Understanding nao: A Chinese “image event”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Many Chinese Internet users accused the Zengs for practicing pengci, or “breaking porcelain,” a common scheme in contemporary China whereby one extorts money out of strangers by faking financial loss or physical injury in public. See, for instance, “Chinese Tourists Playing Up Pengci Antics in Sweden: Lost Much Face for China!” Sohu.com, December 4, 2018, http://www.sohu.com/a/279541378_100071240.

2 Adam Withnall, “China and Sweden in Diplomatic Row after Family ‘Brutally’ Evicted from Hotel Lobby,” The Independent, September 17, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/chinese-tourists-sweden-video-zeng-weibo-china-stockholm-hotel-hostel-argument-a8541361.html.

3 In the aftermath of the incident, the Chinese embassy criticized Swedish police for “brutally treating” its citizens and demanded an apology; the Swedish government claimed to find no evidence of police brutality and refused to apologize. See: “China Urges Sweden to Heed Concern over Tourists Ejected from Hotel,” Reuters.com, September 17, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-sweden-idUSKCN1LX10G.

4 See for instance: “Magic Reversal! ‘Swedish Police Abuse Chinese Tourists’ Truth Revealed: Pengci, Rolling on the Ground, and Telling Lies,” Sohu.com, September 16, 2018, http://www.sohu.com/a/254222899_100241747. Or, “Chinese Tourists Abandoned at Cemetery, Slapped in the Face by Police Efficiency; Netizens: Well Deserved for Attempting Pengci in Sweden,” Eastday.com, September 18, 2018, http://mini.eastday.com/a/180918175025994.html.

5 Kevin M. Deluca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 1–3.

6 Kevin M. DeLuca, Elizabeth A. Brunner, and Ye Sun, “Weibo, WeChat, and the Transformative Events of Environmental Activism on China's Wild Public Screens,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 321–39, 326. Afterward the incident, a Swedish satirical show retaliated by mocking Chinese tourists’ uncivil behaviors, which was then followed by a wave of Chinese online protests calling for boycotts against Swedish brands such as IKEA, H&M, and Volvo. Swedish and Chinese diplomatic relationship tightened significantly due to this incident. See: “Beijing Protests Swedish TV Satire about Chinese Tourists,” The Guardian.com, September 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/25/beijing-protests-swedish-tv-satire-about-chinese-tourists.

7 Despite the widespread accusation against the Zengs for practicing pengci, later interviews revealed that the family did not intend to pull a scam; they were at the time sincerely convinced about the “injustice” of their treatment and staged the scene out of desperation.

8 Ho-Fung Huang, Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1.

9 Kevin M. DeLuca and Elizabeth Brunner, “Activism in the Wake of the Events of China and Social Media: Abandoning the Domesticated Rituals of Democracy to Explore the Dangers of Wild Public Screens,” in What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counter Publics, ed. Christina R. Foust, Amy Parson, and Kate Zittlow Rogness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 236–40.

10 Xinhua Grand Dictionary (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2018), 621.

11 Traditionally, Marriage Ruckus (hunnao) aims to publicly humiliate the couple by forcing them to perform acts of sexual nature in front of the guests. Such humiliation should be physically harmless; however, in the last three decades, more were reported to be violent: sometimes the groom was tied to a tree or thrown in the air to be caught by the crowd, and several deaths have resulted from it; others target the bride and the bridesmaids, some of whom became victims of sexually harassment or rape in the process. See: “Marriage Ruckus: A Case of Five-Thousand-Year Sexual Repression,” Netease News, March 6, 2018, http://news.163.com/18/0306/13/DC7IK0T6000199ET_mobile.html.

12 This cultural preference for noise over quietude, in a way, explains why many Chinese people feel permitted to talk very loudly in public spaces.

13 Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Acting Our Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 49, no. 4 (1990): 844–6, 845.

14 There are two concepts in the Confucian tradition pronounced as li: the first is 理, meaning “underlying reason or principle,” while the other is 礼, “ritual or propriety.” See Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Antonio S. Cua (New York: Routledge, 2013), specifically the entries “Reason and Principle” by A. S. Cua, 631–637, and “Ritualism” by Kai-wing Chow, 646–652.

15 Ho-Fung Huang, Protest with Chinese Characteristics, 2011, 199.

16 Judith Shapiro, Mao's War Against Nature (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 2011), 199.

17 Zichi Li, “Mao Zedong's Lifelong Story with the Journey to The West,” Red Culture Net, December 23, 2013, http://www.hswh.org.cn/wzzx/llyd/ls/2013-12-22/24224.html.

18 In Mao's 1966 editorial “Bomb the Headquarters,” he spoke of the “bourgeois corruption” of the Communist government as if he were an outsider, a common man, occupying the universal moral position (as a proletariat) to censure his colleagues. His rhetoric aroused tens of millions of students, workers, and peasants to violently rise up against their teachers, factory leaders, and village heads, but primarily—his second-in-command colleague, Chairman Liu Shaoqi.

19 Chang Wang and Nathan H. Madson, Inside China’'s Legal System (Oxford, UK: Chandos Publishing, 2013), 56–7.

20 Chongji Jin, “Why did Chairman Mao start the ‘Cultural Revolution:’ From everything in utter chaos to everything in utter order,” People.com.cn, April 2, 2011, http://history.people.com.cn/GB/205396/14305549.html.

