The Beijing Olympics were about more than just sporting competition. They were about China and its role on the international stage. This was long anticipated by journalists, scholars, Chinese and foreign officials and politicians, and many others. As Judith Polumbaum put it several years before the Beijing Games, they were likely to offer “Chinese citizens new purchase on a sense of national greatness and collective destiny.”Footnote ¹ However, the Games were clearly far from being just for Chinese citizens and were explicitly recognized for their role in showcasing China's economic, technological, cultural, social and environmental achievements to the rest of the world.Footnote ² It was clear before the Games and subsequently confirmed during them that with unprecedented world media attention focused on the country – more than 30,000 journalists from around the world came to Beijing – the Games would play a crucial role in setting the agenda for how China would be understood in coming decades by politicians, journalists, academics and the general public both in China and throughout the world. As International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge's closing ceremony speech made clear, the Games were not only a sporting event but an educational experience: “Through these Games, the world learned more about China, and China learned more about the world.”Footnote ³

As the Summer Games of the 29th Olympiad drew to a close in Beijing in late August 2008, Chinese newspapers and other media sources proclaiming the various successes of the Games made repeated references to the “real China” and replayed Jacques Rogge's educational theme.Footnote ⁴ The Games, readers were told, had “let the world better understand the real China” in contrast to what Chinese often see as biased, out-dated and even malicious representations of their country.Footnote ⁵ Meanwhile foreign journalists, although to some degree silenced by the impressive organization and sporting spectacle of the Games, nevertheless engaged in their own efforts to reveal the “real” China behind what they took as state propaganda, official deception of the public and Olympic “fakery.”Footnote ⁶ The Beijing Games were therefore inevitably going to lead to a dispute between competing representations, understandings and identifications of China, and a common motif of this process became the designation of what is or is not the “real China.”Footnote ⁷ Consequently China's “reality” and the relationship between truth and representation became fundamental battlegrounds for those seeking to shape present and future understandings – another contested term as we shall see – of the country.

This article takes as its focus the notion of the “real China” and the debates and disputes surrounding it in the Chinese and foreign media over the months preceding and during the Olympics. It identifies what these debates and contending claims may reveal for a broader understanding of the role of the media in the country and the need to rethink our approaches to them. I will argue that popular media representations of China, appositely exemplified by the discussions of the “real China” over the Olympic period, fail to recognize the importance of different media not for recording or documenting but in constituting the diverse realities of Chinese people's daily lives. The article will suggest that the assumptions about reality and representation made by both Chinese and foreign media are often unhelpful for the task of understanding contemporary China.

As shown below, efforts to understand China's reality are nothing new and it is helpful to reflect upon issues arising from previous representations of China. However, unlike many of these previous searches for “real China,” recent versions have more often than not circulated in and around the media, from television and newspapers to the internet and mobile phone text-messaging. In particular, Chinese and foreign media organizations and journalists have set themselves up as important brokers of the “real China” linked to their own particular agendas and interests.

This article deals to some degree with the foreign media's role in such debates and their search for and claims to represent the “real China,” but it focuses more concertedly on Chinese media representations, particularly those related to the Beijing Olympics. Its aim is not to resolve the issue of what, where or when the “real China” actually is or was, but rather to explore what the various claims and counterclaims about the “real China” reveal about contemporary Chinese media and related social practices in the country.

From the Torch Relay to the Real China

In the run-up to the Olympics, the issue of the “real China” first came to the fore in the Chinese and international media in March and April 2008 at the time of the unrest in Tibet and, very shortly afterwards, the start of the international Olympic torch relay. On 24 April Li Xuan, a Chinese student from Xi'an studying in France, made an impassioned speech to fellow overseas Chinese at a rally in Paris to protest against the disruption of the torch relay in London and Paris by pro-Tibetan protestors. Li's words were soon reported in detail by the Xinhua News Agency, the People's Daily Online and other Chinese news agencies and media organizations.Footnote ⁸ Li set the tone for the Paris rally, and many subsequent similar gatherings, when he called for Chinese people overseas to “support the Beijing Olympics and oppose media injustice.”

