a means to push China’s political reform.

5.2 Media and Scandal: Revisiting Investigative Journalism in China

Scandal is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human society. From a morality perspective, scandals reveal a moral order that is temporarily disrupted (Jacobsson & Lofmarck,

2008, p. 205). From a political point of view, scandals are abuses of power “at the expenses of process and procedure” (Markovits & Silverstein, 1988, pp. 6, 7).

According to different subjects, processes and public responses, scandals are classified into three types: official corruption, human rights violation and celebrity scandal (Waisbord, 2004). This chapter follows Waisbord’s classification and takes

“official corruption” and “human rights violation” as two major types of scandal in

China’s post-reform era for its high frequency and significant impact on China’s economic development and political stability. In media-saturated societies, scandals

131 have become more “media-oriented” or “media-centric”. As Thompson (1997) argues, “the media become the principal mechanism through which corruption is made visible to others” (p. 51). The media function not only as storyteller, but also director, which controls the drama, generating various media scandals.

The term “media scandal” is used to describe the relation between scandal and the media. According to Lull and Hinerman (1997), media scandal occurs “when private acts that disgrace or offend the idealized, dominant morality of a social community are made public and narrativized by the media”. The term underlines the visibility and publicity created by the media, and their influences on the emergence, development, prominence and consequences of scandalous events.

Media scandals are “in varying ways and to some extent, constituted by mediated forms of communication” (Thompson, 1997, p. 49). These mediated forms of communication, which expose, report and investigate scandalous events, centre on investigative journalism in modern societies.

In Western tradition, investigative journalism is taken as the “most vigorous” journalistic practice (Glasser & Ettema, 1989). This tradition emerged with the rise in scandal politics in the 1960s and 1970s in Western democracies. The “Watergate

Scandal” in the US and the “Thalidomide Scandal” in the UK, for example, are representative cases of investigative journalism during that period. Investigative journalism embodies the professional ideology of journalists as “kings without crowns”, as well as the power of news media as “the fourth estate”. It is regarded as the paradigm of “good journalism” (Pilger, 2005), and is vital to “the checks and balances of a healthy democracy” (Ricketson, 2001).

132 Unlike the liberal and democratic societies in the West, investigative journalism in China has a relatively recent history, due to China’s unique historical, political and cultural factors. It has various philosophical principles rooted in the ideological traditions of “Confucianism, Liberalism and Communist Maoism” (Tong, 2011, p. 15).

As a genre of modern journalism, investigative journalism has emerged in China since the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform in 1978 (Chan, 2010, p. 7). Different from traditional Party journalism or Command journalism, investigative journalism challenges the role of Chinese media as the CCP’s propaganda apparatus. It has created a public channel for Chinese media to represent public interests, while monitoing the effectiveness of CCP’s policies. It advocates and aims to fulfill the function of “public opinion supervision” [舆论监督].

“Public opinion supervision”, according to Cheung (2007), refers to a dynamic and interactive process involving the CCP, the media and the public. It emphasises the media’s positive function in mobilising the opinion of the masses to act as a check against the state, defining substantive social problems, and pushing for legislative or policy reforms. Investigative journalism plays a central role in fulfilling the media’s supervisory function as a watchdog of China’s economic and political reforms. This journalism evolves with China’s changing political atmosphere, deepening media reform and rapid development of media technologies. Its promises and limitations can be seen from the following review of its short history since the

1990s.

The rise in investigative journalism was one of the most significant developments in Chinese journalism during the 1990s (de Burgh, 2003; Tong, 2011; Zhao, 2000).

There are two main reasons for this rise. One is the changing media landscape in

133 China. Since the late 1980s, the government had gradually stopped subsidizing media organisations and has pushed the media into the profit (commercial) market.

The commercialisation of Chinese media effectively brought the competition mechanism into China’s media landscape. Media outlets could not survive under the fierce market competition by merely doing Party journalism. A new genre was needed to attract both the advertisers and subscribers. In Western societies, the commercialisation and tabloidisation of the press require the production of eye- catching scandalous news to increase the sales of newspapers. As Thompson (1997, p. 49) succinctly put it, “scandal sells”. Similarly, the rise in investigative journalism in the 1990s in China was partially due to the market value of scandalous news.

The other reason for the rise in investigative journalism is Jiang Zemin’s

“pragmatic leadership” and the political need to “reassert control over an unruly and dysfunctional bureaucracy” caused by economic reform (Zhao, 2000, p. 580). Since

Deng’s economic reform, the priority of economic growth above all other issues caused many social problems, such as the massive laid-off workers in the state- owned enterprises, the dislocation of farmers, the unfettered abuse of taxation powers by local government, and the drastic increase in local corruptions. Nagging social and political problems stemming from economic reform threatened the legitimacy of China’s economic reform and the stability of the CCP’s governance.

Therefore, investigative journalism was welcomed by the CCP, for its supervisory function could monitor local governments, promote public trust in leadership, and create a positive environment for further reform. Against these backdrops, investigative journalism has been institutionalised at central and local media organisations since the 1990s.

134 According to Jingrong Tong and Colin Sparks (2009), investigative journalism in

China had two main sites: China Central Television and the newspapers owned by the Guangzhou-based Southern Daily Group. In 1994, CCTV launched its daily program Focus Interview, which featured hard-hitting reports on corruption and government wrongdoings. The print media press in China’s most liberal area,

Guangdong province, was the first to embark on investigative journalism. In 1995,

Southern Weekend began in-depth critical reporting. The investigative TV program and newspaper reporting proved highly successful in the media market. Focus

Interview became one of China’s most popular TV programs within a short period of time, attracting about 300 million viewers every day (Chan, 2010, p. 8). Southern

Weekend soon became one of the most influential newspapers because of its bold and independent approach. Following this trend, many local TV stations and newspapers set up their own investigative journalism programs and columns.

Among them, Freezing Point in China Youth Daily (1995), CCTV’s News Probe (1996),

Southern Metropolitan Daily (1997), Shanghai TV’s Journalists’ Investigation (1998), and Caijing magazine (1998), gained national reputation for their investigative reporting on official corruption and cover-ups.

However, the supervisory function of Chinese investigative journalism could not be seen as correlating with the press theory of the “fourth estate” in the West, which implies the media have independent power to criticise the state policies. Chinese investigative journalism, according to Yuezhi Zhao (2000), focuses on “specific issues”, deals with “concrete problems”, and is therefore “practical-minded” (p. 579).

As Yu vividly argues (2009), Chinese investigative journalism hunts down “flies” and

135 “dead tigers”, but seldom touches “live tigers”10 (p. 94). It exercises supervisory power only at the behest of the Party and works as the watchdog “on the Party’s leashes” (Zhao, 2000). Therefore, the supervisory power of investigative journalism in China is quite “precarious” (Tong & Sparks, 2009, p. 337), due to the changing political and economical environment the Party faces.

After a short period of vigorous development, investigative journalism in China since 2003 has declined. According to Tong (2011, p. 31), the decline is attributed to the same reasons as its rise, that is, the Party’s political needs and the marketisation of China’s media industry. In 2003, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiaobao came to power and initiated the Chinese media dubbed “Hu-Wen New Deal” [Huwen xinzheng 胡温新政].

The Hu-Wen leadership aimed to construct a “harmonious society” [Hexie shehui 和

谐 社会] by mitigating domestic social conflicts. Thus the media’s role as a propaganda machine for the Party and education tool for ideological unity was reasserted. Particularly after the occurrence of two influential public opinion supervision events in 2003: the SARS epidemic and the case of Sun Zhigang, in which, the liberal media’s investigative journalism successfully forced the government to reform its crisis communication and abolish the detention and repatriation system. The Party stepped up its control of news media and suppressed investigative journalism, in case the media’s growing public opinion supervision function would challenge the CCP’s legitimacy. Hence “legal, administrative and extralegal means” were used to suppress investigative journalism (Chan, 2010, p.

10). For example, in 2004, the Southern Daily Group, whose newspapers had taken

10 “Flies” refer to low-ranking officials and low-level corruption. “Dead tigers” refer to high-level corruption, which the state had already determined to crack down on. “Live tigers” refer to high-level corrupt officials (see Yu, 2009, p. 24).

136 the lead in investigating the SARS epidemic and the case of Sun Zhigang suffered a reprisal. The editor and deputy-editor of the SMD were arrested for alleged corruption. In the same year, the Publicity Department of the CCP banned media from conducting “extra-regional media supervision” [Yidi jiandu 异地监督]11. In

January 2006, Freezing Point, the “critical idea” column in China Youth Daily was shut down.

In addition to restrictions caused by the Party’s new political need, the decline of investigative journalism is partially due to the “new kinds of censorship”, caused by the “maturing media market” (Tong & Sparks, 2009, p. 338). The expensive input and high risk nature of investigative journalism had forced many established media outlets to reduce their budgets and start to explore new, profitable journalistic practice in order to survive in the competitive media market.

However, under pressure from the political realm and market, China’s investigative journalism has not stopped or disappeared. It has been evolving and adapting to new social realities. Particularly with the popularity of the Internet, the increase in networked online communication is a promising way of arresting the decline of Chinese investigative journalism (Chan, 2010). Networked online communication has provided an alternative means to expose, report, disseminate and discuss scandalous events beyond the Party-market controlled television and

11 “Extra-regional media supervision” is also translated as “cross-region media supervision”. In China, local media’s investigative reporting which exposes the negative regional news, is likely to be shut down by the local publicity department. By investigating negative news in other regions, local media can avoid regional restrictions and establish a national reputation. “Extra-regional supervision” is an effective investigative reporting tactic in China’s hierarchical and authoritarian press system (see Cho, 2010).

137 press media. It has enabled a “contra-flow” of agendas (Tong, 2011, p. 206), which has transformed the traditional mobilisation model of investigative journalism.

According to the traditional model, scandalous events are usually initially exposed and reported by the television or the press. Investigative reporting of traditional media then mobilises the audiences and forges public opinion, which in turn influences the government’s decisions. However, in the Internet age, netizens are usually represented as heroes to expose and report scandalous events. Stories of scandal provided by netizens are usually widely circulated and discussed online prior to mainstream media’s investigation, generating strong online public opinion.

