Ethnicities in Sinophone cyberspace

Sinophone cyberspace, the imagined, global space where netizens write and communicate predominantly in Chinese, is a dynamic set of encounters and narratives in the lived realities of ‘Chineseness’, where ‘being Chinese’ is a fluid, sometimes imposed, and often challenged notion. The language and cultural practices of Sinophone communities around the world are highly diverse, refracted by a large number of endogenous factors and responses to the stimulus of exogenous local conditions.

As we understand it in this special issue, the Sinophone internet includes all the sites of Chinese language-based activities online. It incorporates the confined parameters of online space ‘behind the Great Firewall’, as well as the vast array of Chinese language websites, platforms, and communities located on servers outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These venues are used by Chinese speakers in ‘greater Chinese’ locales like Taiwan and Singapore, in addition to ‘Diaspora’ and migrant communities across the world. The ‘Chineseness’ of the Sinophone internet is a deliberately shallow, practical distinction that allows variation in all other facets of netizens’ identities and practices, regardless of whether they are physically located in the PRC or in Sinophone communities elsewhere.

The resulting heterogeneity makes the Sinophone internet one of the most dynamic online spaces in the world, a venue where the dominant discourses of ‘Chineseness’ can be questioned, subverted, and lived in a variety of ways by cultures and communities at the literal or symbolic margins of China. The Sinophone internet is a window onto the constructions, understandings, and subjectivities of Chinese speaking actors, without discrimination by hegemonic markers of ‘Chineseness’, such as citizenship of the PRC or Han ethnicity.

This special issue focuses on the articulation of ethnic and national identities among netizens in Sinophone cyberspace. In doing so, it goes beyond the dominant paradigms of control and resistance,¹ the emergence of ‘civil society’² and expressions of Han/PRC nationalism³ in Chinese cyberspace behind the Great Firewall. To a certain extent, these concerns are unavoidable when discussing the Chinese internet. The studies in this special issue that investigate online communities located within China take seriously the impact of control and state-led notions of nationality and permitted boundaries of identity articulation. This is inevitable in a context where individual and collective expressions of identity are subject to systematic monitoring and control mechanisms that pervade the online and physical worlds.

Rather than focusing on, for example, the ways in which the state enforces its authoritarian information regime, the contributions to this special issue focus on the subjectivity of netizens. They are concerned with the ways in which their subjective understandings are constructed within various types of Sinophone cyberspaces inside and outside the PRC. In short, the studies are concerned with identifying the ways in which the complexities, contradictions, and articulations of ‘being’ and ‘not being’ Chinese are manifest online. Ultimately, they use Sinophone cyberspace as a means to investigate the impact of the internet on ethnic politics.

In doing so, the articles in this special issue interrogate a number of crucial issues at the intersection of ethnic identification and the internet. Is the Sinophone internet being used in ways that allow the articulation of ethnic and national identities outside of hegemonic Han/PRC nationalist narratives, and the equally dominant boundaries of ethnocultural diversity set by the Chinese Communist Party? To what extent does Sino-cyberspace sharpen or blur community boundaries among Chinese-speaking netizens of various ethnic groups? How do netizens use online spaces to find meaning and articulate their own and others’ sense of ethnic and national identity? What does Chineseness mean and signify to users of Chinese language online spaces?

The parameters of ‘official’ ethnic diversity within the PRC were finalized in 1979 when the last of 56 minority ‘minzu’ groups was ‘identified’ (the Jinou) and subsequently written into the constitution defining Chinese multiculturalism. Since then, the state has imposed on all citizens of the PRC a definitive and indelible minzu designation on their official record and identification papers. The state enforces and reinforces its hegemonic hold on ethno-cultural identity articulation in the public sphere through control of the systems of education, media, and the bureaucracy. In these venues, minimal space exists for individuals to contest or reimagine their own minzu.

But what about in cyberspace, where conditions are, despite systematic mechanisms of censorship and surveillance, relatively free? Under these conditions, what happens to official notions of minzu? In his comprehensive survey of various ways ethnocultural identities have been manifest in Sino-cyberspace, James Leibold provides evidence of how rigid minzu designations are reconstituted, mediated, disrupted, animated, and reimagined with the diversity that coheres to netizens’ lived experiences. Leibold bases his empirical investigation on the myriad of internet forums, the Bulletin Board Systems that continue to enjoy immense popularity in China despite the rise of microblogging and instant messaging. He identifies three major forms in which identity is articulated: minzu-based, typonym-based, and diaspora-based. Minzu-based online platforms tend to perpetuate the Party-state’s discourses and categorization of minzu identities in contemporary China. However, minzu-based identities sometimes intersect with typonym-based identities (i.e. emotional links to one’s hometown).

While ethnocultural identities can be reinforced through various online communications, Leibold cautions against the formation of segregated communities and essentially racist discourses online, with the spectre of destabilizing ethnic and social relations in Chinese society. In sum, Leibold’s analysis suggests that synchronous forces are at play. While it is true that Sino-cyberspace is binding netizens along different lines, sometimes netizens are able to move beyond existing categories and find meaning in ‘hyphenated identities’ that can challenge or transcend state definitions and practices. For instance, minorities threatened by inundation by Han, literally in terms of migration and figuratively in terms of their sociopolitical and cultural dominance, can carve out cyberspaces to articulate alternative identity expressions and form online ‘imagined communities.’ However, as the experiences of the Uyghur academic Ilham Tohti and Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser demonstrate, challenges to state orthodoxies, wherever they occur, can be risky and incur great personal costs. And as Leibold concludes, ‘netizens in the PRC can play with [minzu categories], even distort them, but like one’s shadow, they are impossible to shake’.⁴

‘Distortions’ are the focus of Leung Wing-Fai’s paper, which analyses the discursive reactions of Han netizens to a young woman contestant on the television talent show Go Oriental Angel! Lou Jing was born in Shanghai to a Chinese mother and an African-American father. A Chinese citizen, born and bred in Shanghai, Lou Jing was raised alone by her mother. In terms of cultural, linguistic, and other practices, her ‘Chineseness’ is demonstrable and unproblematic. However, the ‘wrongness’ of her skin tone created a storm in Chinese cyberspace and the media, confronting and destabilizing hegemonic understandings of ‘Chineseness’ as being rooted in ‘pure’ Han ethnicity.

