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China: The big screening

By Kathrin Hille in Beijing

Published: November 17 2010 20:37

Li Gang is a powerful man. As deputy police chief for a district of Baoding, a Chinese city of 1m, he is influential enough to deal with almost any trouble.

Or so thought his son. When 22-year-old Li Qiming hit and killed a student while allegedly driving drunk last month, he zoomed off shouting from his car window: “Make a report if you dare – my dad is Li Gang!”

But once those words spread on the internet, a wave of scorn and derision at the arrogance of officialdom hit the country’s numerous blogs and bulletin boards. Li Qiming was arrested and his father forced to bow and sob on national television.

The episode is one of the most graphic examples yet of how China’s authoritarian politics is colliding with the relatively free public space created online. Now that more than one-third of the world’s most populous nation are web users – whether at home, at work or in internet cafes – responding to and managing online public opinion has become an important focus of the Communist party.

China watchers in the west have long argued that Beijing will struggle to control the virtual monster it has unleashed. The argument has gained new traction with the rapid growth over the past year of micro­blogs, which have increased the number of people taking part in online debates and upped the speed at which information – including items critical of the government – is spread.

Yet many outsiders are by now convinced that the government is by no means losing the battle with public opinion. Google’s decision this year to redirect its Chinese search traffic to Hong Kong and its appeal this week to make the fight against censorship a trade issue also indicate the effectiveness of Beijing’s censorship regime.

The party “has adapted to the internet much more successfully than most western observers realise”, argues Rebecca McKinnon, an expert on the internet in China, in a paper for a recent conference.

“In the networked authoritarian state, while one party remains in control, a wide range of conversations about the country’s problems nonetheless rage on websites and social networking services,” she says. “The government follows online chatter, and sometimes people are even able to use the internet to call attention to social problems or injustices, and even manage to have an impact on government policies.”

Ever since the ruling party decided to link the country up to the internet in 1994, observers have asked whether the technology would help democratise China. “It’s the Chinese leadership itself that is digging the Communist party’s grave, by giving the Chinese people broadband,” the Pulitzer prize-winning Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times in 2005.

As the spread of otherwise unreported information over the internet started making its mark in China, expectations grew that the Communist party’s monopoly on power might be challenged. In one case involving a man who died in police custody, heated internet debate helped spur legal changes designed to deal with jail deaths. When a notorious gang leader had his death sentence suspended, an online outcry led the Supreme Court to revert to the initial verdict. The internet also forced the government into action about Sars after the disease struck in 2003, by spreading information that local authorities had tried to suppress.

“That year, China’s netizens witnessed the power to change the course of events through the internet,” says Hu Yong, one of the country’s leading internet experts.

Since then, cases such as those have become the stuff of everyday life. This month, state media published a list of 221 such “internet incidents” over the past 12 months. The risk of being criticised like Li Gang has become an occupational hazard for party and government officials.

But overall, the Communist party is alive and well. In spite of the constant noise online, a systemic challenge to its power is hard to detect. Beijing has been able to achieve this balance through a sophisticated apparatus that monitors, controls and responds to public opinion voiced online. Around the clock, officials from a wide range of administrative levels in all departments read news websites, blogs and bulletin boards that could contain comments touching on their interests. When officials perceive content as a threat, websites are asked to remove it. News portals, blog hosting sites and other new media also run extensive self-censorship operations.

At the same time, information collected is used to analyse shifts in public opinion. Officials then address hot topics on their own blogs, in articles placed in state and party media, or in chats with web users. Hu Jintao, China’s party chief and president, and Wen Jiabao, premier, have themselves held web chats on a few occasions in an effort to demonstrate their openness and responsiveness, and Mr Hu has acknowledged that China’s citizens have “a right to know”.

This right is, however, limited to content not declared “illegal” or “harmful” by the censors – such as comments supporting the Dalai Lama or multi-party democracy. The mechanisms of modern spin go hand in hand with heavy-handed controls.

Content from websites based outside China is filtered at the border. Over the past two years, China has blocked leading western social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and closed many domestic ones, notably Fanfou, a Twitter clone. Thus the news that the Nobel peace prize had been awarded to Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident, appeared nowhere on China’s internet and attempts to access websites outside the country that carried related content mostly failed.

In the days after the award, bits and pieces managed to slip through on the fastest and hardest to control media – microblogs, instant messaging tools and chatrooms. “It is heartening that he got the prize,” said one contributor on QQ, which with well over 600m active users has come to be the world’s largest instant messaging tool.

Some complain that the country’s controls make the web there simply a huge intranet – a garden surrounded by the so-called Great Firewall of China. But inside, the space is big enough for most. After all, as elsewhere, Chinese use the web mostly for entertainment.

Those writing and reading blogs often concentrate on personal topics. “Political interest seems to be lacking in the Chinese blogosphere,” says Junhao Hong, an expert on Chinese free speech on the web at the University of Buffalo. “Many of them merely enjoy writing on less sensitive topics as a way for ordinary folks to let off steam.”

But even in the political sphere, a range of topics can be reported and discussed online. Most political discourse consists of stories such as the one about Li Gang and son – individual cases of bad governance, corruption or abuse of power at local level.

What is also notable is the immense pleasure China’s netizens derive from mocking their target, and the creative ways they find to do so. Many websites created competitions for mock lyrics that had to include the sentence “My dad is Li Gang”. At least two pop songs attacking nepotism with “My dad is Li Gang” as the chorus are circulating online and net users have even dreamt up an animal – a fat, ugly carp – whose name in Chinese sounds like “father Li Gang”.

