Media and Cultural Transformation in China (Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia Series)

Media and Cultural Transformation in China This book examines the role played by the media in China’s cultural transfo...

Author: Haiqing Yu

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Media and Cultural Transformation in China

This book examines the role played by the media in China’s cultural transformation in the early years of the twenty-ﬁrst century. It demonstrates that the media is integral to China’s changing culture in the age of globalisation, while also being part and parcel of the state and its project of re-imagining national identity that is essential to the post-socialist reform agenda. It describes how the party-state can eﬀectively use media events to pull social, cultural and political resources and forces together in the name of national rejuvenation. However, it also illustrates how non-state actors can also use reporting of media events to dispute oﬃcial narratives and advance their own interests and perspectives. It discusses the implications of this interplay between state and non-state actors in the Chinese media for conceptions of identity, citizenship and ethics, identifying the areas of mutual accommodation and appropriation, as well as those of conﬂict and contestation. It explores these themes with detailed analysis of four important ‘media spectacles’: the media events surrounding the new millennium celebrations; the news reporting of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS); the media stories about acquired immunodeﬁciency syndrome (AIDS) and SARS; and the media campaign war between the Chinese state and the Falun Gong movement. Haiqing Yu is lecturer in Chinese Contemporary Culture and Media at University of New South Wales, Australia.

Routledge Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia Edited by: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Editorial Board: Devleena Ghosh, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Yingjie Guo, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia K.P. Jayasankar, Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay, India Vera Mackie, University of Melbourne, Australia Anjali Monteiro, Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay, India Gary Rawnsley, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Ming-yeh Rawnsley, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Adrian Vickers, University of Sydney, Australia Jing Wang, MIT, USA The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality work by both new and established scholars in the West and the East, on all aspects of media, culture and social change in Asia. 1 Television Across Asia Television industries, programme formats and globalisation Edited by Albert Moran and Michael Keane

6 Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema No ﬁlm is an island Edited by Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam

2 Journalism and Democracy in Asia Edited by Angela Romano and Michael Bromley

7 Media in Hong Kong Press freedom and political change 1967–2005 Carol P. Lai

3 Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia Copyright, piracy and cinema Laikwan Pang

8 Chinese Documentaries From dogma to polyphony Yingchi Chu

4 Conﬂict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia Edited by Benjamin Cole 5 Media and the Chinese Diaspora Community, communications and commerce Edited by Wanning Sun

9 Japanese Popular Music Culture, authenticity and power Carolyn S. Stevens 10 The Origins of the Modern Chinese Press The inﬂuence of the Protestant missionary press in late Qing China Xiantao Zhang

11 Created in China The great new leap forward Michael Keane 12 Political Regimes and the Media in Asia Edited by Krishna Sen and Terence Lee 13Television in Post-Reform China Serial dramas, Confucian leadership and the global television market Ying Zhu 14 Tamil Cinema The cultural politics of India’s other ﬁlm industry Edited by Selvaraj Velayutham

15 Popular Culture in Indonesia Fluid identities in postauthoritarian politics Edited by Ariel Heryanto 16 Television in India Satellites, politics and cultural change Edited by Nalin Mehta 17 Media and Cultural Transformation in China Haiqing Yu

Media and Cultural Transformation in China

HaiqingYu

First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2009 Haiqing Yu All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN 0-203-88201-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 978-0-415-44755-3 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-203-88201-6 (ebk)

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements

ix x

Introduction

1

Post-socialism in the post-New Era 4 Media conglomeration in the era of globalisation From active audience to creative commons 9 Chapter outline and case studies 12 1

7

Chinese media and modernity

16

From dichotomies to interplay 16 From party politics to identity politics 22 Counter-narratives of modernity in China 31 2

Media event: the new millennium celebration The making of a media event 37 The politics of counting down 41 Chinese millennialism in the making 45 Rejuvenation millennialism and Chinese post-socialism Conclusion 58

3

Media stories: the politics of AIDS and SARS The making of media stories Talking 68 Linking 72 Clicking 74 Conclusion 79

4

36

50 61

62

News event: SARS reportage The making of a news event 83 The many faces of Chinese journalists

81 87

viii

Contents Investigative journalism revisited 94 Double-time narration of SARS 98 Conclusion 103

5

Media citizenship Deﬁning media citizenship 107 The paradoxes of media citizenship Conclusion 121

6

106 111

Media campaigns: the war over Falun Gong

124

The making of a media campaign war 125 The representational politics of Falun Gong 133 From representational politics to body politics 137 Conclusion 165 7

Media spectacles and cultural transformation

150

From body politics to ethics 152 From minoritised community to mediation community 158 From millennialism to post-utopianism 162 Towards a post-political critique of Chinese media culture: in lieu of conclusion 148 Appendix Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

169 171 176 187 213

Illustrations

Tables I.1 1.1

Growth of Chinese television and radio industries, 1980–2005 Internet and mobile phone usage in China 2003–7

7 18

Figures 2.1 6.1 6.2

6.3

Three time arrows Caricature of ‘Evil Jiang’ A Canadian Falun Gong practitioner (one of thirty-six Western practitioners) making a peaceful appeal and being arrested at Tiananmen Square Image of the ‘man being trodden upon’ by plain clothes policemen

53 131

135 136

Acknowledgements

This book began as a doctoral research project at the University of Melbourne. The University, particularly its School of Culture and Communication and Asia Institute, provided me with ﬁnancial support, thesis supervision and opportunities for career development. I would like to express my thanks to Dr Audrey Yue of the cultural studies programme. Her guidance and support during and beyond my doctoral research has been formative to my academic development. The intellectual insight and strength that Audrey and other academics in Melbourne – particularly Dr Fran Martin and Professor Michael Dutton – have demonstrated will remain forever an inspiration to me. I especially wish to thank Professor Stephanie Donald for her support during my candidature and for my research more generally. Without her generous assistance, this book would not have been published at this time. I am grateful to all my friends – Emily Dunn, Victor Cheng, Ayxe Eli, Dale Lin, Alvin Koh, among others – whose invaluable moral and emotional support accompanied me throughout my Melbourne years. My gratitude also goes to Dr Pradeep Taneja, Dr Lewis Mayo and Dr Yongxian Luo for the opportunities, advice and support they have given me in embarking upon an academic career. I am indebted to unwavering support from Professor Wang Ning, whose advice on career development still sounds so fresh. I would like to express my deepest thanks and love to Bick-har Yeung, Che-wing Kong, my parents, for giving me unconditional love and consistent support during and beyond the most diﬃcult days of my life, and Mitchell Rolls. It is this love and support that has enabled me to grow as a person. Finally, I dedicate this book to my daughter Deena who, born in the throes of my thesis writing, has coped brilliantly with my depression and unwilling ignorance of her. I believe that these diﬃcult experiences, including painful separation from her mother at an early age, will give her great personal strength and resilience. I hope that one day she can understand and appreciate her mother’s eﬀorts to live a fulﬁlled and purpose-driven life. I thank Clearwisdom.com for permission to include the four images from its photo archive that appear in Chapter Six. Earlier versions of some parts of this book have been published previously in Positions: East Asian

Acknowledgements

xi

Cultures Critique 15.1 (2007): 35–63 and Social Semiotics 16.2 (2006): 303– 26. I acknowledge the publishers for permission to reuse parts of my own articles. I also acknowledge the support from the School of Asian Languages and Studies at te University of Tasmania in the production of the book. At Routledge, Peter Sowden and Tom Bates gave this book a gracious welcome. I am grateful for their careful attention and assistance. Haiqing Yu January 2008, Hobart

Introduction

Since 1978, China has witnessed structural transformations marked by doubledigit economic growth, technological innovation, ideological battles, social unrest and political crises. These transformations have produced new political and social formations, new identities and subjectivities, and new forms of citizenship and ethics. The media have played a central role in presenting and facilitating these transformations. In the process, Chinese media culture has also been transformed. The central role of the media in China’s structural transformations is exempliﬁed in media spectacles. Media spectacles abound in the historical juncture of the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries. Spectacular historical events (such as the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and Beijing’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympic Games in July 2001) and ordinary – yet equally remarkable – everyday mediated experience (such as the use of the Internet and mobile phones to express and protest) are all media spectacles that have speciﬁc Chinese characteristics. As China enters the new millennium, these provide rich social texts for the examination of the post-socialist condition of Chinese modernity. This book investigates the centrality of media spectacles in contemporary Chinese media culture – their position as sites of contestation over identity, citizenship and ethics. It uses a series of case studies – the new millennium celebration, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) reportage, urbanites’ uses of the new media around acquired immunodeﬁciency syndrome (AIDS) and SARS, and Falun Gong’s media campaign with the Chinese state – to illustrate contesting narratives of Chinese modernity. The chapters detail the complicated dynamics of contestation, conjunction and incorporation between the state and the non-state in their creative production and use of media in their old and new forms.1 Chinese post-socialist modernity is produced and explored at the interplay of such contesting narratives. Chinese media culture refers to a myriad of forces that shape Chinese politics, economy, society and everyday life within the residual socialist system (albeit with capitalist tendencies). It describes a post-socialist media sphere organised around the production, consumption and circulation of media texts, images, symbols, stories and events. The media culture excels in producing spectacles that embody the contradictions and incoherence of post-socialism

2

Introduction

in China. Television, newspaper, the Internet and mobile phones are all part of the post-socialist media culture. They produce spectacles that are not tools of paciﬁcation, but are sites of participation and contestation. As such, contemporary Chinese media culture is essential to discussions about Chinese politics, society, culture and everyday life – or the conjoining of these spheres as narratives of Chinese modernity. Studies of Chinese media culture have become increasingly popular and more sophisticated over the last decade. There has been a marked change from a liberal view, which views Chinese media as equivalent to communist propaganda, to a more balanced perspective that views Chinese media as a combination of the ‘creative industries’ and ‘architect state model’ (Donald and Keane 2002; Keane 2006; Su 1994). Clearly, Chinese media are integral to China’s structural transformations in the age of globalisation; it is also part and parcel of the state and the project of national re-imagining under way in the reform era. In fact, the reach of the state in media discourse deserves special attention, as media and cultural transformation in post-Mao China has facilitated the modernisation of its propaganda system (Brady 2005, 2006). Meanwhile, the modernisation of media and communication technologies has enabled non-state players to engage creatively with the state. There is no doubt that an open discussion on the relationship between the state and the non-state, manifested through their contesting but also conjunctive narratives and representations of cultural transformation in contemporary China, is important and timely. While a socio-political economy approach is adopted, with a few exceptions (such as Lee 2003; Zhao 2007), current theoretical perspectives on Chinese media and communication have not fully interrogated their cultural and historical aspects. Moreover, existing studies on Chinese critical theory have not taken account of the centrality of media spectacles in contemporary Chinese media culture as key sites for examining the cultural logic of Chinese post-socialism. I address these gaps by integrating Chinese media and communication studies with critical theories about Chinese modernity, on the one hand, and problematising the interplay of the state and the non-state through a detailed elaboration of the dynamics and complications of such interplay, on the other. I adopt an interdisciplinary methodology that combines theories and methods from media studies and critical theory. These are complemented by those from Chinese studies, particularly cultural studies in and about China. This book locates critical cultural history and theory about Chinese media and culture within the framework of globalisation, using both Chinese and English sources. I use close textual and discursive techniques to analyse and contextualise media texts produced in the spectacles. These techniques point towards socio-historical issues of Chinese politics, culture and society in the new millennium. Textual analyses of media reports, television programmes, videos, newsletters, Internet postings, mobile phone text messages and onsite observations are used to study the discursive practices of the state, journalists, urbanites and Falun Gong.

Introduction

3

This integrated approach enables one to adopt a broad perspective to examine contemporary Chinese media culture while attending to detailed analyses. The focus on everyday life and its socio-cultural agents further enriches the depth of the subject matter. These agents – represented by the Party-state, new media users, journalists and Falun Gong practitioners – participate in the indeterminate moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ and contribute to the culture of convergence in contemporary Chinese cultural production.2 As active agents, they each contribute to the construction of the ‘circuit of culture’ (du Gay 1997: 3) and the transformation of culture in the Chinese mediasphere. Their relationships are shaped by their creative uses of media in the processes of media regulation, production, circulation and consumption. New media and communication technologies especially have facilitated the enactment of creativity (particularly at the individual level) and contributed to a convergence culture that describes the collision of old and new media, the intersection of grassroots and corporate media, and the interaction of media producers and media consumers (Jenkins 2006). Such an integrated approach to Chinese media culture opens up new ways of considering Chinese media and communication without the dichotomies of media production versus consumption, local versus global, or control versus resistance. This approach draws our attention to the centrality of various agents in contemporary China’s cultural transformation. It also points out the seminal role of creativity in any consideration of the cultural aspects of media work. In the chapters that follow, I examine the complex and dynamic relationships between media structure, agents and messages across their multifaceted embodiments in old and new media forms. I explore how different types of media spectacles have highlighted the creativity, pragmatism, resourcefulness and predicament of these agents in their struggles to manipulate media production, circulation, consumption and representation. I also investigate how creativity has underscored the eﬀorts of the socio-cultural agents in shaping and articulating their identity, subjectivity, citizenship and ethics. ‘Creativity’ – a new buzzword among Chinese policymakers, cultural and media industry professionals and entrepreneurs – has been used to describe the upstream of cultural production. The idea of creativity has been championed as a new niche in China’s innovation and national development, a vantage point to celebrate consumer freedom and artistic expression, and a new way to understand China’s transition to a high-end cultural content and service provider in the global trade.3 Contrary to Adorno’s cultural pessimism, the discourse of creativity is underpinned by optimism about the ‘culturalization of the economy’ (Flew 2005). Despite some guarded observations, its focus is overwhelmingly on the economic aspect of interest to an elitist minority. ‘Creativity’ has a wider application in the examination of media and cultural transformation in contemporary China. It not only feeds on the ‘artistic’ sensibility of the ‘cultural intermediaries’ (artists, designers and advertising

4

Introduction

agents, etc.) (Nixon 1997) or the ‘innovative’ strategy of the post-socialist party-state to modernise its thought work; it also invokes the everyday ‘marginal public/private spaces where new cultural ideas, patterns and objects emerge’ (O’Connor and Gu 2006: 280). In trying to ‘conjure up marketable products that appeal to and engage people,’ creative industries are also ‘a social force in creating possible practices and institutions’ (J. Wu 2006: 367). The discourse of creativity calls for a re-examination of the relationship between empowerment and control, hegemony and counter-hegemony, freedom and suppression. It calls forth the diﬀerent agents in China’s ‘great new leap forward’ (Keane 2006: 285). Moreover, it calls for an interrogation of how these agents interplay with one another in producing China’s cultural transformation. Such interplay signiﬁes a collision as well as a convergence of media production and consumption, corporate initiative and individual creativity, and state enterprise and non-state manoeuvre. ‘Creativity’ plays a pivotal role in the emergent convergence culture that has characterised Chinese post-socialist media culture. In this introduction, I map out the broad issues related to the creative articulation and manipulation of history, culture and politics in Chinese media ideology. This ideology is characterised by a culture of convergence. As the Chinese case demonstrates, convergence is driven and contested by a variety of forces, including an industry desperate for audience share and maximal proﬁt, a consumer market that privileges active audiences and media participants, a media intelligentsia willing to intervene in national politics, a partystate seeking ideological legitimacy and political control, and a transnational mediasphere that aﬀects domestic changes. Chinese media and cultural transformation is implicated in the discourses of convergence and creativity.

