Worker Web Sites and Activism in China

After the recent worker unrest in China, I received media queries about the role of the internet in labor protests, specifically about workers web sites. Below are some of my responses:

There are some worker web sites and blogs, but the number is not in proportion to the number of workers. These web sites mostly focus on social and cultural issues. For example, some web sites publish literary works written by migrant workers. A few such sites may be devoted to issues related to labor rights and consumer rights, but overall, politically-oriented labor web sites are few and far between.

One reason is that the Chinese government seems to be especially worried about independent worker organizations, yet web sites could serve as an important forum for such organizing. State monitoring and control of worker web sites may be especially tight. One example is the forced closure of the influential worker web site “Chinese Workers Web” in 2006.

Another reason is the relative lack of worker presence in Chinese cyberspace. Young students and professionals still make up the vast majority of Chinese internet users. There is still a huge digital divide in China.

The dissemination of information about the suicide of Sun Danyong (the Foxconn worker) and the online controversy surrounding it seem to be typical in two ways. First is the issue – it is about the death of a vulnerable individual in a confrontation with a powerful institution (in this case a business corporation). Numerous cases of internet protest in recent years are about such vulnerable persons.

Second is the logic of information dissemination. Stories about the case appeared in both mainstream newspapers and the internet, but it was stories and interactions on the internet that drove the controversy. As far as I can tell, part of the popular anger comes from the chat records between Sun and his college friend (who was a student in France) and the text messages Sun exchanged with his girl friend not long before his death. These records were posted and circulated online, thus provoking interest in the details of Sun’s death.

It’s hard to assess the relative importance of foxlife.cn vs other social networking sites in the circulation of the story. Foxlife.cn seems to be more active than the few worker web sites I know, but as in so many other cases, postings about Sun’s death seemed to have first appeared in large and popular online communities (in this case Tianya.cn). Following the appearance of these postings, other web sites such as Sohu.com set up special sections devoted to the case. The case then was rapidly pushed into the public limelight. Mainstream media were also involved, but public debate and protest happened online.

The logic of information dissemination behind this case is thus typical. Social media are crucial, but it is the more influential online communities that matter most. These web sites first provoked public interest in the case by breaking news and leaking information and then promoted public controversy by encouraging online interaction. As I argued in my book The Power of the Internet in China, all kinds of web sites, including official web sites, encourage contentious online interaction because such interaction pumps up the web traffic.

The recent case of steel workers’ protest in Tonghua, Jilin shows that the government is ready to make concessions in order to prevent large-scale worker unrest. When workers take to the streets, it's like adding the oil of class struggle to the fire of ethnic conflicts and rural protests. For party leaders, a class struggle is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. As sociologist Ching Kwan Lee has argued, labor activism is mostly contained because it is isolated and fragmented. Nevertheless, web activism may have the potential of helping workers to overcome such fragmentation and build coalitions. State authorities must be very concerned with worker web sites.

Emotional Mobilization in Online Collective Action

I don’t often publish in Chinese, but the Chinese Journal of Communication & Society, edited by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has just published a paper I wrote in Chinese. The paper is titled "Of Sympathy and Play: Emotional Mobilization in Online Collective Action". Here is the English abstract:

Internet incidents are a new form of collective action. They are an integral part of the countermovement against the “great transformation” in contemporary China. This article analyzes the mobilization of internet incidents from the perspective of cultural analysis in social movement theory. It argues that the mobilization of internet incidents depends on those expressive forms and content that may produce among internet users such emotional responses as joy, laughter, anger, sadness and sympathy. The occurrence of internet incidents is thus a process of emotional mobilization. This article reveals two styles of emotional mobilization through two case studies. The incident known as “A Bloody Case Triggered by a Bun” represents a humorous style of emotional mobilization and is typical of internet incidents involving cultural issues. The other incident, known as the “Shanxi black kiln” case, represents mobilization that appeals to the sentiments of sadness and sympathy, most often seen in cases involving various types of social injustices.

Source: The Chinese Journal of Communication and Society 9(2009): 39-66.