Speaking to People's Daily journalist Gu Baoqing, Li explained further about what he and others saw as the overly negative portrayal of China in the French media spurred on by money-seeking asylum seekers. “Because these people exist,” he explained, “we should all the more positively make our voices heard and let more people understand (liaojie 了解) the real China (zhenshi de Zhongguo 真实的中国).” He added that the rally's slogan had consequently become “Go to China and see – recognize a real China (zhenshi de Zhongguo真实的中国) that the media will not let you know (zhidao 知道).”Footnote ⁹

This particular round of searching for the real China had its roots in events several weeks earlier when riots – themselves often linked to the Olympics for their timing – broke out in the Tibetan capital Lhasa. This attracted massive international media attention, despite foreign journalists being barred from travelling to the region, and was soon also dominating domestic Chinese media coverage, albeit with a very different emphasis and version of events.Footnote ¹⁰ Within China, one of the principal media concerns following the disturbances in Tibet was the demonization of the Dalai Lama, leading to an old-fashioned propaganda campaign of the kind that followed the clampdown on the falun gong (法轮功) in the late 1990s or the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.

However, in late March for a short period an equal amount of attention was devoted, across different media, to the demonization of foreign media coverage of China. The focus of such attacks soon became the anti-CNN website set up by a former Tsinghua University student which offered detailed dissection and analysis of Western media reports of the recent events in Tibet. The site pointed out the many factual errors of reporting made by prominent and reputable Western media organizations including CNN, The Washington Post, The Times, the BBC, Germany's NTV, RTL and Der Spiegel, and Radio France Internationale.Footnote ¹¹ These included, among other things, mistranslations of vox pop comments, misidentification of the location of events, and inaccurate captions attached to photographs and video clips. However, importantly, the anti-CNN website itself became widely reported and commented upon in other media including television, national and local newspapers, and online. Subsequently, a whole new media discourse emerged focused upon anti-China bias in foreign media reporting which also underpinned the comments made by Li Xuan in Paris a few weeks later.Footnote ¹² Indeed, Li's “real China” was specifically conceptualized in contrast to foreign media coverage perceived as misleading, factually inaccurate and biased against China.Footnote ¹³

However, claims about what constituted the “real China” were coming from both within and outside the country. While the anti-CNN climate in China was intensifying discontent among some Chinese with foreign media coverage, foreign journalists were themselves staking their own claims to reveal what was “really” going on in China and Tibet in contrast to the partial and misleading accounts carried in the “official” Chinese media.Footnote ¹⁴ So, for instance, the New York Times reported on 14 March: “Xinhua, the Chinese government's official news agency, issued a two-sentence bulletin, in English, confirming that shops in Lhasa had been set on fire and that other stores had closed because of violence on the streets. But the protests were otherwise censored in the Chinese press.”Footnote ¹⁵ This atmosphere of mutual distrust was subsequently maintained by a succession of reports on both sides over the following months with the Olympics and the torch relay featuring prominently. Indeed, some argued that how events unfurled from the very first hours of the riots themselves was shaped by Chinese concerns about the forthcoming Games in Beijing.Footnote ¹⁶

The “real China” story took another twist in May following the tragedy of the Sichuan earthquake. International media negativity was rapidly dispelled and replaced with sympathy, praise for the courageous and efficient relief effort led by the PLA, and commendation for Premier Wen Jiabao and his swiftly organized visit to the devastated region within hours of the first news of the quake breaking. However, in China itself the “real China” story did not entirely disappear. Indeed, some media sources saw this as a further opportunity to put the record straight. For example, under the heading “Critique: let the world see the real China,” Tianjin-based journalist Wang Aiying wrote with reference to this international praise and offers of help and support:

As the Olympic Games came closer in late June and early July and attention was gradually drawn away from the tragedy of the earthquake, Chinese media refocused attention on the Games' significance for China. The issue of the “real China” and its revelation through the Games to the rest of the world arose once again.

