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ABSTRACT
The spreading application of digital networks throughout China’s social, economic and political structures exposes the Communist Party to new weaknesses that are increasingly exploited by citizens and used by them to contest and restrain its power monopoly. The Party successfully counters these trends by employing alternative web tactics. To make sense of this dynamic, the paper proposes a new concept of power as shared weakness (ruò shì jūn zhān de lì liàng). The term refers to the inability of actors (from the most powerful to the least powerful) to exercise full control over the digitally networked environment in which they operate.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor John Keane, Dr Jian Xu, Dr Jing Hao, Ms Felicity Ruby, Ms Rachell Li at the University of Sydney, Professor Dibyesh Anand at the University of Westminster, and the students and staff at the Department of Journalism at the Hong Kong Baptist University for their many insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dr Navarria’s research interests include the relationship between authoritarian regimes in Asia and the language and tactics of democracy; the role new communications media have in politics; the meaning of representation and the role of civil society in contemporary democracies. He is also interested in and works on issues related to current Italian politics.
Notes
1 Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003), 14.
2 Jack Linchuan Qiu, ’Coming to Terms with Informational Stratification in the People’s Republic of China’, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 20 (2002): 157–80.
3 Xiongjan Liang and Xu Yang, ’Networks’, in Telecommunications in China: Development and Prospects, ed. Jintong Lin, Xiongjian Liang, and Yan Wan (Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2001), 43; See also Jens Damm and Simona Thomas, Chinese Cyberspaces: Technological Changes and Political Effects (London: Routledge, 2006), 15–16.
4 ‘Statistical Report on Internet Development in China 35th Report’, China Internet Network Information Center, January 2015, http://www1.cnnic.cn/IDR/ReportDownloads/201507/P020150720486421654597.pdf.
5 Ibid.; see also Cong Cao, Richard P. Suttmeier, and Dennis Fred Simon, ‘Success in State Directed Innovation? Perspectives on China’s Medium and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology’, in The New Asian Innovation Dynamics: China and India in Perspective, ed. Govindan Parayil and Anthony P. D’Costa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 247–64.
6 Lianjie Ma, Jongpil Chung, and Stuart Thorson, ‘E-Government in China: Bringing Economic Development through Administrative Reform’, Government Information Quarterly 22, no. 1 (January 2005): 22–3.
7 The statistics are from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; however as the number of mobile users is about 94% of the population, it is fair to assume that many of these users have more than one number. Adam Hwang, ‘China March Mobile Phone User Base Reaches 1.294 Billion, Says MIIT’, Digitimes.com, April 22, 2015, http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20150422VL200.html?mod=0.
8 Charles Arthur, ‘The Chinese Technology Companies Poised to Dominate the World’, The Guardian, June 3, 2014, sec. World news, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/03/chinese-technology-companies-huawei-dominate-world.
9 Paul Carsten, ‘China to Spend $182 Billion to Boost Internet by End of 2017’, Reuters, May 20, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/20/us-china-internet-idUSKBN0O50JH20150520.
10 Catherine Shu, ‘E-Commerce Sales in China Will Reach $1 Trillion By 2019 Thanks To Mobile, Says Forrester’, TechCrunch, April 2, 2015, http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/02/04/china-1trillion-ecommerce/; And Jennifer Booton, ‘Alibaba Surpasses Wal-Mart by Market Cap’, MarketWatch, October 28, 2014, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/alibaba-surpasses-wal-mart-by-market-cap-2014-10-28.
11 ‘China to Promote E-Commerce to Modernize Agricultural Sector’, Gov.cn, September 25, 2015, http://english.gov.cn/state_council/ministries/2015/09/25/content_281475198031536.htm.
12 ‘Internet Boom Reshaping Jobs Market’, Chinadaily.com.cn, August 13, 2015, http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2015-08/13/content_21583905.htm.
13 ‘Statistical Report on Internet’.
14 Lu Wei, ‘Liberty and Order in Cyberspace – Keynote Speech at the Fifth China–UK Internet Roundtable’, China.org.cn, September 9, 2013, http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-10/15/content_30302533.htm.
15 Giovanni Navarria, ‘Can Democracy Survive the Rise of Surveillance Technology?’, Democratic Theory 1, no. 2 (January 1, 2014): 76–84, doi:10.3167/dt.2014.010208.