Post-socialism in the post-New Era The term ‘post-New Era’ (hou xin shiqi) was originally proposed by Chinese intellectuals to describe the rupture in Chinese literature in the post-1989 era (Wang 1992; Zhang 1992; Zhao 1992). It has increasingly been used as a cultural framework to mark the paradigmatic change in Chinese cultural discussions in the post-Mao era. It responds to ‘New Era’ (xin shiqi), a socio-political construction to describe the cultural trend of the 1980s, also known as the reform era or the post-revolutionary era. The New Era was characterised by a sense of social and cultural crisis and an urgency shared by Chinese political and intellectual elites to critically analyse the process of modernity in China. Many scholars have given detailed analyses of the genesis and development of a great cultural discussion known as the ‘Cultural Fever’ (wenhua re) in the 1980s (see Wang 1996; Zhang 1997). Despite its romanticisation and idealisation of Western knowledge and Enlightenment ideals and its anti-tradition and counter-oﬃcial stance,4 the Cultural Fever is characterised by an undercurrent of nationalistic sentiment that is both compelling and simplistic. Modern Chinese

Introduction

5

intellectual history has been characterised by a nationalistic desire to transform China into a modern nation-state. The nationalistic desire is expressed, on the one hand, as ‘a radical attitude about modernisation embracing the existing modern as an absolute, universal order’ and, on the other hand, as ‘a siniﬁcation impulse to restore a past cultural self-suﬃciency – including a self-motivated course of evolution and transformation – in an equally absolute, universalistic manner’ (X. Zhang 1997: 90). In the words of Mayfair Yang, ‘[m]odern China is the product of the conjoining of modernist discourses originating in the West and native institutions … , historical social conditions … , and native reaction-formation’ (quoted in Ong 1997: 171). The dichotomies of modernity and tradition, China and the West, have characterised the inherently nationalistic, yet contradictory, intellectual narratives of Chinese modernity. These narratives have taken a populist turn in the postNew Era when, more than ever before, China is integrated with global capitalism. This populist turn was largely a result of Deng Xiaoping’s endorsement of accelerated economic reforms during his famous ‘Southern Tour’ in 1992.5 Vigorous economic development has seen the increasing depoliticisation of Chinese society. The consuming masses have started to take central stage in the national life, while intellectuals (zhishi fenzi or knowledgeable elements) have been marginalised and socially alienated. As Zhang Yiwu (1994: 115) observes, ‘the poetic aspirations for a “civilisation” and “life of abundance” designed by the discourse of modernity now become a realistic choice in the everyday sphere itself ’. The common folk are the ‘biggest players of the 1990s as they ﬂy involuntarily from the iron hold of the double hegemony of the past – the historical rule of the Confucian state and the pure ideology of socialism on the one hand, and the “knowledgeable elements” on the other’ (Wang 1996: 117). The post-New Era media transformations and cultural discussions are entwined with the increasing secularisation of Chinese society, the rise of popular culture, rampant consumerism, the marginalisation of intellectuals and elite culture, and China’s integration into global capitalism. They express the eﬀorts by the state and non-state players to come to grips with the post-socialist and post-modern cultural space that is no longer circumscribed by universalist, modernist concepts of truth and progress alone, but a space characterised by convergence of ideologies and discourses. Post-socialism determines the political, social and cultural conditions of the inherently contradictory and incoherent narratives of Chinese modernity. These narratives, which form the backbone of this book, are implicated in socialism (or rather capitalism) with Chinese characteristics. Arif Dirlik ﬁrst proposed the term ‘post-socialism’ to describe Chinese socialism in the post-reform era, referring to both China’s revolutionary history and global capitalism. He argues that post-socialism captures a new phase in the existing socialist system where: (a) socialism has lost its coherence as a metatheory of politics because of the attenuation of the socialist vision in its historical unfolding; partly

6

Introduction because of a perceived need on the part of socialist states to articulate ‘actually existing socialism’ to the demands of a capitalist world order, but also because of the vernacularisation of socialism in its absorption into diﬀerent national contexts; (b) the articulation of socialism to capitalism is conditioned by the structure of ‘actually existing socialism’ in any particular context which is the historical premise of all such articulation; and (c) this premise stands guard over the process of articulation to ensure that it does not result in the restoration of capitalism. (Dirlik 1989: 364)

Post-socialism relates to Chinese communist evolution, which regarded socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism. It also refers to the post-Mao reform era when socialism had to be reinvented, nationalised and localised in order to make claims upon the present situation. The future is no longer imagined in socialist terms; nor can it be imagined as a capitalist modernity. It is the projection and interrogation of the future, which does ‘not necessarily imply a return to capitalism or the abandonment of “actually existing socialism”’ that justiﬁes the description of the contradictions implied in ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as post-socialist (Dirlik 1989: 377). The post-socialist condition implicates residual forces of the past (socialism) with emerging forces of the present (capitalism) in China’s self-reinvention and renewal under the new historical condition. It indicates continuity with, as well as a departure from, the socialist legacy and cultural tradition of the past. It also signiﬁes integration with, as well as resistance to, global capitalism. This post-socialist condition is further complicated at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century when China is becoming further integrated into the global capitalist system and at the same time is increasingly staking out native cultural resources for imagining the future. An array of forces, ranging from the pre-modern to modern and post-modern, from Chinese to non-Chinese, and from socialist maxim to capitalist axis, have rendered Chinese post-socialism a product of hybridity, non-synchronicity and contradictions. This situation justiﬁes the characterisation of Chinese post-socialism as ‘post-modern’. As Sheldon Lu (2001: 8) writes, post-modernism is ‘the emergent cultural logic in contemporary China’, within a residual socialist system and a dominant capitalist world system. As such, the contemporary Chinese culture is both post-socialist and post-modern. The association of post-modernism with the cultural logic of Chinese postsocialism has been a central concern in critics of contemporary Chinese culture. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (1997: 8) suggest grasping Chinese post-modernity ‘not only in its relationship to modernity in general but also in the relationship to a socialist and revolutionary modernity’. To push Dirlik and Zhang’s idea further, Xiaobin Yang (2002: 245) argues for an understanding of Chinese post-modernism as a post-Mao–Deng politicocultural paradigm that ‘implies simultaneously a preoccupation with and a deviation from the original/primal’. As ‘a parody of modernity’, Chinese

Introduction

7

post-modernity involves self-reference and reﬂexivity; it produces a postmodern subjectivity that ‘breaches the absolute, rational, and totalistic oppression of both the politico-historical Mao–Deng and the culturo-literary modern’ (Yang 2002: 246). Post-socialism marks a discontinuity with the Maoist socialist tradition while retaining enough room for continuity with tradition – not just the socialist past but also Chinese cultural tradition and some aspects of Western tradition (such as modern nationalism). It is characterised by self-innovation and ideological hybridisation. In the process, culture and history are embraced as an ideology as well as a commodity. It is reinvented as an essential part of a packaged ideology that is post-socialist and post-modern. This ideology, which is examined further in Chapters One and Two, provides a broad theoretical framework to investigate the dynamics at the operational and everyday levels in Chinese media and cultural production. Such a reinvention is itself a reﬂection of and reaction to the developments in the global mediasphere. As an eager player in the world’s media and cultural industries as well as an important ideological apparatus of the party-state, Chinese media have gone through a series of reforms and consolidations that results in a new bureaucratic–business–publicity network.

Media conglomeration in the era of globalisation Chinese media have undergone a series of consolidations and conglomerations since the mid-1990s – ﬁrst in the press and then in the broadcast and communications sectors. Media conglomeration featured top-down administrative power, rather than bottom-up market forces, to streamline media resources, management and operation. It was characterised as ‘messy, protracted, confusing, and confused, littered with odd, even counterintuitive institutions, structures, and practices’ (Zhao 2000: 3). The process was implemented by the state to strengthen control over the expanding media and communications industries in the name of protecting Chinese native industries against foreign media giants. It also aimed to prepare them for global competition when China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO). The messy and ‘mass’ media restructure started with the formation of the Guangzhou Daily Press Group in 1996. It gained momentum in 1999 when Table I.1 Growth of Chinese television and radio industries, 1980–2005

TV Radio

1980

1986

1992

1998

2001

2004

2005

38 106

392 278

591 812

3280 1363

429 296

282 314

273 302

Source: Lull (1997: 6); Pei (1994: 170); SARFT (2006).

Coverage rate as of 2005 95.81% 94.48%

8

Introduction

radio, television, ﬁlm and Internet were all recruited in the conglomeration mania that resulted from the issuing of ‘Document 82’.6 Under the principles of ‘six favourables’ and ‘ﬁve no-changes’, the restructure featured streamlining broadcasting channel resources, upgrading media and communications technology and, more importantly, forming media groups at both national and provincial levels.7 Starting from the Hunan Radio, TV and Film Group (formed in December 2000), all provinces and regions streamlined the previous scattered and small-scale local broadcast stations and channels within their prefectures to form media groups. These groups managed broadcast, print, ﬁlm, advertisement, the Internet, exhibition centres, real estate and cultural groups. They reported to and were supervised by local propaganda departments and State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) oﬃces. As a result of conglomeration, the numbers of television and radio stations decreased dramatically compared with those before 1998 (see Table I.1). Their coverage rates and proﬁt margins, however, increased equally dramatically. The largest media conglomerate is the Beijing-based China Radio, Film and TV Group. Formed in December 2001, which paralleled China’s move into the WTO, this group comprises China Central Television (CCTV), China National Radio, China Radio International, China Radio, Film and TV Exchange Centre and some state ﬁlm and cable network units. The second largest group is the Shanghai Media Group (SMG), whose objective is to position itself as an alternative to CCTV. Formed in 2000, it includes Shanghai Television, Shanghai Oriental Television and many radio stations and advertising, marketing and exhibition centres. The SMG model is informed by global business trends, particularly that of Rupert Murdoch’s BskyB. The group has a strong international reach in distribution management and joint venture initiatives. Media conglomeration has proved to be the most eﬀective means of ensuring the central control of media resources while generating maximum proﬁts for party press and broadcast stations at the expense of local, ‘small’ media (Lee 2003; Zhao 2000). Conglomeration is a political imperative led by the party-state in response to the perceived cultural and media imperialism after China joined the WTO. It takes place under the institutional umbrella of the party-state, and has local, national and global considerations. Conglomeration combines a resistant consciousness, a victim complex and a pathos of heroic nationalism. The conﬂux of opposite possibilities facilitates the strategic alliance and convergence of state interests and popular imperatives, local designs and global ambitions. This provides a precondition for the emergence of new forms of hegemony over media and cultural production in contemporary China. But counter-hegemony tendencies have always followed hegemony in any political context. From Raymond Williams to Stuart Hall and Michel de Certeau, critical theorists constantly remind us of the counter-hegemonic tendencies in popular culture. Following this line of argument, James Lull points out that such tendencies ‘permeate mediated texts’ from both within

Introduction

9

and without the media industries (Lull 2000: 64). The rise of the popular and its assertive presence in contemporary Chinese cultural production can be viewed as part of the counter-hegemonic process. But whether the counterhegemonic texts of the popular constitute the ‘unoﬃcial’ deserves further discussion.

From active audience to creative commons The issue of the ‘popular’ has been central to contemporary media and cultural studies, especially in studies on active audiences. Empirical research in ‘active audience’ studies has demonstrated that people are not dupes who are easily fooled and manipulated by media producers, but are active decoders of media messages. But ‘active’ does not mean ‘powerful’. Similarly, the counter-hegemonic practices in popular media do not necessarily translate into resistance. Rather, studying media audiences and, to a larger degree, ‘the popular’ is ‘not interesting or meaningful in its own right, but becomes so only when it points towards a broader critical understanding of the peculiarities of contemporary culture’ (Ang 1996: 4). Before the notion of ‘audience’ (guanzhong or shouzhong) was introduced into China, ﬁrst among communication researchers in 1978 and later by the Party mouthpiece CCTV in 1979, there were only ‘masses’ (qunzhong) and ‘comrades’ (tongzhi) in Chinese media ideology. The ideational change from ‘masses’ to ‘audience’ is a deﬁning moment in Chinese media culture. Zhang Yong has noted that the replacement, or rather conﬂation, of ‘masses’ with ‘audience’ functions as ‘an anchor for a constellation of ideas that in some signiﬁcant degree articulates with a particular media system arrangement and its resulting practices’ (Zhang 2000: 618). The result of the ideational change is the rise of audience studies, exempliﬁed by the incorporation of audience rating and audience survey practices into media organisational and operational routines. With the ideational and operational changes in the Chinese media industry, there is also a rise in audience participation programmes on television and radio broadcasting. These programmes encourage audiences to express their opinions, comment and criticise issues of common concern, thus fostering a rights consciousness, especially the ideas of ‘right to know’ (zhiqing quan) and ‘right to speak’ (fayan quan). In Chinese communist history, there was no concept of the people’s ‘right to know’, let alone the concept of informed citizenship. People were regarded as ‘masses’ who needed to be told and guided by the party and its representatives. The ‘right to know’ was introduced in the 1980s by liberal intellectuals who used it to argue for freedom of the press in China.8 By the mid1990s, the concept of the ‘right to know,’ if not fully delivered, had been established in Chinese media ideology, even though the freedom of the press was still an unfulﬁlled project to ﬁght for. The ‘right to speak’ was fostered in the development of audience discussion and participation programmes in the 1990s. In those programmes, people