With support from netizens, mainstream media tend to follow up these stories with further investigation. Mainstream media’s follow up reporting then reinforces online public opinion, pushing scandal agendas to enter the government’s vision.

The reverse flow of scandal agendas, enabled by networked online communication, has transformed the mobilisation model of Chinese investigative journalism (see

Figures 5-1 and 5-2, which modify the mobilisation model of investigative reporting in China) (Tong, 2011, p. 200).

Mainstream Mobilisation and Response from the media’s initiative formation of public government investigation opinion

Figure 5-1: Mobilisation model of traditional investigative journalism reporting

Mobilisation and Mainstream Response from the formation of online media’s follow up government public opinion investigation

Figure 5-2: Mobilisation model of the Internet-mobilised investigative journalism

reporting138 From these figures, it can be seen that the sequence of moblisation and formation of public opinion are different in each model. However, in both models, mobilisation and formation of public opinion play the most important role in pushing agendas to a higher level for further resolution. As indicated from the Chinese translation of the political slogan “public opinion supervision”, public opinion exercises supervisory power. Without public support, both traditional and the Internet-mobilised investigative journalism are scarcely able to fulfill their supervisory function.

Particularly with the latter, public opinion support is more critical. The stronger online public opinion is, the more attention it will gain from mainstream media, and this makes it more possible to set agendas for government to resolve.

Therefore, the examination of mobilisation and formation of online public opinion is a core issue in relation to the Internet-mobilised investigative journalism.

In Chapter Four, I discussed how China’s new public intellectuals strategically use new media to organise and conduct investigations on the schoolhouse scandal in the

Sichuan earthquake. The independent investigation project was examined as an important form of citizen journalism in the times of crisis. However, in this chapter, I shift my research from established social activists and public intellectuals to millions of anonymous Chinese netizens. I examine how online public opinion against scandalous events is mobilised and formed through the active participation, collaboration and networking by Chinese netizens in cyberspace. I argue that online weiguan is a key networked collective action, which contributes to the mobilisation and formation of online public opinion, which can intervene in government’s scandal resolution. The following section discusses online weiguan by examining its concept, platform and practice.

139 5.3 Online Weiguan: Concept, Platform and Practice

5.3.1 Online weiguan: a conceptual discussion

The term “weiguan” [围观], literally translated as “surrounding gaze”, refers to a crowd activity that occurs in public venues. It describes mass gatherings around public spectacles, such as ceremonial celebration, traffic accidents and strikes.

Increasingly, this term has been used to illustrate the phenomenon of virtual crowd gathering in China’s cyberspace to discuss events of public concerns. This has been termed by Chinese netizens as “online weiguan” [Wangluo weiguan 网络围观].

Online weiguan refers to the Internet-mobilised collective actions, which contribute to the visibility of controversial scandal issues and the concentration of public opinion about these issues. This usually results in high volume of online traffic by attracting millions of netizens’ reading, reposting, commenting and discussing. In the process of online weiguan, public emotion and opinion are highly mobilised, which tend to form networked power and group pressure to promote the transparency and resolution of controversial events. Online weiguan is not a new development, but has its origins in China’s cultural and political history.

China’s literary giant Lu Xun probably first wrote about the weiguan phenomenon in his short novel Medicine [Yao 药] in 1919. The story is that the dramatis personae Old Chuan spent money to buy the steamed bun dipped in the revolutionist Xia Yu’s blood at the execution site in order to save his son’s life. Old

Chuan ignorantly believed the superstition that the steamed bun dipped in human blood could be used as specific medicine to cure his son’s tuberculosis. In fiction, Lu

Xun vividly described a crowd of indifferent and numb Chinese who dumbly

140 watched the beheading of the revolutionist Xia Yu, who had fought for their liberation and freedom.

Craning their necks as far as they would go, they looked like so many ducks held

and lifted by some invisible hand. For a moment all was still; then a sound was

heard, and a stir swept through the on-lookers. There was a rumble as they

pushed back, sweeping past Old Chuan and nearly knocking him down (Lu, 1960).

Lu Xun used Xia Yu as a hidden reference to Qiu Jin [秋瑾], a pioneer of the 1911

Revolution, who advocated the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of a republican China. By telling this story, Lu Xun criticised the

“culture of gaze” [Kanke wenhua 看客文化] in Chinese society. The culture of gaze, as exemplified in the weiguan crowd of Xia Yu’s beheading, in Lu Xun’s mind, was one of deep-rooted weaknesses of the Chinese nation. It reflected the ignorance, numbness, conservativeness, and backwardness of ordinary Chinese in feudal societies. They did not care about the fate of the nation and were ignorant about revolution. They were only concerned about issues, which involved their own shortsighted interests, as Old Chuan. They were obedient subjects of the feudal ruler, though they suffered a lot under imperial governance. They did not want to take part in the revolutions, because they were afraid that the resistance against the authority would evoke risk and social change would disrupt their routine family- centred lives. However, they were curious to see the result of the revolution as spectators and gossiped about the revolution in private. In the meantime, Lu Xun also criticised the bourgeois democratic revolution in the late Qing Dynasty, which

141 lacked a mass base and was doomed to failure. He thought if only the revolution could enlighten and unite ordinary Chinese and turn them from passive onlookers into active participants; then the revolution could succeed.

Lu Xun’s prediction about China’s revolution was not realised in the bourgeois democratic revolution, but instead came true in the Chinese Communist revolution that followed, led by Mao Zedong. Mao made use of the Chinese people’s weiguan habit in everyday life and incorporated weiguan in a series of Communist political campaigns from the 1930s to the 1970s. The passive weiguan spectators were strategically organised and mobilised by the CCP and transformed into mobs with revolutionary fervour. A series of techniques were consciously used by the CCP to harness the emotional energy of the weiguan masses in order to realise its political purposes, such as “speaking bitterness” [Suku 诉苦], “denunciation” [Kongsu 控诉] and “criticism-self criticism” [Piping yu ziwo piping 批评与自我批评] (Perry, 2002).

These techniques were usually intentionally applied in weiguan contexts to agitate ordinary people’s outrage against the CCP-selected political targets and heighten the emotional commitment of the masses to CCP-led revolutions.

The mass criticism meetings in the Cultural Revolution were representative cases to show the fervour of the mass. In these meetings, the Red Guards, Rebels and the people were organised together and became weiguan crowds. They stood around the capitalist roaders and counter-revolutionists to hold an open trial on these CCP- selected targets. In stark contrast to the numb and indifferent on-lookers around Xia

Yu’s execution in Lu Xun’s novel, they became frenzied participants with revolutionary fervour. They shouted slogans, denounced crimes or even threw stones to attack labeled evil. The emotions of the weiguan crowds were highly

142 wrought by the intensive propagation and strategic emotion work of the CCP, facilitating the CCP to fulfill its revolutionary purpose.

The “show-and-shame” ritual, as exemplified in these mass criticism meetings in the Cultural Revolution, proved to be an effective strategy for the CCP to propagate, mobilise mass emotion and punish political enemies at different revolutionary stages in the Mao era. This ritual continued to exert a powerful influence over the

CCP’s political governance and China’s collective actions in the post-revolutionary era.

After the Cultural Revolution, the CCP shifted its focus from the Communist revolution and class struggle to the maintenance of social and political stability and economic development. The “show-and-shame” ritual was used again to punish destructive forces that harmed social and political stability. In a series of “campaigns on criminal activities” [Yanda 严 打 ] since the 1980s, the “show-and-shame” ceremonies could be widely seen in public trials and shame parades of criminals. In these weiguan contexts, the masses were not encouraged to participate as mobs in the Communist revolution. They had become organised or voluntary audiences, who cooperatively watched public executions. By openly showing the punishment of criminals, the CCP aimed to manifest its sovereign and disciplinary power over society as China’s only legislated ruling Party, and in the meantime, to warn the masses to behave within the range of the Party’s disciplines. For example, on

November 29, 2006, the public security bureau in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, handcuffed about 100 prostitutes and forced them to march in front of a jeering crowd on the street. The march was broadcast via television to show the government’s efforts to combat the illegal sex trade (Watts, 2006). This

143 phenomenon resonated with Michael Foucault’s argument on the working mechanism of the French penal system in the mid-18th Century, that is, “the

‘subjects’ were presented as ‘objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifested only by its gaze” (1977, p. 188). In both the French and Chinese contexts, the visibility of punishment on the few was used as a means to show disciplinary power of the authority over many (Foucault, 1977).

As previously discussed, it can be seen that the “shame-and-show” ritual and the weiguan context it created were consciously and strategically used by the CCP to achieve its political purposes at different historical stages. In the Mao era, they were used to mobilise emotional power and revolutionary fervour of the masses. In the post-Mao era, they were used to maintain the CCP’s social control and manifest its governing capability. However, this ritual has been reinvented and reversed by

Chinese people to articulate social critiques and supervise political powers in the

Internet age, forming a popular online weiguan phenomenon. Compared with its precedents offline, online weiguan has the following features that mark its striking differences, including virtual participation, mobilisation and collaboration, reversal of political ritual, and discursive communication.

First, similar to offline weiguan, online weiguan also needs a group of gathering crowd as composition. However, the connectivity, interactivity and networking of the Internet have made virtual crowd gathering possible without the physical co- presence of participants. Therefore, online weiguan theoretically could enable more heterogeneous participants to take part. Anyone who has a digital device and can access the Internet could be a potential participant without being restricted by temporal and spatial factors. In online weiguan, participants are not organised and

144 manipulated by the CCP as in the previous “shame-and-show” ceremonies. They get together instead through the Internet-enabled connection and networking, based on their own interests and voluntary participation.

Second, online weiguan also makes use of the “show and shame” ritual to mobilise public emotion against selected targets as in the Communist revolution.