16 Bill Clinton, ‘Speech on China Trade Bill’, The New York Times, August 3, 2000, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/030900clinton-china-text.html.
17 The crackdown on the Internet started at the very early stages of development. Less than a year after ChinaNet begun operating, the Internet’s threat led to a series of countermeasures: all service providers were instructed to censor all ‘pornographic and detrimental information’ from both within and outside China; also a new set of regulations were issued to control on-line links with the outside world. See Hao Xiaoming, Kewen Zhang, and Huang Yu, ‘The Internet and Information Control: The Case of China’, The Electronic Journal of Communication 6, no. 2 (1996), http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/006/2/00625.HTML.
18 Jintao Hu, ‘Hold High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Strive for New Victories in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China on’, China.org.cn, October 15, 2007, http://www.china.org.cn/english/congress/229611.htm.
19 Greg Walton, China’s Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People’s Republic of China (Montréal: Rights & Democracy, 2001), http://publications.gc.ca/collections/Collection/E84-7-2001E.pdf.
20 Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 36–37–139; ‘Race to the Bottom’: Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship (Human Rights Watch, 2006), 30–72.
21 ‘“12th Five-Year” Development Plan for the Internet Sector’, China Copyright and Media, 2012, https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/12th-five-year-development-plan-for-the-internet-sector/; Rogier Creemers, ‘Xi Jinping’s 19 August Speech Revealed?’, China Copyright and Media, December 22, 2012, https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/xi-jinpings-19-august-speech-revealed-translation/.
22 ‘Xi Jinping Leads Internet Security Group’, Xinhua News, February 27, 2014, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-02/27/c_133148273.htm.
23 Rebecca MacKinnon, ‘China’s Censorship 2.0: How Companies Censor Bloggers’, First Monday 14, no. 2 (January 25, 2009), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2378.
24 There are three types of major mainstream media events in China: ritual celebrations, natural disasters and political scandals. Wǎngmín use online activism, in the form of culture jamming, citizen journalism and mediated mobilisation, to reinvent the way in which these types of media events produce nonofficial discourses, generate networked public opinions and shape collective action. See Jian Xu, Media Events in Web 2.0 China: Interventions of Online Activism (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2016).
25 ‘Freedom of Speech Does Not Protect Rumors’, Global Times, December 4, 2012, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/704501.shtml; See also Helen Gao, ‘Rumor, Lies, and Weibo: How Social Media Is Changing the Nature of Truth in China’, The Atlantic, April 16, 2012.
26 Steve Lambert, ‘Netizens Chew Out CCTV as Sympathetic Weibo Post Backfires’, China Smack, January 27, 2015, http://www.chinasmack.com/2015/pictures/netizens-chew-out-cctv-as-sympathetic-weibo-post-backfires.html.
27 Duan Shui Yu Chen ‘断水雨尘 – 假窗事件爆料人 (10月23日7点32分)’, http://weibo.com/smarterboy. See also ‘青岛假窗事件网上爆料后5天的网络舆情分析⟪舆情:经适房画假窗似神笔马良 画饼充饥引争议⟫(Analysis on the Comments and Public Opinions on the Qingdao Fake Windows Over Five Days Since the News’ First Appearance on the Internet)’, Qingdao News, October 28, 2013, http://yuqing.qingdaonews.com/content/2013-10/28/content_10064103.htm.
28 Steven Mufson, ‘This Documentary Went Viral in China. Then It Was Censored. It Won’t Be Forgotten’, The Washington Post, March 16, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/16/this-documentary-went-viral-in-china-then-it-was-censored-it-wont-be-forgotten/.
29 ‘Google Disrupted Prior to Tiananmen Anniversary; Mirror Sites Enable Uncensored Access to Information’, GreatFire.org, February 6, 2014, https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2014/jun/google-disrupted-prior-tiananmen-anniversary-mirror-sites-enable-uncensored-access.
30 ‘China Censors VPNs to Protect Great Firewall, But Some Manage to Get Through’, International Business Times, http://www.ibtimes.com/china-censors-vpns-protect-great-firewall-some-manage-get-through-1802938 (accessed July 31, 2015).