21 For propaganda posters that testify to Mao's personality cult during the Cultural Revolution, visit Stefan R. Landsberger's online poster database Chinese Posters: Propaganda, Politics, History, Art: https://chineseposters.net/themes/mao-cult.php.

22 Guobing Yang, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 19.

23 Huang, 2011, 194.

24 Carl F. Minzner, “Xinfang: An Alternative to formal Chinese Legal Institutions,” Stanford Journal of International Law 42 (2006): 103–79.

Michelson, Ethan. “Climbing the Dispute Pagoda: Grievances and Appeals to the Official Justice System in Rural China,” American Sociological Review 72, no. 3 (2007): 459–85.

25 Huang, 2011, 2.

26 Mark Selden and Elizabeth Perry, “Introduction: Reform, Conflict and Resistence in Contemporary China,” in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, ed. Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden (London: Routledge, 2010), 1–4.

27 DeLuca and Brunner, “Activism in the Wake of the Events of China and Social Media,” 236.

28 Elizabeth A. Brunner and Kevin M. DeLuca, “The Argumentative Force of Image Networks: Greenpeace's Panmediated Global Detox Campaign,” Argumentation and Advocacy 52, no. 4 (2016): 281–99, 297.

29 Christopher Beam, “Under the knife: Why Chinese patients are turning against their doctors,” The New Yorker: August 18, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/under-the-knife.

30 Ibid.

31 Benjamin L. Liebman, “Malpractice Mobs: Medical Dispute Resolution in China,” Columbia Law Review 113, no. 1 (2013): 181–264, 204.

32 Ibid., 192.

33 Ibid., 204.

34 There are also “Bus Ruckus” (chenao), “Plane Ruckus” (naofeiji), and “High Speed Train Ruckus” (naogaotie), though these terms are used exclusively to criticize selfish and wanton individuals who refuse to obey public order.

35 Deluca, Image Politics, 5.

36 DeLuca et al., “Weibo, WeChat, and the Transformative Events of Environmental Activism on China's Wild Public Screens,” 327.

37 Margaret E. Roberts, Censored: Distraction and Diversion inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 1–20.

38 Teresa Wright, Popular Protest in China (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018), 4–23.

39 Peter L. Lorentzen, “Regularizing Rioting: Permitting Public Protest in an Authoritarian Regime,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 8, no. 2 (2013): 127–58.

40 Ibid., 127.

41 Ibid., 131.

42 Huang, Protest with Chinese Characteristics, 194.

43 Elizabeth Perry, “Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights:’ From Mencius to Mao—and Now,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 1 (2008): 37–50, 43.

44 Huang, Protest with Chinese Characteristics, 196.

45 Perry, “Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’,” 45.

46 Wang and Madson, Inside China’'s legal system, 56–7.

47 Daniel C.K. Chow, The Legal System of the People's Republic of China: In a Nutshell (St. Paul, MN: West Academic, 2003), 61–6.

48 A traditional idiom in China goes: “The crying baby gets more milk” (Huiku de haizi younaichi), which means that the individual who complains more tends to get more favorable treatment. “Ruckus-based Distribution” is nothing new; it is simply a modern version of this long-standing cultural phenomenon.

49 Comrade Aqiang, “The Swedes rejected ‘Ruckus-based Distribution:’ Why did they get into big trouble?” Weixin.qq.com, September 17, 2018, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MjM5NDI0NDQ4MA==&mid=2649695091&idx=1&sn=983d9d99c26e552a67e40d4a32243ecb&chksm=be91319c89e6b88a6774e183083e4f6a94c6a57f5abda7e22a01a5b72ecbe368c2d1abedf81f&token=1301285981&lang=zh_CN#rd.

50 Ibid.

51 Deluca, Image Politics. AND John W. Delicath and Kevin M. DeLuca. “Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups,” Argumentation 17, no. 3 (2003): 315–33.

52 Deluca, Image Politics, 15.

53 Brunner and DeLuca, “The Argumentative Force of Image Networks,” 290.

54 Deluca, Image Politics, 127.

55 DeLuca and Brunner, “Activism in the Wake of the Events of China and Social Media.”

56 Ibid., 238.

57 DeLuca et al., “Weibo, WeChat, and the Transformative Events of Environmental Activism on China's Wild Public Screens,”333.

58 DeLuca and Brunner, “Activism in the Wake of the Events of China and Social Media,” 237–8.

59 Ibid., 238.

60 DeLuca et al., “Weibo, WeChat, and the Transformative Events of Environmental Activism on China's Wild Public Screens,” 322.

61 Ibid., 328.

62 See, for instance, Danielle Every, “‘Shame On You:’ The Language, Practice and Consequences of Shame and Shaming in Asylum Seeker Advocacy,” Discourse & Society 24, no. 6 (2013): 667–86.

AND Jason Hannan, “Trolling Ourselves to Death? Social Media and Post-Truth Politics,” European Journal of Communication 33, no. 2 (2018): 214–26.

63 See Gay W. Seidman, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transactional Activism (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007). AND Philip Balsiger, “Between Shaming Corporations and Promoting Alternatives: The Politics of An ‘Ethical Shopping Map’,” Journal of Consumer Culture 14, no. 2 (2014): 218–35.