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.

What Do Weibo, Mo Yan, and Romney Have in Common?

Not meaning to be sensational by using a very incongruous title for this posting, I do see some commonality among these three very current though unrelated topics. The commonality is -- stories!

The main thing I now remember of Romney’s debate with Obama last week was when Romney brought up his first story. He said, “I was in Dayton, Ohio, and a woman grabbed my arm, and she said, "I've been out of work since May. Can you help me?" The story gave his rhetoric some human touch. Obama later also told a story, but Romney was the first to tell and Obama’s didn’t sound as “original” any more.

Mo Yan is the new Nobel literature laureate, the top trending name on Chinese Weibo. As a novelist, he would have to be a good story-teller. He is especially good at telling stories about rural lives. His Red Sorghum, made famous for Western readers after Zhang Yimou turned it into a film, tells the story of a poor peasant girl in a Chinese village who was married to a man suffering from leprosy.

Why has Weibo become so popular in recent years? I’d say it’s because it offers interesting stories, some of them outrageous, some funny, some silly, but all entertaining. 140 Chinese characters are enough for telling a good story. And of course, the stories that didn’t get told because they were censored – those forbidden tales also become materials for tantalizing stories.

I will be giving a talk at Temple University tomorrow to explain why understanding stories is important for understanding internet activism in China. Some information about the talk is here.