10

Introduction

were encouraged to participate in discussion panels and discuss issues of common concern. Direct participation from audiences outside the studio was also encouraged through such means as phone calls, text messages via beepers and mobile phones, and online discussion forums. Audience discussion programmes, such as CCTV’s Talk As It Is (Shi hua shi shuo), focus on socio-cultural issues with a personal touch. They mix personal dramas with political issues, and use ordinary people as central players to discuss and debate issues of popular concern. Investigative and current aﬀairs programmes such as the News Focus (Jiaodian fangtan) have also started to function as venues of public debate, and feature audience discussions and interviews. As a result, a sense of rights, obligations and common values has been nurtured among television audiences (X. Li 2002). Such a development has aided scholarship on active audience studies. It shows that mass media in China have never operated as a well-oiled totalitarian machine envisaged by cold-war warriors (Polumbaum 2001); that Chinese audiences have always been active decoders of oﬃcial messages through such tactics as reading between the lines and eliciting oppositional decoding (Friedman 1995: 295–310); and that audiences ‘move through diﬀerent reading zones, engage in diﬀerent modes of reading and adopt diﬀerent reading strategies in diﬀerent segments of his or her everyday life’ (Ma 2000: 30). Young people especially have played an important role in generating an unoﬃcial and ‘provocative imagined culture’ in urban China (Lull 1991: 48). The active audience thesis recognises the creativity and resourcefulness of people in consuming the mass media. The studies have succeeded in turning ‘away from the habit of thinking in terms of what the media do to people’, to use James Halloran’s often quoted remark, towards the idea of ‘what people do with the media’ (quoted in Morley 1992: 51). Consumption is no longer considered as a domain of ‘passivity’ but central to the cultural production of a symbolic order of everyday life and politics. This is a salient feature of post-modernity. As Fuat Firat and Nikhilesh Dholakia have aptly summarised, In modernity, the subject (the consumer being) encounters the objects (products) as distinct and distanced from her/himself. In postmodern consumption, the consumer renders products part of her/himself, becoming part of the experience of being with products. (Firat and Dholakia 1998: 96–97) This post-modern view on consumption helps us to rethink the concept of ‘active audience’ in contemporary media production. Being central to corporate concerns (Ang 1996), ‘active audience’, however, does not entail a two-way ﬂow in media production. Despite its celebration of the audience as active decoders, it still implies a degree of passivity in media production. As the Chinese case demonstrates, stories narrated in the mass media are mediated, selected, constructed and scripted by media authorities rather than

Introduction

11

by ordinary people, despite them being ‘active’. In those stories, the party’s voice is still much stronger than the people’s voice (Chan 2002: 46). The introduction and popularisation of new media and communication technologies in the everyday lives of the common people has started to change this situation. People do not need to wait for, or rely on, the mainstream media to report news and tell stories about their lives. They can authorise their own stories and spread news on the Internet and through mobile phones, without the technical restrictions of a television studio setting or the spatial constraints of traditional face-to-face communications. In this new communication setting, the ‘active audiences’ exercise their right to know and right to speak as co-authors of media stories with media professionals. The interactivity between professionals and amateurs points towards a convergence culture that is taking root in the Chinese mediasphere. This interactivity has seen the convergence of media producers and consumers (the ‘prosumers’) and of professionals and amateurs (the ‘proams’), particularly in news production and circulation, through online posting, mobile phone texting and blogging. As Marshall McLuhan (1967) observed, ‘the medium is the message’. New media of communication create new possibilities for creative commons. I use ‘commons’ in a double sense, referring to the common people as well as the shared space in the mediasphere. ‘Creative commons’ describes the prosumers and proams as creative agents in post-modern cultural production; it also points towards participatory media’s role in creating a public sphere that facilitates such cultural production. This theme underlines the discussion on Chinese media and cultural transformation in the pages that follow. The new culture of convergence characterises the emergent ‘knowledge culture’. Knowledge culture nurtures cultural competencies among the common people who produce, circulate and reproduce news and stories. Cultural consumption thus points to the centrality of popular agents in cultural production. As Pierre Levy points out, the emergent knowledge culture is gradually altering the ways in which the commodity culture operates. Although knowledge culture cannot operate outside commodity culture, the former, while emerging from popular new media use, serves as the ‘invisible and intangible engine’ to propel the dismantling of the order of the old commodity culture (Levy 1997: 237). Play, interactivity and participation are embedded practices in the dismantling of the old order and the construction of the new knowledge culture. Such an interpretation of creative commons highlights the centrality of new media and popular agents in the terrain of cultural production. But it should also be pointed out that the concept of creative commons does not lead to a celebration of the popular or the new convergence culture, just as ‘active’ does not necessarily equate to ‘resistance’. As the following chapters demonstrate, the Chinese cultural scene is scattered with residual, dominant and emergent forces. The encounter and interplay among the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces produce the cultural condition and contradictions of post-socialism.

12

Introduction

Chapter outline and case studies This book takes a macro-perspective on China’s cultural transformation through micro-analyses of four major case studies. These four case studies, which are loosely categorised as the media event, the news event, media stories and the media campaign war, represent four aspects of Chinese media spectacles. The concept of media spectacles, as proposed by Douglas Kellner, describes the ‘phenomena of media culture that embody contemporary society’s basic values, serve to initiate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conﬂict resolution’ (Kellner 2003: 2). It is based on the ‘society of the spectacle’ thesis proposed by Guy Debord (1994) to describe a consumer and media society organised around the capitalist mode of production and consumption of commodities, images and events. Kellner argues that we live in an age of technocapitalism, which is marked by ‘a synthesis of capital and technology and the information and entertainment industries, all of which is producing an “infotainment society” and spectacle culture’ (Kellner 2003: 11). As one of the organising principles and key features of contemporary media cultures, the concept of media spectacle incorporates production, reproduction, circulation and consumption of cultural products and forms, social relations, identity and subjectivity, and modes of experience and existence. Almost every aspect of the mediated experience in everyday life – from moral panic to media panic (Shevory 2004: 6), from watching television to surﬁng the Internet and sending text messages from a mobile phone, from consuming the latest technologies to staging media campaigns – can be viewed as constituting a certain kind of media spectacle. Watching politics, watching borders, watching sex and watching AIDS are all media spectacles in themselves (Garber et al. 1993). Media extravaganzas about news, television programmes, commodities, sports, political events, scandals and terror war can also be viewed as media spectacles that invade almost every corner of the world. Media spectacles dramatise the various forms of interplay between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces. In China, the newly formed media conglomerates, although still bounded by their political obligations to the party-state, play a central role in the spectacularisation of politics, culture and everyday life. This process is complicated by the participation of many heterogeneous forces coming from local and global agents and formations. The interplay and interpenetration between these forces and actors form ‘heterogeneous dialogues’ associated with globalisation (Appadurai 1993). This book examines four carefully chosen cases to foreground four types of socio-cultural agents in the making of Chinese media spectacles. These four agents are the state, the urbanites, the investigative journalists and the exiled Falun Gong. They each call forth a diﬀerent dimension in Chinese media and cultural transformation – the state policies and ideology in media management, the impact of new media use on cultural production, intellectual politics in generating a new

Introduction

13

knowledge culture and the transnational repercussion of and impact on national politics. These case studies simultaneously invoke considerations of identity, subjectivity, citizenship and ethics. The book is organised as follows. Chapter One attempts to contextualise the trajectories of studies on Chinese media and modernity within the historical background of China’s structural transformations in the last two decades. It shows how the discourses of interplay and identity politics are brought out to respond to China’s post-socialist transﬁguration. It also examines counter-narratives of Chinese modernity as a tripartite concept and situates them within the thesis of interplay. This chapter maps out the theoretical coordinates for the four case studies. Chapter Two examines the new millennium celebration in 1999/2000 as a media event. This illuminates the interplay of the state narrative with intellectual and popular narratives about nostalgia, consumerism and nationalism. It follows Dayan and Katz’s (1992) deﬁnition of ‘media events’ to show how the celebration was presented as a great and exceptional occasion to celebrate national unity and reinforce the ‘unicorporate communication order’ scripted by the state.9 The aim of forming an organic solidarity among the Chinese people was realised through the cultural-cum-political rituals of collecting and igniting the China holy ﬁre and counting down to zero. All these rituals were designed to incorporate diﬀerences and conﬂicts into a state-engineered rejuvenation discourse. The momentary conﬂuence of the organic solidarity was not without its tensions and contradictions. Accordingly, nostalgia, nationalism and consumerism need to be rethought, not by the ways in which they are manifested, but by the internal logic of Chinese post-socialism. Chapter Three takes up a second type of media spectacle, media stories. While the media event is about national identity and oﬃcial time/space, media stories are about mediated experiences of the creative commons and unoﬃcial time/space. ‘Media stories’ refer to popular and sometimes unoﬃcial scripts of social realities produced by ordinary people themselves, whether as prosumers or proams. This is diﬀerent from Wanning Sun’s deﬁnition (2001: 32), which views the media story as a story of and about a ‘slice of life’ of ordinary Chinese scripted by journalists. As active agents, in my argument, the creative commons script their own stories about AIDS and SARS via the use of new media. The ideational change from ‘masses’ to ‘audience’, rights consciousness (as expressed by people’s ‘right to know’ and ‘right to express’) and the rise of prosumers and proams all lead to the reconstruction of audiences and consumers as active and creative agents in cultural production. I regard the ‘audience’ or ‘active audience’ as a social and political construct. In Ien Ang’s words, it is ‘not an ontological given, but a socially constituted and institutionally produced category’ (Ang 1991: 3). In Chapter Three, I use media stories about AIDS (in the case of Li Jiaming) and SARS (in the case of Sun Zhigang and text messages about

14

Introduction

SARS) to demonstrate how talking, linking and clicking have become technologies of re-subjectiﬁcation for the post-Mao urban populace. Popular media uses of the Internet and mobile phone communication are conducive to a culture of circulation with both subcultural and transnational signiﬁcance. Such circulation entails both reﬂexivity and playfulness, through which subjectivity and citizenship are re-conﬁgured. Chapter Four uses SARS reportage as a news event in order to illuminate Chinese journalism and intellectual politics. The ‘news event’ is often a ‘hijacked’ event, sometimes within the happenings of a media event. Unlike the media event, the news event is ‘not preplanned but news-worthy’ (Dayan and Katz 1992: 9). The summit meeting between Deng and Gorbachev in 1989 was a media event, whereas the student protest at Tiananmen Square was a hijacked news event that eventually took the central stage as a media spectacle in the global media vectors. In spring 2003, the tenth National People’s Congress and tenth People’s Political Consultative Conference was a media event, whereas the outbreak of SARS was a news event.10 The outbreak of SARS provided Chinese journalists with an opportunity to undertake journalism as a political and intellectual enterprise, or the ‘sensemaking practice of modernity’, to use John Hartley’s words (1996: 33), during a national crisis. The focus on journalists and intellectual politics allows one to focus on the agents of cultural capital, on how it is created, encoded, circulated and appropriated. This enables one to shift the focus from media institutions and oﬃcial narrative, or popular resistance, oppositional decoding and consumption of media products alone as a possible force for change, to media intellectuals who are in a vantage role as the ‘legitimate’ cultural producers within the system. As a sense-making practice, journalism should not be viewed as a specialised media practice but as a cultural practice of the intelligent commons whose creativity and resourcefulness underlines the collective enterprise to record and interpret their living history. Chapter Five brings together the central arguments of both Chapters Three and Four to put forward the concept of media citizenship. It shows how the interplay between the state and non-state (represented by new media users) can eﬀect the re-formation of subjectivity, identity and citizenship. Unlike the media event that commands a ‘mandatory ritual of citizenship’ (Alexander and Jacobs 1998: 27), the news event and media stories imply a mobile and ﬂexible type of citizenship. Media citizenship describes the ﬂowing and unstable nature of citizenship in contemporary China. Despite its limitations, it represents an important step in the Chinese people’s long march towards fully informed democratic citizenship. Meanwhile, the creative commons becomes the primary battleﬁeld where the ‘big’ politics of the state and the ‘small’ politics of the individual are contested. Chapter Six uses the media campaign war between Falun Gong and the Chinese state to illustrate the transnational dimension as well as hegemonic processes of Chinese media spectacles. Media campaigns have been a deﬁning characteristic of Chinese political culture. From its earliest days, the Chinese

Introduction

15

Communist Party (CCP) has been able to harness the mass media to propagate its policies, build social consensus and mobilise the population in mass campaigns against class enemies (Hawkins 1982). In the post-Mao era, the mass media still remain a powerful ideological apparatus of the state, even though the ‘propaganda state’ has loosened (not relinquished) control over ‘thought work’ (Lynch 1999). However, the mass media are no longer monopolised by the state alone. They can be an eﬀective tool ‘to challenge or defend the legitimacy of those who claim to embody the political center’ (Wasserstrom 1995: 214). The creative uses of the media by media intellectuals and audiences have empowered them to conﬁgure alternative identities and subjectivities. Likewise, the creative uses of the media by oppositional groups, especially those outside the boundary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) such as Falun Gong, have seen the emergence of a new stage in the PRC’s history of media campaigns: the state is no longer the only body that can stage a media campaign against class enemies or cults; it is challenged and attacked by an opponent body that is capable of staging an equally vigorous and sustained counter-media campaign. The media campaign war surfaces in the clashes between the two bodies. The media campaign war incurs resistance, attack and counter-attack. It brings to light the diﬀerences and conﬂicts in the representational and body politics of the two parties. Both sides can be hegemonic in their ideologies and representational politics. Through the counter-media campaign, Falun Gong has eﬀectively sustained itself as a civil disobedience movement that can mobilise its members, sympathisers and supporters to take to the streets, gather in public squares and participate in symbolically charged performances, demonstrations and rituals both in and outside China. Falun Gong represents a historical force that splits the politics of the self and the nation from that of the state. Chapter Seven summarises the central themes of the previous chapters, and at the same time re-interrogates the four case studies by addressing four key questions: What have the case studies illuminated about the narratives and counter-narratives of Chinese modernity? What are the options that people face in order to improve their existence as a nation and humanity? What is the implication of the split or reconciliation in narrating the nation for the future? What is the vantage point and perspective that we should take in order to provide timely critiques of Chinese media, culture and society? As the case studies demonstrate, the interplay of the state and non-state illustrates the contestation as well as the accommodation between the hegemonic and the heterogeneous forces around identity, citizenship and ethics. Like any living and dynamic culture, Chinese media culture is a chaotic mix of contradictory representations, practices and ideologies, all of which are constantly changing. Enquiries into Chinese media, culture, politics and society are more complex and complicated than the case studies suggest. It is my aim, in this book, to mark a fresh beginning in informing Chinese politics, culture, society and everyday life in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

1

Chinese media and modernity

An increasing body of literature on Chinese media development has been published in the last decade or so. These studies recognise that Chinese media is no longer a tool of class struggle but instead a tool ‘in service of modernization’ (Lull 1991: 4). The ‘modernisation’ refers to economic modernisation, but inevitably infers cultural transformation. China’s structural transformations since 1978 provide the historical background for media reforms to take place. Through these reforms and transformations, Chinese media have evolved from the communist ‘commandist’ party-press system (Lee 1990) to a modern media industry that is essential to China’s strategic plan for sustained development. In the meantime, scholars have begun to question any simplistic dichotomies – such as global versus local, state versus market, and party versus people – in contemporary cultural production in China (such as Y. Zhao 1998). Cultural transformation in contemporary China is endowed with innovation and creativity by various social and cultural agents. These agents navigate the endless points of cultural multiplexes through representation, production, consumption and circulation. As such, interplay rather than simpliﬁed dichotomies is brought to the centre of media and cultural transformation in China.