For instance, CCTV1's Us (Women 我们) – a heavily scripted studio discussion programme – discussed China's preparations and readiness for the Olympics in a programme broadcast at the end of June with two invited guests from the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games and the International Olympic Committee. One of the questions put by a young female member of the audience was: “Given the cultural differences between China and other countries (waiguo 外国) and the fact that some parts of China are deemed to demonstrate ‘low quality’ (di suzhi 低素质), then should China display to the world a China that foreigners are used to and like seeing or by contrast a ‘most real China’ (zui zhenshide Zhongguo 最真实的中国)?”Footnote ¹⁸

Meanwhile, many foreign media took the opportunity of the run-up to the Games to focus upon the figuratively unseen and unreported sides of China, Chinese society and the country's Olympics preparations. This included countless stories on air pollution, forced evictions, human rights campaigners and dissidents, corruption, heavy-handed security, political crackdowns in the capital, Xinjiang, Tibet and elsewhere, and much more.Footnote ¹⁹

What is important here, however, is not so much the specific content of these stories as their framing. A prevailing foreign journalistic approach to China in the run-up to the Games was to seek out that which is not reported in the Chinese media, the stories that would subvert the official Olympic propaganda messages and, in a way that could almost parody Li Xuan's statements in Paris back in April, help the rest of the world “recognize a real China that the media will not let you know,” only in this case “the media” would be the Chinese media representing officialdom rather than the biased Western media to which Li referred.

The “real China” Olympics came to a head with the opening ceremony of the Games on the evening of 8 August 2008. Film director Zhang Yimou 张艺谋's lavish display of cultural history generally impressed, if not stunned, audiences around the world for its creativity, scale and complexity. However, within a matter of days the opening ceremony's shine was wearing off for foreign journalists. On 9 August a Beijing newspaper revealed that the stunning fireworks footprint broadcast on televisions around the world involved computer animation and enhancement of fireworks filmed a year before.Footnote ²⁰ Not long after, the story was breaking in the international media under headlines such as “Beijing Olympic 2008 opening ceremony giant firework footprints ‘faked’.”Footnote ²¹ At around the same time, the news came that one of the little girls singing in the ceremony had been miming to another girl's voice and that the representatives of the country's 55 minority nationalities were Han.Footnote ²² All of this fuelled international media debate about Olympic fakery, how the Games clearly did not reflect the “real China,” how the Chinese authorities were overly concerned about image, and the lengths to which they were willing to go to ensure that their portrayal of a perfect China would prevail.

A few days later, some Chinese media hit back. The Global Times, for instance, ran a front page lead on 13 August with the headline “The real China brings the world closer” (zhenshi Zhongguo ling shijie qinqie 真是中国令世界亲切) and opened with the rebuttal: “With more than 30,000 foreign journalists all reporting at the same time from Olympic China, the China that the world sees cannot possibly be false.”Footnote ²³ As the Games drew to a close, Chinese media sought to drive home the messages that were intended to accompany the Beijing Games on their journey into the future and once again, the “real China” was on hand. Towards the end of the Olympics in an article originating on the website of the China Internet Information Centre (Zhongguowang 中国网) but also later recycled on the People's Daily website among others, journalist Tan Haojun explained the role that the Beijing Games had played in “enabling the world to understand the real China.”Footnote ²⁴ Tan argued that the Games had dispelled suspicions and malicious concerns that had circulated widely in the run-up to them, such as those relating to pollution, the environment, security and organization. Coming just 30 years into the post-Mao reform period, Tan argued that although China's impressive economic growth had been widely accepted by the rest of the world, for various reasons the country was still not “fully recognized and in many aspects was even misunderstood by the world.”Footnote ²⁵ He went on to link media, understanding and the “real China” together in a formula that neatly summarizes the assumptions behind many other similar articles promoting this officially-backed position:

Tan's article pinpoints what are commonly seen as some key relationships, most notably that between the media and understanding. Understanding and misunderstanding are both dependent upon “objective” media that “seek truth from facts.”Footnote ²⁷ However, just as important is the secondary relationship implied by Tan, and made all the more forceful in China's post-anti-CNN media environment, between misunderstanding and bias against China. Those who do not understand China are those dependent for their (mis)understanding upon (biased foreign) media. The Olympics offered a chance for such people to be liberated from this distortion.