However, the targets of online weiguan are no longer selected by the CCP; instead, they are chosen by ordinary Chinese people. Interestingly, online weiguan targets are usually CCP government officials, who are suspected of being involved in immoral and/or corrupt scandalous affairs. The ritual wielded by the CCP to punish its political opponents and manifest its disciplinary power has been reinvented and reversely used by disgruntled citizens to fight official corruption and human rights violations under the governance of the CCP. The mass power of crowds has become a double-edged sword, which could not only facilitate the CCP to fulfill its political purposes offline, but also could facilitate citizens to exercise supervisory power over the CCP’s governance online.

Third, online weiguan is based on discursive communication conducted in words, images and sounds with few corresponding offline actions. The core power of online weiguan is its discursive power generated through a series of discursive activities online, such as storytelling, commentary and discussion. A complete online weiguan process could be normally divided into three communicative phases. The first phase is the storytelling of scandalous affairs with wrongdoers and victims involved. The stories are usually represented by victims, eyewitnesses or journalists, and posted online in the form of words, pictures and videos. The second phase is the concentration of public emotion and opinion. The attention-grabbing posts are likely

145 to be widely circulated and evoke heated commentaries and discussions in cyberspace. The netizens’ personal emotions (usually sympathy toward victims and indignation against evil) are highly mobilised through networked communication, which constitute strong online public opinion that advocates justice for victims and punishment for wrongdoers. The third phase is the “online-offline” and “bottom-up” flow of weiguan agendas. The heatedly discussion about weiguan agendas is likely to attract the attention of mainstream media and government for further investigation and resolution. I will explain the three communicative phases in detail along with case studies in 5.3.3.

As a Chinese phenomenon, online weiguan can be seen as an equivalent of crowd activity in the West. According to crowd history in the West, crowd activity is usually taken as a synonym with social protest, and has the potential to make social and political change (Brighenti, 2010; McClelland, 1989; Rudé, 1964). As Rudé

(1964) succinctly put it, crowd activities should be viewed as an integral part of the social process within which the nature of popular politics could be explored directly.

He suggests the main study of crowds should be activities, such as strikes, riots, rebellions and revolutions, which involve “aggressive mob”, “hostile outburst” and

“political demonstration” (Rudé, 1964, p. 4). Accordingly, most of the offline weiguan phenomenon in China should be excluded from crowd activity in the

Western tradition, because they seldom involve mass politics or advocate social and political change. They are either motivated by the inherent psychological curiosity and crowd mentality of humans, or strategically manipulated by political power to realise certain political ends. Only in cyberspace could the weiguan show its nature

146 of doing crowd politics and its function of effecting political change on behalf of the people.

In China, free expression and political participation of people are restricted, and collective actions against the authority are likely to evoke heavy-handed crackdowns. Online weiguan is what Hu Yong calls a kind of “minimal (or bottom- line) form of public participation” (as cited in the China Media Project, 2011). It has lowered the risk to organise and the threshold to participate in collective actions. It is affordable and practically achievable for most Chinese people equipped with digital devices and the Internet. It could be writing up a blog article, leaving a comment on the BBS forum, talking with peers through instant messaging systems, or sharing the link of audio-visual content on SNS sites. These micro actions (writing, talking and sharing) constitute networked social collaboration, which has the potential to generate “the power of organizing without organization” (Shirkey, 2008) to push government to resolve scandalous issues in the offline world. In this way, online weiguan can be taken as an Internet-mobilised crowd activity or a new repertoire of social protest in China’s Internet era. It works as “unofficial” and

“unconventional” public opinion supervision, when official legislative mechanisms are restrained or fail, such as the Letters and Visits System [Xinfang zhidu 信访制

度]12 and the mass media’s public opinion supervision.

Except for the participatory crowds, online weiguan also needs “venues” or

“platforms” as another important composition. Online weiguan is usually conducted

12 “Letters and Visits System” was established in the PRC from the 1950s. It serves as an official channel for Chinese citizens to seek assistance to resolve their grievances. In the absence of transparent and fair legal and judiciary systems in China, Letters and Visits System is one of the main methods for ordinary citizens to solicit institutional recourse to redress the violations of legal rights, property rights, and other human rights (see Minzner, 2006). 147 on three major platforms in China’s cyberspace. According to their technological development in chronological order, they are the BBS, HFS engines and weibo. Each platform has its own technological characteristics and plays a crucial role in holding online weiguan practices. In the following subsection, I will first examine three major online weiguan platforms in China’s cyberspace and then discuss online weiguan practice with regard to each platform with case studies.

5.3.2 Online weiguan platforms: from BBS to weibo

BBS was invented in the United States in the early 1970s (Jones, 2003). It was first introduced to Chinese universities in the mid-1990s and soon obtained huge success among China’s young people (Pan, Ling, & Yu, 2007). One of the earliest and most famous BBS sites in this period was “Shuimu Tsinghua” [水木清华] established in

1995 at Tsinghua University. From 1998, BBS has developed rapidly in China. Many popular BBS sites were set up, such as “Xi Ci Hu Tong”[西祠胡同], “Strong Nation

Forum”[强国论坛], “Tianya Community”[天涯社区], “Kdnet”[凯迪社区], “Baidu

Tieba” [百度贴吧] and so on. These BBS forums have attracted a large number of registered users. According to statistics in 2008, 98 million Chinese netizens participate in publicly sharing topics, perspectives and passion via BBS. Of this total, over 98% have contributed to BBS and 96% of users spend at least one hour a day on BBS (Digitrends, 2009). Different from SNS, where browsing content requires logging in, BBS provides a platform for netizens to browse free content and engage in conversation anonymously. BBS sites open up virtual communities for the

Internet users to share and affirm information and opinion on a broad spectrum of

148 topics, particularly on some “critical”, “negative” or “sensitive” social issues.

Therefore, it has become one of the most popular platforms to hold online discussion, petition and protests. Many influential online weiguan cases are fermented on BBS sites first, and then catch the attention of mainstream media and government, such as the case of Sun Zhigang.

HFS engine is another important online weiguan platform. HFS [Renrou sousuo 人

肉搜索] is a cyber term invented by Chinese netizens. It refers to a strategic problem-solving model through online crowdsourcing, which aims to track down offline individuals by making an open call to the massive Internet users (Pan, 2010;

Herold, 2011). HFS is not a unique Chinese phenomenon. Similar phenomenon widely exists in other social and cultural contexts. In Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes

Everybody: the Power of Organizing without Organization (2008), he begins by telling a HFS-like story, which happened in New York. A lady lost her phone in a taxi.

After a few days, the lady was able to find an e-mail address of the person who had picked up her phone, because this person used her phone to post pictures she took a few days earlier online. When the owner asked this person to return the phone, the current holder responded with ‘no’. This set in motion a series of events where the netizens were able to use social networks to track down the culprit and finally bring the New York Police Department into investigation. Though similar examples of netizen vigilante justice have taken place in many countries, only Chinese netizens have embraced this cyber vigilantism as a regular practice to punish a wide range of people labelled “evil”.

In China, mop.com [猫扑网] has the largest and most popular HFS engine. In 2001, mop.com established China’s first HFS engine for users to submit information

149 queries and respond to questions. The mop site described the feature of its HSF engine as, “using collective knowledge instead of technology to solve problems”

(Pan, 2010). In the ensuring years, several major portal sites, such as Baidu, Sina and Yahoo, continuously set up their “question-and-answer” (Q&A) search engines.

Though not named as HFS engine, these Q&A search engines could have a similar function. Different from major web search engines, which scan their database of sites to match the keywords to those same keywords in the database, such as google.com, HFS engine is based on the Internet users’ massive labour. It operates by enlisting as many people as possible to collaborate and contribute, in order to track down the individuals from the original posting. The collaborative and networked way to solve problems is likely to attract high online traffic and generate online weiguan.

BBS and HFS engines both lie somewhere between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. They work on the same “forum and editor” model. With the development of Web 2.0 technologies, SNS become popular globally. SNS allow registered users to share information, interests, ideas, activities and events within their individual networks in a highly connected and interactive way. Since their introduction, SNS has attracted millions of users, such as Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. However, these popular SNS in the West have a limited market in mainland China, due to the

Chinese government’s massive blockage of global social media sites (Flumenbaum,

2009; Kerr, 2009). The restriction on Western SNS has resulted in the rise in China’s home-grown and state-approved SNS. Renren Network [人人网](Chinese version of

Facebook), founded in 2005, attracted 160 million registered users by February

2011 (Tradingstocks.me, 2011). Sina Weibo [新浪微博](Chinese version of Twitter),

150 launched in August 2009, reached 368 million registered users by June 2012

(Xinhuanet.com, 2012). The highly interactive and networked SNS have created many potential platforms for online weiguan, such as weibo.

Weibo [微博], Chinese translation of the term “micro-blogging”, is a copycat of

Twitter. The number of registered users to China’s top two weibo service, Sina and

Tencent, has already skyrocketed past the 200 million mark just two years since its operation began in 2009 (Global Times, 2011), while it took Twitter five years to reach 200 million subscribers in 2011 (Shields, 2011). Both Twitter and weibo limit their users to no more than 140 characters. However, weibo users can express much more meaning with 140 characters in Chinese than with the Roman alphabet due to the conciseness of Chinese. Another design feature that differentiates weibo from

Twitter is that weibo allows users to tweet images, videos, audios, and a large number of emoticons as attachments, which greatly enhances the degree of self- expression. In addition, weibo allows users to comment on other users’ tweets, which increases online traffic (Wyrsch, 2011). As the Online Public Opinion

Monitoring Centre based in the People’s Daily put in a report issued in March 2011,

“micro-blogs have shown most vividly the speed and breadth of information transmission on the Internet, and they rapidly transmit information on the Internet with a means of high efficiency” (as cited in Bandurski, 2011). Therefore, weibo can be seen as a multifunctional media platform, which integrates weblog, BBS, HFS engine, instant messaging software and the audio-visual site. The technological advantages and number of subscribers to weibo ensured it has become a popular and effective online weiguan platform after BBS and HFS engine.