From dichotomies to interplay The structural transformations of Chinese media since the 1990s have been realised through three major processes. These processes are marketisation, decentralisation and socialisation. They are intertwined with one another, with the Party-state, people, market and globalisation forces meshing at their centre. These reform processes were initially a state-led, top-down ‘peaceful evolution’, as in the case of television (Huang 1994). This peaceful evolution was soon marked by internal ambiguities and contradictions. The tension between continued state control and centrifugal market forces is a prominent one. It has produced a logic of ‘two-in-one’. Like the logic of ‘one country, two systems’, Chinese media have been characterised as ‘one channel, two systems’ (Redl and Simons 2002), ‘between the party line and the bottom line’ (Y. Zhao 1998) or ‘between politics and the market’ (Polumbaum 2001).

Chinese media and modernity

17

As a result, Chinese journalism falls into a ‘tug of war’, as journalists struggle between the party and the market, central power and local autonomy, and political hegemony and popular demands (He 2000a). Marketisation of Chinese mass media started in the 1980s, with the rapid growth of advertising in the mass media. It allowed media organisations to seek institutional independence from the state via ﬁnancial independence, which eventually led to the end of state subsidies in the late 1990s. This produced a competitive media culture in which the party press must compete with the non-party press for survival (Wu 2000). All media companies vie for audience share in the world’s biggest media market and compete with each other to provide a ‘news–information–entertainment–trivia smorgasbord’ (Polumbaum 2001: 270). More and more media organisations have resorted to the stock market to enlist domestic and foreign investments, either by buying oﬀ an already enlisted company as an entrance to the stock market (the so-called ‘listing via buying a shell’, mai ke shang shi) or by separating non-news sectors from the state-owned media businesses and listing in the stock market as separate companies. Marketisation produces ‘new money’ that is centred in the urban and coastal areas. It also leads to the second feature, decentralisation. Decentralisation allows various ministries, bureaux and local governments to set up their own media outlets, thus diversifying Chinese media within the Party-state system (Wu 2000). It also allows non-state sectors – including private, semi-governmental, intellectual organisations and foreign investors – to engage in media content businesses such as sports, animation, ﬁlm and television dramas. These non-state media content providers have secured reasonable market shares in big cities and coastal provinces (Feng 2002). Decentralisation expands the space for media production, but has not weakened the state monopoly over media distribution as the state still monopolises all distribution channels and licensing. Decentralisation, however, creates a ‘turf war’ situation where print media must compete with broadcast media, national with local and regional media, domestic with foreign media, and even between diﬀerent ministries – such as the rivalry over Internet development between the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) and the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) (Harrison 2002; Ure and Liang 2000). With the concurrent media consolidation and conglomeration, this situation has been eased. But it is oﬀset by the third trend, socialisation. Socialisation responds directly to the market. It emphasises audience needs and social eﬀects; it endorses the growth of new forms of media. These include the ‘mass appeal’ media (semi-independent, market-oriented press including tabloids), which have experienced rapid expansion in both the number of titles and national circulation (Zhao 2000). They also include the so-called ‘micro-media’, such as music (especially pop and rock), compact discs (including the illegal, cut CDs from the West or the dakou CDs) and VCD (including pirated VCDs of Hong Kong artists) (Fung 2003; Harris

18

Chinese media and modernity

2005; Kloet 2005; Lee and Huang 2002).1 These new forms of media have increasingly taken transnational, transcultural and translocal features and operations. New media and communication technologies have aided the increasing socialisation of Chinese media production. In an attempt to gain ‘technical legitimacy’ and economic legitimacy, the Chinese government has taken a series of measures since 1993 – including the projects of ‘Government Online’, ‘Enterprises Online’ and ‘Household Online’ – to make Internet growth part of the national strategy of sustained development (J. Zhang 2001). As a result, Chinese Internet user growth has been extraordinary. By March 2002, China had become ‘the largest Internet population in the Asia Paciﬁc region, and the second largest worldwide after the US’, with 56.6 million people living in households with Internet connections (Chan and Steyn 2002). By June 2006, the number hit 123 million (although this still comprises only 9.4% of China’s total population of 1.3 billion). Besides Internet growth, mobile phone usage has increased exponentially. China is the largest mobile phone market in the world, with the number of mobile phone handsets towering over other countries (see Table 1.1). In the reform era, broadcast media functioned as a modernist cultural technology. In the post-reform era, it is digital media that operates as a post-modernist cultural technology par excellence. The Chinese government’s policies towards the Internet and other new communication media have vacillated between exercising control and encouraging growth. Familiar stories about Internet control in China include keyword censorship in search engines, the closing down of politically sensitive websites, the arrests of cyber-activists, and global Internet search companies (such as Google, Yahoo and MSN) giving in to Chinese government demands by imposing stricter censorship to control the ﬂow of Internet information. On the other hand, the Internet is viewed as a tool for political activism and a platform for democratisation (for example, Schroeder 2005). This has characterised overseas Chinese political movements, such as the Uyghur opposition movement (representing cyber-separatism) and the Falun Gong protest movement (representing cyber-sectarianism) (Gladney 2004; Thornton 2002). It has led some scholars to claim that ‘imported technologies, the

Table 1.1 Internet and mobile phone usage in China 2003–7 Year

No. of Internet users (millions)

No. of mobile phone users (millions)

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

79.5 94 111 137 210

269 334.8 393.4 461 547

Source: BBC Chinese (2004); CNNIC (2008); MIIT (2006, 2008); Xinhuanet (2005).

Chinese media and modernity

19

global ﬂow of information, and commercial media have the potential to create a more open and reasonable public sphere’ (McCormick and Liu 2003: 142). The apparent dichotomy of control versus freedom has constituted the internal logic of China’s information and communication technology (ICT) development and dominated Western scholarship on Chinese new media. Recently, however, a socio-political economy model that tries to embed China’s state-led and market-driven ‘digital revolution’ within the broader developmental path of China’s post-socialism has been developed. Yuezhi Zhao, for example, examines the parallel developments in the aggressive topdown ‘digital revolution’ and in the increasing social tensions coming from industrial workers, farmers and Falun Gong members – all subaltern subjects in relation to the elite nature of Chinese ICT promoters and users. For Zhao, these subaltern subjects have been at ‘the forefront of contesting the terms of China’s ‘digital revolution’, and they represent the ‘unevenness and incommensurability of the digital age’ (Zhao 2007: 113). Zhao’s article underscores the interface between the economic, political and socio-cultural dimensions of ICT in China. She points out the interface of the meso- and macro-dimensions of the Chinese digital revolution as the vantage point from which to examine the multiple forms of hegemony and counter-hegemony embedded in China’s digital age. Although the ‘everyday’ is ubiquitous at such an interface, the central role of the everyday dimension in the interplay among the micro-, meso- and macro-levels in Chinese new media culture has not yet been fully investigated. Chinese Internet development in recent years, particularly the fast growth of blogging since 2002, has posed new questions about digital media practices by prosumers and proams, their interaction with the traditional media, and their embedding in contemporary Chinese culture. Media marketisation, decentralisation and socialisation in China have been keenly observed by scholars from various disciplines. Most recognise the weakening of ‘thought work’ (sixiang gongzuo) and ‘political orthodoxy’ in Chinese media culture, while remaining guarded about the democratising eﬀects of the new ‘commercial orthodoxy’ (Lynch 1999, 2000; Polumbaum 1994, 2001). It is pointed out that media reforms have transformed China’s media policy from propaganda to hegemony and from domination to compromise, resulting in more formalised and regularised control and censorship while granting the media ‘commercialisation without independence’ (J. Chan 1993; A. Chan 2002). As Geremie Barmé (1999: 23) argues, media reforms lead to a more inclusive political culture while oﬀering ‘a measure of redemption and a prolonged life to Chinese Communist Party hegemony’. Chinese media culture has become increasingly complicated at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Dichotomies of the state versus people and market, and socialism versus capitalism are no longer suﬃcient to explain concrete issues and cases. This situation calls for new approaches to address the multifaceted transformations of Chinese media and culture. Much of media production and consumption in China today can be explained by way of

20

Chinese media and modernity

interplay rather than contestation of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces. Interplay signiﬁes boundary crossing; it means meeting (conﬂuence) and departing (contestation). Moving from dichotomies to interplay allows one to have a more balanced view towards the relationships of the local, national and global, and of the state and the non-state. I use the terms ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ rather than ‘oﬃcial’ and ‘unoﬃcial’, because the interplay of diﬀerent social players has rendered the intellectual and the popular discourses inseparable from the state and oﬃcial discourse. The non-state discourses are not de facto ‘unoﬃcial’; nor is the state discourse antagonistic to the nonstate ones. Their interplay signiﬁes an internal ‘transculturating modernity’ at work here. The term ‘transculturating modernity’ is proposed by Joseph Chan and Eric Ma (2002) as a third-way approach to address the relationships of the local, national and global. It recognises globalisation as ‘complex connectivity’ (Tomlinson 1999). It also resonates with the local/global or glocalisation thesis to emphasise translocal and transnational imaginary in global cultural productions (Robertson 1995; Wilson and Dissanayake 1996). For Chan and Ma, transculturating modernity represents the attempt to ‘capture the push and pull, the mix and break, of global cultural encounters, while at the same time highlighting the forceful and directional nature of cultural formation’ (Chan and Ma 2002: 4). Transculturation emphasises cultural appropriation and reinvention among encountering cultures. It dissolves binary opposites and renders any kind of boundary insigniﬁcant or at least negotiable. The concept of transculturation also lends new light to the relationship between the state and the non-state. I have described this internal transculturation as interplay. This refers to the contestation and conjunction between and among diﬀerent social forces that are at the same time global and national, transnational and personal, oﬃcial and unoﬃcial. Narratives of Chinese modernity are most often produced at the conjunction of the state and the non-state. In such interplay (as in Chan and Ma’s transculturation thesis), ‘there is an interface between the macro and the micro’, and ‘the macro transculturation of modernity’ is expressed in ‘the micro ritual of daily existence’ (Chan and Ma 2002: 12, 13). As the party/state versus people/market dichotomies are no longer adequate to explain the contradictions and ambiguities in Chinese media culture, the ‘transculturating modernity’ thesis is best ﬁtted to address the mutual articulations between the state and the non-state agents. The interface or conjunction between the ‘macro’ and the ‘micro’ is where the state and nonstate narratives and counter-narratives of Chinese modernity are produced. Such an interpretation entails the daily ‘rituals’ in media production and consumption as the key sites for examining the relations between the national and the global, state and market, and state and non-state politics. In recent years, many people have taken this ‘transculturation’ view on the various factors that characterise Chinese media and journalism. In media production, journalists are no longer viewed as little accomplices of the

Chinese media and modernity

21

party or quixotic heroes of mass democracy movements. Rather, they are conditioned by the various forces that shape Chinese professional journalism. They localise the universal model of professionalism through improvised and situated practices (Pan and Lu 2003); they improvise news practices to reduce organisational incongruence (Pan 2000; He 2000b). Not only do journalists and the state mutually articulate each other’s desires, their interplay also illuminates their mutual articulation with market forces and consumer desires. Zhao Yuezhi (2000: 21) points out that ‘the state and the market are mutually constitutive of each other’ and ‘simultaneously reinforcing and undermining each other’. Stephanie Donald and Michael Keane (2002: 6) describe the Chinese media system as ‘a model of governmentality’, whereby ‘Chinese people have been allowed an increasing freedom to choose, to consume, and to be self-regulating, but where the authoritarian spectre of the disciplinary state remains as a fallback strategy of governance should civic freedom lead to anti-government uprisings’. This view complements the thesis of ‘Party Publicity Inc’ proposed by Zhou He (2000a) – the chief mission of the state media is to promote the image of the party and justify its legitimacy through softened messages, on the one hand, and to thrive ﬁnancially in an increasingly competitive market, on the other. The result is the appearance of propaganda as ‘indoctritainment’ (Sun 2002b). While the ‘mainstream ideology strengthens its control’, ‘the cultural market and industry increasingly share the power of the ideological apparatuses and constantly transform this power into capital’ (Dai 1994: 99). Even in proﬁt-oriented local tabloids, a symbiotic relationship between the national and global interests is realised through local operations (Hendrischke 2005). The tabloids mix individual/personal needs for consumption with popular desires for social justice and democracy, and ‘an Enlightenment belief in the instrumental use of knowledge’ with ‘an authoritarian emphasis on law and order’ (Zhao 2002: 130). They are not oppositional to, nor completely subdued by, the Party politics. Rather, they contain a mixed and uneven bag of ‘residual,’ ‘dominant,’ and ‘emergent’ (to use Raymond Williams’ categories) forms of consciousness speciﬁc to the ideological landscape in post-socialist China. As the cultural products of a complicated and contradictory process of social transformation, they can be simultaneously functional to the dominant social order and expressive of people’s genuine desires and needs, as well as their lived experience of this historical life process. (Zhao 2002: 132–33) The conjunction of the ‘residual’, ‘dominant’ and ‘emergent’ forms of consciousness in tabloid tales is indicative of popular culture in China. As Sheldon Lu (2001: 195–212) points out, the meshing of popular culture with revolutionary and communist cultures before and after 1949 rendered the former an uneasy bedfellow of the oﬃcial culture of the party. It partially

22

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explains the opposition and even contempt felt by intellectuals towards popular culture in the New Era. In the post-New Era, however, a newly commercialised popular culture has taken centre stage in Chinese cultural and economic productions despite denunciation by elite intellectuals. Furthermore, it is dictating what cultural workers produce in arts, ﬁlm, screen, literature and music. This post-New Era popular culture displays an elastic and eclectic nature. It interplays: (1) with transnational cultures and hence acquires a hybrid and translocal character; (2) with the anti-elitist intellectual narrative (represented by popular music and popular literature) to produce a subculture that is both against the oﬃcial communism and intellectual elitism and coterminous with them; and (3) with the oﬃcial culture and forms an inter-textual relationship with the latter. Through this interplay, popular culture producers (such as the rock n’roll star Cui Jian and the ‘hooligan’ writer Wang Shuo) ‘mix oppositional and cooptational energies and messages’ with the dominant ideology, while at the same time the party is able to ‘incorporate, appropriate, and “domesticate”’, rather than oppose and suppress, the former (Lu 2001: 203, 206). The interplay between state and non-state narratives is not only found in the everyday rituals in media production and consumption; it is also present in the construction of identity politics in media production and consumption. As the following section shows, identity politics has taken the place of party politics as the major issue of debate in the face of globalisation and China’s accession to the WTO.

