Resistance In Digital China

By investigating the Southern Weekly Incident, in which censorship of the prominent Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly triggered mass online contention in Chinese society, Resistance in Digital China examines how Chinese people engage in resistance on digital networks whilst cautiously safeguarding their life under authoritarian rule. Chen's in-depth analysis of the Southern Weekly Incident ties together overlapping debates in internet studies, Chinese studies, social movement studies, political communication, and cultural studies to discuss issues of civic connectivity, emotions, embodiment, and the construction of a public sphere in digital China. Resistance in Digital China demonstrates a valuable methodology for conducting in-depth empirical examination of an act of resistance in order to explore political, cultural, and sociological meanings of Chinese people's resistance within party limits. Fruitfully combining 45 interviews with key players in the Southern Weekly Incident with largely Western-based communications theory, Chen develops an understanding of the ongoing formation of the Chinese public sphere as elite-led and emotional, at once invoked and rejected by Chinese citizens.

"A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Book" -- dust jacket.

A scholar and activist tells the story of change makers operating within the Chinese Communist system, whose ideas of social action necessarily differ from those dominant in Western, liberal societies. The Chinese government has increased digital censorship under Xi Jinping. Why? Because online activism works; it is perceived as a threat in halls of power. In The Other Digital China, Jing Wang, a scholar at MIT and an activist in China, shatters the view that citizens of nonliberal societies are either brainwashed or complicit, either imprisoned for speaking out or paralyzed by fear. Instead, Wang shows the impact of a less confrontational kind of activism. Whereas Westerners tend to equate action with open criticism and street revolutions, Chinese activists are building an invisible and quiet coalition to bring incremental progress to their society. Many Chinese change makers practice nonconfrontational activism. They prefer to walk around obstacles rather than break through them, tactfully navigating between what is lawful and what is illegitimate. The Other Digital China describes this massive gray zone where NGOs, digital entrepreneurs, university students, IT companies like Tencent and Sina, and tech communities operate. They study the policy winds in Beijing, devising ways to press their case without antagonizing a regime where taboo terms fluctuate at different moments. What emerges is an ever-expanding networked activism on a grand scale. Under extreme ideological constraints, the majority of Chinese activists opt for neither revolution nor inertia. They share a mentality common in China: rules are meant to be bent, if not resisted.

Nationalism, in China as much as elsewhere, is today adopted, filtered, transformed, enhanced, and accelerated through digital networks. And as we have increasingly seen, nationalism in digital spheres interacts in complicated ways with nationalism "on the ground". If we are to understand the social and political complexities of the twenty-first century, we need to ask: what happens to nationalism when it goes digital? In China's Digital Nationalism, Florian Schneider explores the issue by looking at digital China first hand, exploring what search engines, online encyclopedias, websites, hyperlink networks, and social media can tell us about the way that different actors construct and manage a crucial topic in contemporary Chinese politics: the protracted historical relationship with neighbouring Japan. Using two cases, the infamous Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and the ongoing disputes over islands in the East China Sea, Schneider shows how various stakeholders in China construct networks and deploy power to shape nationalism for their own ends. These dynamics provide crucial lessons on how nation states adapt to the shifting terrain of the digital age and highlight how digital nationalism is today an emergent property of complex communication networks.

Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, this volume shows the complexity behind the central role the party-state plays in shaping social media platforms. The party-state increasingly penetrates commercial social media while aspiring to turn its own media agencies into platforms. Yet state-sponsored platformization does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party’s desired outcomes. Citizens continue to appropriate social media for creative public engagement at the same time that more people are managing their online settings to reduce or refuse connection, inducing new forms of crafted resistance to hyper-social media connectivity. The wide-ranging essays presented here explore the mobile radio service Ximalaya.FM, Alibaba’s evolution into a multi-platform ecosystem, livestreaming platforms in the United States and China, the role of Twitter in Trump’s North Korea diplomacy, user-generated content in the news media, the emergence of new social agents mediating between state and society, social media art projects, Chinese and US scientists’ use of social media, and reluctance to engage with WeChat. Ultimately, readers will find that the ten chapters in this volume contribute significant new research and insights to the fast-growing scholarship on social media in China at a time when online communication is increasingly constrained by international struggles over political control and privacy issues.

