The field of Chinese internet studies is rich and diverse. Just this past year, exciting new books have been published on internet use among urban youth (Liu Reference Liu2011), online videos (Voci Reference Voci2010), online carnival (Herold and Marolt 2011), new media events (Qiu and Chan Reference Qiu and Chan2011), and cyber-nationalists (Shen and Breslin Reference Shen and Breslin2010).

These works present a lively and dynamic, albeit controlled, image of Chinese internet culture. For example, Paola Voci (Reference Voci2010) studies “smaller-screen realities” such as cell-phone movies, online spoofing videos, internet animations, and “accidental video journalism.” She finds lightness to be a notable common feature of these diverse genres. They are light in production costs, contents, and even actual physical weight; light in style, because they are funny and humorous; and light in comparison with mainstream and official movie productions. Although they do not fit neatly into the conventional category of resistance or opposition, they offer outlets for meaningful cultural practices that effectively challenge “cultural hierarchies, social classifications and political polarizations.” (Voci Reference Voci2010: 2).

Fengshu Liu (Reference Liu2011) studies online experiences among Chinese urban youth. Linking their experiences to family, school, job market, and the state, Liu offers a nuanced account of a young generation eager for self-expression and individuality and yet bent on a middle class dream of material comfort. Family and social pressures force them to study hard in a highly competitive educational system, and so they frequent internet cafes for fun, relaxation, and “letting out bad moods and experimenting with identity.” (Liu Reference Liu2011: 182). In Liu's analysis, online entertainment takes on meaning and significance.

James Leibold's characterization of a “good versus evil” battle in the academic analysis of the Chinese internet does not fit the image in the works mentioned above. His argument that the Chinese internet (which he calls blogosphere) is full of “shallow infotainment,” “pernicious misinformation,” and “cyber-sectarianism” raises some legitimate concerns about aspects of Chinese internet culture and politics, but is unconvincing due to flawed assumptions about technology, politics, and internet culture and the uncritical use of evidence.

Technology without People

A persistent problem in the study of media and technology is a deterministic view of technology. To say that the internet can “narrow and warp our beliefs,” or “Google is making Americans stupid,” or online anonymity is responsible for uncivil behavior, is a form of technological determinism. This view assumes that technology produces its own effects. It leaves out the values and practices of the people using the technology, or the history, culture, and political economy of technological development and use.

Take the example of the so-called “internet verbal violence.” It may be true that anonymous users in online forums feel fewer constraints to use foul language. But they may also feel fewer constraints in speaking their minds on critical social and political issues. At this level of analysis, online anonymity may appear as the cause of a problem and the solution to another. But could both “internet verbal violence” and online political expression be rooted in a common underlying cause having little to do the internet?

In China today, riots and other violent protest, not to say violent talk, happen often. These protests concern a broad range of issues, from environmental pollution to corruption to ethnic conflicts. People take to protest out of anger and indignation at social injustices and frustration with the lack of effective institutional channels for dissent and redressing grievances. Under these conditions, it is almost inevitable that citizens will also use the internet to pour out their grievances. Online behavior reflects social trends.

Politics and Political Change

The integration of the internet into contemporary Chinese life means that it is integral to the process of social change. Students of China, both inside and outside of the PRC, naturally wonder how it bears on political change. Although there is no easy answer to this question, sustained academic debates deepen our understanding.Footnote ¹

To see politics only in the higher echelons of power or as its outright subversion, and consequently to think of political change only as regime change, has its limits. This view neglects the possibility that state power, however hegemonic it may be, not only shapes, but also responds and adapts to, the influences of other institutions and even mundane social practices.

Abundant empirical work has shown that despite tightening control of the internet in China, there are great varieties of online political expression and activism. These popular political forms have already left their imprints on Chinese politics. The changes may be slow and piecemeal, sometimes accompanied by setbacks, but they add up and their cumulative effects are profound. This is what I mean by gradual revolution.

