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Abstract
This article explores what happens to the Chinese Party-state’s notion of minzu (nationality, ethnicity or ethno-national identity) in the vastness of cyberspace. The idea that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) comprises 56 distinct yet united minzu groups has encapsulated and circumscribed the performance of ethnocultural diversity in mainland China over the last 60 plus years. In this article, I seek to demonstrate how the Internet helps to loosen the Party-state’s grip on ‘Chineseness’ and its related categories of identity, opening up new spaces for the articulation of a wide range of ethnocultural subject positions that both self-define, mediate and, at times, even transcended minzu-ness. At the same time, however, the fractured and transitory nature of these online congregations renders them largely inconsequential when faced with a powerful and authoritarian Party-state and its robust regime of minzu classification and minzu-based policies inside the PRC.
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge here and thank the anonymous reviewers who provided sound advice and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi and Chen Yangbin for their additional comments and helpful suggestions, as well as Asian Ethnicity’s executive editor Julie Yu-wen Chen.
Notes
1. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation, 120–33. Yet, as Mullaney notes, this ethnotaxonomic orthodoxy is never complete or unchallenged. In the most recent 2010 census, 640,101 individuals were identified as ‘yet-to-be-classified’ (未识别民族), down from 734,438 in the 2010 census. The 2010 census also enumerated 1448 ‘Chinese foreigners’ (外国人加入中国籍) whose position within the fifty-six-minzu paradigm is also unclear.
2. Gladney, Dislocating China.
3. Castells, Power of Identity, 6–12.
4. Ibid., 11.
5. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 65. Original emphasis.
6. Jiang, “Authoritarian Informationalism.”
7. Cover, “Performing and Undoing Identity Online,” 180–2.
8. Brukaber, Ethnicity without Groups, 86–7.
9. Pieke and Barabantseva, “New and Old Diversities.”
10. Carlson, “A Flawed Perspective,” 26–32.
11. CNNIC, 33rd Statistical Report, 15 and 32.
12. Yang, The Power of the Internet, 20–23; and Lagerkvist, After the Internet.
13. Hine, “Virtual Ethnography,” 65.
14. Lee, “Baidu’s BBS Service Tieba.”
15. As discussed, cyber-communities are highly dynamic: here today, gone tomorrow. All forums, URLs, and membership figures and post numbers were correct at the time of the initial writing, December 2013. Server locations were verified through the URL location data provided by the UK-based Internet services company Netcraft and available at www.netcraft.com.
16. Character sets (simplified versus traditional), encoding technology (GB versus Big-5), input methods (phonetic versus shape-based), and state censorship (the so-called ‘Great Firewall of China’), among other factors, create physical, technical and cultural barriers that divide, fragment and gate the Sinophone Internet, creating a complex yet unique spatial geography. By limiting my survey to forums written in simplified characters and with GB encoding, I’m consciously privileging cyber-assemblages inhabited by PRC citizens (either physically inside the Mainland or abroad); yet the open architecture of the World Wide Web obviously allows for membership and inactions with individuals without PRC citizenship.
17. CNNIC, 33rd Statistical Report, 36–7; and Lee, “Baidu’s BBS Service Tieba.”
18. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. Emphasis added.
19. Giese, “Speaker’s Corner or Virtual Panopticon,” 23.
20. Over the last couple of years, the Chinese Party-state has attempted to institute real name registration, requiring (in most cases) users to either provide their mobile phone numbers or ID cards when opening a new online account. Yet, foot-dragging on behalf of service providers and various circumvention tactics have thus far limited the scope and to some extent the effectiveness of real name registration.
23. They are china Ewenki (中国鄂温克族, www.ewenkemz.com); Ewenki.gov (鄂温克族自治旗人民政府网站, www.ewenki.gov.cn); Nantun Net (南屯网, www.nantunwang.com); Ewenki Net (鄂温克族网, www.ewenki.net); and Ewenki Bar (鄂温克吧, http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kw=%B6%F5%CE%C2%BF%CB.
24. See, for example, http://ewenki.net/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1281.
25. Leibold, “More Than a Category”; and Leibold, “The Beijing Olympics and China.”
26. Zhang, “Displaying Culture, Voicing Identity”; Zhang, “Manchu in the Making”; and Bai, “Evolving on-Line Empowerment.”
27. They are (吉祥满族, www.manchus.cn; 满族在线, www.manjusa.com; 满网论坛, www.imanchu.com; 满族儿女, www.manzu8.com; 满族心, www.manchuheart.com).