Human Flesh Search Is Not Ochlocracy: More Q & A

Nowadays there is a great deal of interest in “human flesh search,” which obviously reflects the prevalence of the phenomenon. I have just discussed it in the previous entry. And then I received another list of questions about the same phenomenon from Li Gao, a graduate student in Cardiff University who is writing a thesis on this topic. Among these questions are the following (in my simplified rendering):

Is the “human flesh search engine” derived from the Chinese tradition of "people's war" in Mao's period? Is it a kind of ochlocracy similar to the Cultural Revolution in China?

Below are my responses:

The short answer is “No.” Such analogies misrepresent both the “human flesh search” and the Cultural Revolution. A long answer will have to be very long, but to make it short, I’ll briefly mention the following.

1. The Cultural Revolution was not a period of ochlocracy. It may be a power struggle, a class struggle, even a revolution, but it was not “government by the mob.” Mob behavior is viewed as irrational behavior, but as so many experts have shown, the Cultural Revolution was not irrational but had deep social and political roots.

2. The “war” in the Cultural Revolution was a factional war between two or more factions, again with extremely complex social and political causes and consequences. It cannot be understood out of its historical context and therefore should not be used haphazardly as an analogy for other social phenomena such as the “human flesh search.”When talking about the Cultural Revolution, people often talk about Red Guard behavior, but Red Guards were not a homogeneous entity. There were Old Red Guards, conservatives, radical rebels, and moderate rebels, just to mention a few. They were not the same.

3. The “human flesh search” phenomenon is rooted in different social conditions than the Cultural Revolution. On the social conditions of the human flesh search, see my previous blog entry. There, I mentioned that some cases of human flesh search may be viewed as cases of online activism. The structural conditions of contemporary online activism are discussed in Chapter 1 of my book The Power of the Internet in China. The chapter is titled “Online Activism in an Age of Contention.”

4. If there is one thing in common between the two phenomena, it is the broad-based social grievances. The conflicts in the Cultural Revolution and in many cases of human flesh search are rooted in popular discontents, especially about party authorities and various forms of social inequality or discrimination.

5. There are differences in form, means, and ends. Cases of human flesh search usually adopt technological, discursive, and symbolic means. They happen in cyberspace. Though some cases may involve some form of offline action, by and large they are not about street action. The goal of human flesh search is exposure. Participation is not driven by the kind of revolutionary zeal and asceticism typical of the Red Guard period. The grandiose aspirations of making a world revolution often found among the Red Guards are completely absent in the contemporary world.

6. Regarding violations of privacy in some cases of human flesh search, see my previous blog entry.

Q & A about "Human Flesh Search"

Natalia Tobón, a reporter for China Files, recently asked me some questions about the phenomenon of "human flesh search" (ren rou sou suo) in China. Below are my responses to her questions:

Tobón: How do you define Human Flesh Search Engine and would you consider it as a way of online activism?

Yang: I don’t think it should be called the “Human Flesh Search Engine.” That’s a wrong translation. It is simply “human flesh search.” Some people think it is a tool, something like Google Search, but it is not. It is a social phenomenon, a form of collective action. Some cases may be considered as instances of online activism, but not all of them. In those cases that may be viewed as online activism, the targets of the search are usually 1) corrupt officials, 2) individuals who have violated the moral codes of the society, and 3) people who have committed some form of social injustice against vulnerable individuals. These cases are forms of social activism because those who participate in or support the search wish to expose social ills, challenge authorities, and produce social change in some other ways.

Tobón: What are the reasons (practical, historical, sociological) that make this practice relatively common in China. Do you think Chinese society has some traits that helped the development of this phenomenon?

Yang: Two factors are most important. One is the existence of a lively, dynamic and contentious Internet culture in China, including large and popular online communities. These online communities provide the communication networks for human flesh search. They are channels of communication. The other main reason is contemporary social conditions – the prevalence of social injustice, corruption, a sense of powerlessness among the common people, and the government’s failure to deal with these problems. Under these conditions, human flesh search becomes a means of collective action and a reflection of the high levels of popular resentments and frustrations in Chinese society.