With the spread of online protest, for example, the Chinese government has come to recognize the importance of “online public opinion.” In June 2010, it issued a white paper on “The Internet in China.” Despite controversial claims regarding internet freedom and regulation, the white paper acknowledges the legitimacy of online public opinion by stating, “The authorities attach great importance to social conditions and public opinion as reflected on the Internet, which has become a bridge facilitating direct communication between the government and the public.”Footnote ²

Since July 2009, a newly established “Media Opinion Monitoring Office of People's Daily Online” has published reports on how local governments responded to “internet mass incidents,” a euphemism for online protest. One of these reports states that Chinese netizens have formed a new “pressure group” and that government officials should be responsive to online opinion and learn to handle it in a way that will not intensify social conflict. It proposes that publicizing information is a better approach than damming it.Footnote ³

As an example of mundane online expression, let us take the least likely candidate, “internet rumors.” Such “rumors” thrived for a period during the SARS crisis in 2003 because citizens had no reliable information channels to understand the spread of the epidemic. Another case concerns a government employee in Sichuan province several years ago, who composed a funny poem mocking corrupt local officials and text-messaged it to friends. The local authorities arrested him on charges of rumor and slander only to be forced to dismiss his case after netizens protested against this arbitrary use of power.

These cases show that internet rumors in China, as elsewhere, happen in a specific context in response to social circumstances. In their subtle ways, they reveal the intricate but changing relationships and dynamics between citizens and state authorities. Understanding their meaning requires sensitivity to context and ambiguity.

Internet without Culture

Entertainment is often used as a scapegoat for blaming the supposedly apolitical character of Chinese internet culture. The assumption is that if people just play online, they are not doing politics.

A wholesale rejection of online playful activities masks an elitist and biased conception of internet culture and popular culture more generally. First of all, there is no reason why Chinese netizens should not be engaged in online entertainment unless they are all dull automata. Further, it is not true that play (or popular culture in general) is necessarily apolitical. Quite the contrary, in PRC history, popular culture, including and sometimes especially entertainment, is where many political struggles started or were waged. Cases in point include underground poetry and songs during the Cultural Revolution, misty poetry in the late 1970s and early 80s, Cui Jian's rock and roll music, Teresa Teng's songs (Baranovitch Reference Baranovitch2003), and today, the flourishing of personal blogs. These popular cultural forms were under attack at one point or another by official Chinese media because they challenged dominant values.

The Chinese internet is a vibrant cultural realm. People are engaged in numerous playful activities such as digital animations and flash movies (Voci Reference Voci2010), internet literature (Hockx Reference Hockx2004; Yang Reference Yang, Brokaw and Reed2010), online spoofing and carnival (Meng Reference Meng2011; Herold and Marolt 2011), online creative linguistic practices (Yuan Reference Yuan, Amant and Kelsey2011), as well as gaming (Lindtner and Szablewicz Reference Lindtner, Szablewicz, Herold and Marolt2011). Despite an enormous digital divide, many social groups are actively using the internet, including transnational cyber-sects (Thornton Reference Thornton and O'Brien2008), same-sex communities (Ho Reference Ho2007), Chinese diaspora (Ding Reference Ding2007), migrant workers (Qiu Reference Qiu2009), American expatriates in China (Qi and Chao Reference Tanga and Chao2010), environmentalists (Sullivan and Xie Reference Sullivan and Xie2009), journalists (Yu Reference Yu2011), rights-defense activists (Yang Reference Yang2011), and even lawyers and judges (Cheung Reference Cheung2011).

These activities give the internet its cultural content. Without such content, the internet would be a wasteland. As the values, behavior, and practices associated with these activities merge into everyday life, they become a central part of contemporary culture. Dismissing them as “shallow infotainment” in favor of rational-critical debate and deliberation is problematic. Implicitly, this view uses the Habermasian notion of public discourse as the normative standard to measure online activities. It not only ignores the importance of emotion in public life, but at its worst, reduces the emotional to the irrational and runs the danger of pathologizing online behavior. Invoking Gustave Le Bon's conservative language of “mobs” and “the hive mind,” long abandoned by modern social science, does little to enhance our understanding of online culture.