Although academics have paid much attention to contentious politics in China and elsewhere, research on the outcomes of social protests, both direct and indirect, in non-democracies is still limited. In this new work, Yongshun Cai combines original fieldwork with secondary sources to examine how social protest has become a viable method of resistance in China and, more importantly, why some collective actions succeed while others fail. Cai looks at the collective resistance of a range of social groups—peasants to workers to homeowners—and explores the outcomes of social protests in China by adopting an analytical framework that operationalizes the forcefulness of protestor action and the cost-benefit calculations of the government. He shows that a protesting group's ability to create and exploit the divide within the state, mobilize participants, or gain extra support directly affects the outcome of its collective action. Moreover, by exploring the government's response to social protests, the book addresses the resilience of the Chinese political system and its implications for social and political developments in China.

This book examines the use and culture of digital media in Chinese cities. By examining examples and data from Chinese and global social media platforms, the book argues that digital media facilitate Chinese people’s sense of local self and local identity. In doing so, the book moves on from the polarised debate regarding the democratic function of Chinese internet to instead examine the connection between digital technologies and the country’s history, culture and eventually, people and their everyday lives. It offers a rich analysis of a Chinese city in the digital age, and challenges the nationalistic approach to study China’s digital media culture.

Based on in-depth field research conducted in China between 2019 and 2023, this book raises a concept of “rightful control” and demonstrates a new means of dispute resolution used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through digital technology and its impact on state-society relations. The author argues that when rightful control relies more on means beyond law and policy, it not only fails to construct an image of a responsible state but also leads to the counterproductive result of creating new conflicts that may bring social instability and threaten regime legitimacy. The study explains why digital technology could only perform a limited role in strengthening social control, which adds a new dimension to state-society relations in China from the perspective of digital governance. The book will attract researchers and students studying law, political science, and sociology, and government personnel who focus on digital governance.

Yan Lianke is one of the most important, prolific, and controversial writers in contemporary China. At the forefront of the “mythorealist” Chinese avant-garde and using absurdist humor and grotesque satire, Yan’s works have caught much critical attention not only in the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan but also around the world. His critiques of modern China under both Mao-era socialism and contemporary capitalism draw on a deep knowledge of history, folklore, and spirituality. This companion presents a collection of critical essays by leading scholars of Yan Lianke from around the world, organized into some of the key themes of his work: Mythorealism; Absurdity and Spirituality; and History and Gender, as well as the challenges of translating his work into English and other languages. With an essay written by Yan Lianke himself, this is a vital and authoritative resource for students and scholars looking to understand Yan’s works from both his own perspective and those of leading critics.

"In this book, we use the case of China to examine how state actors can transform the Internet and online discourse into a key strategic element for maintaining the government and relieving domestic pressure on national institutions. While scholars have long known that the democratizing influence of the Internet can be blunted by autocratic states, in this book, we show that the online sphere can effectively be co-opted by states like China and transformed into a supporting institution. Our theory, Directed Digital Dissidence, explains how autocracies manage critical online information flows and the impact this management has on mass opinion and behavior. While the expansion of the Internet may stimulate dissidence, it also provides the central government an avenue to direct that dissent away and toward selected targets. Under the strategy of Directed Digital Dissidence, the Internet becomes a mechanism to dissipate threats by serving as a targeted relief valve rather than a building pressure cooker. We consider the process and impact of this evolving state led manipulation of the political Internet using data and examples from China. We use an original large-scale random survey of Chinese citizens to measure Internet use, social media use, and political attitudes. We also consider the impact of the state firewall. Beyond simply identifying the government strategy, we focus on testing the effectiveness of the strategy with empirical data. We also consider how the redirection of dissent can be done across a broader range of targets, including non-state actors and other nations"--