This was a common formulation in other Chinese media using the same sort of language. The Global Times article on 13 August, for instance, had already made a similar point: “The Beijing Olympics,” it said, “are currently ‘correcting’ (jiuzheng 纠正) the distorting (waiqu 歪曲) Western reports about China.”Footnote ²⁸ That article concluded: “With several hundred million people around the world watching Olympics transmissions and reports about present-day China, those that still want to say bad things about China will lose their credibility and even further re-emphasize how those old criticisms are meaningless.”Footnote ²⁹

This tit-for-tat tussle between Western and Chinese media, with both claiming to reveal the “real China” neglected or hidden by the other is notable not so much for what either side may ultimately tell us about contemporary China as what it shows about the anachronistic understandings of media and representation upon which it rests. Both of these positions are ultimately dependent upon the assumed or claimed ability to represent reality from a neutral, objective position. The media are taken simply to reflect reality in the world; they are not themselves considered to be parts of it. As shown below, in contemporary China there are clear examples of how this is no longer the case – if indeed it ever was – and it is necessary to recognize quite different relationships between media, representation and reality.

It is also worth noting that the “real China,” in these discussions, is almost invariably conceptualized in relation to something that it is not. Hence, it is what is not reported by “state propaganda” or what is not revealed by biased anti-Chinese journalism. Western media uncover the fakery of political propaganda or representation while official Chinese representations reveal the friendly, smiling, comfortable China that is generally sidelined by a focus on human rights, pollution, corruption or Tibetan and Taiwanese independence. This is not necessarily a problem in itself, but it should set some alarm bells ringing in relation to reality and representation. Such appeals to the “real China” or claims to understand it better do not deal with the reporting of a reality in the world so much as the negation of someone else's claim to do as much. Consequently, such representations are not based upon the transparent reporting of reality that they purport to but are already shaped by sets of pre-existing discursive forces.

On (Not) Understanding the Real China

In a current affairs discussion programme broadcast on the CCTV news channel in April 2008 the programme host and interviewer Dong Qian 董倩 asked the studio guest, Beijing University's Professor Zhu Feng 朱锋, an expert on US–China relations, why United States congresswoman and speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi harboured such hostility (choushi 仇视) towards China.Footnote ³⁰ Zhu replied: “I think she really doesn't understand China” (wo juede zhishi peiluoxi feichang bu liaojie Zhongguo 我觉得只是佩洛西非常不了解中国). The discussion was in the context of comments made by Pelosi about China's human rights record in relation to Tibet and the Olympic torch relay's then anticipated San Francisco leg. Pelosi had said that those planning protests along the torch relay route were making a “significant statement that the Olympic ideals of peace and harmony should apply to all people, including those in Tibet and Darfur.”Footnote ³¹

With these comments, Professor Zhu was reiterating a by now familiar and standard explanation as to why foreigners should be negative in relation to China: because they do not understand.Footnote ³² The notion of understanding China has also been intricately bound up with the search for the “real” China and has featured prominently in Olympic Games discourse, from discussions about Tibet and the torch relay right the way through to post-Games reflection on their significance.

This use of “not understanding,” however, is a multi-faceted phrase that can work in several ways at once. First, it denies agency to the other party designated as not understanding. The rationale is that they do not understand and so they have no proper right to comment. Second, in a related fashion it works to discredit any criticism that is so labelled. Those making the comments do not understand China so even if they might have their own reasons for saying such things they are wrong. This goes hand in hand with the notion that not understanding the “real China” is equated with bias. Third, however, this use of “not understanding” sets up a cultural barrier between Chinese people and foreigners or at least between those that are deemed or not deemed to understand. For some this may contribute to a kind of siege mentality – particularly evident at the time of the anti-CNN debates for instance – whereby Chinese people are surrounded by hostility and lack of understanding. At best, such reasoning suggests that foreigners still have a lot of work to do before they come round to the Chinese way of seeing things, even assuming that they will. At worst, it denies the other party equivalence with Chinese people and implies relative ignorance on their part. Somewhere in the middle it suggests a lack of sophisticated appreciation of the complexity of Chinese society.