151 As discussed above, the online weiguan platform has expanded from BBS, HFS engine to the latest weibo with the development of Web 2.0 technologies. However, the emergence and popularity of a new weiguan platform does not mean the old platforms have perished. A HFS posting may be reposted on BBS and cause crowd gathering on both platforms. A scandal clue originated from weibo may soon become a buzz topic on BBS and evoke netizens’ HFS labeled “evil”. Therefore, the three online weiguan platforms are not balkanised, but interconnected and interplayed. They also work together with other forms of networked communication, such as personal weblogs, e-mail groups, instant chatting systems and so on, to increase the social influence of online weiguan practices. The following subsection examines online weiguan practice via case studies. Three scandalous events: the

Hide-and-Seek Incident, Luxury Cigarette Case and Wenzhou high-speed train crash, will be taken as research contexts to analyse online weiguan practices based on BBS,

HFS engine and weibo respectively.

5.3.3 Online weiguan practice: three case studies

BBS weiguan: Hide-and-Seek Incident

On February 8, 2009, Li Qiaoming, a 24-year-old prisoner, was admitted to hospital from Jinning detention centre, Yunan province, and died four days later. On

February 13, a local newspaper Yunan Information Daily first reported the incident and quoted the local police’s explanation that Li died from playing “duomaomao” [躲

猫猫] (a game similar to “hide-and-seek”) with his cellmates, and injured himself by running into a wall. The impact led to fatal brain injuries. The sensational news was

152 immediately reported by major portal sites in China, such as Sina.com, Tencent.com and 163.com. Major BBS sites, personal weblogs and e-mail groups instantly jumped on the official explanation and questioned its veracity. The local incident quickly became a weiguan agenda in cyberspace. Netizens suspected the local police had covered up the real reason for Li’s death and urged mainstream media and government to investigate.

On China’s most popular BBS sites, “Tianya Community” and “Kdnet”, many netizens cross-posted this news from other major portal sites since February 13, which caused a considerable amount of follow up discussion. Without convincing evidence to prove the local police’s deceit, most netizens posted their online expressions in e’gao style. They created parodic comments with words and images, in the façade of mockery, sarcasm and irony, challenging the official explanation on the death of Li Qiaoming.

On Tianya Community, some netizens quickly registered new ID names with the term “duomaomao”, such as “duomaomao youxi” (hide-and-seek game), and “dajia doulai duomaomao” (let’s play hide-and-seek game), and used these ID names to create posts and write comments (Southern Metropolitan Daily, 2009). Most were written in a sarcastic and humorous tone, such as, “If you have children at home, don’t allow them to play hide-and-seek game”, “Cherish your life and get away from hide-and-seek”, “How can the prisoners play hide-and-seek in the cell? If they can, where should the police go and find them?” A registered user of Tianya community, with the ID name “manca1222”, wrote a hide-and-seek announcement. He said: “1.

Do not play with the wall, otherwise, the wall will kill you when you are caught. 2. If you do want to play, please make sure you have enough safety protection equipment,

153 such as the safety hat, bullet-proof jacket, and so on” (Southern Metropolitan Daily,

2009). Except for sarcastic comments, some caricatures produced by critical newspapers and anonymous netizens were also widely circulated on BBS sites and personal weblogs (see Figures 5-3 and 5-4).

Figure 5-3 was first produced by SMD and widely reposted in online forums. It shows three prisoners taking part in a hide-and-seek competition held in the cell and they all hit their heads (http://news.qq.com/a/20090218/000432.htm).

Figure 5-4 was produced by an anonymous netizen. It was widely posted and reposted in online forums, news columns and personal weblogs. It shows a man, who represents “the public” [Gongzhong 公众], is looking for the truth with his eyes covered. Many hands are guiding him. The caricature conveys a metaphoric meaning that seeking truth in China is similar to playing the hide- and-seek game (http://opinion.people.com.cn/GB/8844421.html).

In addition to online critiques in textual and visual forms, the incident also evoked offline action on a smaller scale. A blogger, named “shisan hu”, initiated a recruitment of music videos. He wrote two theme songs for the hide-and-seek

154 incident and posted them on his blog. These songs used the original tunes of a children’s song and a popular song, which most Chinese people are quite familiar with. However, he substituted the original lyrics with sarcastic lyrics. He called on netizens to sing the theme songs, record their singing with a camera and upload these music videos online. His recruitment was widely circulated on major BBS sites and got many responses from netizens (Shisan hu’s blog, February 24, 2009).

As discussed above, it can be seen that grassroots netizens produced a lot of e’gao comments and caricatures in response to the incident. The production, circulation and consumption of these playful but critical discourses could be taken as construction of a “counter-hegemony” (Gramsci, 1971), which challenged the local police’s unbelievable explanation. These seemingly light-hearted and playful online expressions, but with serious concerns, quickly evoked resonance from the public, formed strong online public opinion, and further caused offline influences. In contrast with the Sun Zhigang case in 2003, in which the SMD first exposed the scandal and its investigative reporting later caused the netizens’ online outcries, online public opinion was formed prior to the traditional media’s investigation in the hide-and-seek incident. In 2003, online public opinion played a supplementary role in enhancing the communicative effects of traditional media’s investigative journalism, whereas by 2009, it had become an important force to set agendas for both traditional media and government.

As a response to the public’s online outcries, on February 20, the local propaganda department started to follow up the incident. It recruited ordinary netizens to set up an investigation committee. The committee was allowed to enter the prison, check police documents and investigate the incident. An investigation

155 report, written by the committee, was later released to inform the public about what the committee saw, heard and found in the cell (Rednet.cn, 2009; News.qq.com,

2009). Though the committee was unable to get to the bottom of the incident, and the investigation was questioned as a “government show”, it had at least has proved one thing: online weiguan and the strong public opinion it generates could directly set agendas and force the government to take action.

Though mainstream media’s investigative reporting did not play a leading role in this incident, it still played a very important one in expanding the social influence of this incident from online to offline, making the incident a national news event. After the netizens’ cell investigation, SMD and CCTV’s investigative news program Law

Online [Fazhi zaixian 法制在线] organised in-depth reporting on the incident. Their reporting both emphasised online public opinion and the local government’s response, with a particular focus on the unprecedented netizen investigation.

Mainstream media have thus changed their identity from investigator to commentator by adjusting the time and focus of their reporting. They did not start to follow up on the incident until online public opinion had reached its peak. In this way, their reporting would have a good public opinion foundation and obtain more public opinion support. In addition, their reporting mainly focused on the tention between netizens and government. This was represented in a neutral and objective way instead of challenging the government directly. Therefore, their reporting tended to cause less risk, and was relatively safe.

As a result, mainstream media’s follow up investigation consolidated online public opinion, expanded the influence of the incident to a national scale, and set agendas at the higher level of government. Zhou Yongkang, Secretary of the Central

156 Political and Law Commission, issued a demand that the truth must be found by a certain deadline. On February 27, the Yunnan Provincial Government Information

Office held a news conference and released the investigation result. The victim of the incident, Li Qiaoming, died from assault by bullies in the detention centre. The previous explanation that Li was dead from playing hide-and-seek had proved to be a lie. The related authorities in Jinning County Public Security Bureau and the detention centre, as well as police on duty, were either removed or punished. The scandal about human rights violation ended with a victory for the netizens.

In the Hide-and-Seek Incident, netizens failed to provide powerful evidence to the judicial organs, although a netizen investigation committee was allowed to inspect the prison. It was the government’s investigation that finally released the truth. The main function of online weiguan is to struggle for the visibility of a potential scandal by imposing public opinion pressure on the government. In the following Luxury Cigarette Case, an online weiguan case centered on HSF engines, the netizens collaborated and contributed to the collection of evidence and finally unhorsed a corrupt official.

HSF weiguan: Luxury Cigarette Case

On December 10, 2008, Zhou Jiugeng, director of Jiangning District Property Bureau in Nanjing, accepted media interviews and said he would punish real estate developers who sold houses below cost price. His remark immediately evoked online outcries from urban citizens, who could not afford the skyrocketing housing prices and expected a decrease. Zhou Jiugeng’s speech seriously disobeyed public

157 opinion, which made him instantly become a target of massive critiques online. On

December 11, the day after Zhou’s media interview, an Internet user wrote a post on

KDnet.com and called on netizens to track down Zhou. This post was soon reposted on HFS engines and other BBS sites, starting a collaborative HFS on Zhou Jiugeng.

On December 14, a netizen named “huage” wrote a post entitled “Look at Zhou’s cigarette”. He said: “I happened to find Zhou’s photo taken in a conference. What a good civil servant he is! One carton of his cigarette is worth of three months’ salary of a laid-off worker”. He posted the photo below his comment as evidence (See

Figure 5-5).

Figure 5-5 shows Zhou Jiugeng delivering a speech in a conference. His cigarette on the table is circled in red. A note appears in blue characters above, saying “What brand is this cigarette? It is 9-5 zhizun, the best cigarette from Nanjing Cigarette Company. One carton costs 1500 CNY.” (http://news.163.com/08/1216/05/4T8S3EQ600011229.html)

On December 15, a netizen with the ID name “cheyou007”, uncovered more evidence of Zhou’s luxury lifestyle from another photo. He wrote a post, entitled

“Zhou Jiugeng smokes brand cigarette and wears brand watch”. He pointed out that

Zhou’s Vacheron Constantin watch was worth over 100,000 CNY. He posted this photo as evidence below his comment (see Figure 5-6).

158

Figure 5-6 shows Zhou Jiugeng sitting in a conference. He is wearing a Vacheron Constantin watch on his left wrist and holding a lightened “9-5 zhizun” cigarette in his right hand (http://news.163.com/08/1216/05/4T8S3EQ600011229.html)

Zhou’s two photos were quickly circulated online and attracted massive critiques on his luxury lifestyle. The netizens questioned how Zhou could afford such a luxury watch and cigarette as an ordinary CCP official who earned a moderate wage, and they wondered if Zhou misused public funds for personal consumption. In the next few days, more evidence of Zhou’s luxury lif style and corruption were exposed online. Somebody witnessed Zhou drove a Cadillac to work. Someone said Zhou’s younger brother was a real estate developer. Zhou cracked down on other real estate developers in order to protect his brother’s business. Though these gossips about Zhou’s private life and family were not verified, they contributed to the collaborative HSF and provided as much evidence as possible of Zhou’s corruption.

