Fili’s world

Background

The student response to the Internet crackdown by the Chinese government was a small example of the power of the Internet in forming a new type of Chinese citizens that respond to both local and nation wide events, using the Internet as a medium to carry out their message. In the following chapters, I’ll discuss some of the intriguing events of the past year involving Chinese Netizens.

A Teacher’s Death in Wenzhou

A Chinese high-school teacher was found dead. Chinese police filed a report concluding that the teacher has probably committed suicide, but her students were not so sure. In what seems like a rare event in China, the high-school kids have decided to become active and demonstrate against what they believe to be is extreme injustice. The students first issued a public open letter detailing their doubts on a popular BBS (summarized from a translation by ESWN[i]) :

The incident took place two days ago.  Why has law enforcement refused to investigate?  Why is the legal doctor late?  Why are the people’s guide — the media — also late?  We don’t understand!  In a society under the rule of law, something infuriatingly unjust has happened!  Our rights become so pale and powerless in the face of money!

The students then continued in listing all of their doubts regarding the investigation and its conclusion. The response to their open letter was overwhelming and over 10 thousand people responded to their call and started a full-scale riot clashing with the local police.

A witness said thousands of residents started to gather in the afternoon in the square in front of the government compound and by 7.30pm up to 10,000 protesters were in the area. At least 700 riot police were called in and erected barriers around the compound, but there were no reports of casualties.

The BBSes were full of coverage, with photos and videos of the events, detailing all that has happened. But, in a most effective crackdown - the Chinese government has taken all information about the event down from all the Chinese sites[ii], although a few videos did make it to the western websites and some are still available today[iii]. Western media has mostly ignored this story, but the International Herald Tribute[iv] mentioned the event and commented:

The protests reflect widespread perceptions that China’s weak and largely opaque legal system is tainted by communist officials’ abuse of power and susceptible to influence by the country’s newly moneyed classes. […]

The newspaper reports and an account of the protests posted on the Internet said the students initially staged a silent protest march last week after local media published the results of the police investigation. Demonstrations then snowballed, eventually drawing thousands of participants who smashed glass and overturned cars. […]

Mainland China’s entirely state-controlled media has not reported the Rui’an protests, a sign of the regime’s anxiety over all unauthorized demonstrations.

Hunting down the immoral foreigner

Among all the English blogs about China there was one that stood out, and that was a blog called "Sex and Shanghai" blog[v] written by one “Chinabounder” about his sexual adventures in Shanghai with Chinese women, some of them who were his students or married women. His blog was quite blunt, almost pornographic, and although the blog had only been running for a few months, it quickly took the title of the most popular English blog about China in the China Blog List website[vi].

The story is about some Chinese professor, Zhang Jiehai (张结海), who - after coming across that "Sex and Shanghai" blog - became pretty upset and has made it his mission to track down the blogger and "kick him out of China". This professor of psychology at the Department of Sociology in the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences has started a crusade in his blog[vii] with a multi-stage master-plan on how this could be achieved, reading his entire blog and digging up his details in between the lines. ESWN translated some of his cry for help in tracking out the immoral foreigner:

This POG openly declared in this blog that he was only dallying with these female Chinese students. […] In his words, the Chinese men not only have low sexual potency, but they are also incredibly ugly. […] This is risible!  This is so risible!

This is how it is: Several days ago, a friend told me about a blog run by an English man in Shanghai. I read it and I was shocked, angered and disgusted … after I read his blog, I had only one idea: This is intolerable and this piece of garbage must be found and kicked out of China!!! […]

But what makes it intolerable for me is that this piece of garbage deliberately hurt the feelings of the Chinese national feelings in his class and he openly spoke to divide China. […]

The response to his message was overwhelming and a full-scale Internet hunt began with websites setup to gather details about him and plans of what will happen to him once he’s found.

