What’s up with China’s internet bars during the 18th party congress?

There is a great deal of talk recently, in China and outside, about how state censorship of the internet has tightened during CCP’s 18^th party congress. Sina’s microblogging service Weibo reportedly have some new ways of blocking key words. Google services, including Gmail, were said to be unavailable on Friday, November 9.

With all the buzz about Weibo (see Sullivan’s new article on Weibo here), people seem to have forgotten an old passion -- China’s numerous internet bars. After all, that’s where lots of young people, rural, urban AND migrant, spend their leisure time (for a good book on youth and internet bars, see Liu).

To see what cyber police might have been doing with internet bars, I did a simple search on Baidu today. I typed in the Chinese characters for internet bars + cyber police + 18^th congress, like this: 网吧+网警+十八大.  It returned over 44,000 results. 

I read only a few results, but they were revealing enough. First was a short news item released on October 22, 2012. It was about how a district police station in the remote city of Baoquanling in Heilongjiang province "innovates methods of social management" in order "to safeguard the smooth openning of the party congress."  “Social management innovation” (社会管理创新) is a new term in the language of the state which I will not try to explicate here.  The Baoquanling police’s innovation was to install video monitoring software on the computers of local internet bars, which would supposedly make it possible for cyber police to monitor the internet bars from the cozy distance of their offices in their police station.

Clicking on the second search result opened the cyber police web site in the city of Mengzi in Yunnan province. Mengzi is in the southwest end of China while Baoquanling is in the northeast end. There seems to be some unintended (or intended?) symbolic meaning here, because between Mengzi and Baoquanling, China is pretty well covered from the north to the south. In any case, I tried opening the first item under the “Announcements” section. It required authentication and did not open. The second item opened and it was a news release posted on November 4, 2012. It announces in a few sentences that “to maintain stability during the 18^th party congress,” the cyber police section of the city public security bureau inspected local internet bars on November 2. Five internet bars were penalized for violating the user registration rule (patrons of internet bars are required to show ID cards. See original regulations here in Chinese).

Such violations are apparently rampant.  One item on the second page of my Baidu search results is a news story about internet bars in Hainan province. It reports that again, “to safeguard the successful opening of the 18^th party congress,” the police department of the Hainan province secretly inspected 80 internet bars in 15 regions of the province and found violations in 37 of them.  ID check was still one of the main problems, but there also seemed to be cases where internet bars might have uninstalled required filtering software from their computers, a practice that happens in other places too (which I have read about elsewhere).

So, Weibo is not all the story about internet control. Cyber police teams in even the most remote corners of China have been busy, cracking down on internet bars and monitoring the Chinese cyberspace to “maintain stability” for the 18^th party congress.   

A Cultural Revolution Radical from Wuhan： The Story of Lu Li'an

I would like to continue discussions about the importance of the Chinese Cultural Revolution for understanding contemporary Chinese society and politics by posting here a book review I published in 2006. The book under review is a memoir by a former rebel leader in the city of Wuhan. It was published in Hong Kong and available in Chinese only. The memoir offers a view of the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of a radical rebel who joined the Cultural Revolution as a loyal and committed activist but ended up in prison for 11 years. So it's the story of the transformation of a radical believer into a radical non-believer. To see the complexities of the Cultural Revolution from the perspectives of different actors involved, I will try to post more of this kind of stories in the future. So here it goes, below is my review of the memoir by Lu Li’an:

 

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Outcry from a Red Guard Imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, by Lu Li'an and edited by Wang Shaoguang, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005, 656pp, US$23 (Paperback), ISBN: 962-996-250-0

Memoirs about the Chinese Cultural Revolution fall into at least five types. There are those written by persecuted intellectuals, by high-level party leaders, by ordinary individuals, by the English-writing Chinese diaspora, and by former Red Guard leaders. These memoirs present different images of the Cultural Revolution depending on the authors' individual experience and the audience targeted. Readers of this journal are perhaps most familiar with the profitable industry of English-language memoirs. With a few exceptions, personal accounts by former Red Guard leaders are conspicuously missing. This leads to the curious phenomenon that the story of the Red Guard Movement, arguably the most important aspect of the Cultural Revolution, is told mostly by those on the periphery, not in the centre of the storm. Lu Li'an's memoir thus fills a yawning gap. His is the story of an influential rebel leader in the city of Wuhan, itself a major battleground of the Cultural Revolution.

Rebel leaders were of various stripes. Some rose to important positions of power in the Cultural Revolution but were indicted at the end of it. Nie Yuanzi, Kuai Dafu, and Tan Houlan in Beijing were perhaps the best known examples. Others were taken into custody in the middle of the Red Guard Movement or during the period of "cleansing of class ranks" but were rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution. Lu Li'an belonged to this second group. But Lu differed from most Red Guard leaders in a crucial way. He was among a small handful who took the Cultural Revolution so seriously that they sought theoretical foundations and practical means to transform it into a real revolution — a fundamental change in the national power structures and social structures. Lu's memoir provides a gripping account of how he came to this position and what disasters his words and activities brought to him and some of his fellow rebels.