However, foreigners have for a long time been trying to achieve just such an appreciation of China, and efforts to understand the country – or indicate to others how to do so – do not emerge out of a vacuum. As recent scholarship has shown, such efforts by China scholars are themselves historically constituted and speak from and for particular situated interests even if they outwardly adopt an external neutral observer's position similar to that identified above.Footnote ³³ From the early days, this scholarship has also been regularly couched in the terminology of Chinese “realities.”Footnote ³⁴

Farquhar and Hevia eloquently argued that in post-war China scholarship the very notion of culture itself has played a key role not only in maintaining ethnographic distance but also supporting various forms of political positioning:

There are important points here that can inform our analysis of “understanding” and the lack of it in relation to China and the Olympics. We are reminded that understanding Chinese culture, first, is a question of media and representation (“a problem in communications”) and not simply an identification of the “facts,” and, second, has also been deployed as a way of creating or maintaining cultural barriers between Chinese and others.

In more recent scholarship efforts to understand China have generally pushed in two different directions. First, there has been a revitalized effort to identify the “real China,” particularly in relation to cinema and documentary film.Footnote ³⁶ Like the recent Olympics-related claims, such arguments about different kinds of film-making in post-Mao China similarly define reality in relation to something that is missing: not in this case what is left out of either biased foreign media accounts or Chinese propaganda journalism, but the idealized socialist fantasies of previous film-making, the neglect of contemporary urban China or the ideological imagery of global capitalism.

Second, postmodern scholars have queried notions such as the “real China” as part of a questioning of essentialist notions in China scholarship.Footnote ³⁷ This has shifted attention away from China's cultural unity to its complexity, social fragmentation and multiplicity with the emergence of marked differences of wealth, education, lifestyle, consumption patterns and media use across class, generational, gender, ethnic, linguistic, rural–urban and regional divides in the post-Mao period.Footnote ³⁸ Yet, despite these trends, as the recent Olympics clearly showed, there is no shortage of people ready to explain what the “real China” consists of, how one should conceptualize it and how other versions of the same “real China” are misleading or misguided.

Reflection upon this trajectory of efforts to understand China, alongside more recent disputes over the real China and who does or does not understand it, draws attention to several important issues. First, we are reminded that the whole question of “understanding China” is historically constituted and its aims and objectives are constantly shifting. Second, it is clear that the question of understanding China is itself the site of various not necessarily connected struggles over power, knowledge and position, whether scholarly disputes among academics as to what constitutes Chineseness or interpretations of Olympics fakery.Footnote ³⁹ Understanding and not understanding are not neutral statements of fact, but claims, counterclaims, justifications and accusations exchanged with a variety of aims and intentions in a range of sites of mediated dispute. Third, understanding China is not about finding the correct or most accurate representation of the country. Rather, it is something that may gradually come about through a (possibly long) process of exposure to a whole range of varying and sometimes contradictory experiences and representations. Considering that “the notion of ‘accurate representation of reality’ is simply an automatic and empty compliment which we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us do what we want to do,” such realizations suggest we shift understanding into a realm of practice and social action rather than one of facts, data and objectivity. Footnote ⁴⁰ Consequently, the “real” Olympic China needs to be pursued not in media representations but in the practices that produce them, some of which are considered in the next section.