It was soon after that Chinabounder responded to the Chinese professor and two online groups were formed, one which is made out mostly Chinese joining the professor and despising everything Chinabounder is about, while on the other side Chinabounder’s readers as well as freedom of speech activists joined together to fight against the crusade. Eventually, due to immense pressure from the Chinese Netizens and in fear of what might come, Chinabounder has shut down his blog and kept quite till February 2007.

It was extraordinary to witness the Chinese social censorship and the netizens forming up to resist what they strongly feel against.

Netizens against molesting a wax statue

Two Chinese boys were the center of another Internet scandal, when their photos molesting wax statues in the Madame Tussauds wax museum in Shanghai were published by their friends on a popular BBS. Due to immense pressure and criticism by the angry Netizens who found this to be disgraceful and an attack on their moral values, the photos were removed and the boys had to make a public apology. The story made it to a few Chinese newspapers[viii] and has been covered by Shanghaiist[ix] and ESWN[x] who translated:

Afterwards, someone posted these indecent photographs at certain Internet community section for everyone to see.  When the netizens saw these obscene acts, they were outraged and condemned those actions.  A netizen wrote: "What a waste!  Art is for enjoyment, not for abuse.  I don’t know what the people who made the statues would think if they see these photographs."

On the evening before yesterday, the troublemaker named Zhang De responded on the Internet.  […]  But he did not expect that the photographs would be posted on the Internet and received such broad circulation.  He said: "I was shocked to see many criticisms from netizens.  This time, I was over my head, and the affair is blowing up."

Summary

There’s not a month that goes by with out some form of Netizen uprise against a certain issue, and it seems that this has become a regular reality in today’s China[xi]. Other famous stories include the Chinese blogosphere’s crusade against Shenzhen-based manufacturer of iPod MP3 players[xii], the hunt for the World of Warcraft community member abuser and the Netizens’ uproar against to a guy who seduced bored married Chinese housewifes[xiii]. If we ignore all the juicy gossip part, all those stories do give an indication on the social change that the Chinese people are undergoing and the immense influence the Internet has on personal and community life. The Internet was successful in creating a new generation of Chinese celebrities that are quite different from all previous types of celebrities in the Chinese society, who derive their popularity from their online presence and the Netizen followers and the online controversy that they’ve created.

The Netizens of China are unique in their sense of community and the social power that they exert. The online communities in China have become so strong that they serve as a political power to promote certain ideas and protest against government and social injustices that they come across. It sometimes seems as though their social power is contradicting, when on one side they fight for their freedom of speech and against government corruption, but on the other side use their force, sometimes violently, to criticize and shutdown all that they find offending. This seems to reflect the Chinese Netizens attitude towards how the Internet should behave in their society in accordance with the Internet survey results on “Internet Management” by the government.

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(This is the last part of an essay submitted for a course about "modern society in urban China" summarizing my China Netizens online reading throughout the past year. Part 1 introduced the "Chinese Netizens", and part 2 was about "The Chinese Netizens and Internet censorship")

[i] http://zonaeuropa.com/20060826_2.htm

[ii] http://www.danwei.org/danwei_noon_report/dnr_tuesday.php

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060913_1.htm

[iii] http://s86.photobucket.com/albums/k109/chinasun/Ruianvedio/?action=view&current=see01.flv&refPage=&imgAnch=imgAnch2 ; http://s86.photobucket.com/albums/k109/chinasun/Ruianvedio/?action=view&current=see03.flv ; http://youtube.com/watch?v=VSnTDwFNfGk

[iv] http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/09/11/asia/AS_GEN_China_Riot.php

[v] http://www.chinabounder.blogspot.com/

[vi] http://www.chinabloglist.org/

[vii] http://blog.phoenixtv.com/user3/zhangjiehai/archives/2006/299423.html

[viii] http://ent.people.com.cn/GB/1082/4828828.html

[ix] http://www.shanghaiist.com/archives/2006/09/20/sexual_harrassm.php

[x] http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060920_1.htm

[xi] http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1503785,00.html

[xii] http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060903_1.htm

[xiii] http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060927_1.htm