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.