From party politics to identity politics Identity politics characterises China’s mixed responses to global capitalism. ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ – or Chinese post-socialism – borrows elements from capitalism in order to invigorate socialism in China, and at the same time is resistant to being imagined as a capitalist modernity. As Arif Dirlik accurately observes, ‘even as China is drawn into a global capitalist economy, and makes claims to impending supremacy within it, there is evidence of continued resistance to being identiﬁed as one more emerging capitalist society with its own market repertories – resistance in which cultural memories, nationalist longings and socialist habits are intertwined inextricably’ (Dirlik 2001: 3). As a result, a ‘pseudo-Marxist neoliberalism is the closest thing to an oﬃcial ideology that exists in China today’ (Link et al. 2002: 7). This oﬃcial ideology produces the ‘neo-liberal logic of market supremacy and globalisation’ that has dominated the mainstream media representation of China’s WTO membership (Zhao 2003a: 50). This neoliberal view on globalisation is paired with a new leftist, nationalistic discourse, which views globalisation as ‘a threat to China’s sovereignty, culture, and socialist values’ (Barrett 2001: 415). The cultural imperialism thesis, which was associated with ‘conservative Party ideologues’ in the 1980s and early 1990s (Zhao 1998: 187), became part of critical enquiry among

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Chinese intellectuals at the end of the 1990s. A ‘say-no club’ emerged in response to the increasing presence of foreign cultural and media products in China, among whom were media scholars, journalists and intellectuals in the humanities.2 Thus, China’s accession to the WTO on 11 December 2001 after ﬁfteen years of protracted negotiations was celebrated as China’s ‘second coming’ in the new millennium, on the one hand, and criticised for being the harbinger of (Western) cultural imperialism, on the other. Both discourses served the state by legitimating the control of its media and people (Ma 2000), while stimulating the national and media market and fostering national media giants through conglomeration. Both discourses take issue with and capitalise on identity politics. In contemporary China, identity politics is not only the property of the state ideology, but is also a strategy adopted by intellectuals seeking to participate in global knowledge production under post-socialist and post-modern conditions. A wide variety of perspectives ranging from liberalism, conservatism, neoconservatism (also known as cultural nationalism), leftism and new leftism have risen from the intellectual community in the post-Tiananmen era. Despite their diﬀerences, these perspectives are deeply aﬀected by the ‘fever’ for Western culture and knowledge, which has its roots in the May Fourth Movement of the early twentieth century and the ‘Cultural Fever’ of the 1980s. At the same time, they are shaped by an intrinsic rejection of Western values and interpretations of China. This rejection of Western ideas in favour of Chinese culture, values and ideas, using Western theories and language as props, has characterised the neoconservative trends among Chinese intellectuals. Chinese intellectuals share with the state a strong nationalistic dream – the qiangguo meng (dream to make China strong and powerful). This is a dream that has haunted Chinese reformists and revolutionaries, conservatives and radical liberals alike for a century (Zhao 1997). It is this central logic that drives two extremes in the intellectual narratives of Chinese modernity: either nihilistically denouncing Chinese traditional culture and romanticising Western modern culture, or romanticising tradition and denouncing the West. The paradigmatic shift from ‘calling for (Western) modernity’ in the 1980s to ‘reﬂecting on modernity’ in the 1990s represents an intellectual endeavour to aﬃrm ‘who we are’ in the post-Cold War, post-socialist and globalised context of Chinese modernity.3 As Wang Hui observes, With the disintegration of the traditional social system and its ethical structure, we are no longer assigned with a social role that provides us with an objective foundation to make moral judgments or with the condition that allows us to understand ourselves. … Consequently, the search for identity is an act of reaﬃrming who we are under the new social condition. In order to complete it, we must reconstruct a space for self-recognition. … Self-aﬃrmation is not only a psychological act but also a social one. (Wang 1997: 1)

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As a social act, self-recognition and aﬃrmation, however, take a conservative and inward-looking twist in the cultural scene, against an aggressive and outward turn in the economic sphere. Native studies and Confucianism, new leftism and post-ism are three major trends that constitute the neoconservative intellectual narratives of the post-New Era.4 They are not completely separate schools, but are inter-related in their use of Chinese cultural tradition, revolutionary history and an essentialised Chineseness to mark out Chinese identity politics. While accusing the New Era cultural trend of ‘selfotherisation’ (Guo 1999), the post-New Era intellectual discussions are nevertheless guilty of ‘self-orientalisation’ (Ong 1997: 195). These schools represent an anxious search inward for a new indexical entry into the postmodern and post-socialist order of knowledge production in the cultural ﬁeld. The ﬁrst school, the so-called ‘craze for native studies’ or ‘native studies fever’, relates to the Culturalist School in the 1980s. By calling for a return to Chinese cultural essence in the debates on Chinese modernity, this school represents self-reﬂection and self-assertion among Chinese intellectuals after a century of self-criticism and self-negation (Zheng 1995). It is also a moralistic response to the rampant commercialism and consumerism that have dominated Chinese society and hence marginalised humanistic intellectuals. Through advocating pure scholarship, especially Confucian scholarship and historical studies (especially of late Qing historical ﬁgures) (Guo and He 1999), the ‘new Confucians’ function as moral crusaders for a society that is seen as losing its cultural and moral root when people are more interested in material pursuits than moral regeneration. It expresses an intellectual search for a new national identity and a desire to see the Chinese nation as a high civilisation (again) that has its unique place in the world and a unique contribution to world civilisations. The cultural rejuvenation thesis, proposed by established scholars such as Ji Xianlin (1993), represents such a nationalistic drive. The return to the Confucian tradition and orthodoxy is viewed by liberal and leftist intellectuals alike as an act of political conservatism. Liu Qingfeng (2001: 49), for example, calls the new Confucians ‘ﬁdeist scholars’ (xinyang zhuyi shi de xuezhe). The fact that the Confucian revival is espoused by party oﬃcials is viewed as an intellectual collaboration with the state (Y. Tang 2001). But as Guo Yingjie (2004: 74) points out, what is implicated in the new Confucians’ call for cultural revival is not so much their support of a repressive regime but a repudiation of the Party orthodoxy represented by Maoism and Marxism. While the Marxists are ready to compromise and draw strength from Confucianism, the new Confucians view Marxism – more than anything else – as being responsible for China’s lack of national spirit and spiritual anchorage in the twentieth century. The new Confucians are ‘most determined to deny Marxists a role in the imagining of a Confucian nation and to eradicate the “contamination” of Marxism from the Chinese psyche’ (Guo 2004: 74).

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The new Confucian revival is a response not only to the Chinese postsocialist condition but also to global capitalism. The Chinese craze for native studies is fed by the Confucian renaissance in overseas Confucian societies, where Confucianism is believed to be the driving force behind capitalist developments (Tu 1996). Native studies and the Confucian revival do not merely represent a cultural revivalist movement. As Arif Dirlik observes, they are also ‘a functional component of an emergent Global Capitalism’ (Dirlik 1995: 265). Their backward-looking critiques on national discourses of history constitute a post-modern turn in the critical enquiry of global modernity. While the new Confucians look backwards to Chinese cultural tradition, the new leftists turn to China’s revolutionary tradition for answers to the identity crisis. Dismayed at China’s increasing departure from socialism during its rush towards globalisation, a group of overseas-educated Chinese intellectuals, known as the new leftists, desperately seek to restore an alternative way of thinking about Chinese modernity by invoking Maoist imaginings of the Chinese socialist blueprint. Borrowing from Western theories such as neo-Marxism and post-modernism, they emphasise the need for a new and positive interpretation of communist China’s history (such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution) and China’s alternative modernity. Cui Zhiyuan (1994), for instance, regards a positive re-evaluation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution as crucial to mark China’s alternativeness from the Western-style democracy. Liu Kang (1995, 1996) shares a similar view when he proposes drawing upon Mao’s socialist experiments and Mao’s ‘alternative thinking’ – the ‘revolutionary alternatives to capitalist modernity’ (Liu 1997: 69) – to resist the global capitalist system and address China’s problems.5 For Liu (2002: 348), Chinese media innovations should be carried out ‘under the premise of building socialist new ideology and new culture in the era of globalisation’. Unlike the old left, which aims to strengthen the Communist Party as the party of the proletarians and to restore the principles of Chinese socialism (including Mao Zedong Thought), the new left seeks to justify China’s otherness while addressing the mounting social problems such as poverty and class inequality that accumulated during the last decades of the twentieth century. The new leftists’ view on strengthening the socialist state’s capacity to control China’s globalisation and urbanisation process appeals to the advocates of new authoritarianism, which emphasises state capacity and economic development while appealing to moral values based on Confucianism (Hu and Wang 1994; H.-N. Wang 1995a; Xiao 1995). Gan Yang’s thesis on order and freedom, for example, sits well with the state’s dual emphasis on social stability and economic development – these are the two rationales often used to justify its repression of pro-democracy movements.6 The new leftists have been accused of readily going to ‘the aid of hard-line ideologues within Chinese government with Western theoretical props’ (Liu 2001: 53). By voicing concerns that have been central to the public appeal of

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the CCP for the past ﬁfty years, however, the new left critics also articulate concerns about class politics and national identity in the presence of capitalism in the Chinese socialist system. As Geremie Barmé (2001: 249) points out, they are in eﬀect ‘questioning the modernising project not only of the liberal intelligentsia and technocracy but of the Communist Party itself ’. Like the new Confucians, the new leftists look to China’s history as a starting point from which to criticise the current state of aﬀairs. Although their interplay with the state narrative produces complicity and cooperation, it also produces an implicit attack on the legitimacy of the CCP, which they argue is responsible for stripping China of its uniqueness as a culture and a nation. Both the new Confucian school and the new left school in eﬀect wage a double attack on both the current post-socialist regime and the global capitalist system. The interplay between intellectual narratives and the Party ideology is also shown in the third and also the most controversial intellectual trend, that of ‘post-ism’ (hou xue). Post-ism is a term ﬁrst used by Zhao Yiheng (1995) to describe the neo-conservative tendency in Chinese cultural criticism during the 1990s. It represents a linguistic maze that encompasses a series of ‘post-s’: post-structuralism, post-modernism and post-colonialism, etc. Post-ist scholars or post-ists use Western theoretical notions to engage in domestic cultural debates. Unlike new Confucians and new leftists, they celebrate the secular turn and popular concern embodied in the post-socialist consumerism, and welcome the coming of age of Chinese popular culture as a ‘new state of aﬀairs’ (Y. Zhang 1997). Although the post-ist scholars use Western post-modern and post-colonial theories, their theoretical framework is by nature not much diﬀerent from the other conservative cultural trends that emerged during the 1990s. Like the new leftists, they declare the end of the grand narrative of Enlightenment modernity and the Western cultural hegemony. They criticise Chinese scholars, especially overseas Chinese intellectuals, for using their knowledge about China (especially China’s political system) as an indispensable resource in their ‘pedagogical’ writings. Zhang Yiwu, a well-known ‘post-master’ (houxue dashi, so-called for his leading role in Chinese post-modernist criticism) writes: From the Western human rights discourse to Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige’s insinuation of China’s politics [in their ﬁlms], China and its politics have become a useful resource for cultural reproductions. … ’Chinese politics’, together with its folkway and exotic scenery, is used as a special commodity in their re-presenting the ‘otherness’ of China. (Zhang 1995: 131) Besides the celebration of post-modern consumerism and the critique of Orientalist representations of China in global cultural production, the third motif of the post-ists lies in the call for Chineseness. Similar to the new

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Confucians’ vision of Confucian China or Cultural China, Chinese post-ists advocate the establishment of a ‘Chinese cultural rim’ with Chineseness as its centre (Xie and Zhang 1995; Zhang et al. 1994). Their version of Chineseness has three features: a Chinese world outlook, a unique Chinese identity and free assimilation of whatever is useful. Chinese modernity is no longer understood as a unilinear progression associated with Marxian historiography, but as one of ‘an inﬁnite variety of models’ and as a speciﬁc cultural and temporal form (Xie and Zhang 1995: 19; Zhang et al. 1994: 18). Aware of the pitfalls of the binary opposition of East and West, Chinese post-ists claim that Chineseness represents a ‘transcendent mode of thinking’, and advocate ‘free assimilation’ or ‘interpenetration’ between the local and the global (Wang 2004; Xie and Zhang 1995: 23). Chineseness serves as a new mode of knowledge and cultural–moral system to construct the national identity in the new century. The post-ists’ claim of Chineseness is disturbing to critics who are aware of the inherent epistemological pitfall in essentialising any culture, whether of Chinese or Western origins. Hence, Chinese scholars who are trained and teaching in Euro-American universities have ﬁercely attacked the post-ists. Zhao Yiheng (1995) criticises Chinese post-ists for being ‘complicit with mass culture’ in order to ‘destroy elite culture’. Zhang Longxi (1999: 197) points out that ‘Chinese “postism” is a discourse that does not have its own voice embedded in the reality of Chinese social and political life, but echoes the Western theoretical discourse of postmodernism and postcolonialism and, even worse, the oﬃcial discourse of the cultural and political establishment at home’. Xu Ben (1998a) attacks Chinese post-ists for being ‘out of touch with Chinese reality’ and ‘complying with oppressive oﬃcial power’. For Xu (1998b: 204), post-ism is a unique nativist cultural discourse that ‘mixes xenophobia, polemical rhetoric, and nationalist sentiment into a deﬁant third-world or postcolonial stance confronting Western cultural hegemony’. This discourse can not only ‘coexist peacefully with the oﬃcial discourse of nationalism’, but also ‘accommodate the interests of the latter’: ‘[b]y ignoring immediate oppression at home and criticizing global oppression at a distance, it has developed a phony mode of resistance-criticism in the humanities that is extremely conducive to the state’s ideological control and appropriation’ (Xu 1998c: 91). This view is echoed by a domestic critic, Wang Hui (1998: 28), who points out that Chinese post-modernism ‘misrepresents the production and reproduction of desire as people’s “needs”, and it interprets the marketised social mode as a neutral and ideology-free “new mode” (xin zhuangtai)’. The complicity of post-ists with cultural nationalists and political conservatives testiﬁes to the interplay of the intellectual and state narratives in the 1990s. The cultural critiques of China’s post-socialist condition by the new Confucians, the new leftists and post-ists, albeit by way of Western postmodern and post-colonial theories, represent an intellectual eﬀort to mediate the universal claims of Western master narratives with the local condition of