31 As reported by The Wall Street Journal there is plenty of information available on China’s Internet for users to learn how by-pass the firewall and access unfiltered information. See Paul Mozur, ‘No VPN? No Problem. A New Way Around China’s Great Firewall’, China Real Time Report – Wall Street Journal Blogs, HKT November 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/11/29/no-vpn-no-problem-a-new-way-around-chinas-great-firewall/; and also Philipp Winter, ‘Measuring and Circumventing Internet Censorship’ (PhD diss., Karlstad University, 2014), chaps. 2, 3, http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:758124/FULLTEXT01.pdf.
32 The phrase fàn zuì 饭醉 (get rice-drunk) is a coded reference to ‘dinner gathering to discuss politics’ which is homonymous with ‘commit a crime’; the word ‘river crab’ (河蟹 - héxiè) which means ‘bully’, because it sounds similar to ‘harmony’ (和谐 héxié), the tag line of Chinese society as imagined by the Party, it is used in online discussion as code-word to speak of censorship; similarly ‘grass mud horse’ (草泥马 cǎonímǎ) which sounds like ‘f*** your mother’ (肏你妈 cào nǐ mā), is often used to criticise the Party (known colloquially as the mother). ‘The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon’, China Digital Space, http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Main_Page (accessed September 24, 2015).
33 Liu Xutao, ‘多少官员患有“网络恐惧”症 (How Many Officials Have “Internet Terror”)’ (People’s Forum Survey Centre, May 6, 2010), http://www.rmlt.com.cn/2010/0506/4317.shtml.
34 ‘Official Axed after Holding Sumptuous Banquet’, Xinhua News Agency, April 23, 2013.
35 Stephen Chen, ‘Time Runs Out for ‘Brother Watch’ Yang Dacai’, South China Morning Post, August 30, 2013, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1300579/chinas-brother-watch-official-goes-trial-graft; Jonathan Kaiman, ‘China’s ‘Brother Wristwatch’ Yang Dacai Jailed for 14 Years for Corruption’, The Guardian, September 5, 2013, sec. World News, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/china-brother-wristwatch-yang-dacai-sentenced.
36 ‘Freedom of Speech Does Not Protect Rumors’.
37 Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, ‘How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism But Silences Collective Expression’, American Political Science Review 107, no. 2 (May 2013): 326–43.
38 Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, ‘How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression’, American Political Science Review 107, no. 2 (May 2013): 326–43.
39 Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, ‘Reverse-Engineering Censorship in China: Randomized Experimentation and Participant Observation’, Science 345, no. 6199 (August 22, 2014): 891.
40 ‘Guideline Doesn’t Curb Online Speech, Experts Say’, China Daily, September 28, 2013.
41 Harold Innis Adams, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951).
42 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Routledge, 2001), 151.
43 Evgeny Morozov contrasts the ‘digital activist’ with the ‘slacktivist’, who is seen as the ‘more dangerous digital sibling, which all too often leads to civic promiscuity – usually the result of a mad shopping binge in the online identity supermarket’ Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), 70–1, 190–91.
44 Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1964).
45 Ibid., 1.
46 Ibid., 16–17.
47 Baran, On Distributed Communications; see also Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 20–39; and the analysis of distributed networks and power is discussed in W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 148.
48 Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 45–53.
49 Ibid., 55.
50 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 2010), 152.
51 Wang Haiming, ‘权力概念辩难 (Analysis of the Definition of Power)’, Journal of Southwest University for Nationalities (Humanities Social Science Edition), no. 5 (2010): 71–5.
52 Max Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 196–266.
53 A strong state ‘is one that is able to remake the society and culture in which it exists – that is to change economic institutions, values and patterns of interactions among private groups’ China, after 1949, is certainly an example of strong state. Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 56; See also Xiaoqin Guo, State and Society in China’s Democratic Transition: Confucianism, Leninism, and Economic Development (Routledge, 2012), 1–16.
54 Lotus Yuen, ‘Communist Party Membership Is Still the Ultimate Resume Booster’, The Atlantic, May 29, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/05/communist-party-membership-is-still-the-ultimate-resume-booster/276347/.
55 Michael Forsythe, ‘Q. and A.: Tony Saich on What Chinese Want From Their Leaders’, The New York Times, Sinosphere - Dispatches from China, (September 11, 2015), http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/anthony-saich-china-communist-party/; R.W. McMorrow, ‘Membership in the Communist Party of China: Who Is Being Admitted and How?’, JSTOR Daily, December 19, 2015, http://daily.jstor.org/communist-party-of-china/.