Forced evictions, misbehaviour by local officials and the like make up the lion’s share of the stories that grow into nationwide scandals through the web. In many, the government responds by allowing state media to report on the case, while the central authorities blame and discipline individual local officials.

But in a society that lacks political checks and balances, such waves of public outrage can develop a force rarely seen in democratic societies. In some cases, courts have been seen to rule in the way thought most acceptable to the outraged public. As they are subject to interference from the Communist party anyway, the argument that courts should do so is more acceptable in China than it would be in a western system with an independent judiciary.

When the new president of China’s supreme court took up his job last year, he listed being responsive to public opinion as one of the court’s main duties – alongside being responsive to the Communist party.

The other big topic of Chinese online discourse is international affairs. China’s latest spat with Japan over a group of disputed islands triggered fierce anti-Japanese outpourings on a number of internet forums. Even though the two governments later toned down their war of words, the online debate continues unabated. Anti-Japanese demonstrations, organised in QQ messaging groups, keep happening.

Some Chinese scholars say Beijing’s harsh tone in dealing with Tokyo during the stand-off – which at one point drove Japan’s foreign minister to call China “hysterical” – was an attempt to get ahead of public opinion and pre-empt a nationalistic backlash.

At times when China takes a hardline or assertive stance, its foreign policy officials justify it with the argument that the government is under public pressure to do so. Indeed, the determination that China should become a great power, along with the hatred of Japan or the US reflected in some posts, concerns those who worry whether Chinese public opinion, if released from the constraints that now apply, might set the nation on a more dangerous path. “It is beautiful to hope for a democratic China,” says Mark Chen, a Taiwanese ex-foreign minister. “But for us, there is the risk that that could spell disaster. With all those nationalist forces, a democratic China could be much uglier than what we have now.”

It is impossible to measure the real weight of the nationalism expressed on Chinese websites in overall public opinion. “Cyberspace is often filled with radical and nationalistic opinions and, though they may sound ‘patriotic’, they are mostly irrational,” says Mr Hong at Buffalo university.

Other scholars point out that the ruling party has itself cultivated nationalism – because after it diluted its totalitarian system with economic reforms, it felt something else needed to take the place of Communist ideology in order to secure the people’s continued support for one-party rule.

When Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, angered Beijing in July by declaring the South China Sea to be an American strategic interest, some of the key participants in the ensuing nationalist online debate in China were scholars and officials, some with a military background. In addition, as the authorities use hired hands to influence online debates, reaction to international events can be spun either way, either helping either to fuel or cool nationalist fervour.

More than 10 years ago, the Communist party not only secured itself a seat at the table of nationalist debate but made itself the host. The bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade – described by Washington as an error and denounced by Beijing as deliberate – was, experts agree, a seminal event for the development of nationalism online in China. As anti-American rage broke out among Chinese internet users, the organiser of one of the main protest forums – hosting the online debate and co-ordinating real-life rallies – was none other than the website of the People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece.

In response to that initial success, the outlet was made permanent. It is now the Strong Nation Forum, one of the main places for nationalist online comment in China today.

Hot topics: the personal, the political and the fictional

Forced evictions

On September 10, three residents of a town in the south-eastern province of Jiangxi set themselves alight in protest at the demolition of their home. One dies. Bystanders put photographs online the next day. Along with comments, the pictures are taken down by censors but quickly reposted on many sites.

Local officials try to prevent two relatives of the protesters travelling to Beijing to petition the government, chasing the women through the local airport until they lock themselves in the toilets. The episode is reported on microblogs. Again, comments are deleted but reposted elsewhere. Alerted by the heated online debate, regional authorities investigate and fire one county official. State media criticise the local government. On October 9, the local party chief and county magistrate are removed from their posts.

Japan-China naval spat

On September 7, Japanese coast guards arrest the captain of a Chinese fishing boat after a collision in disputed waters in the East China Sea close to uninhabited, but contested, islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. Chinese internet users react with angry comments. Beijing demands the captain’s release, halting a number of bilateral contacts when Tokyo refuses. Premier Wen Jiabao warns Japan that it has “aroused the anger of all the Chinese people”. After China detains four Japanese for allegedly trespassing on a military site, Japan releases the captain.

Outpourings of anger continue on nationalist Chinese websites, with demands ranging from boycotts of Japanese products to military action. Meanwhile, officials from both countries continue with their war of words. Protest marches, organised on the QQ instant messaging service, are held in several Chinese cities in October. The website of Global Times, a Communist party-backed nationalist tabloid, launches an online game where users go ashore on the disputed islands.

Personality cult

On October 5 Rongrong, a user on the Tianya online community, posts an account of a trip to Shanghai with Xiao Yueyue, an old schoolfriend. Rongrong relates in detail how her friend – described as a kindergarten teacher from the inland province of Anhui who stands at just under 5ft, weighs almost 13 stone and wears red high heels – embarrasses her by reciting poetry, screaming and rolling on the ground in public, and stripping naked to seduce her boyfriend in Rongrong’s presence.

Tianya users spread and comment on the post. A “Religion in worship of Yue” is started, and an online game and a chatroom are created in her honour. The character is later discovered to be fictitious but this does nothing to cool the craze.