Cultural Revolution memoirs, especially those in English, have been subject to such critical scrutiny that they seem to suffer from a sort of "credibility crisis." But if readers bring with them a healthy lens of scepticism and an appreciation of the differences between historical evidence and personal memory, memoirs can offer powerful insights into the meaning of historical experience. I find Lu's account credible. He apparently chewed over many details of his life during his eleven years in prison. Indeed, because of the repeated interrogations he was subjected to, he was forced to recall detail after detail over and over. Furthermore, many of his key activities involved other historical figures and therefore are verifiable to some extent. And finally, the book is carefully edited by Wang Shaoguang, author of two books on the Cultural Revolution and a leading expert on the Cultural Revolution in Wuhan.

The book consists of two parts. Part One takes the story from Lu's childhood to July 1968, when he was kidnapped by an opposing faction. Lu devotes relatively little space — one chapter out of a total of twenty-four — to his childhood years. He was born in 1946 and started junior high school in 1959. He remembered not having enough to eat during the "three years of natural disaster," but clearly he had fond memories of his school days. He was a good student and athlete in junior and senior high school.

Lu's college life coincided with the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. He started college in the autumn of 1965, at the Central China Institute of Technology (CCIT) in his home town. Before the end of his first year, the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. As in other schools and universities, a work-team came to CCIT to guide the Cultural Revolution, The workteam encouraged students to expose "bad elements," thus creating conflicts among students. Initially Lu was more of a spectator, but his sympathy lay with the student minority under attack by the work-team. One evening, he and two female classmates went to watch the two camps debating with each other. One of the girls prodded him, "Aren't you a good speaker? Why don't you step forward and talk some?" (p, 70) Lu did, and as a result, he turned from a spectator into an active participant.

One may argue that Lu stepped into the political storm quite accidentally. There is nothing more natural than when a young man is goaded into action by a young woman. Perhaps herein lies an insight into political activism. Perhaps it is small social interactions like these, as much as socio-structural factors like one's family background, that create the immediate motivations for  participating in politically risky activities. And onee the first step is taken, the next becomes easier. Time and again, Lu remembers how he felt a sense of pride and empowerment because of the encouragement he received from classmates for a speech he made or a wall-poster he put up and how this sense of empowerment radicalized him further. Every small incident of social engagement took him one step deeper into the vortex of the political storm. Below is an abbreviated inventory of his major deeds:

• In late August 1966, he put up his first wall-poster, a critique of a speech made in his university by the Governor of Hubei province. He denounced the Governor's speech as a defence of the workteam.

• In November 1966, having been excluded from Red Guard organizations because of his family background, be went on a long march to Yan'an with a team of 45 school mates. They walked long distances in emulation of the Red Army soldiers of an earlier age.

• Upon returning to Wuhan in January 1967, Lu Li'an joined the ranks of the rebels and in time started his own rebel organization called "New CCIT Daredevils," which gained considerable influence.

• After the downfall of the conservative organizations in July 1967, Lu disbanded his rebel organization and started a study society in order to make theoretical preparations for a new stage of political struggle. He named it the Society of the Plough.

For this last activity, Lu Li'an was to be imprisoned for eleven years, from 1968 to 1979. What about Lu's study society was so terrifying that he was subjected to such harsh punishment?

Chapter Six of the book, on the rise and fall of the Society of the Plough, provides an answer. We see here how Lu Li'an wrote a manifesto declaring the will of a small group of individuals to carry the Cultural Revolution to the end, how he gathered with his friends to study the works of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong, and how he proclaimed in his articles that the next stage of the Cultural Revolution would be a peasant war. None of these, taken alone, looked particularly radical or subversive. All seemed to be consistent with the official ideology, perhaps even more so than the official rhetoric. To the central authorities, however, this was the most terrifying thing. Like others of his ilk, such as Yang Xiguang in Hunan province, author of the influential essay "Wither China," Lu Li'an took the values of the ruling class more seriously than the power elites themselves. He was challenging the ruling elites by holding them up to their own criteria of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought. As political theorists have warned us, this critique from within the hegemony constitutes a most powerful kind of political dissent. This explains Lu's downfall.

Lu Li'an was imprisoned without any formal charge. The second part of his book details his humongous sufferings as a political prisoner. It is a heart-rending story of how a thinking and feeling human being struggled to remain human in the dehumanizing and maddening prison-cell of a world.

In one of the most touching passages of the book, Lu writes that from the solitude of his prison, he would often look at a distant mountain, admire its seasonal change of colours, and envy the shadowy human figures coming and going freely on the mountain slope. It was this undying desire for freedom that sustained him through the long years. He vowed to himself one day that if he lived to leave the prison, he would tell his story to the world. It is a historical irony that Lu could not publish his book in mainland China. The Chinese University Press deserves applause for making this valuable book available.

Source: Guobin Yang, 2006. Review of Yangtian changxiao: yige danjian shiyi nian de hongweibing yuzhong yutianlu (Outcry from a Red Guard Imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution), by Lu Li'an and edited by Wang Shaoguang.. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005. In The China Review Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 180-183.

