China's Youth Cultures and Collective Spaces by Vanessa Frangville Gwennaël Gaffric

Author:Vanessa Frangville, Gwennaël Gaffric [Vanessa Frangville, Gwennaël Gaffric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367173043
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Circumventing censorship via creative strategies

As the world’s largest Internet nation, China is unique in that its networks are denser, move faster, and change more rapidly than many of its Western counterparts. According to the data, “China has been at the forefront of internet access for almost a decade” (Robson, 2017: para. 7). Chinese Internet users grew from 22.5 million in 2000 to over 720 million in 2016 while, for comparison’s sake, the US grew from 121 million to 286 million in the same time frame. As of 2016, China had more Internet users than the next three largest countries combined—the US, India, and Japan (Internet Live Statistics, 2016). Of these, 313 million are monthly active users on Weibo and 700 million on Weixin. According to anthropologist Tom McDonald, “It is easy for us to assume that ‘the Chinese Internet’ ought to be a very drab and boring and constraining place, whereas actually, Chinese internet users are incredibly creative and the internet is incredibly lively” (quoted in Robson, 2017: para. 3). Citizens, merged with smartphones and social media platforms have new potentials to become decentered knots of world-making capable of powerful activist practices that spread and stoke dissent and information (DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun, 2012). Though Chinese censorship technology (largely produced by Western companies for surveillance purposes) thwarts open communication, it does not silence it. Social media platforms like Weibo and Weixin are wild enough to offer possibilities for surveillance by governments and activism via persistent imaginative methods simultaneously.

Many of China’s youth, who grew up in a hyper-mediated environment, have learned to cope with the censorship-related barriers that sometimes thwart communication by deploying creativity as a means to circumvent obstacles and engage in important political conversations (Yang, 2009). These creative means include the use of code words, homonyms, memes, images, video, voice texts, and graphics, which grew in tandem with various technologies (Brunner and DeLuca, 2016; Link and Qiang, 2013; Mina, 2014). The proliferating, shifting, and changing online efforts in China supersede what Morozov (2012) terms slacktivism, which he defines as a form of faux-activism in which people like and share social media messages in a way that offers the appearance of participation but which has little impact other than making the user feel useful (even though s/he is not), thereby precluding more productive forms of activism. When the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests utilized Twitter and Facebook to organize and raise awareness in 2011, many critics deemed the online activity to be of little use despite the fact that online spaces are far more trafficked than physical protest sites such as Zuccotti Park in New York City. Scholars such as Morozov feared that if social movements adopted social media, this transition would lead to slacktivism and failed protests. However, as DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun (2012) write, “despite the initial neglect and dismissive framing by traditional mass media organizations” the OWS protests, which utilized online organizing, live tweeting and broadcasting, and embodied protest “changed the national conversation” in that they compelled people to discuss income inequality and the economy in a different light (p.

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