The crowd-sourced evidence by these netizens imposed great pressure and forced the government to hold an official investigation on this alleged corrupt official. On

December 29, Zhou was dismissed from his position and investigated by the

Discipline Inspection Section. He was later sentenced to 11 years in prison for bribery (Moore, 2009).

159 From December 11 to 29, 2009, it took only 18 days to bring down a high-ranking corrupt government official. This is a mission impossible without massive participation and collaboration of the netizens. In the Internet era, any information people give away about themselves in photos, surveillance cameras and online communities, has dramatically increased their social visibility, particularly for public figures, such as government officials and celebrities. Any improper words or behaviours, once recorded, could be used as evidence to punish their wrongdoings.

Compared with the Hide-and-Seek incident, netizens, in this case have more specific and clearer offline targets. They get together online, uncover facts and expose evidence to a baleful glare of publicity, with a “lynch-mob mentality”

(Chinasupertrends.com, 2008). This crowd sourcing process can be seen as online weiguan, generating strong public opinion to impose pressure on government to punish alleged evil.

Some people believe that HFS has provided an effective means to fight official corruption in China. However, some people argue that it is only netizens’ “illusory victories” (Elegant, 2008), because it is not possible for corruption to be effectively resolved without genuine improvement of China’s official anti-corruption mechanism. Some also worry that HFS might violate personal privacy and call on legislation to regulate or ban this cyber activism (Liu, 2010). However, it cannot be denied that HFS is an alternative means to exercise citizen surveillance and public opinion supervision when the official anti-corruption mechanism does not work.

Visibility enabled by the Internet has exposed power via public supervision, which has greatly challenged power relations.

160 Since 2009, the rise of weibo soon replaced the dominant position of BBS and HFS engines in virtual crowd gathering. The technological advantages and large number of subscribers have made weibo become a more networked, interactive and collaborative platform for online weiguan practice. The Weizhou high-speed train crash can be taken as a case study to examine the performance of weibo weiguan.

Weibo weiguan: Wenzhou high-speed train crash

On July 23, 2011, two high-speed trains collided on a viaduct at Shuangyu near

Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, China. Six carriages were derailed, of which four fell off the viaduct (Railway Gazette, 2011). The fatal crash killed 40 people (China Daily,

2011) and injured 192 (Xinhuanet.com, 2011). After the accident, the government hastily conducted rescue operations, ordered the burial of derailed carriages, and issued directives to limit media coverage. The government’s cover-up immediately evoked massive public outrage online. Particularly on China’s most popular micro- blogging site, Sina weibo, millions of weibo users reacted furiously to the government’s irresponsible and non-transparent way of dealing with the accident.

They posted, commented and retweeted on weibo to create more visibility of the accident, such as the death toll and the real cause of the accident, forming a huge online weiguan community in weibo sphere.

In order to obtain research data firshand, I took my own Sina weibo account as a fieldwork platform to observe how weibo users responded to the train crash. From

July 24 to 31, 2011, I spent eight days, one to two hours each day, tracking my followers (120 people) and the people I follow (362 people) on the Sina weibo site. I

161 recorded tweets that were widely circulated on Sina weibo. Through textual analysis of popular tweets, I found Sina weibo had become a platform for “eye-witness reporting” and articulating “official information critiques” after the accident. The tweets that revolved abround these major themes attracted high online traffic and millions of retweeting and commentaries, forming a networked discursive sphere to advocate transparency of the tragedy.

In the aftermath of the train crash, victims on the train first released information about the accident through their weibo accounts. Their eyewitness reporting tweets attracted millions of weibo users’ attention prior to mainstream media’s reporting.

At 20: 38 pm, four minutes after the accident, Yuan Xiaoyuan, a passenger on the train, updated her Sina weibo via mobile phone, saying: “Something happened to

D301 in Wenzhou. There is an emergency shutdown and a strong collision. Twice!

The power is all off. I am in the last carriage. I pray to be fine. It is too terrifying now”. Another D301 passenger, named “yangjuan quanyang” on Sina weibo, called out for help 13 minutes after the accident, writing on her account, “Help! The high- speed train D301 has derailed somewhere not far from Wenzhou South Station.

Children are crying! There is no staff coming. Come and help us!” This SOS tweet was retweeted more than 100, 000 times in a very short period of time (Li, 2011). From

20:38pm to 23:57pm, Yuan Xiaoyuan kept updating her weibo account, sending out seven tweets to report the aftermath story (Yuan Xiaoyuan’s weibo, July 23, 2011).

Compared with previous channels for self-styled reporting, such as personal blogs and audio-visual portals, weibo supports users to update their accounts with words, photos or video clips via mobile phones in a faster and more convenient way.

Sina weibo even provides voicemail service to its users. In some emergency

162 situations, when keypad typing on the mobile phone is not available, users can simply dial a service number on their mobile phones and record a message. The message is automatically uploaded and shared in their weibo accounts (Ye, 2011).

The technological advantages of weibo have made it the most important real-time media for crisis and emergency reporting since 2009.

In addition, weibo has become an open platform for official information critique.

In the weibo sphere, professional journalists, public intellectuals, celebrities and ordinary citizens work together to challenge the accountability of the official information released by government or mainstream media. They either look for alternative news from alternative media outlets to prove the one-sidedness and non-objectivity of official information, or offer critical comments in a rumoresque or parodic way, forming a network of criticism.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, spokesperson for the Railway Ministry, Wang

Yongping, in an interview with CCTV, on July 24, said the crash was caused by bad weather. The train D3115 was hit by thunder, and subsequently lost power and stopped, which made the driving D301 hit from the back. The unconvincing reason immediately aroused massive criticism. The public suspected the Railway Ministry covered up the real cause and urged the release of truth. Another bone of contention came after the government ordered the burial of the train wreckage. On July 24, a citizen journalist uploaded a 3 minutes and 5 second video clip to Youku.com, which recorded loading shovels burying parts of the train wreckage near the accident scene. From the video, at least two bodies were seen falling out of the carriages during the burial (International Business Times, 2011). The link and snapshots of this video clip were rapidly circulated on Sina weibo. People posted and shared

163 comments to interrogate the Railway Ministry, asking why the rescue work stopped so quickly and why important evidence was hastily buried before careful investigation. In the first press conference held by the Railway Ministry on the evening of July 24, Wang Yongping responded to public questions. When asked why the train wreckage was buried hastily, he said the burial was just for the convenience of the emergency rescue operation, instead of burying evidences. He also added: “whether you believe it or not, I certainly do”. When asked why rescuers had pulled a toddler out of the wreckage alive many hours after the rescue effort had been officially called off, Wang said: “it was a miracle”. Wang’s arrogant tone, and his unconvincing answers with rich sarcastic potential, soon became another target for massive criticism.

When the public has failed to obtain credible or sufficient information from the government and mainstream media in times of crisis, they tend to look for useful information from alternative media outlets. Weibo has provided an ideal platform to post, share and view alternative news items. Some professional journalists, public intellectuals and proactive Internet users, in China or overseas, who could access information beyond the Party-state controlled Chinese media, posted alternative news information through their weibo accounts. These alternative news tweets, which challenged official voices on the train crash, were quickly shared and commented on by a large number of weibo users, forming alternative news weiguan spots. The weibo accounts of Qian Gang and Li Mao are two representative examples.

Qian Gang, former editor of Southern Weekend, currently a research scholar based at the University of Hong Kong, updated his weibo with the snapshots of banner headlines about this tragedy from newspapers based in Hong Kong. On July 25 and

164 26, Qian wrote eight tweets to share the main content of critical reporting from

Hong Kong newspapers, including Apple Daily, Oriental Daily, Ming Pao, Wenhui

Daily, AM 730 and Headline Daily. Each of his tweets was retweeted about 5000 times on average and received about 1000 comments (Qian Gang’s weibo, July 25-26,

2011). Similarly, Li Miao, a correspondent from Hong Kong Phoenix Satellite TV based in Tokyo, Japan, posted on her weibo a video clip from a Phoenix Satellite news program at 19: 31 on July 25. In this video, Li Miao interviewed a Japanese bullet train expert. Li succinctly concluded the expert’s opinion and posted it together with the video clip.

Japanese bullet train had been thundered before, but no one died. The emergency

response technology of China’s high-speed train must have defects… Rescue work

and the spot protection are highly important in railway accidents in Japan, the

burial of the train wreckage is just ridiculous.

Li’s word-video combined tweet was retweeted 26,920 times and received 5890 comments by the evening of July 26 (Li Miao’s weibo, July 26, 2011).

From the professional journalists’ weibo accounts, it can be seen that they have transplanted their journalistic practices into the weibo sphere after the accident.

They use their weibo accounts to re-mediate the news stories and commentaries from alternative media outlets, which work independently from the regulations of the Chinese government. The alternative news tweets, as exemplified by Qian Gang and Li Miao’s weibo, attracted huge attention from weibo users, who did not believe the official information but had no means to access alternative media outlets. They

165 tend to become popular weiguan spots for people to check facts, find evidence, look for different perspectives and seek for answers.

Except for alternative news tweets produced by the information have-more groups, some tweets generated by the information have-less grassroots also caused online crowd gathering. These tweets were either written like “inside information”, exposing secrets behind the official information, or written as parody in a playful way, mocking at the Railway Ministry’s cover-up and irresponsibility. These rumour tweets and parody tweets were rapidly circulated online, criticising official information generating strong public opinion to pressure the government to release the truth.

After the train crash, when the news information supplied by the institutional channels failed to satisfy the public’s information need, rumours were more likely to be generated and widely disseminated through networked communication to fill the information gap. As one of the most popular sites of networked communication, Sina weibo became a major platform for such rumours. On July 24, 35 people were reported dead in the accident in the first press conference held by the Railway

Ministry. The death toll was immediately questioned as incomplete. An unverified grapevine was circulated in weibo, challenging the accuracy of the death toll released by the government.

