Martijn de Waal

Together with V2 and the International Institute for Asian Studies I organized a symposium on media culture in China.

Whereas many discussions on media in China focus on censorship, we wanted to address developments in new media from the other side: what can be and is done in China? What new possibilities do digital media like weblogs and podcast open up? Do they play a role in an emerging civil society?

Speakers included Isaac Mao, Karsten Giese and Guobin Yang

There is a registration of the symposium on Archive.org

If you can read Dutch, you can read my research report for which I interviewed a small number of Chinese webloggers.

The following text was the starting point for our inquiry:

Over the last few years, The Great Leap, has become a popular metaphor to describe the fast-paced modernization process in China. However, in spite of the turbulent economic growth some domains of the Chinese society have hardly moved forward at all over the last decade or two. During that time many Chinese did see their private freedoms increase significantly. But, some critics would argue, the official policies of ‘opening up’ have hardly changed the political system or the state control of public media. Other critics claim that over the last few years new social spaces did open up for citizens to voice their opinion and take action. For instance grassroots social organizations have organized small scale debates and demonstrations, usually at a very local level.

The use of bottom-up media such as the web, e-mail and sms have enabled them to self-organize in a middle landscape, somewhere between the official medialandscape, and the private sphere. These organizations too hold a middle position, somewhere in between the official state apparatus with its rigid hierarchy and the informal practice of everyday life. Also ideologically they hold a middle position, between revolution and conformity. Minor reform rather than total revolution is usually their goal.

Nowhere has this new middle landscape become more clear than in the new media culture that has arisen in China over the last few years. Weblogs, bulletinboards, peer-to-peer distribution and chatrooms have made the sharp division between public and private lives problematic. While most of these new media are used for mere entertainment, on the internet Chinese citizens do employ a number of tactics to find or distribute information outside the official media system. More than once collective outrage in this middle sphere – somewhere between private conversation and the official media – has had political consequences. Conversations on bulletin boards and weblogs have spilled over to the official media and forced the state to investigate cases of corruption and even hushed up murder. Is this the beginning of a true civil society in China, emerging from these new middle grounds?

The Chinese state is ambivalent about these trends. New technology and the internet are seen as essential tools for economic advancement. But these same technologies threaten the strict de facto division between the reasonably liberal private sphere and the controlled public sphere. Lately the state has taken severe measures to counter the new media culture. New laws about weblogs are aimed to curtail exactly this new middle landscape. Commercial companies – amongst them multinationals such as Google – are asked to comply with the state policies and build filtering software in their applications.

What than does this new middle landscape on the internet look like? Who are the actors? What are their tactics? What are its consequences? To what extent does the state both promote and curtail the new media culture? And can it be successful in the latter?