China's Changing Media Landscape, New Media and the Search for the Real China

Mainstream traditional media – television and newspapers in particular – have played a key role in the disputes surrounding the “real China” discussed above. However, China's media landscape has been transformed rapidly in recent years with the digitization of television and the proliferation of new channels; the rapid expansion of internet use and broadband access; a rise in the number of mobile phones to more than 500 million and the launch of third-generation mobile services; commercialization affecting different media sectors in different ways; increasing foreign involvement in China's media industries and markets as well as audience fragmentation; and the introduction of greater interactivity and personalization in media consumption.Footnote ⁴¹

New media – computers, the internet, mobile phones, mobile television and other digital devices – are increasingly important features of the evolving media landscape and they are centrally involved in many of the key changes that are taking place in Chinese media.Footnote ⁴² What is more, they offer important insights for understanding Chinese reality – or realities – in relation to media and representation. New media may help us reassess the relationship between media, their users and questions of “reality.” Among other things, for instance, new media offer new ways for those in China with access to them to question official versions of “reality,” to voice discontent, cynicism and scepticism and play subversively with news stories and reports of recent events.

For example, in July 2008 not long before the opening of the Olympic Games, I received a text message in Beijing from a friend who forwarded a joke he had seen on the internet. It relayed an invented news headline and short report saying that Guizhou province would be sending a special delegation to the International Olympic Committee calling for three push-ups to be acknowledged as a new Olympic sport. The joke was multilayered and highly time and context specific, coming just a few weeks after serious social disturbances had shaken the Guizhou town of Weng'an (瓮安), with thousands of protesters attacking and ransacking the local offices of the public security bureau. News of the incident and speculation about the circumstances leading up to the riots spread like wildfire on the internet with bulletin board services (BBS) packed with postings on the topic.

The speculation surrounded allegations of local corruption, police brutality and an official cover-up following the death of a female student in the town. One of the details of the reported events on the night the girl died caught the imagination of Chinese “netizens” and soon offered a popular way of referring to the events surrounding the case, news of which was being censored and blocked by the authorities and internet police. This is where the reference to push-ups arose. One of the young men who was with the girl who died on the bridge was reported in official versions of events as saying that he started doing push-ups on the bridge but having completed two, he heard a noise as he attempted the third and found that his friend and fallen or jumped from the bridge into the river below. Many BBS postings were highly sceptical of the official account and rumours circulated suggesting that the girl had been raped and murdered (adding to the potential connotations of doing push-ups on the bridge), that some of those involved were relatives of local officials and that an uncle of the girl was beaten up, or even killed, in police custody.Footnote ⁴³ Consequently, the internet was flooded with references to push-ups and jokes or wry comments such as those that were forwarded to me. Doing push-ups became associated, among other things, with official cover-ups, internet censorship and lack of openness.

New media, including the internet and mobile phones, offered Chinese people – particularly urban youth – the chance to discuss the issues involved and question official versions of accounts. Consequently, there were multiple versions of events posted online including photographs and videos, and critical appraisal of others' comments.Footnote ⁴⁴ None of this supports either the Chinese or foreign media positions in the tussle over a Chinese reality described above. In fact, the case shows just one way that new media use has complicated the formulation of mediated realities in China. There is a complex positioning of different forces in play that is not best summarized in terms of either propaganda and repression or freedom of speech and public spheres. Propaganda played a part, but it was not entirely or universally effective. Indeed the official account ended up supplying the quotations that became the subsequent focus of jokes and fun-making. At the same time some “netizens” engaged in self-censorship or refrained from joining in the discussions for a variety of reasons.Footnote ⁴⁵ There was also a continuous contest between censors and “netizens” that saw those interested enough looking for new ways to circumvent censors' filters, while censors sought to catch up with the latest key words and phrases (like push-ups for instance) being used by internet users in relation to what were deemed sensitive issues.Footnote ⁴⁶ However there were also those who were simply out to poke fun at the authorities, each other or events in Weng'an and to enjoy the humour of the postings, while others deplored the rumour mill of the internet. In other words, the motivation of participants in this and other similar debates is very diverse, covering a wide range of more and less predictable positions. “Reality” emerges from such media practices as ambiguous, questioned and contested, lacking the certainties voiced by official and foreign media. Furthermore, the formulation of realities is clearly inseparable from media use and representation. This is further demonstrated by another new media phenomenon that has proven popular among internet users over the last couple of years: so-called “people flesh searches.”

