Professor Jing Wang's esteemed career as a scholar-activist, with rich experience in the digital empowerment of grassroots Chinese NGOs, means that her latest book, The Other Digital China, is met with special anticipation. The book presents the mosaic of internet-fuelled activism in contemporary China, a form of activism which seems to persevere and even expand in the Xi era.
Wang conceptualizes this activism as “nonconfrontational” – a tactful, incremental, constructive and often invisible mode of enacting social change. Such activism is enabled by the ingenuity and resilience of China's societal actors, but also by the partial retreat of the Party-state and even its occasional encouragement of public participation in social policy.
As the author herself admits, this book is not the first to challenge the Western liberal depiction of activism as deliberately confrontational political expression. Over the past two decades, a number of China scholars have put forward similar ideas in studying civil society and Chinese media. The concept of “embedded activism” introduced by Peter Ho and Richard Edmonds in the study of NGOs, and the idea of “rightful resistance” coined by Kevin O'Brien and Lianjiang Li in the context of rural protesters, for instance, appear as synonymous with nonconfrontational activism. And the notion of “co-evolution of social agents and a potentially negotiable government” (p. 240) in China has been reflected in the concepts of “guarded improvisation” and “fluid partnership” in the study of creative interactions between Party officials and journalists, as I have argued in Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
This book delves into within-the-system activism in the digital domain by tracing its different practices, including digital networking and campaign building by grassroots NGOs (chapter two), peer-to-peer philanthropy on WeChat and Weibo platforms (chapter three), millennial online engagement with social causes (chapter four) and the emergence of “tech4good” (chapter five).
The Other China does not explicitly state the distinctiveness of nonconfrontational activism online (in comparison to offline), but the analysis reveals that digital activism thrives on cross-sectoral synergy and the fusion of the commercial and the social. First, while offline activism draws on partnerships across sectors, including NGOs, media and official units, the internet has expanded and expedited these partnerships. Digital environmental activism is a good case in point. In chapter four, Wang introduces the various social cause platforms rolled out by Sohu.com, and later Alibaba and Baidu.com, which incite users to practise low-carbon lifestyles in return for “virtual green energy” points that can translate into real trees or other contributions. It was the online tech platforms that initiated this trend, but the playful socially conscious activity fits the millennial disposition as well as the government's objective of non-radical environmental activism. Many other examples, from Deng Fei's crowdfunded village-school-lunch campaign to Qiang Center's minority embroidery digital training, underscore this synergy across platforms and actors which can produce a powerful networked effect of digital activism.
Second, this book shows that the interplay between commercial forces and civil society is more dynamic online, making the lines between business, entertainment and social advocacy somewhat amorphous. Digital platforms allow for gaming mechanisms that entice young netizens to partake in philanthropic causes. Programmers can shift from mainstream companies to social entrepreneurship. Digital corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be viewed as a profit boost for major tech firms. And online campaigns have a better chance of succeeding if they have strong digital marketing skills to generate online traffic.
The hopeful and largely optimistic account of online nonconfrontational activism could be further explored by delving more into its inconsistencies and vulnerabilities. In her evaluation of nonconfrontational activism, Wang writes that unlike the failures of confrontational activism that are highly visible, the more subtle activism “dies a quiet death,” blocked by more mundane forces, like budgetary cuts (p. 30). But this statement appears to take us back to binaries.
Nonconfontational activism in and of itself is a multidimensional and fluid category. Are some policy domains (like the environment) more prone to producing effective results? Have certain regions been more fertile for nonconfrontational activism due to local official support, similarly to Guangzhou being famously lenient towards investigative reporting in the past? Do certain strategies work better than others in avoiding the so-called “quiet death” (p. 30) or at least in delaying it? And when does nonconfrontational activism shift into the more confrontational domain or into a darker shade of the grey one? After all, nonconfrontation is not a static disposition, as we have recently witnessed with the mourning of the coronavirus whistle-blower, Dr. Li Wenliang, rapidly shifting into a radical category of calls for freedom of expression.
Incorporating more ethnographic vignettes into the narrative style writing would illuminate some of these frictions or the micro-processes of nonconfrontational activism. While Wang introduces readers to multiple examples of online activism, as well as to impressive projects and evolving strategies of her own NGO work, only occasionally do we get to witness or really transplant ourselves into the site of action itself.
One such rare occurrence is a memorable vignette about a policeman sent to observe and report on the author's NGO training. Instead of hiding or excusing herself, the author invited the policeman to attend and listen, which provoked an unexpected result. The policeman gets intrigued by the class, and in turn, evolves from a “supervisor” into a student. “Too often, we forget that a watchdog has a split identity too. At critical moments, his public persona – the police/censor – gives way to the private self that makes a moral choice in favor of the activist,” she writes (p. 134). This description was one of the few instances of experiencing the inner world of digital activism – the world that Wang so fluidly inhabits – and it would be fascinating and meaningful to get to know more from the inside. This may also help further reconcile the tensions between the author as activist and as scholar in the writing, something she reckons with in the final methodology chapter.
The Other Digital China comes out at a critical time, when much of the Western popular and scholarly literature is focused on the darker side of a more restricted China. This book provides evidence of the brighter side of relentless societal dynamism that subsists in, and adapts to, the current climate of political and commercial volatility. The author also gives China scholars hope for more field research possibilities, both in the digital and physical spaces of within-the-system activism.