166 35 is a miraculous number. The death toll of the Wenzhou high-speed train crash

is 35. The death toll of the mining disaster in Ping Dingshan, Henan province, is

35. The death toll of Chongqing rainstorm is 35. The death toll of Yunnan

rainstorm is 35…Do you know why the death toll is always less than 36? For as

long as the death toll overpasses 36, the Secretary of Municipal Committee of the

CCP will be removed from the post. Therefore, no matter whatever accident

happens, the death toll is doomed to be less than 36 (as cited in Mai Xiaomai’s

weibo, July 25, 2011).

Another rumour tweet that was widely reposted was about the disappearance of

Chai Jing. It has been rumoured that Chai Jing, one of China’s most famous investigative journalists, from CCTV’s top investigative show, News Probe, had been threatened and detained after she spoke out about her plan of taking an independent investigation of the train crash on her weibo (Maydaily.com, 2011).

Millions of weibo users reposted this tweet and left comments to praise Chai Jing’s courage, supported her investigation, and condemned the government’s strict control of independent journalistic practices.

According to Shibutani (1966), rumours emerge when people attempt to

“construct a meaningful interpretation” of the ambiguous situation by “pooling their intellectual resources”. They should not be taken as inaccuracy of reports transmitted by word of mouth, but rather as “a form of collective problem-solving”

(p. 17). Though the rumour tweets about the death toll and Chai Jing’s disappearance were verified as faked news later, they “challenge[d] official reality by proposing other realities” and “constrain authorities to talk while contesting

167 their status as the sole source authorized to speak” (Kapferer, 1990, p. 215, 14). As

Hu Yong (2009b) argues, in authoritarian China, where free speech is restricted and news production is censored, rumour plays the role as “social protest” in various emergency and crisis events. Particularly in the highly networked and interactive new media environment, rapid circulation and wide consumption of rumours could produce what Harsin (2006) calls “rumour bomb”, generating supervisory force to check on the power and hegemony that dominate the production and release of official information.

In addition, the tweets written in e’gao style also attracted high online traffic. As previously mentioned, in the first press conference after the train crash, Wang

Yongping, spokesman for the Railway Ministry, became a target for criticism, due to his arrogant way of talking to the public. “Whether you believe it or not, I certainly do”, “It’s a miracle” and “I can only tell you it did happen”; three sentences from his perfunctory answers, with great sarcastic potential, immediately evoked sarcastic critiques from weibo users. The netizens transplanted these three sentences into new contexts and produced new paragraphs. This praodic writing style, named

“high-speed train style” [Gaotie ti 高铁体], soon gained popularity online and caused a “sentence-making” competition. Below is one the most reposted “high-speed train style” tweets in Sina weibo.

A woman reported to the government that she was raped by a government

official. Government: “he put on condemn, so it is not a rape crime”. Woman: “he

didn’t wear condemn, he told a lie”. Government: “Whether you believe it or not, I

certainly do”. Woman: “but I am pregnant now”. Government: “It is a miracle”.

Woman: “How can you…?” Government: “I can only tell you it did happen” (as

cited in Ju Detao’s weibo, July 25, 2011).

168 A high-speed train blueprint and a movie poster designed by anonymous netizens were also widely retweeted. In the design drawing, named “never colliding high- speed train blueprint”, the designer placed several government officials in the first and last carriage to avoid the train crash (see Figure 5-7). It satirised a common

Chinese phenomenon, that government officials are privileged in using high-quality products and receive much better service than other people. If government officials could often take the high-speed train, the quality and safety of the train must therefore be greatly improved. In the movie poster, the designer collated pictures of

Sheng Guangzu, the Party Chief and the minister of the Railway Ministry, Wang

Yongping, the spokesman of the Railway Ministry, and Long Jing, the head of

Shanghai Railway Bureau, in the background of train wreckages by using Photoshop technology. The three government officials were named as leading actors in a disaster film called Fatal Bullet Train. On the top of the poster, it said the movie would be a main-melody blockbuster to celebrate the 90th anniversary of CCP funding (see Figure 5-8).

Figure 5-7: snapshot from Shanghai jimo xiaosheng’s weibo, http://www.weibo.com/1617464310

169

Figure 5-8: snapshot from Xiaodan tongxue qiu shunli’s weibo, http://www.weibo.com/snowbeardan

As Regan (2003) put it, “creativity almost always happens at the edges of societies, not in the centre”. The marginalised people deprived of “the right to know” after the accident used parody and digital communication platforms to create strategic expressions. In this process, they were empowered and expressed their outrage against the Railway Ministry’s cover-up in a light-hearted and playful way.

As discussed above, it can be seen that weibo had become an important venue for online weiguan after the train crash. The eye-witness reporting tweets, alternative news tweets, rumour tweets and parody tweets, constituted four major weiguan spots, which attracted huge attention from weibo users. People logged into weibo accounts, read, commented, posted and reposted these popular tweets, forming a networked weiguan community to add group pressure on the government to further investigate the accident. As a result, weibo weiguan effectively checked and shaped official ways of dealing with the accident. The buried train wreckage was excavated and moved to Wenzhou Western Railway Station for further investigation on July 26.

Compensation for all victims in the accident was increased to 91.5 million RMB, which is China’s highest railway accident compensation (Chinahourly.com, 2011).

The Railway Ministry finally admitted that faulty signal technology had led to the

170 collision (Reuters.com, 2011). On July 28, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao headed to

Wenzhou, where he visited the site of the train crash to mourn the victims, comfort the injured, and promised a top-level investigation into the accident (Ramzy, 2011b).

This tragedy seemed to end again with victory for the netizens. However, it does not mean that weiguan on the networked social media has marked the watershed for China’s free speech era. After Premier Wen’s trip to Wenzhou on July 28, the CCP stepped up its crackdown on online discontent over bureaucratic ineptitude that had caused the accident.

Sina.com was coerced into widespread self-censorship, deleting posts critical of the regime and purging topics about the accident from its list of popular topics. The train crash has not only confirmed the collective power of weibo weiguan in China, but also revealed just how much candid discourses the CPC can tolerate.

5.4 Conclusion

By examining the concept, platform and practice of online weiguan, I havce argued that online weiguan is a networked collective action, which aims to mobilise public emotion, form public opinion and generate group pressure on government to resolve scandal issues. In China’s authoritarian regime, when the citizens’ direct participation in public affairs and mass media’s real supervisory function are hard to realise, the failure of official democracy has lead to burgeoning unofficial democracy in the “third realm” (Huang, 1993) between China’s state and society. Online weiguan is such a mediated form to realise unofficial democracy in the “third realm”.

It has caused political implications for Chinese society in purpose, practice and ethos.

171 First, online weiguan has formed a supervisory mechanism from the bottom-up against official wrongdoings. The Internet-enabled interaction and collaboration has greatly challenged Foucault’s Panopticon model in disciplinary society (1977), which allows the powerful few to monitor the powerless many through the normalizing power of the gaze. It has transformed the Panopticon society into what

Cascio calls “Participatory Panopticon” (2005). According to Cascio (2005), in a world of Participatory Panopticon, constant surveillance is carried out by citizens themselves, instead of upper class bureaucracies. He points out the main characteristics of this citizen surveillance are the use of digital devices and the network connection among individual citizens. Online weiguan is a vivid example of

Cascio’s Participatory Panopticon in the Chinese context. Second, online weiguan has constituted an important part of what Guobin Yang (2009a) calls “China’s new citizen activism”. It has shifted previous intensive and high risky social movements into more extensive, flexible and safe online protests, based on the “cultural logic of networking” or “network ideal” (Juris, 2005). It has provided lower thresholds for

Chinese people to participate in collective action. Last, but not least, online weiguan has enabled ordinary Chinese to exercise their “rightful resistance” (O’Brien, 1996) through everyday media consumption. This peaceful activism embedded in everyday life tends to cultivate Chinese people’s citizenship and consolidate the sense that making a better China is an ongoing commitment that requires every individual’s participation and contribution.

Online weiguan represents a unique democratic cultural politics, which challenges conventional management and narratives of political scandals. As Hu

Yong (2010) vividly argues, the rise of online weiguan is caused by a long-term, irreconcilable conflict in Chinese society, that is, even though the ordinary people

172 have sharp eyes to distinguish right from wrong, they have few channels or little courage to express their true feeling publicly. In this way, online weiguan can be viewed as what Scott (1985) calls “weapons of the weak” and could generate what

Havel (1978) calls “the power of the powerless”. It is an innovative strategy to articulate social critiques, mobilise public emotion, form public opinion and generate group pressure in China’s heavily controlled speech environment. It has provided new visibility for an unprecedented look into politically sensitive scandalous events in Chinese society. The public’s outrage and critiques concerning such scandalous events, which are usually removed from the narratives of the Party- state controlled media, have found alternative ways to challenge the repression through networked weiguan action in cyberspace. Online weiguan has generated a new form of political participation but has also transformed conventional ways of reporting and dealing with scandalous events. Online weiguan, and the social networking and citizen surveillance it reconfigures, require us to reconsider the politics of scandal as well as broader political reform in China’s Web 2.0 era. There are popular sayings in China’s cyberspace. They are “attention is power” [Guanzhu jiushi liliang 关注就是力量] and “weiguan changes China” [Weiguan gaibian zhongguo 围观改变中国].

173 Chapter Six

Conclusion:

New Media, New Interventionism and New Deliberation

6.1 Online Activism and the Transformation of Chinese Media Events

In the preceding chapters, three modes of online activism have been examined to illustrate how alternative and activist use of the Internet has intervened in and transformed conventional Chinese media events. The alternative and activist use of the Internet has created innovative interventions for Chinese people to parody, question, resist and challenge China’s Party-market controlled media events, transforming them into more open, contentious and deliberative media events in the

Web 2.0 era. This thesis has illustrated that online activism has provided opportunities and possibilities to challenge and transform China’s conventional media events via agents, agendas, performances and political impacts. As a result,

Chinese media events are no longer dominated by mainstream media, but are also co-represented and re-represented by millions of new media users in multiple digital sites. The extended temporal-spatial mediation of media events in the digital era has made Chinese media events “situated, thickened, centering performances of mediated communication”(Hepp & Couldy, 2009, p. 12). Moreover, the alternative and activist use of the Internet has enabled the people to communicate beyond the pre-planned agendas set by the Party and the market in media events. Media events are no longer related to just one power centre dominated by “power-money” hegemony; they have become “power-related articulations” (Hepp & Couldry, 2009,

174 p. 11), through which, multiple social actors can establish different discursive positions, pursue different agendas and realise different political purposes.