29. See, for example, http://www.manchus.cn/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=6438.
31. Rong, Ethnicity, Nationality and Nation-Building, 68; and Leibold, Ethnic Policy in China, 13–22.
32. See 穿青人, http://chuanqingren.bigclub.cn; 穿青人论坛, http://chuanqingren.haotui.com/bbs.php; 穿青文化, http://chuanqingren.howbbs.com; and 穿青人吧, http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kw=%B4%A9%C7%E0%C8%CB. There are also several other Baidu Tieba forums, although they comprise only a handful of posts.
35. See http://tieba.baidu.com/p/2812888703.
37. See http://www.chinaislam.net.cn; Lipman, Familiar Strangers; and Lipman, “How Many Minzu in a Nation,” 113–30.
42. Castells, The Power of Identity, 68.
43. See as introduced here: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5cf4c0070100mb6m.html.
44. This community has generated quite a bit of controversy among some segments of the Hui cyber-community, with claims that the forum violates Chinese law and should be closed down. See, for example: http://www.noorislam.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=52871; http://www.muslem.net.cn/bbs/thread-23883-1-1.html.
45. Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation.
46. See, for example, Shen and Breslin, Online Chinese Nationalism; and Herold, “Rage and Reflection,” 23–35.
47. See http://t.people.com.cn/g/daguizi.
48. One important exception is the series of edited volumes and journal, Provincial China, produced by the University of Technology Sydney as a part of the ‘Provincial China’ research project. See http://www.china.uts.edu.au/researchareas/provincial.html.
49. See, for example http://bbs.tianya.cn/list-173-1.shtml.
52. See http://topic.ts.cn/201308/Iamfromxj/node_119931.htm; http://topic.ts.cn/201310/network/node_123690.htm. Here the expression guli (古丽) means gül in Uyghur, a common female name denoting ‘flower’; and erzi wawa (儿子娃娃) is a popular expression in the Xinjiang topolect of Mandarin for masculinity and similar to the expression chuyamen (纯爷们) in the standard northern topolect of Mandarin. I thank Chen Yangbin for assisting me in deciphering this phrase.
54. Yang, “China’s Zhiqing Generation,” 276–85.
55. See http://www.yhnkzq.com/hometown.jsp.
57. Ebrey, “Surnames and Han Chinese Identity,” 21–22.
58. The people behind the 10,000 Family Names site (万家姓, www.10000xing.cn) created their first Internet site in 2004 and now operate a Shenzhen-registered company that provides a range of internet hosting, advertising and genealogy services, including help in establishing new surname websites/forums or the hosting of a forum page on their own website. See http://zhongrui.10000xing.cn/index.html.
59. Pieke, “The Genealogical Mentality in Modern China,” 120–1.
60. See http://www.wang-shi.com/bbs/thread-2998-1-2.html; http://www.wang-shi.com/bbs/thread-2791-1-2.html.
61. Shao, “‘Wang’ Is the Largest Surname.”
64. Lary, Chinese Migrations, 171; and McKeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas,” 306–37.
65. Lary, Chinese Migrations, 158; and Chan, “Virtual Communities and Chinese,” 1–32.
74. Damm, “Taiwan’s Ethnicity and Their Representation”; and Jones, “Global Hakka.”
77. Mair, “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’?”
80. Chase and Mulvenson, You’ve Got Dissent!, 14–43; and Chen, The Uyghur Lobby, 52–65.
82. Despite its hosting on American-based servers, frequent DDoS attacks and Dr. Tohti’s detention lead to the collapse of the site; yet much of the forum’s content can still be accessed via the Internet Archive – Wayback Machine at http://archive.org/web/.
83. See Leibold, “Blogging Alone.”
84. Zhang, “Displaying Culture, Voicing Identity,” 176; Chen, The Uyghur Lobby, 64–5; and Brinkerhoff, “Digital Diasporas’ Challenge to Traditional.”
85. See Barabantseva, “Who are ‘Overseas Chinese Ethnic Minorities’?”
86. Joniak-Lüthi, “The Han Minzu,” 863–7.
87. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Ch. 2.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
James Leibold
James Leibold is currently a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Asian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and a Ph.D. graduate of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, USA. He is the author, most recently, of Ethnic Policy in China: Is Reform Inevitable? (Honolulu: East-West Center, 2013) and co-editor (with Chen Yangbin) of Minority Education in China: Balancing Unity and Diversity in an Era of Critical Pluralism (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014); and (with Thomas Mullaney, Stéphane Gros and Eric Vanden Brussche), Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
Author’s postal address: Department of Politics and Philosophy, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria 3086 Australia.