Public spaces and media are natural arenas of identity formation and sociality, necessarily imbued with affect and emotion. Public communication everywhere involves the use of rhetoric, style, imagery and symbolism. It cannot be devoid of emotion. Expressions of sympathy, anger, and humor often dominate intense online interactions (Yang Reference Yang2009). For researchers, the really important and interesting questions to ask are why communication and expression in Chinese blogosphere could sometimes be so passionate and why some issues are more likely to arouse passions than others, or what emotions are more likely to be associated with what issues.

Labeling and Its Consequences

Sociologists have long used labeling theory to explain the emergence of deviant behavior. In a gist, the theory holds that deviant behavior is less an objective act than the creation of social groups, usually people in positions of power (Becker Reference Becker1997).

Current discourse on the Chinese internet has invented many labels. Examples include “digital opium,” “echo chamber,” “online vigilantism,” “online lynch mobs,” “digital scarlet letter,” “digital Maoism,” and “cyber-ghettos.” Are these labels accurate representations of the phenomena in question? The so-called “human flesh search,”Footnote ⁴ for example, has often been described as a form of “online vigilantism” committed by “internet mobs.” Some cases do involve disturbing violations of privacy, and internet users, businesses, and state regulators should all be concerned with such behavior. But this is only part of the story, because many cases involve collective protests similar to those found in social movements, with perfectly rational goals. They happen because Chinese netizens, frustrated with the lack of social justice and outraged by government corruption, decide to redress social ills.

One might also ask who are the creators of these labels and to whom the labels are usually applied. The answer should be self-evident, but has rarely if ever been part of the public debate. Those who create and do the labeling are much more likely to be government officials, police departments, media pundits, and yes, even (and sometimes especially) academic researchers. The voices of those on the recipient end of the labels are missing.

It is not that labels are completely useless. In offering simple ways of seeing the world, however, they may reduce complex phenomena to caricature. If used repeatedly, they create stereotypes, stifle understanding, and may turn innocent individuals into social outcasts or deviants.

Evidence and Context

The fluid, dynamic, and expansive features of internet culture put high demands on the researcher to make critical use of evidence. One way of doing so is to scrutinize evidence in its proper context. This applies to primary and secondary sources alike.

James Leibold's representation of secondary sources has some flaws. For example, he challenges the extensive literature on political impact on the basis of merely two articles. One of these articles is cited as saying that China's repressive political culture explains why most netizens avoid “sensitive topics and are only involved in discussing trivial and mawkish topics,” but the real argument of that article is that the internet could “bring incremental changes to the Chinese society through constructing loosely structured networks.” (Shen et al. Reference Shen, Wang, Guo and Guo2009: 451). And then Leibold uses the same article as evidence of what he calls the “rosy assessment” of the Chinese internet.

Taking primary evidence out of context is just as damaging. To return to the case of “internet verbal violence.” I have already stressed the importance of understanding its social conditions. Additionally, it has its political context. In 2007, the mainstream Chinese media was full of denunciations of “internet verbal violence.” This discourse continued into 2009 when the Chinese government launched an “anti-vulgarity campaign” to crack down on online pornography and other “indecencies.” Throughout this period, political control of the internet tightened. Thus labels like “internet verbal violence” are used conveniently to legitimate political control. Taking evidence of any isolated case of “verbal violence” out of context will leave this important background out of the picture.

The Challenges Ahead

The Chinese internet should not be viewed in isolation from its social, political, and cultural contents and contexts. The internet, and media technologies more generally, is “contentful.” Its contents include values, ideologies, meanings, practices, politics, history, culture, and above all, people. To understand the Chinese internet is to understand all its contents.

More than ever before, citizens, organizations, and nations today face the challenges of computer security, surveillance, and violations of privacy. Political and commercial forces have penetrated deeply into cyberspace everywhere and China is no exception. How these powerful interests will affect the “contents” of the internet and how people will counter these formidable forces of power is a key task for future critical analysis. A view of “contentful” technologies should help to produce thicker and more sophisticated analyses.