People flesh searches present an entirely different kind of search for the “real China” in the age of the internet and digital media, and with personal participation and interactivity becoming key features of everyday media use among ordinary people. They are the practice of seeking out the “real” person – information and personal details – behind online news stories, gossip, scandals and much more. This may involve finding out where people live, what they look like, where they work or who they are, and is achieved by combining the search ability and breadth of knowledge that a large online community can mobilize.

People flesh searches have famously been involved in exposing other cases of fakery. A Shaanxi peasant called Zhou Zhenglong 周正龙 who claimed to have taken a photograph of a rare south China tiger had his trickery exposed just over a month after publishing the picture. People flesh searchers managed to unearth an old Chinese New Year poster from which Zhou had lifted the image of the tiger. Zhou was originally paid RMB 20,000 by the provincial government for the photograph, before eventually being convicted and imprisoned for deception in a very widely publicized case that drew national media attention.

Another Olympics-related example offers an indication of what people flesh searches can do. Wang Qianyuan (王千源，, also known as Grace Wang) was a student at Duke University in the United States in April 2008 when she was associated with pro-Tibet protests on campus. She did not take part in the demonstrations but did help some pro-Tibet protesters.Footnote ⁴⁷ A video appeared on the internet shortly afterwards showing Wang standing between pro-Tibet protesters and Chinese counter-protesters. Wang was vehemently condemned by many Chinese “netizens” who accused her of being a traitor and called for her to be punished. Personal information about Wang was subsequently posted online which enabled protestors to identify her parents' home in north China. This resulted in physical attacks on Wang's parents' home, including a bucket of excrement being upturned on their doorstep, with images of the attacks posted online.

In another case, a Tibetan living in Salt Lake City was falsely identified as one of the attackers of Jin Jing, the disabled athlete assaulted in Paris by pro-Tibet demonstrators who tried to grab the Olympic torch from her hands. Detailed information about the man including his telephone number, employer, photographs and the address of his home appeared on the internet resulting in thousands of abusive emails and pestering phone calls.Footnote ⁴⁸

People flesh searches indicate how the relationship between media and reality has developed in recent years in China. Such searches set out to find the truth or the reality behind issues, stories and people appearing online, and have a complex relationship to the real. Chinese online encyclopaedia Baidu baike 百度百科 – itself, like Wikipedia, an experiment in public participation in the definition of contemporary realities – in an entry entitled “People flesh searches: the boundary between the virtual and the real” (renrou sousuo: xuni yu xianshi de jiexian 人肉搜:索：虚拟与现实的界线) offers various considerations about this relationship, concluding: “Probably, a new era is again getting closer in which the [distinction between] the virtual world and the real world are chaotic and unclear. The internet is really changing our lives.”Footnote ⁴⁹

People flesh searches juxtapose the real, physical world and the mediated, usually online, or virtual world. The virtual world is not necessarily set up as unreal – the opposition is not simply of real to fantasy or real to false – but rather is incomplete, possibly inaccurate or deceptive and generally not tangible. People flesh searches seek to expose and disclose those who hide behind or are hidden from view by the virtual world and who may exploit its anonymity. However, this disclosure and exposure is achieved, and can only be achieved, online in that virtual realm. It is this virtual realm and its tools (the search engines themselves) that have to be used to identify the “reality” assumed to lie beyond it. Consequently, through each people flesh search process a small part of “real” China is uncovered through being named, identified and located, then possibly digitally photographed and virtually displayed. The consequences of that exposure may then develop either in the online or the offline realm or in both.

The issue here is that there is no clear separation between real and virtual. What happens through the use of computers and the internet is intricately bound up with what happens without them and vice versa. Offline “reality” is shaped and physically affected by communication, discussion and other online and media activities.