Lou Jing’s mixed heritage posed a challenge to traditional understandings of what constitutes ‘being Chinese’, which played out in intolerant performances of online debates, as well as serious discussion about the place of ethnoculturalism in rapidly globalizing China. What does it say about the constitutional promise of China as multiethnic when a Chinese person is excluded and excoriated as a traitorous, alien threat? Leung’s study suggests that, rather than categorizing Lou Jing, the crucial issue is to what extent the notion of ‘Chineseness’ encompasses people of mixed heritage. Leung presents ambivalent findings in that regard: on the one hand, ‘Chineseness’ appears flexible where it invokes the ‘Eurasian’ (mixed white/Chinese ethnicity) widely accepted and positively framed in the media for its symbolism of cool and sophisticated globalization. On the other hand, the construction of ‘African-ness’ is undesirable and represents grounds for rejection (notwithstanding that Lou Jing’s father was an American citizen) for many netizens. Leung argues that the mixed heritage destabilizes Chinese ethnic identity, and the netizens’ debates have to be understood alongside international migration and ethnic tensions within a globalizing China.

The Tibetan online communities acting within Sino-cyberspace that Tricia Kehoe analyses are in some ways symptomatic of the contradictions of modern Tibet. The political and cultural domination of Han Chinese across the region has estranged many Tibetans from their own language. Yet, as Kehoe demonstrates, Tibetan netizens are using the language of the colonial centre to examine, question, and construct individual interpretations of what it means to be Tibetan under the triple threat of modernization, Sinification, and globalization.

Kehoe centres her analysis on Tibetan netizens and eschews the intractable political poles that dominate public discourse on Tibetan identity. She examines accounts put forward by Tibetans themselves in Sino-cyberspace to understand to what extent the Chinese identity is treated as the ‘other’ in the construction of the Tibetan identity. She identifies four distinct ways that Tibetan identities have been presented online: pure Tibetan identity; Tibetan identity hyphenated with Chinese identity; Creole identity, in which the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy cannot be detected; and depoliticized identity, in which overt political identification and ‘othering’ do not exist. Across a variety of internet forums within Chinese cyberspace, she finds various forms of identity construction at work in hybrid and multidimensional expressions of Chinese, Tibetan, and ‘in-betweeness’. The title of Kehoe’s paper comes from an appeal posted by a Baima boy (a group officially classified as Tibetan), who earnestly and painfully asked on an internet forum, ‘Am I Tibetan or not?’

Tzu-kai Liu’s paper focuses on the Wa people, one of the 56 official ‘minzu’ groups in the PRC. As with Lou Jing, the Wa people’s darker skin tones have frequently formed the basis for negative stereotyping and racist discourses in Chinese society. While the Wa people are often treated as the ‘other’, Liu focuses on how young Wa migrant workers make use of telecommunications technology, particularly mobile phones and social media, to connect and communicate their views of language hierarchy and social differences in the Chinese labour market. The online networks Wa migrant workers have formed are not just ‘minzu-based’. Place-based networks, which are created on the basis of shared recognition of laoxiang ties (literally co-ethnics or fellow villagers), are also prevalent.

Cyberspace gives these ethnic minority migrant workers a platform to express their counter-discourse against the social prejudice they experience in urban market places. Liu’s paper brings a much needed ethnic dimension to the literature on technology and internet use by groups marginalized by class and gender.⁵ Redolent of Cara Wallis’ work on migrant women workers, Liu’s work suggests that internet spaces are an important component in the constitution of selfhood, friendship, and group solidarity.

This special issue showcases how the Sinophone internet can provide a new platform for the manifestation of ethnic relations, (mis-)understandings, and hostilities in contemporary Chinese sites. Given rising ethnic tensions in the PRC, it is important to examine the Sinophone internet as it widens the researchers and students’ frames of reference in analysing ethnic relations and the potential for conflict resolution. Findings reported in this special issue suggest that discussions in the Sinophone internet could have both centrifugal and centripetal impacts on the official notion and lived realities of ‘ethnic harmony’. As a part of social communication and its complexities among Chinese-speaking people in and beyond the PRC, the Sinophone internet is a space where intolerance and hegemonic understandings of ‘minzu’ and ethnicity are present alongside the rethinking, reimagining, and reconfirmation of the meanings of ‘being Chinese’ beyond the conventional PRC/Han-centred framework.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Sullivan

Jonathan Sullivan is an associate professor in the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies and Deputy Director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham.

Yu-Wen Chen

Yu-Wen Chen is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.

Notes

1. Chen, “Brining a Network Perspetive”; Sullivan, “China’s Weibo” and Yang, The Power of the Internet in China.

2. Damm and Thomas, Chinese Cyberspaces and Yang and Calhoun, “Media, Civil Society.”

3. Hughes, “Nationalism in Chinese Cyberspace” and Shen and Breslin, Online Chinese Nationalism.

4. Leibold, “Performing Ethnocultural Identity,” 288.

5. Qiu, Castells and Cartier, Working-Class Network Society and Wallis, Technomobility in China.