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China. They do not so much signal the end of critical thinking among Chinese intellectuals as mark the beginning of reﬂection on Chinese identity politics in relation to both, rather than either/or, Chinese tradition and China’s post-socialist connection with global capitalism. Identity politics, like globalisation, is a double-edged sword. It contributes to the neoliberal view on economic globalisation and also explains the conservative outlook in the intellectual ﬁeld. The fact that both the liberal and conservative narratives have criticised each other and been criticised for siding with the regime not only tells of the elusiveness of their arguments, but also suggests the capacity of the party-state to appropriate and accommodate nonstate narratives in cultural production. While the neoliberal narrative is used to justify and celebrate economic globalisation, China’s WTO membership and Beijing’s 2008 Olympics, the critical and conservative narrative can be summoned to mobilise the Chinese people against enemies from outside while concealing China’s own history of oppression and violence and displacing domestic social crisis and inequality (Dai 2001; Polumbaum 2003). In the popular ﬁeld, identity politics can lead to both consumer nationalism and the formation of new subjectivity and identity for the consuming subject. Imbued with the transculturating process, identity politics has been played up by both domestic and foreign enterprises to maximise their market shares and proﬁt margins in the global consumer market (Dirlik 1996b: 195). In the domestic market, nationalism is used to promote native products and resist consuming foreign products (Hooper 2000). The natives of third world countries have become active promoters of identity commodiﬁcation in the global capitalism. The national and transnational manipulations of identity politics form the ‘macro’ forces to shape the consumer market and consuming subjects. Meanwhile, the consuming subjects are constantly seeking satisfaction and opportunities through the ‘micro’ ritual of consuming activities. Situated between two contending and yet mutually articulating forces of state manoeuvre and economic manipulation, the consuming masses are in search of an elusive satisfaction in consumption as well as an assurance for their subjective position as consumers and producers. As Arif Dirlik observes: [D]iﬀerence itself may be produced so as to preclude the possibility of the satisfaction of desire, which must be multiplied inﬁnitely, and inﬁnitesimally, if an ever expanding volume of commodities is to be consumed by a ﬁnite number of consumers. In the process, the subject, regardless of national or other origin, has to be made and re-made constantly … while state manipulation seeks most importantly to create ﬁxed subjects who are amenable to prediction and control, economic manipulation seeks exactly the opposite end: subjects who are destabilised to be voracious consumers, in search of an elusive satisfaction that is perpetually deferred. This is the subject of global capitalism – as producer, manger or consumer. (Dirlik 2001: 18)

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In Mao’s China, self-identity was ﬁxed, stable and inscribed. It was a function of prescribed social roles, as a legitimate resident of a certain place (deﬁned by hukou, the household registration system), member of a work unit (deﬁned by danwei, the work unit system) and of a certain class and set of social relations (deﬁned by the dang’an, the personal dossier system) (Lü and Perry 1997; Wang 2005). The hukou, danwei and dang’an systems rigorously circumscribed the realm of thought and behaviour. One did not have choices, but was born and died a member of a set of predeﬁned social roles. The party came to override itself onto the state, which then imposed itself onto the nation. Nation and state became coterminous and integrated into a single entity represented by the party. The Chinese existed in a ‘nationless state’ that had ‘little traction in a nation which is suﬃciently conﬁdent to name itself ’ (Fitzgerald 1996b: 85). The decoupling of nation from state started in the reform era, which was implicated in the processes of marketisation, decentralisation and socialisation of Chinese media. As the consuming masses surged onto the central stage of history in the 1990s, identity politics took a populist turn. Like the active audience who ‘decode’ media texts, the post-socialist consuming subject can re-conﬁgure his/her subjectivity in the very act of consuming media and communication technologies. Their subjectivity and identity are not simply manipulated by the ‘culture industry’ (to borrow from Theodor Adorno) and controlled by the ‘ideological apparatuses’ of the state (à la Louis Althusser), but can be reinvented and re-negotiated. Although still relatively circumscribed by and ﬁxed within certain boundaries (such as those related to territorial and social mobility and political associability), identity and subjectivity have become a symbolic project that can be constructed rather than prescribed.7 The mass media have played an important role in pluralising and diﬀerentiating Mao’s mass public. They have also helped to shape media publics according to gender, class, age, ethnicity, region and occupation. The spillover eﬀect of electronic and satellite media contributes to the formation of transnational visuality, a transnational Chinese cultural sphere and satellite modernities (Lu 2001; Ma 2001; Yang 2003).8 It also contributes to transnational imagination and subjectivity for individuals both inside and outside China through transborder travelling and imagined travelling (Sun 2002a). Subjectivity is at once local, national and transnational. It can be embedded in traditional social relations in local contexts and at the same time disembedded through translocal and transnational mediated encounters. The mass media’s embedding and disembedding operations in turn aided the constitution of a new national community in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, then a powerful state subjectivity under communist rule in the latter half of the century and, at the end of the century, a transnational Chinese global media public and a deterritorialised and transnational subjectivity among people in Chinese metropolises such as Shanghai (Yang 1997). With the increasingly mediated life experiences facilitated by the media and communication technologies, ‘the self, understood as a reﬂexively organised

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symbolic project’, has increasingly ‘drawn on mediated experience to inform and refashion the project of the self ’ (Thompson 1995: 233). New subjectivities can be reﬁgured by watching Hong Kong and Taiwanese shows, in karaoke and in listening to pop or rock music on cassette recorders or the Walkman and ipod. In karaoke, for example, the subjectivities of singers are vastly diﬀerent from those produced by the Maoist loyalty dance: Whereas Maoist subjectivity sought to merge the self with the body of the state and its embodiment, Mao’s body, karaoke places the subject in a narcissistic dynamic between self and the love object through which it learns to desire, and whose desire it needs, to fulﬁll and strengthen the fragile self. This Other through which the self yearns to be completed is no longer the larger and powerful collective ‘I’ of the nation, but a Chinese cultural Other of Taiwan or Hong Kong who has a gender. (Yang 1997: 302) In singing and ‘listening otherwise’ (Chow 1999), ‘I’ is separated from the collective body of the nation-state. And a new mode of subjectivity is accompanied by a portable technology, such as the Walkman, MP3 player or mobile phone. The penetration of new media into people’s daily lives should not be taken as merely an economic or social event, but as a political phenomenon, because it is in the popular consumption and production of media products in daily life that new modes of subjectivity and citizenship can be conﬁgured. Identity politics is, for the consuming subject, a social act, an intellectual strategy and a personal choice. In summary, studies on Chinese media and culture have evolved from dichotomies to interplay and from party politics to identity politics. The interplay between state and non-state narratives of identity politics is the central concern of this chapter. The interplay is implicated in the contestation as well as the conjunction of the state and the non-state. Most of the reality in media and cultural production in contemporary China can be explained by this interplay thesis. Both the state and the non-state narratives are responses to each other and to the new possibilities and challenges that China faces in the new century. These narratives come after the socialist revolution and socialist reforms, but they do not come after modernity. They ‘respond synchronically as well as diachronically, to the cultural contradictions brought about by, and inherent in, modernity itself ’ (Ang 1996: 157). They function as critiques of, and apologies for, China’s post-socialist condition. As the next section will demonstrate, the resort to capitalism and globalisation by the party-state in order to revive socialism in China, the call upon Chineseness by intellectuals in order to re-assert identity politics in the global cultural production and the creative use of media and communication technologies by the consuming masses in order to reclaim a consumer subjectivity are all part and parcel of the narratives and counter-narratives of modernity in China.

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Counter-narratives of modernity in China The concept of counter-narratives of modernity in China has three layers of signiﬁcance: the state narrative of Chinese socialist modernity, intellectual critiques of the Chinese state and Western narratives of modernity, and popular expressions of Chinese modernity at the everyday level. These three meanings have two frameworks of reference: Chinese counter-narratives of modernity (in relation to the West) and counter-narratives of Chinese modernity (in relation to the party-state). The ﬁrst meaning, Chinese socialist modernity, describes a non-Western and third world narrative of modernity in a socialist country. It falls within the paradigm of alternative modernity or modernities, the paradigm used by non-Western nations to describe native developments, variably described as colonial modernity, third world modernity or socialist modernity. In such a paradigm, non-Western modernities are positioned as belated and reactive to, derivative and deductive of the Euro-American modernity. Their own history- and culture-speciﬁc readings and constructions of alternative or multiple modernities do not subdue the Euro-centric paradigm of Enlightenment. Rather, these counter-narratives serve to accentuate the binary oppositions of Western-ness and non-Western-ness. As Dilip Gaonkar (1999: 15) puts it, in countering the inexorable spread of Western modernity, the concept of alternative modernities provide a culture-speciﬁc and site-based reading of non-Western modernities. Counter- or alternative narratives of modernity in Asian, African and Latin American nation-states emerged against the cultural backdrop of an internal critique of capitalist modernity within Western critical tradition. From Kant, Sartre and Marx to the Frankfurt School, critical intellectuals took issue with the grand narratives that ensued from the Enlightenment movement and its organisational principle of capitalism (most notably in economic areas). The Marxist critique of capitalism left a permanent mark upon modern Chinese history as Chinese modernists in the early twentieth century consciously rejected Euro-American modernity and chose socialism as an alternative for China. The ascendancy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as (still) the only ruling party in China and its socialist blueprint, which dominated the Mao era (1949–76), was based on a critique of the grand, master narratives of capitalist modernity that prevailed in the twentieth century (Dirlik 2001: 21–22). As a state project, the socialist revolution engaged in the production of the ‘imagined community’ and socialist subjects for such a purpose.9 Chinese socialist modernity posited itself as the opposite and (better) alternative to Western capitalist modernity, thus essentialising West-ness and Chineseness. Maoist socialist modernity, as a counter-narrative in itself, met serious challenges in the post-Mao era from its own counter-narratives coming from both the top – by post-Mao reformist techno-bureaucrats led by Deng Xiaoping – and the bottom – by intellectuals who appropriated Western

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theories to critique Chinese socialist experience. It was also challenged by Mao’s masses who appropriated the ‘thought liberation’ (accompanied by the state open reform policies) and consumerism (encouraged by the state’s project of a ‘socialist market economy’) to articulate alternative narratives about their everyday realities.10 Under such circumstances, counter-narratives of modernity in China not only emerge in reaction to the West and Western critiques of capitalist modernity, but also arise out of tensions within national and regional forces. This point is related to the second and third meanings of counter-narratives of modernity in the Chinese case. The second meaning of counter-narratives of modernity is related to postmodern and, in the Chinese case, post-socialist critiques of modernist narratives in the intellectual ﬁeld. In the Western tradition of critical enquiry, there is a long tradition in the critique of Enlightenment modernity, which can be construed as ‘postmodern counternarratives’ (Peters and Lankshear 1996). As Michael Peters and Colin Lankshear point out, from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972) to JeanFrancois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), post-modern counternarratives have characterised Western critical theories (especially since the Second World War) as eﬀorts to ‘search for new cultural and political orientations following the collapse of foundationalism’ (Peters and Lankshear 1996: 2). Post-modernism, as a Western socio-cultural phenomenon, has been regarded as the cultural logic of late capitalism, in which cultural and economic production converge (Jameson 1991). In such a theoretical context, post-modern counter-narratives are not only critiques of Enlightenment modernity and its grand narratives, but also descriptions of an epochal shift from the modern to the post-modern era. This has heralded many changes. In the post-modern era, reason, power and knowledge are multiple and plural; groups of diﬀerence or outsider groups based on ethnicity, sexuality or location within the third world are increasingly involved in global knowledge productions; old binaries such as centre–periphery and modern–tradition are disregarded as ‘we’ are conditioned in a new cultural process characterised by ‘fundamental disjunctures’ in the global cultural ﬂows (Appadurai 1990), or ‘spaces of indeterminacy’ in the context of Asian urbanism (Lim 2003). ‘Pluralism, tolerance of diﬀerences and creative rebelliousness’ are the main characteristics of the post-modern condition, both local and global (Lim 2003: 22). As such, post-modernity, although a Western intellectual construct, has been given a translocal and glocal twist in local, regional and transnational encounters. Counter-narratives of modernity and post-modernity in non-Western societies are more complex and problematic. They are produced, to quote Donald Nonini and Aihwa Ong (1997: 16), ‘in diﬀerent sites of power’ and ‘refer to each other as much as to the West’. In other words, they are counternarratives in relation to Western modernity and post-modernity, as well as to hegemonic forces in national, regional and local contexts. This situation

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produces what Aihwa Ong (1999) calls a state-sponsored, territorial-bound modernity and a deterritorialised, ﬂuid and transnational modernity. In the current debates on modernity and post-modernity in China, narratives about alternatives ﬁnd ways to join with third world studies (a global discourse), new Confucianism (a regional discourse) and native studies (a national discourse). The notion of the local has become, to quote Arif Dirlik (1996a: 22), ‘a site both of promise and predicament’. It promises liberation and resistance and gives rise to discourses that were previously suppressed or marginalised by the socialist modernisation. It is also a site of predicament because the celebration of diﬀerence and resistance produces a ‘global localism’ or a ‘Third-Worldism’ that can in turn be a new form of hegemony to suppress inequalities, injustice and oppression in the local context. Counter-narratives of modernity in China in the intellectual ﬁeld, viewed from such a socio-cultural and historical background, are responses to global and regional forces, and to the national imperative to construct postsocialist realities. In other words, they are responses to both post-modern counter-narratives coming from outside and post-socialist critiques of native socialist modernity from the inside. Cultural trends in the New Era and postNew Era are set against such a tempo. They are essential parts of the centurylong critique of modernity among Chinese intellectual and political elites. Their counter-narratives are better viewed as indispensable components of the ‘antimodern theory of modernity’ (Wang 1998: 14). The following comment from Xudong Zhang on the contemporary Chinese intellectual ﬁeld summarises my discussion of the intellectual counter-narratives in the post-New Era: The search for an alternative indicates a refusal to view the Eurocentric notion of modernity as modular or universal; it is an eﬀort to analyze and break the colossal and often mythologized categories – capitalism, market, modernity, democracy, etc. – and to see them as bundles of historical contingencies that can be selected and reorganized under different historical, social, and cultural circumstances and by means of the theoretical coming-into-being of a critical utopian consciousness. The ‘alternative,’ therefore, means nothing more than the articulation of diﬀerences in concrete institutional, everyday, and theoretical terms. (Zhang 2001a: 65–66) Counter-narratives of modernity in China are produced by the post-socialist state at the institutional level, by intellectuals at the theoretical level and by consuming masses at the everyday level. The last component leads to the third meaning of counter-narratives of modernity in China, narratives about everyday life experience, or the ‘practice of everyday life’ in Michel de Certeau’s term, at the cultural conjunction of the global and the local, the state and the non-state.

