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.