This thesis is among the first to use a “media events” framework to examine

China’s online activism and Internet politics. To my knowledge, it is the first study of the transformation of China’s media events through the parameter of online activism. This thesis has shown that online activism has become a leading force, which has transformed not only China’s media events but Chinese politics, by facilitating the dynamics of interplay between the state and the non-state. In China, when the direct political participation by the people is limited and official channels of free expressions are controlled, online activism has created alternative ways for the non-state players to take informal political participation and “talk-back” to the state. Conversely, online activism practices, which embody the non-state players’ grievances, demands and advocacies, have provided important channels for the state to “listen-to” public needs and opinion. Accordingly, the state could adjust its role and practice in media events specifically, and in everyday governance generally, in order to absorb public criticism, improve governance and maintain leadership.

Therefore, I argue that online activism tends to bridge the communicative gaps and shape the patterns of social interaction between the state and the non-state in

China’s media events and beyond. The function of online activism fosters a need to examine the paradox of Internet interventionism in Chinese society.

6.2 Internet Interventionism and Deliberative Politics in China

As discussed in Chapter Two, the Internet is not only viewed as a new technology, but an alternative media, which has provided a relatively free communicative space

175 beyond the Party-market controlled Chinese media. In this space, the Internet is alternatively used by Chinese people in society, culture and politics, generating various online activism practices which have intervened in conventional ways of doing thought work (see Chapter Three), crisis communication (see Chapter Four) and scandal investigation (see Chapter Five) in China. Online activism practices have extended and enhanced the Chinese people’s political participation in form and scope and have also transformed dominant approaches in society, culture and politics. These practices have thus vividly demonstrated the political impact of

Internet interventionism in Chinese society.

Internet interventionism refers to the Internet-centred political engagement, through which multiple social actors communicate, interact and effect social and political change. I propose this concept based on the broader concept of “media interventionism”. Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser (2009) argue that media interventionism refers to “a media-centered political reporting style in which, increasingly, journalists and media actors become the stories’ main newsmakers rather than politicians or other social actors” (p. 217). Media interventionism can be taken as a kind of journalistic intervention, through which political reality is defined and constructed by journalistic practices. As Strömbäck and Esser (2009) succinctly explain this interventional mechanism, “the media logic trumps political logic with respect to how the media cover politics” (p. 216). As an influence or effect, media interventionism could force political actors and institutions to accommodate and adapt to media logic (Cook, 2005; Strömbäck; 2008). Therefore, media interventionism in a way has facilitated interactions between the state and the non- state.

176 In China, where the media and journalistic practices are highly controlled by the

Party and the market, it is diificult to conceive the media’s interventional mechanism in the West applying to China. The media logic, in most cases, has to give in to political logic or commercial logic, such as China’s investigative journalism (see

Chapter Four). However, the popularisation of the Internet since the mid-1990s, has decentralised the dominant media power controlled by the Party-market, and has created participatory channels and platforms for multiple social actors to claim media power. In the Internet era, media power is unlikely to be totally controlled by mainstream media and their “power-money” hegemony. Instead, it has become a contested terrain where multiple social actors compete to intervene in social, cultural and political issues by using their representational spaces. The rise of decentralised and participatory media power has facilitated the formation of an alternative Internet interventionism beyond conventional journalistic intervention.

First, Internet interventionism has greatly extended social agency in doing media intervention. Media intervention is no longer the exclusive right of professional journalists in the newsrooms. Everyone who has access to the Internet can participate in such interventional practice and exercise media power. They can be grassroots entrepreneurs, citizen journalists, public intellectuals, social activists, and ordinary citizens. These non-state social actors take the Internet as their representational tool which affords the space to express and organise themselves in ways that parody, modify, complement or challenge dominant and institutionalised ways of doing society, culture and politics in Chinese society.

Second, Internet interventionism has diversified practice of media interventionism beyond merely “political reporting”. It has generated various

177 innovative practices to intervene in politics in direct or indirect ways. It could be shanzhai media culture, which challenges dual monopolies of the Chinese media in ideology and market by spoofing and copycatting media spectacles. It could be citizen journalism, which complements or challenges mainstream media’s crisis reporting. It could be online weiguan, which exercises citizen surveillance and applies public opinion pressure on government by organising, mobilising and networking millions of netizens to post, repost and comment on scandalous events.

These practices are embedded in everyday Internet communication and consumption by the Chinese people. They seek social and political changes in non- official, non-serious, communication-centred way, and from multiple social, cultural and political entries into public and private life, making media intervention more affordable, flexible, frequent and extensive.

By extending social agency and diversifying media practice, Internet interventionism has greatly increased the mediation of politics in scope and degree.

Mediation, as Silverstone (2005) argues, is “a fundamentally dialectal notion which requires us to address the processes of communication as both institutionally and technologically driven and embedded” (p. 189). His mediation approach provides an insightful perspective from which to examine the “interdependence and mutual shaping of communication action and communication technology” (Lievrouw, 2011, p. 234). Following this approach, the mediation of politics refers to political communicative actions, which assume media technologies and forms. On the one hand, the media have become a relatively independent institution with a logic of their own that political actors in other institutions have to adapt to. On the other hand, the media have been incorporated by different political actors into the

178 working mechanisms of their own institutions and have worked for various political purposes.

Mediation of politics is not a new phenomenon in the Internet era. As Finnemann

(2008) argues, “[n]ew media—whenever they arrive in history—imply extended mediatisation”. The Internet, which is usually taken as “new” media, as well as “old” media, such as telegraph, telephone and television, have all extended existing communicative forms and have transformed patterns of social, cultural and political interaction as they are newly invented. However, the Internet, for the first time in history, allows information (texts, graphics, sound and audio) to be rapidly and effectively compressed and transmitted across multiple media platforms. This has caused not only the digitisation of media and communication technologies (Fidler,

1997) but also the convergence of new and old media (Jekins, 2006). In this

Internet-centric, digitised and converged media environment, the patterns of political communication have are innovated, reformed and transformed. The mediation of politics has thus increased in form, scale and degree.

The non-state players increasingly depend on the Internet to obtain political information, articulate political discourses and organise political activities. However, the state power increasingly relies on the Internet to listen to people’s voices, respond to the public critism and alleviate social confrontation. The Internet has become a public interventional tool that multiple social actors could make use of to pursue different political agendas. In this way, Internet interventionism should not be seen as a one-sided process, in which the non-state players mediate politics from the bottom-up. It should also include the reverse process, in which the state power mediate politics form the top-down. The double edge of political mediation in the

179 Internet era has shaped new patterns of social interaction between the state and non-state.

This thesis has focuses on Internet interventionism from the bottom-up by examining online activism practices of the non-state players in media events.

However, it is equally important to look at Internet interventionism from the top- down as well as mutual constitutions between these two dimensions. The intervention of online activism has forced the state to reform its traditional ways of doing media events and politics. CCTV has incorporated audiences’ online and offline participation into its annual Spring Festival Gala, and transformed the gala into a more open and interactive media spectacle. The government, on different levels, has increasingly used the Internet for crisis communication to alleviate public opinion pressure or proactively guide online public opinion in various disaster and scandalous events. For example, at the same time weibo became a popular online weiguan platform to mobilise collective action and make advocacy, it has been swiftly incorporated by government into its everyday publicity work and governance in order to dissolve public opinion risk in emergencies and promote more interaction with citizens between crises. By the end of September 2012, the number of official weibo accounts certified by Sina.com had reached 50,947. Among which, 33,132 were run by government institutions and 17,815 run by government officials (Sina.com.cn, 2012). The weibo platform has already been institutionalised by government on different levels. This institutionalisation has transformed traditional ways of governing societies and conventional patterns of state—society interactions.

180 The Internet-mediated interactions between the state and the non-state have facilitated the deliberative turn of China’s political development. For non-state players, this deliberation has democratic potential. As exemplified in this thesis, the non-state players promote discursive participation and citizen engagement through alternative and activist use of the Internet. The Internet has siginificantly contributed to political participation and civic engagement for the Chinese people, creating popular forms of deliberation, when the authentic “deliberative democracy”

(Cohen, 1997; Dahlgren, 2009) through rational debate and consensus decision- making could not be fulfilled in China. For the Party-state, the deliberation is authoritarian in nature. The Internet has been strategically used by the government to adjust state—society relations and enhance the CCP’s governing capability and legitimacy. Ordinary people’s voices and public opinion seem to have unprecedented opportunities to be heard by government to influence the policy- making process. However, whether the expansion of “listen-to” channels can ensure effective “listen-in” results remains questionable. The government’s adaptive use of the Internet primarily aims to establish a more transparent, responsible and quasi- democratic image of the Chinese government, rather than actually democratising

China’s authoritarian political system. This phenomenon is particularly relevant to what He and Warren (2011) call “authoritarian deliberation”, through which the authoritarian regime incorporates deliberative practices into its governance to better stabilise and strengthen authoritarian rule. Although these deliberative acts seemingly transform authoritarian governance and sometimes empower society, they exclusively promote what Warren (2009) calls “governance-driven democratization”.