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Our everyday lives are invested with and punctuated by various narratives and their counter-narratives. The production of counter-narratives has been characteristic of popular culture, especially in the case of subalterns who are marginalised and suppressed by the dominant structures of power (Ong and Nonini 1997; Scott 1990). It is, nevertheless, fresh in the post-socialist and post-modern condition in that everyday counter-narratives are the sites of reproduction as well as reduction of hegemonic ideology. As pointed out in the earlier analysis, identity politics is double-edged. It can be used by the populace to reconstruct alternative subjectivity in singing, listening and consuming ‘otherwise’. Identity politics can also be used by them (urban youths for example) to articulate nationalistic sentiments that are sometimes more militant than the state discourse (Rosen 2003). Counter-narratives in everyday experience are not necessarily counter or oppositional to the oﬃcial narrative of the state and mainstream ideology constructed by elite intellectuals. They are ‘counter’ to the extent that they supply diﬀerent and diversiﬁed ways of interpreting Chinese social realities. They can both conform to the state ideology and mainstream culture and resist them at the same time. Counter-narratives at the everyday level thus refer to contestation and conﬂuence of hegemony and counter-hegemony narratives, and are not without their own contradictions and incoherence. As part of the everyday experience, counter-narratives of modernity in the third sense belong to the category of popular or unoﬃcial China. My interpretation and interrogation of these everyday counter-narratives is underpinned by Jing Wang’s advice to scholarship on ‘unoﬃcial China’. Wang writes: The concept of unoﬃcial China draws a popular imaginary stuck in three consequences of logic: domination is total and resistance is complete; the ‘people’ are valorised as a site of resistance and assigned a subject-position diametrically opposed to the authoritarian state; the ‘popular’ culture produced by the people is ‘unoﬃcial’ by default. The moral idealism underlying these premises is irreproachable. But scholarship about the Chinese ‘popular’ cannot be sustained by moral idealism alone. (Wang 2001: 3) The earlier analysis has shown that the interplay among diﬀerent socio-cultural agents suggests boundary crossing between the oﬃcial and unoﬃcial, intellectual and popular, local and global. Media producers and consumers alike can creatively use the media and communication networks to produce counter-narratives that challenge, appropriate and accommodate the dominant ideology, and vice versa. The media and communication networks are conducive to the formation of new mediated public spaces that allow people to devise new ways to imagine subjectivity and identity and, hence, citizenship and ethics. These mediated public spaces do not form the ‘bourgeois

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public sphere’ conceptualised by Jürgen Habermas (1989); nor do they belong to the ‘subaltern counterpublics’ put forward by Nancy Fraser (1992). Rather, they constitute a third realm in state–society relations. The concept of a ‘third realm’ is proposed by historian Philip Huang (1993) in an article on the debate about public sphere and civil society in China. He points out that an intermediate space, or a third realm, has always existed between the state and society in China. From the ad hoc, semi-formal and semi-oﬃcial organisations in the Qing Dynasty to that of gentry and merchant public activities in Republican China, and up to the auto-organisations in post-Mao China, collaboration rather than opposition between the state and the society characterised this third realm. In the reform era, the retreat of the state from being a major factor in daily lives, or the de-state-iﬁcation of Chinese society, has seen a rapid growth of third realms in both rural and urban areas. These third realms express a sense of in-between-ness in the relations of state and society, the oﬃcial and unoﬃcial, the local and global. It is within the third realm framework that the new mediated public spaces should be located. These spaces are negotiatory spaces in which alienation is registered, together with accommodation and consolidation. They entail the formation of a Chinese mediasphere, which indicates not so much about the media industry or ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai 1990), as about the ‘interpermeation of politics, media, and “semiosis” that renders so much of what passes for politics as narratives’ (Hartley and McKee 2000: 210). The Chinese mediasphere consists of media publics that are discursive spaces to pronounce narratives and counter-narratives of Chinese modernity. Counter-narratives of modernity in China signify a post-modern mode of cultural production. This post-modern mode is not a ‘total system’. Rather, it includes ‘a variety of counterforces and new tendencies within itself, of “residual” as well as “emergent” forces [à la Raymond Williams], which it must attempt to manage or control (Gramsci’s conception of hegemony)’ (Jameson 1991: 406). Furthermore, ‘[w]ere those heterogeneous forces not endowed with an eﬀectivity of their own, the hegemonic project would be unnecessary’ (ibid.). In this post-modern mode of production, the emergent forces interplay with the residual and dominant forces, and together they produce new cultural forms and power relations. Aihwa Ong points out that Chinese alternative modernities do not denote so much the diﬀerence from Western ones as ‘a new self-conﬁdent political reenvisioning of futures that challenge the fundamental assumption of the inevitable Western domination’, and that those alternative discourses ‘intersect in pronouncing the cultural logic of Asian capitalism’ (Ong 1997: 195–96). To paraphrase Ong, I propose that counter-narratives of modernity in China denote not so much diﬀerences from the dominant ones as the emergence of new imaginaries in Chinese society. These counter-narratives – as Chinese counter-narratives of modernity (in relation to the West) and counter-narratives of Chinese modernity (in relation to the hegemonic ideology of the state) – interplay with one another in pronouncing the cultural logic of post-socialism in China.

2

Media event The new millennium celebration

The dawn of the twenty-ﬁrst century is arising. We greet it at the seaside, bearing one-century humiliation and glory. We greet it at the peak of Mount Tai, with a ﬁve-thousand-year civilisation. We greet it at Tiananmen Square, the great symbol of the Chinese nation. We salute to the dawn of the new century with emotional memories: Chinese nation’s overall regeneration will be the enterprise of the twenty-ﬁrst century. We salute to the sun of the new millennium with a ﬁrm belief: A prosperous, strong, democratic and civil China will surely be another splendid sunrise in the history of human civilisation! Good morning, 2000! ‘Epilogue: entering the new era’, Meeting the Year 2000, CCTV

At the close of the twentieth century, there were several self-declared endings: the end of ideology, the end of history and the end of revolution. In fact, a millenarian aspiration for an end of 100-year chiru (humiliation) and luohou (lagging behind) characterised Chinese thought throughout the twentieth century. The aspiration for an end was a two-sided coin: it was matched by an aspiration for a new beginning. The call for an end and a beginning was best exempliﬁed in the new millennium celebration (2000). As a media event situated at the historical juncture of two centuries and millennia, the celebration was an exemplary occasion to examine the narratives and counter-narratives about nation, history and culture. The new millennium celebration was one of a series of media events that were celebrated at the end of the twentieth century, among which were also the return of Hong Kong to China in July 1997 and the return of Macao in December 1999. As the last media event of the twentieth century and the ﬁrst media spectacle in the twenty-ﬁrst century, the new millennium celebration was not therefore an isolated media spectacle, but a consummation of a series of ﬁn-de-siècle spectacles that all led to the counting down to the zero hour of China’s new beginning in the new century. This was explicitly stated in the ‘Epilogue’ of the CCTV special programme Meeting the Year

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2000, as quoted above. As a media event, it was preplanned and broadcast live on television, both manipulative and hegemonic in its intrusion into and interruption of the routines of everyday life. It was a grand show of festive performances that aimed at reconciling diﬀerences among diﬀerent social players. It called upon all members of society (organisers, broadcasters and audiences) to celebrate national solidarity and collective aspirations. The new millennium celebration was an occasion to think about history and time, nation and narration, nostalgia and revolution. It was an occasion to reﬂect on the diﬀerent narratives of Chinese modernity expressed by the state, intellectuals and the general populace. This chapter uses the new millennium celebration to examine how the media event elicited and accommodated narratives and counter-narratives about nation, history and culture in conjuring a new millennial discourse about China’s rejuvenation. It examines the politics of temporality (integration of linear time with cyclical time) and historicity (revisiting history in order to remake history) in order to highlight the rejuvenation discourse embodied in the new millennium countdown. It shows how the rejuvenation discourse was invoked to pull social, cultural and political resources together to serve the party-state in the name of nation and culture. The interplay of the state narrative with non-state narratives about history, nation and culture produces rejuvenation millennialism. Rejuvenation millennialism is expressed as a complex of millennial moods and narratives such as nostalgia, nationalism and consumerism. It signiﬁes a ‘second coming’, not just of Jesus to earth and a 1000-year golden age in the Christian sense of millennialism, but of the ‘Central Kingdom’ on earth and another 1000-year golden age of Chinese civilisation.1 Rejuvenation millennialism is hence underscored by a collective desire to redeﬁne Chinese identity vis-à-vis China’s internal ‘Other’ – not other ‘places’ but other ‘times’. In such a discourse, Chinese modernity is not only imagined as something that has happened elsewhere, but as something that has its precedence at other times in Chinese history and, more signiﬁcantly, is re-appearing in renewed and rejuvenated forms. This rejuvenation discourse provides a new point of departure to project Chinese modernity in relation to China’s cultural history, socialist experience and post-socialist condition. It pronounces the cultural politics of China’s post-socialism.

The making of a media event For millennia, China has been celebrating its own new year, the Spring Festival (chunjie). The Chinese New Year falls on the ﬁrst day of the ﬁrst month according to the lunar calendar. The adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1912 led to the introduction of a Western new year, yuandan. Now both Chinese and Western new years are celebrated in China. Until 2000, the yuandan was still treated as a minor celebration compared with that of chunjie. Since 1983, CCTV has put on an annual Spring Festival Gala under the auspices of the central government. This gala has been used to promote

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national unity under the theme of people of all nations gathering together as one ‘happy family’ (B. Zhao 1998). While yuandan is only a one-day celebration, chunjie is a ﬁfteen-day celebration with an oﬃcial seven-day holiday. To greet the yuandan of 2000, however, a ﬁve-day (seven days in eﬀect including weekends) holiday was oﬃcially granted to celebrate the coming of the third millennium. The Propaganda Department of the Party’s Central Committee even gave directives to all media organisations that they should celebrate the occasion wholeheartedly and make it ‘boisterous’ (renao), ‘jubilant’ (huanqing) and ‘harmonious’ (hexie). The live event China’s ﬂagship national broadcaster, CCTV, launched a 24-hour live broadcast of the celebration via satellite (from 17:30 on 31 December 1999 to 17:30 on 1 January 2000) entitled Meeting the Year 2000. Having gained experience in live broadcasting of major events since the return of Hong Kong in 1997, CCTV was determined to make the new millennium celebration a truly global media spectacle. It produced the ﬁrst 24-hour live broadcast of a media event in the history of Chinese television, with cooperation from transnational media networks such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, regional media networks such as the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV, and provincial and local television networks. All routine programmes were stopped; commercials were suspended; editors and technicians worked 24-hour shifts. The televised media event also integrated radio, print and the Internet. It used Chinese and foreign footage in order to give the celebrations a global perspective. In the live broadcast, a countdown marked each and every hour. Worldwide countdown ceremonies – from Tonga and Kiribati to Tokyo, Sydney, Beijing, Cairo, Moscow, Paris, London and New York – were brought to people’s living rooms like a relay race. Satellite broadcast brought a new kind of experience to the homes of ordinary Chinese, especially those in remote and rural areas. The home became a public space apart from squares, pubs and other public assembly places to witness and celebrate the historic moments of the countdowns. Nearly 300 million people, or 27.3% of total Chinese television audiences (1 billion), gathered in front of their televisions and counted down to greet the year 2000, making CCTV the biggest winner in market share of the television audiences (51%) (Wang 2002: 292, 297). The Beijing celebration was marked by an extravagant display of energy, splendour and excitement. It featured drumming, torch lighting, bell ringing, dragon dances, yangge folk dances and ritualistic performances at famous religious-cum-tourist sites. Flags, banners and balloons with slogans such as ‘New Era’, ‘New Life’, ‘Welcoming 2000’ and ‘The Giant Dragon Spurts Fire’ decorated Beijing and all major cities. Yellow and red, the two colours used in the television series River Elegy (He Shang) (1988) to symbolise China’s ‘inferior culture’, made an appearance in the nationwide and

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worldwide live broadcast as symbolic colours of the Chinese nation and its glorious cultural tradition.2 The quintessential spaces in the celebration were the Great Wall (China’s oldest cultural icon) and the China Centennial Altar (the newest architectural landmark), chosen by the China New Century Organisational Committee (CNCOC) as oﬃcial sites for the celebrations because of their cultural and political signiﬁcance. The Great Wall has attracted people from everywhere – from the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explorers, politicians and tourists in current times. For a long time, however, it has also stood for despotism, cruelty and political failure. This was seen most recently in the River Elegy, in which the authors viewed the Great Wall as ‘a massive monument to tragedy’ and ‘a symbol of conﬁnement, conservatism, impotent defense, and timidity in the face of invasion’ (Su and Wang 1988: 35). Even in such Great Wall blasphemy, there is, as some have pointed out, a nationalist pride as well as a strong desire for China’s cultural regeneration (Zhao et al. 1990). This Great Wall-inspired nationalist narrative has always been part of the oﬃcial ideology.3 It has also been represented in many other contexts: in China’s national anthem and the Great Hall of People, and on the walls of the Zhonghua Hotel and the UN headquarters in New York. The mutation of the Great Wall from a symbol of oriental despotism to that of Chinese nationalism has characterised the post-1989 mainstream ideology. It is no surprise that the Great Wall was chosen as a key site for mass gatherings to celebrate ‘the historical moment for the Chinese nation’. The televised Great Wall celebration featured long shots and aerial views, which eﬀectively projected a macro- and historical perspective onto its cultural history. This was especially evident when 2000 students (representing the year 2000) climbed up to the winding Great Wall at Badaling (west of Beijing city) with bright candles in their hands to form the shape of a dragon. The dragon, like the dragon-shaped Wall in an aerial view, is viewed as an auspicious symbol in Chinese culture. It signiﬁes an indomitable spirit that is capable of grandiose, exhilarating, colossal and daring projects. The year 2000 was the year of the dragon according to the Chinese zodiac. It was believed to be a year of great ambition, expectation and achievement. The invocation of the Great Wall as a dragon in the year of the dragon rendered the old architecture something more signiﬁcant than the construction itself. The symbolic re-appearance of a dragon on the Great Wall at the turn of the new millennium resonated with the indomitable spirit of China as a ‘dragon culture’ and the desire for its second coming. It was then transformed into a political statement when the ‘Holy Fire of China’ (zhonghua shenghuo) was ignited at the Altar at the zero hour of the year 2000. The holy ﬁre The holy ﬁre was symbolically drilled and collected by actors dressed up as ‘Peking Men (and Women)’. This took place at Zhoukoudian, 48 kilometres

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from downtown Beijing, where in 1923 archaeologists discovered the remains of ‘Peking Man’, an evolutionary ancestor of human kind about 600,000 years old. The ﬁre was ﬁrst passed onto a torch held by Li Ning, a celebrated former world gymnastics champion who later ignited the Olympic ﬂame in 2008. Li carried the torch out of the cave and, witnessed by a choir of 2000 students, ran down the hill. The torch was passed onto a 21-year-old university student from Inner Mongolia who, accompanied by eight girls, carried the ﬁre to the Altar. State leaders were lined up at the Plaza of Heaven at the foot of the Time–Space Probe waiting for the ﬁre. The jubilant crowd – about 25,000 people who gathered at the Altar to participate in a grand performance called ‘Embracing the New Century’ (yongbao xin shiji) – started to count down to zero as the then-President Jiang Zemin slowly put his hand on the button that would ignite the holy ﬁre at zero hour of the new century. Medium shots switched to close shots as world media vectors focused on the moment when China entered the new century. The crowd erupted with loud cheers that ﬁlled the sky as the countdown clocks at the Wall and the Altar struck zero hour 2000. Simultaneously, the holy ﬁre was ignited and the China Centenary Bell was sounded at the Altar. The Altar is situated on Chang’an Avenue to the west of Tiananmen Square. Shaped like a giant sundial, the 4.5-hectare architectural landmark was ﬁnished in December 1999. A 300-metre-long bronze corridor that records signiﬁcant events in the 5000-year Chinese civilisation connects the Holy Fire Plaza at the west end with Heaven and Earth Plazas and a needleshaped Time–Space Probe at the east end. As a monument to ‘the 5000 years of Chinese civilisation and people’s aspirations for the coming millennium’, the Altar is meant to ‘represent the essence and splendors of 5,000-year civilisation, commemorate ancestors to educate the people, preserve good traditions to create a bright future, and stimulate people to strive for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ (China Centennial Altar oﬃcial website 2005a). In contrast to the long and aerial shots of the Wall, the close-up and medium shots of the Altar signiﬁed an immediate political statement, which was magniﬁed by the ﬁre relay. From Zhoukoudian to the Altar, the ﬁre linked the most ancient symbol of human evolution with China’s newest monument of the twentieth century. The ﬁre relay symbolised a union of tradition and modernity, culture and politics, nation and state. Starting from ‘primitive’ men and women to modern men and women and ﬁnally to the state’s most senior leader, the relay reversed the ‘normal’ torch relay routines, where it was normally the state’s leaders who passed the torch to men and women. Now it was the state leader who received the torch in a speciﬁed spatial sequence that signiﬁed the unity of time and space. As indicated earlier, state elders stood in the Plaza of Heaven beneath the Time–Space Probe, both signifying a heavenly designated mission to perpetuate the glory of Chinese civilisation. It was from the Plaza of Heaven that President Jiang ignited the ﬂame, which, it was hoped, would ‘remain alight throughout the coming century as a symbol of the