Media, Understanding and Reality

When Tan Haojun (see above) pointed out that the media have a fundamental role to play in brokering understandings of the real China and that the key issue is truthful reporting, he, perhaps unwittingly, put his finger on the problem with the whole formulation of media, understanding and reality that underpins many of the accounts of the Olympics and “real China.” This formulation assumes a referential model of media representation – that is, the media refers to, describes and presents images of “the real world.” The media are taken to point to or reflect reality from their neutral observational standpoint and then the quality of the understanding depends on the quality of the mirror. The same assumption is made by Western journalists seeking to uncover the realities behind the partial – in both senses of the word – truths offered by China's propagandists. However, as the few cases discussed above show, China's media in the digital information age are no longer, if they ever were, appropriately conceived as mirrors of reality. Rather they offer Chinese people tools for investigating, contesting, questioning, supporting, discussing and fighting over the nature of contemporary Chinese realities. These may include the significance of events like hurdler Liu Xiang 刘翔's premature exit from the 110 m hurdles – which led to millions of postings and articles online – foreign media bias, the implications of swapping the voices of two little girls in the Olympic opening ceremony, or the consequences of doing push-ups on a bridge in Guizhou. Rather than reality being a given, waiting to be exposed and reported, there is a complex negotiation of reality involved in contemporary media use in China.

The Olympics opening ceremony fireworks reveal the extent to which contemporary Chinese realities are mediated and constituted in and through the media. What has gone down in Western journalism as firework fakery needs to be understood not as an attempt to deceive as such but as an attempt to create media spectacle. The fireworks were specifically designed to be seen on television, not live in person. In the run up to the ceremony Chinese journalists along with Olympic and city officials all told Beijing citizens through newspapers, television and other media that they would better appreciate the opening ceremony on television. On the night of the opening, volunteer security guards and police – rightly as it turned out – told crowds near the stadium to go home where they would see things much better. Indeed, officials explaining why the firework footprint had been “faked” using computer simulation and old footage pointed out that one of their concerns had been the complexity, if not impossibility, of filming the footprint.Footnote ⁵⁰ To achieve the desired result would have taken complex co-ordinated filming and live transmission from several aircraft flying over the capital in tight formation. They considered it almost impossible to appreciate the complex artistry of the display properly even from an aeroplane. This decision reveals not the treacherous deception of the Chinese authorities but a remarkable honesty and pragmatism among the event's organizers who conceived the evening's performances as a media spectacle, not a live event. Indeed, media reports prior to the ceremony even pointed out that those in the Bird's Nest stadium, although clearly privileged in many ways, would not be in the best position to appreciate the fireworks display, most of which would not be visible from their seats. The “reality” of the fireworks footprint was conceptualized and constituted through and in the media, not separate from or outside them.

Acknowledgement of this situation causes problems for the fundamental assumptions upon which both China's propagandists and their overseas journalist critics contest the country's reality. Representations of the real China cannot stand outside that reality in referential neutrality; rather they are utterly imbricated in the complex mediated realities of contemporary China. Propagandists and journalists for both Chinese and Western media organizations have been busy trying to close down possible understandings of the Olympics and contemporary China, suturing their preferred readings of what the Games are about. Consequently, what these various claims and counterclaims about the real China actually reveal is a new inadequacy of the models of representation upon which they are founded. They also draw attention to the impossibility of pinning down any singular understanding of what the “real China” might be. Rather than educating the world about the real China, the Olympics and their media coverage should be attributed with demonstrating the impossibility of ever knowing it in its full complexity. What is required is acknowledgement of the need to move away from the idea of an ideological “misrecognition of a positive essence” to a recognition of “the precarious character of any positivity, of the impossibility of any ultimate suture” in the identification of Chinese realities.Footnote ⁵¹

This recognition, however, does not belong simply in a theoretical realm of post-structuralist critique. It is, on the contrary, important precisely as a means of moving forward understandings of contemporary China and the fundamental role that the media play in constituting Chinese people's lives. As long as scholars, journalists and others continue to equate Chinese media with representational models of the world and themselves seek to counter propaganda with claims resting upon the same models, then the potential for worse and worse understandings of Chinese people's everyday experiences will only be enhanced.