For some individuals, participation in human flesh search brings that sense of honor and self-righteousness that is often found in hacker culture. In Chinese cyber-culture, hackers are often compared to xia - heroes or heroines in the imagined world of martial arts, who strive for fame and honor by seeking to restore justice in an evil society.

The most radical behavior in “human flesh search” usually involves the hacking of web sites or personal emails. This aspect of the phenomenon has drawn criticism from observers because hacktivism often violates individual privacy and sometimes brings harm to innocent individuals.

These issues of honor, justice, and violations of privacy in Chinese cyber-culture are discussed in Chapter 7 of my book. The chapter is titled “Utopian Realism in Online Communities.”

Tobón: How is possible that in a country with such control of Internet, this phenomenon seems to be freely practiced?

Yang: This shows that efforts to control the Internet are often ineffective, however sophisticated Internet control has become. There is a simple truth here, but one often neglected: Internet users are not dupes. They always come up with creative ways of undermining or bypassing control.

It may also indicate some degree of government tolerance toward some cases of human flesh search because the main issues involved in these cases are social rather than explicitly anti-governmental. Undoubtedly web sites also use various strategies to promote this phenomenon because whenever such cases happen, web traffic increases.

Third, I think the growing frequency of the human flesh search phenomenon demonstrates the power of the Internet as a tool for communication, interaction, and search. So much information is online nowadays, private or public, that it often doesn’t take a great deal of efforts to dig up and piece together information about an individual person. Users can make creative use of the Internet to generate and circulate information. When such information is put to good use, it becomes powerful knowledge. Of course, there is always the possibility of misinformation or abuse of information, but assuming that Internet users, like other human beings, are mostly people with reason, judgments, and analytical skills, they are not going to be so easily duped by misinformation.

Excerpts from Page 99

The theme of this blog comes from the title of my new book. Since information about the book is available on the web site of the Columbia University Press, I'll start off with something more fun.

I recently learned about the Page 99 Test from Marshal Zeringue's blogs Campaign for the American Reader. Zeringue’s Page 99 Test blog has the following inscription from Ford Madox Ford:

"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."

I’m not too sure about how Page 99 reveals the overall quality of my book. In any case, it is up to readers and critics to judge. But the two main paragraphs on that page, cited below, do reflect one main goal in my book. That goal is to examine online activism in contemporary China both diachronically and synchronically. Diachronically, the book attempts to reveal its continuities and discontinuities with earlier social movements in China. The student movement in 1989 is the major point of reference, but some historical comparisons reach as far back as the May Fourth Movement.

Synchronically, I try to show that online activism is tied to social, economic, cultural, global, as well as political trends in the contemporary world and therefore serves as a prism for understanding broader social change. My analysis of online activism is thus an attempt to reveal “the drama of our time,” to borrow from the title of a book by former Swedish ambassador to China Borje Ljunggren. Ljunggren’s book is titled: “China - The Drama of Our Time.” The book is in Swedish but hopefully there will be an English edition soon.

Now back to Page 99. Below are the two main passages on that page:

Although the culture of digital contention depends on the new technologies, its formation takes place in a historical process involving real people figuring out how to use the technologies. The ways in which they do so are inevitably shaped by their own history and culture. Creativity comes through practice. The innovations in the rituals, genres, and styles of digital contention I analyzed did not come about overnight. They did not appear as soon as the new media technologies became available.

It is not hard to see why. Styles and genres are embodied. Like other embodied habits, they change slowly. It takes time and effort to learn to speak and write in certain styles and genres. Once learned, they become such a natural part of us that the chances of thinking and acting outside of the familiar modes decrease. For example, a quick glance at the earliest online Chinese magazines, those run by Chinese students in North America in the early 1990s, suggests that they resemble more closely the unofficial journals published during the Democracy Wall movement than those that are being produced today. The editors, authors, and readers of the earliest online Chinese magazines and personal Web sites had grown up in the culture of print magazines and newspapers of 1980s China. The content categories, styles, and genres of writing they produced reflected the imprints of their socialization in print culture.

--Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 99.