On April 11th, Zhifan Luo, Assistant Professor of Sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, gave a talk for UVA’s East Asia Center entitled “Repression Beyond Digital Measures: Digital Authoritarianism in China as a Coordinated Project.”
Since President Trump’s second inauguration, China has frequently been discussed in the news. While it had been simmering on the back burner for decades prior, the rivalry between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has exploded in the past few weeks. As the Trump administration continues to levy larger and larger tariffs on China, the Chinese government has responded with defensive rhetoric and tariffs of its own.
Luo explained that at the turn of the 21st century, however, the relationship between China and the United States was viewed much differently. Many Americans were hopeful about the possibility of liberalization in China. President Bill Clinton, who visited China in 2000, was particularly optimistic, believing that in an increasingly modern China, “liberty would spread by cell phone.” Indeed, he even went so far as to state that the Chinese government’s attempt to control the growth of the internet there would be akin to “nailing jello to a wall.”
25 years later, however, it has become abundantly clear that China has more than succeeded in “nailing jello to the wall”: China’s internet community is both the largest and one of the most heavily censored on the planet, and the government’s existing patterns of censorship show few signs of stopping.
However, one might ask whether it is really only the government’s efforts that have led to success with censorship, and whether or not censorship has totally succeeded. Luo began by offering three clarifications on the nature of authoritarian rule and the internet. First, because there are so many technology users in China, to completely control the internet—even with an unprecedented amount of government authority—would be nearly impossible. Second, measures to control the internet can have unintended consequences, which can make the government cautious about implementing anything drastic. Finally, attitudes of civilians towards authoritarian rule are often complex, and people cannot be simply divided into a group that supports the government and one that opposes it.
Luo then proposed a more nuanced approach to explain coercive measures on the Chinese internet. She considered the hegemonic aspect of authoritarian rule, negotiations between the state and civilians, and the concept of “participatory censorship.” To elaborate on these ideas, Luo outlined three sociological case studies that she had researched.
The first case study dealt with the online feminist movement and attitudes towards domestic violence in China. Internet usage has significantly expanded the reach of feminism in China, as in other countries around the world. Activists have used apps such as Sina Weibo (a Chinese analogue to Twitter) to challenge existing norms on the treatment of women, particularly domestic violence, which was traditionally considered a “family matter” about which public discussion was discouraged. When five feminist activists were arrested in Beijing in 2015 for protesting sexual harassment on local public transportation, the online response was immense and immediate, and popular pressure eventually led the government to release the prisoners. The next year, China passed an anti-domestic violence law. Over the past few years, however, the government has also issued a crackdown on online feminism, banning the accounts of many notable activists. In Luo’s words, the online public sphere in China has essentially been “hollowed out.”
The second case study dealt with a television program that many internet users believed contained misogynistic content, including positive depictions of sexual harassment. In this case, internet users expected censorship from the government, and often expressed their outrage that the government was not, in their words, “doing its job” to prevent offensive content from being promulgated on official television networks. In response, the People’s Daily, a state-run newspaper, issued a statement encouraging media institutions to follow “mainstream behaviors” in their content. In Luo’s view, this study illustrates the fact that public censorship and government censorship are not always in line, and that the legitimacy of censorship can depend on the extent to which the public trusts the government to censor the “correct” things.
The final case study dealt with the production of a movie that was closely followed by a small Chinese internet community. The movie’s plot centered around a same-sex relationship, and while filming and production went smoothly, some Chinese netizens began to notice that the film’s release date was consistently being pushed back, stirring major debates within forums dedicated to movies and books of the same genre. Comments often debated the nature of the censorship, such as whether or not the movie had been delayed because it contained a same-sex relationship, and discussed strategies for bypassing censorship.
To symbolize Chinese attitudes towards online censorship, Luo discussed the concept of “Jubao,” or accusatory reporting. Initially the name of a reporting system during China’s anti-corruption campaigns decades ago, the term eventually came to refer to the practice of voluntarily reporting other internet users. After collecting a database of internet comments on Jubao, Luo found that around half of Chinese internet users discussed it in the context of avoiding it, while another half discussed it in the context of promoting it.
In general, Luo emphasized that the authoritarian nature of China’s internet is essentially based on a social contract: both society and the government collectively agree to some forms of censorship, but the people have the ability—though often limited—to slowly push for changes if they desire. In many cases, however, the people themselves are the agents of their own censorship. Throughout her talk, Luo made it clear that if we hope to understand the inner workings of China and its rise as a global superpower, we must acknowledge the complexity of the relationship between its government and its people.
Leave a Reply