How to Crack Down on China Like a Brother

China became a character in absentia in the last part of the Obama-Romney debate last night. Asked about how he differed from G.W. Bush, Romney said, "I'll crack down on China. President Bush didn't." Obama retorted: “you’re the last person who’s going to get tough on China.” Romney: “the president has a regular opportunity to label them as a currency manipulator, but refuses to do so. On day one, I will label China a currency manipulator.”

“For the President, Punch, Punch, Another Punch” - this New York Times story compared the debaters to “roosters in a ring” in fist fights. Huffpost has photos of the candidates in postures like a fist fight. Howard Fineman tweeted last night: “I've never seen a prez debate in which the personal animus and near-physical confrontation was so clear. Politics at its most primal level.”

All this reminds me of street fights among kids in China when I was young. Such fights were common in the 1970s, indeed an interesting part of the youth culture at that time. If two boys of equal size were on the verge of a fight, the one who had an elder brother could often browbeat the other and make him back down by saying, “Damn it, if you dare to put a finger on me, my big brother will hunt you down.”  Then there was another scenario. If either of the two engaged in a fight had a little brother, that hapless little guy could easily become a stake in the fight. The boy with no little brother would threaten the other by saying, “If you beat me, I’m going to beat up your little brother when you’re not around.” Nowadays I suppose this kind of scene has become quite rare because few kids (except in some rural areas) have brothers.

Was China the little brother or the big one last night?

Internet with Chinese Characteristics

Discussions about the internet in China nowadays often depict some features unique to China. It is not surprising that a capitalism with Chinese characteristics will develop an internet with Chinese characteristics. Earlier this year, I published a short essay in The Chinese Journal of Communication to argue that because of its Chinese characteristics, there is now good reason to talk about "the Chinese internet," as opposed to "the internet in China." Below are a few excerpts from the essay:

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…the Internet in China has become domesticated to the extent that it is now possible, even necessary, to talk about the Chinese Internet, as opposed to the Internet in China. “Domesticated” here means “localized” more than “tamed”. “Localized”, however, does not mean that the Chinese Internet is not global or that it has become an intranet. It still has global features, and yet it has assumed distinctly Chinese characteristics.

The forms of the Chinese Internet

The Chinese Internet comprises network services associated with specific technologies, genres, and practices common among Chinese users. In the late 1990s, when the Internet was just catching on in China, bulletin board systems (BBS) and personal home pages were the fashion. Then personal home pages gave way to blogs, while BBS forums have remained vibrant to the present day. Meanwhile, numerous other forms have appeared, such as chat rooms, shockwave flash videos, instant messaging, and most recently, microblogs. Among the most popular genres and practices are Internet literature (Hochx, 2004; Yang, 2010), the practice of spoofing known as egao (Meng,2011; Voci, 2010), Internet events or new media events (Jiang, 2010; Qiu&Chan, 2011; Yang, 2011), and Internet and cell phone jokes (Yu, 2007).

Sina’s microblog service Weibo, the Chinese acronym for microblog, is a network service with Chinese features. Launched in August 2009 as a copycat of Twitter, it had registered over 100 million users by early 2011. In the meantime, user habits, Sina’s management practices, as well as the contingencies of political control, jointly gave Weibo a unique character, both in a positive and negative sense.

Like users of other Chinese network services, Weibo users do all sorts of things. Most people are engaged in chitchat, sharing even the most intimate details about personal life. Others talk about current affairs and politics. Still others use it for civic organizing and mobilization for online and offline action. In March 2011, when news came that the city of Nanjing planned to fell the lush French plane trees lining its avenues, a campaign to stop the plan was organized through Sina Weibo. Activists set up a “Weibo group” (weibo qun) to coordinate action and gather and disseminate information. Another campaign, this time to save dogs, happened in April 2011

through Sina Weibo. On 15 April, animal rights activists in Beijing spotted a truckload of dogs reportedly being shipped to the slaughterhouse in a northern city. They stopped the truck on a highway outside Beijing and negotiated a deal to purchase the dogs and send them to various animal shelters.

In both cases, activists posted videos and images directly on Weibo, functions which Twitter does not have. These videos and images were circulated numerous times along with text messages using Weibo’s forward function, another of Sina Weibo’s innovative functions. In comparison, Twitter’s retweeting function does not yet allow users to add comments to their retweets. Sina Weibo has many other minor functions that encourage user interaction and community-building. These have contributed to the rapid growth of its user base.1

Sina Weibo is thus a lively and dynamic sphere. Yet like other domestic websites, it is censored for subversive content. Tweets that directly challenge the legitimacy of the party-state are filtered. In times of social crises or critical events, such as the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to the dissident Liu Xiaobo or the calls for a Chinese jasmine revolution, Sina Weibo has closed its search function to prevent it from being used for mobilization. Users, however, have creative ways of negotiating and bypassing keyword filtering by inventing an Aesopian language combining

linguistic with non-linguistic symbols.

Source: Guobin Yang, "A Chinese Internet? History, Practice, and Globalization." Chinese Journal of Communication. Vol. 5, No. 1(2012), pp.49-54.