56 Andrew Mertha, ‘“Fragmented Authoritarianism 2.0”: Political Pluralization in the Chinese Policy Process,’ The China Quarterly 200 (December 2009): 996; Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg, Policy Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
57 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
58 Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in The Final Foucault, ed. James William Bernauer and David M. Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 11–13.
59 Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 92.
60 Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 222–23.
61 Michel Foucault, ‘On Power’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 104.
62 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 218.
63 Ibid., 200.
64 Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2005).
65 David Wertime, ‘Online Poll Shows Overwhelming Support for End to China’s One-Child Policy’, Tea Leaf Nation, November 2, 2012, http://www.tealeafnation.com/2012/11/online-poll-shows-overwhelming-support-for-end-to-chinas-one-child-policy/; Josh Chin, ‘China Says It Suspended Officials in Forced-Abortion Case’, Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2012, sec. World News, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303410404577468170016159682.
66 Robert Birsel, ‘China Vows Punishment over Forced Abortion at Seven Months’, Reuters, June 15, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-abortion-idUSBRE85E08U20120615.
67 Chin, ‘China Says It Suspended Officials in Forced-Abortion Case.’
68 ‘Every bureaucracy’ remarked Weber
seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intention secret. Bureaucratic administration always tends to be an administration of secret sessions: in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism. Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’, 233.
69 Jonathan Hassid, ‘Safety Valve or Pressure Cooker? Blogs in Chinese Political Life’, Journal of Communication 62, no. 2 (April 2012): 212–30, doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01634.x.
70 Ying Chen, ‘Is the Arab Spring Coming to China? The Missing Piece of the Puzzle’, Journal of International Affairs, November 4, 2013, http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/online-articles/arab-spring-coming-china-missing-piece-puzzle/.
71 ‘Public Opinion via Internet’, China Daily, December 16, 2010.
72 ‘Microblogging Offers New Platform for Officials’, Xinhua, October 15, 2011, http://www.china.org.cn/china/2011-10/15/content_23634487.htm.
73 Cary Huang, ‘Xi Jinping Handshake Has Bloggers Thrust into the Mainstream’, South China Morning Post, February 11, 2014; Ning Hui and David Wertime, ‘Is This the New Face of China’s Silent Majority?’, Foreign Policy, October 22, 2014.
74 ‘山西国企欲招志愿者收集网络舆情并正面回应 (Shanxi State-Owned Enterprises Want to Recruit Volunteers to Collect Public Opinion and a Positive Response Network)’, Chinanews.com, March 16, 2011, http://www.chinanews.com/gn/2011/03-16/2911248.shtml.
75 Zhao Guohong, ‘提高执政党在新传播环境下的社会管理能力 (Enhance the Party’s Social Management Capability in New Communication Environment)’, Study Times, March 14, 2011.
76 Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, ‘How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument’ (working paper, Harvard University, June 21, 2016), http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf.
77 50-cent is a reference to the amount paid to bloggers for each pro-government post; see ‘An Inside Look at a 50 Cent Party Meeting’, China Digital Times, April 8, 2010, http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/08/an-inside-look-at-a-50-cent-party-meeting/; see also Xiaoyan Chen and Hwa Ang Peng, ‘Internet Police in China: Regulation, Scope and Myths’, in Online Society in China: Creating, Celebrating, and Instrumentalising the Online Carnival, ed. David Kurt Herold and Peter Marolt (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 40–5; and Catherine Shu, ‘China’s Government Will Embed Police in Its Largest Tech Firms’, TechCrunch, May 8, 2015, http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/08/05/china-internet-policing/.
78 See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (New York: Walker Books, 2010), 292–305; Benedict Stavis, ‘China Explodes at Tiananmen’, Asian Affairs: An American Review 17, no. 2 (June 1990): 51–61.
79 ‘Police React to Blogging about Street Chaos’, China.org.cn, August 18, 2011, http://www.china.org.cn/china/2011-08/18/content_23236306.htm.
80 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970), 35, 44.
81 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 200.
82 Arendt, On Violence, 41.
83 The page on the Global Times was first censored and then reappeared 2 days later ‘Ministry of Truth: Urgent Notice on Southern Weekly’, China Digital Times, July 1, 2013, http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/01/ministry-of-truth-urgent-notice-on-southern-weekly/; for the Global Times censorship see William Farris, Southern Weekend Constitutional Dream Global Times Article 404 Message, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6fuN42idiU.