181 According to Warren (2009), the governance-driven democratisation, is not

“replacing other forms and spaces of democracy—such as electoral democracy, public sphere discourse, social movement and advocacy democracy”. It is “a response to democratization in these other areas”. Warren (2009) argues that this popular trend mostly exists in developed democracies, but can also be seen in authoritarian societies, such as China, because of similar market-driven neoliberal development and the increasing strength and pluralism of Chinese society. The striking feature of this innovative practice is that it has created “deliberative opportunities” (Warren, 2009) to facilitate interactions between state power and civil society. Hence, governance-driven democratisation has enabled the government to “capture the potentials within civil society for organization, information, energy and creativity” and has thus made administrative powers more responsive and efficient. However, it has empowered Chinese citizens who are involved in the governance-driven process and provided more opportunities for the people to participate and be represented. The governance-driven democratisation aims to improve governing and administrative capabilities of the state by selectively incorporating deliberative strategies into its governance process. As Warren (2009) argues, it is “a domain of political experiments that may have democratic potentials”, but stands autonomously from the “regime-level democratization”. For example, in the Chinese context, governance-driven democratisation may cause democratic transformation of China’s authoritarian governance, but it will not necessarily lead

China’s real institutional and constitutional democracy.

As discussed, it is evident that political communication is increasingly relying on the Internet as an institution. Making deliberations through the Internet-mediated political communication has gradually been incorporated into effective political

182 strategies for both the state and the non-state players. Competition, negotiation, interaction and mutual constitution between these deliberations have formed deliberative politics with Chinese characteristics. This politics underscores “talk- centric” public deliberation (Chambers, 2003) through the Internet-based communicative practices and takes Internet interventionism as a fundamental mechanism of social and political change. It promotes peaceful, continuous and small-scale social adaptations and arrangements, rather than adopting violent revolutions and drastic political reform. It generates micro social and political change in the paradoxical process of making deliberations, in which the state and society, public and private, structure and action, material and symbolic, online and offline dynamically interplay. This study on the interventions of online activism in

Chinese media events has provided representative social context and rich empirical evidence to investigate the deliberative politics in China’s Web 2.0 era as well as the mediated social and political change this politics provokes.

6.3 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research

Like any other research, this thesis has its limitations. It has necessarily not examined all modes of online activism in China’s media events, such as hacking.

Given the scope of this research, I have only investigated the interventions of online activism in China’s domestic society, while leaving transnational online activism unexplored, such as online campaigns organised by overseas Chinese pro- democracy dissidents in media events. The democratic potential of online activism is emphasised, rather than non-democratic aspects. For example, HFS, a popular way of exercising online weiguan, has facilitated Chinese people’s supervision of

183 official power abuses in various scandalous events. However, if deployed in cyber- violence, HFS could raise alarming illegal issues, such as slander, defamation and violations of privacy law. Also regarding nationalistic media events, online activism usually articulates popular nationalistic sentiment that promotes the nationalistic ideology of the CCP, enhancing rather than challenging the legitimacy of the authority.

This thesis has not fully examined the governance of China’s online activism. With the development and evolution of online activism, the state is continually updating its censorship and regulation through innovative Internet technologies, to improve relevant laws and regulations. Beyond such technological and legal control, market force have also been strategically incorporated in governing online activism, to curb the rise of online public opinion caused by alternative and activist use of the

Internet. For example, the government on different levels recruits the propagandist

Internet commentators, who are popularly dubbed, by the Chinese netizens, the “50

Cent Party” [Wumao Dang 五毛党] (It is said they are paid 50 cents of CNY for a posting.). These government agents widely post comments on BBS, blogs and micro- blogs to promote pro-government opinion, particularly when government institutions and officials are forced to denfend their credibility. Similarly, the

“Internet Water Army” [Wangluo shuijun 网 络 水 军 ], a group of Internet ghostwriters hired by private public relation companies and paid to post comments with particular content online, plays a similar role to the “50 Cent Party” in balancing online public opinion. The participation of quasi grassroots players has made it difficult to verify the authenticity and credibility of voices and opinions from the real “masses” [Remmin qunzhong 人民群众].

184 The rise of online activism has forced the state to reform and innovate its governance on the Internet. Vice versa, online activism practioners also have to develop innovate strategies to adapt to the state intervention. The mutual constitution and co-evolution between online activism and governance have made studies of China’s online activism more sophisticated and challenging. In future, more genuine, in-depth empirical research is needed to investigate the increasing and evolving range of factors that influence online activism in media events and everyday life. By examining these interventional practices, and the mediated social and political change they evoke, the dynamics of interplay between China’s state and society as well as the social, cultural and political transformation will continue to unfold.

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Appendix: Glossary of Chinese Names and Terms

baidu tieba 百度贴吧 http://tieba.baidu.com/index. html

baijian jiangtan 百家讲坛 Lecture Room

beijing zhiqun 北京之春 Beijing Spring

chaiji nüsheng 超级女生 Super Girl

chunjie 春节联欢晚会 Spring Festival Gala lianhuan wanhun

daju yishi 大局意识 ideas of overall situation

dangxing yuanze 党性原则 Party principle

dazibao 大字报 big-character poster

duli jilupian yundong 独立纪录片运动 Independent documentary movement

duomaomao 躲猫猫 hide-and-seek game

e’gao zhifu 恶搞之父 the father of e’gao

fazhi zaixian 法制在线 Law Online

gaotie ti 高铁体 high-speed train style (a sarcastic writing style)

gei zuguo muqin 给祖国母亲拜大年 greet the Motherland Happy baidanian Spring Festival

gongzhong 公众 the public

guanzhu jiushi liliang 关注就是力量 attention is power Focusing on the Wenchuan

211 guanzhu wenchuan 关注汶川地震 Earthqkae dizhen

hexie shehui 和谐社会 harmonious society

hexie zhilü 和谐之旅 Journey of Harmony

huaer weishenme 花儿为什么这样红 Why Are the Flowers So Red? zheyang hong

huwen xinzheng 胡温新政 Hu-Wen New Deal

jiaoban yangshi, gei 叫板央视，给全国人 challenge CCTV and wish all quanguo renmin 民拜年 Chinese People a Happy bainian Spring Festival

jintian 今天 Today

kaidi shequ 凯迪社区 http://www.kdnet.net

kanke wenhua 看客文化 culture of gaze

kongsu 控诉 denunciation

Lao Ma Ti Hua 老妈蹄花 (Ai Weiwei’s documentary on Tan Zuoren case)

Liangshanbo 梁山泊 a bandit in Outlaws of Marshes

makesi zhuyi 马克思主义新闻观 Marxist view of journalism xinwenguan

mantou jiaozhu 馒头教主 master of the steamed bun

maopu wang 猫扑网 http://www.mop.com

minjian chunwan 民间春晚 Folk Spring Festival Gala

minjian kanwu 民间刊物 non-governmental periodicals

muzimei xianxiang 木子美现象 muzimei phenomenon

nanfang dushibao 南方都市报 Southern Metropolitan Daily

nanfang zhoumo 南方周末 Southern Weekend

nian 念 Reading

niubo wang 牛博网 www.bullogger.com

piping yu ziwo piping 批评与自我批评 criticism-self criticism

212 qiangguo luntan 强国论坛 http://bbs1.people.com.cn

qiujin 秋瑾 a female pioneer of the 1911 Revolution renmin chunwan 人民春晚人民办，办 People’s Gala Held by the renmin ban, banhao 好春晚为人民 People, Run a Good Gala for chunwan wei renmin the People

renmin qunzhong 人民群众 the masses

renren wang 人人网 http://www.renren.com

renrou sousuo 人肉搜索 human flesh search engine

shanzhai chunwan 山寨春晚 Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala

shanzhai nian 山寨年 the year of shanzhai

Shimin yuban 市民欲办山寨版春晚 Ordinary citizen intends to shanzhaiban chunwan 叫板央视 run shanzhai version of jiaoban yangshi Spring Festival Gala to challenge CCTV

shuihu zhuang 水浒传 Outlaws of the Marshes

shumu qinghua 水木清华 http://www.newsmth.net

sixiang gongzuo 思想工作 thought-work

suku 诉苦 speaking bitterness

tianyan shequ 天涯社区 http://www.tianya.cn

tiaoli 条例 regulation

tonggao 通稿 unitary manuscript

tongzhi 通知 announcement

wang chuan 忘川 Forgetting Sichuan

wangluo shijian 网络事件 Internet incident

wangluo shuijun 网络水军 Internet Water Army

wangluo weiguan 网络围观 online surrounding gaze

wangluo yulunnian 网络舆论年 the year of online public opinion

213 weibo 微博 micro-blog

weiguan 围观 surrounding gaze

weiguan gaibian 围观改变中国 weiguan changes China zhongguo

wei renmin fuwu 为人民服务 Serve the People

women de wawa 我们的娃娃 Our Children

woyao shang chunwan 我要上春晚 I want to perform on the Spring Festival Gala

wuji 无极 The Promise

wumao dang 五毛党 50 Cent Party

wusi luntan 五四论坛 May Fourth Forum

wuyier xuesheng 5.12 学生档案 5.12 Student Archive dang’an

xici hutong 西祠胡同 http://www.xici.net

xidan nühai 西单女孩 (a subway female singer)

xin chunjie wenhua 新春节文化宣言 New Spring Festival Culture xuanyan Plato

xinfang zhidu 信访制度 Letters and Visits System

xin jilupian yundong 新纪录片运动 New Documentary Movement

xin minsu 新民俗 new fork custom

xinlang weibo 新浪微博 http://www.weibo.com

xinmeiti shijian 新媒体事件 new media events

xinwen lianbo 新闻联播 News Broadcasting

xuri yanggang 旭日阳刚 (a migrant worker duo)

yanda 严打 campaigns on criminal activities

yao 药 Medicine (one of Lu Xun’s short novel)

214 yidi jiandu 异地监督 extra-regional media supervision yige mantou yinfa de 一个馒头引发的血案 xue’an The Bloody Case of a Steamed Bun

yindao yulun 引导舆论 guide the public opinion

yulun jiandu 舆论监督 public opinion supervison

zhongguo fazhi 中国法制报道 China Legal Report baodao

zhongguo renquan 中国人权 China Human Rights

zhongguo shanzhai 中国山寨电视台 China Countryside Television dianshitai

zuiniu dingzihu 最牛钉子户 the coolest nail-house

zuoda zuoqiang 做大做强 make China’s media industry bigger and stronger

215