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Chinese nation’s unceasing eﬀorts in the progress of human civilisation’ (China Centennial Altar oﬃcial website 2005b). Dayan and Katz argue that a fundamental allure of media events lies in their resonation with human mythology and fascination with the transcendent. Media events are thus rituals through which members of a society are connected to their sacred codes, images and values that are ‘bigger than life’ (Dayan and Katz 1992). Media events draw upon collective memories and function as particular ways of narrating the nation. As rituals, they reconcile conﬂicts and diﬀerences, facilitate national unity and solidarity, and function as a means of social control. As one of the most important moments in the new millennium celebration, the ﬁre relay was like a rite of communion. It invoked the collective memories of culture and history as well as a renewed loyalty to the pan-Chinese nation. Like the ritual of counting down to zero, it constituted a ‘strategic arena for the embodiment of power relations’ (Bell 1992: 170). The Wall and the Altar, the candle dragon and the ﬁre relay all functioned as rituals to conjure a millennial dream – the dream of making China strong and powerful, qiangguo meng. The series of rituals formed a liturgical clock that worked against the digital countdown clock. The liturgical clock presented an extraordinary time, a ‘time out of ordinary social time’ (Rappaport 1999: 225). Both the new millennium clock and the liturgical clock formed a temporal region where ‘mundane social interaction is vacated’ (ibid.). This remaking of time at a historical juncture was signiﬁcant because of its inherent politics of temporality and historicity.

The politics of counting down The new millennium clock The perfect symbol of the end of history was the countdown clock on the Great Wall. Installed on 25 March 1998, the clock was 5.8 metres tall with a red digital display face shaped like a giant oﬃcial document and a base shaped like part of the Wall. The inscription on the timepiece said, ‘Seize the moment to build the Motherland’. Many smaller replicas were built throughout China. Despite their diﬀerences in shape, size and form, these clocks all functioned as a symbolic gesture to end the old and greet the new century. The ‘new millennium’ clock is used as an abstraction rather than a speciﬁcity. It refers to the clock on the Great Wall as well as clocks around the country during the new millennium celebration. The ﬁrst widely publicised and politicised countdown clock in China was the Hong Kong Clock installed at the History Museum, next to Tiananmen Square, in 1997. Since then, countdown clocks had been repeatedly installed at Tiananmen Square and around the country. The year 1999 was especially characterised by a reversal of time with numerous countdowns and anniversaries.4 The new millennium clock was one of the ﬁn-de-siècle countdown

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clocks. It resembled the Hong Kong Clock in its shape as a giant oﬃcial document, as well its function as a ‘soft monument’ – short-term oﬃcial installations in public places. Such a soft document was contained by the ‘hard monument’ – the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square and the China Centennial Altar. Together with the ‘hard monument’, the new millennium clock fulﬁlled its duty to ‘keep time’ and ‘tell time’. Wu Hung (1997) introduces the concepts of ‘time keeping’ and ‘time telling’ in his study of the Hong Kong Clock. ‘Time telling’ describes the mundane function of the Drum Tower outside the imperial palace and of the Westernstyle mechanical clocks used in people’s daily lives. Daily activities are organised around these time-telling mechanisms. Time telling makes the Drum Tower and the mechanical clock a popular timer. ‘Time keeping’, on the other hand, resides with the emperor inside the palace, or the Party leadership in Zhongnanhai. It is determined by an invisible liturgical ‘clock’ of political power and is used by such power to make a political statement. The Hong Kong Clock thus symbolises both a popular timer and a political timer. During the handover ceremonies just before midnight on 1 July 1997, a rupture occurred between time telling and time keeping, as Beijing was determined to turn the countdown ceremonies into a political statement about its version of historiography. Wu thus writes of the political signiﬁcance of counting down: ‘Counting down’ is … a powerful symbol of (and an eﬀective means for) termination and revolution: the old Hong Kong will die and a new Hong Kong will be born at point zero. Before that point, Hong Kong belongs to a ‘counter-history’ which must be measured backwards. After that point, Hong Kong will be given a ‘positive time’ synchronised with the rest of the country. Before that point, Hong Kong must rush to complete the ‘democratic revolution’ (accomplished half-a-century ago in Mainland China). After that point, Hong Kong will still have to catch up with the ‘socialist revolution’ of the Mainland in ﬁfty years. ‘Counting down’ thus provides a structure for constructing history. (Wu 1997: 353) As ‘a structure for constructing history’, counting down signiﬁed a rupture between Hong Kong’s negative time as a British colony and its positive time as a member of the Chinese family. In oﬃcial historiography, the last century did not begin in 1900 but in 1840 (with the Opium War and the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain), and it did not end in 2000 but in 1997 (with the return of Hong Kong). The ﬁn-de-siècle countdowns, from the return of Hong Kong in 1997 to the return of Macao in 1999, served as prolonged rehearsals for the new millennium countdown. Like the Hong Kong Clock, the ﬁn-de-siècle countdown clocks signiﬁed a rupture between a ‘before’, the negative time in Chinese history, and an ‘after’, the positive time in contemporary China.

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This oﬃcial historiography was inculcated through all sorts of media, most notably in the celebrated documentary produced by CCTV, Century (Shi ji). The documentary was a montage that interspersed old and new video footage with interviews. Running through all seven episodes was a contrast between negative time (represented by black-and-white footage taken at the beginning of the century) and positive time (shown in colour, bright, fast-moving video extracts at the end of the century). The following excerpt from the prologue to Episode One is telling about the oﬃcial historiography.5 This is a cheerful moment as well as a contemplative moment. One thousand years ago, China was the most advanced civilisation in the world – she was strong and prosperous. One hundred years ago, China was trampled underfoot by foreign powers – she lost national integrity. Today, China is alive and energetic – she is marching steadily toward building a strong and prosperous, democratic and civilised modernisation. What is the reason that has caused the historical contrasts? What kind of element is it that caused China’s decline in the nineteenth century? What kind of power is it that has promoted Chinese people to rise from miseries, struggle amid humiliations, and advance wave upon wave in order to rejuvenate China?

To answer these rhetorical questions, the documentary invokes the negative time at the beginning of the allegorical ‘century’, represented by the Opium Wars (1840 and 1961) and a sick Li Hongzhang (a Qing mandarin who signed a series of unequal agreements with his foreign counterparts). It also invokes the positive time at the end of the allegorical ‘century’ that marked important years in PRC history: 1949 (the founding of the People’s Republic of China), 1978 (beginning of the open and reform policies), 1992 (Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern Tour) and 1997 (return of Hong Kong). The twentieth century was marked by humiliation (under predatory Western imperialism), struggle (for national salvation and independence) and revolution (as in the socialist revolution). Now, at the turn of the new century, it was time to celebrate China’s great socialist achievements as a modern state, and commemorate the end of ‘100-year humiliation’ as a nation and ‘1000-year decline’ as a civilisation and culture. This end of history (of China’s decline) as a beginning of the new history (of China’s coming back) served as a structure for constructing history, as in the case of the Hong Kong Clock. The new history was symbolically ushered in as the hands of the countdown clock pointed to zero o’clock midnight on 1 January 2000. This was a time-telling moment of global signiﬁcance when people around the world watched China to count down to zero to greet the New Year according to the Gregorian calendar. As an exemplary moment in

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the series of ﬁn-de-siècle countdowns, the Chinese new millennium countdown also signalled a time-keeping push as the state media presented the countdown ceremony as a salute to socialist achievements. Unlike the Hong Kong Clock, the new millennium clock did not see the rupture between time keeping and time telling during the countdown. Rather, it attempted a reconciliation between the two. After all, China had caught up with the positive time worldwide in ‘real time’. Counting down was the means to unite time keeping and time telling and herald a post-socialist revolution. This postsocialist revolution was not simply to end history but to review and renew history. The history to be renewed dated back to the turn of the second millennium when China was at its peak in overall national strength. A third timer was implicated in the countdown. Counting down to renew time Time renewing is a concept rooted in Chinese cultural tradition. For thousands of years, the Chinese have been using cyclical dating methods to imagine time.6 Even with the introduction of the Western calendar and mechanical (and later digital) clocks, the traditional concept of time repeating itself still holds ﬁrm in the Chinese psyche. Time renewing means that something that has happened before will be repeated according to certain patterns. History will be renewed at certain points in new forms of reincarnations. Time renewing does not mean repeating history but remaking and regenerating history in a spiral chain of transcendence. Through time renewing, the new millennium clock became a cultural timer. As already pointed out, counting down to greet the year 2000 in the year of the dragon was an emotive event for the Chinese nation. Explicit symbols appeared promoting the renewal of the dragon culture’s glories and invoking its indomitable spirit: the dragon-shaped number ‘2000’ in the logo of CCTV’s Meeting the Year 2000 programme, the dragon-shaped candle lights on the Great Wall and the dragon dance on the China Centennial Altar. The re-appearance of dragon symbols at Western yuandan to usher in the year of the dragon at Chinese chunjie in the year 2000 was a smart manoeuvre of time and history. Counting down to greet the twenty-ﬁrst century and third millennium was transformed into a national ceremony to greet the second coming of the dragon culture, ‘another splendid sunrise in the history of human civilisation’ (Zhang and Luo 2000). This central theme was fed by a debate on the Chinese ‘Axial Age’ among Chinese intellectuals around the year 2000. ‘Axial Age’ refers to the high civilisation of a nation or culture during a historical epoch. Proposed by Western historians such as Karl Jaspers and Samuel Eisenstadt to earmark world history, it was earnestly accepted by Chinese scholars to envisage a second coming of the ‘Central Kingdom’.7 The ‘Axial Age’ framework gave these scholars a new perspective on Chinese modernity in their enquiries of Chinese history and culture. They argued

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that, if the ﬁrst ‘Axial Age’ appeared in the ﬁrst millennium between 800 and 200 BC in China, Greece, India and the Near East, and the second ‘Axial Age’ happened in the second millennium from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century in Euro-America in the form of Western Enlightenment modernity, the third ‘Axial Age’ would return to the old civilisations in the third millennium. China, as an old culture and civilisation, was situated at such a historical juncture. Its renewal and rejuvenation was depicted as a predestination according to both the traditional Chinese view of time and the ‘Axial Age’ benchmark of history. Counting down to renew time eased the tension between time keeping and time telling. The millennial wish for a renewal of a historical time in the form of China’s second ‘Axial Age’ rendered the new millennium clock a cultural timer. Counting down became three-fold and the new millennium clock a triple timer: it was a popular timer that functioned as a time-telling mechanism to usher in the popular narrative about celebration and entertainment; it was also a political timer that functioned as a time-keeping mechanism to celebrate the socialist achievements of the late twentieth century; and it was ﬁnally a cultural timer that functioned as a time-renewing mechanism to call forth a millennial dream that had haunted the Chinese nation for over a century. As the following sections demonstrate, the threefold functions of the new millennium counting down worked against one another to call forth a new millennialism.

Chinese millennialism in the making Counting down to the new millennium is marked by a journey back into history in order to remake history as well as to race against time in order to re-envisage the future. Three modes of temporality are connected in counting down: the past, the present and the future. Counting down therefore does not simply signify approaching an end or a beginning, but the concept of ‘fold’. This concept is used by Gilles Deleuze (1993) to express an ‘encounter’, that is, a moment stacked with other moments. The new millennium clock invoked the concept of ‘fold’ as ‘a three-fold present’ – ‘the present as we experience it, the past as a present memory, and the future as a present expectation’ (quoted in Bell 1968: 1). As I argue in this section, memory, experience and expectation all help to create a discourse of rejuvenation. This discourse is, in an important sense, millenarian, especially when it is viewed in the context of Chinese millenarian tradition. Chinese millennialism Benjamin Schwartz once commented that China had no reason to be excited about the new millennium and its implied millennialism, if millennialism referred to an apocalyptic transformation and deliverance of human beings based on the Western calendar (Schwartz 2001). Although China does not

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have a millennium calendar, it has a cultural tradition of millenarian expectations. As many historians have documented, millennialism has a long tradition in Chinese history, and has been associated with apocalyptic and rebellious movements. The Japanese scholar Mitsuishi Zenkichi, for example, identiﬁed six types of millennialism or millennial movements in the ﬁrst two millennia of Chinese history. They are the Daoist millennialism expressed in the peasants’ revolt (184), the Maitreya millennialism expressed in the Mahayanan revolt (515), the Christian millennialism expressed in the Taiping movement (1851–64), the Confucian millennialism expressed by Wang Tao (1828–97) and other Confucian scholars, the Confucian–Buddhist millennialism expressed in the Boxer Rebellion (1900–01), and the revolutionary millennialism expressed in the communist revolution (1919–89) (quoted in Miyake 2001: 217; see also Rinehart 1997). The White Lotus rebellion (1796–1803) and Taiping rebellion (1851–64) are the most widely discussed millenarian movements in imperial China among scholars of Chinese history and religion (Haar 1999; Reilly 2004). These popular movements are regarded as millenarian movements, because the people involved in the movements believed themselves to be standing at critical historical moments to enact an earthly delivery from pain, suﬀering and injustice. Millennialism, in a secular sense, refers to the belief in this worldly transformation and salvation. It has been associated with rebellion, violence and revolution. Besides the above-discussed millenarian movements in imperial China, secular millennialism also characterises modern revolutionary movements that claim to create a new life in this world, such as the Chinese communist revolution.8 Michael Barkun argues that revolution and millennialism have merged as one since the French Revolution, the inaugural event in the history of Enlightenment modernity, by which millenarian ideas in the religious tradition ﬁnally and irreversibly entered Western politics. The union of revolution and millennialism has since permeated and characterised political, cultural and social movements in Western and non-Western societies alike (Barkun 1974). Revolutionary millennialism has become part of the discourse of secularised millenarianism in modern politics. In China, the concomitant relationship of revolution and millenarianism is best witnessed in the republican revolution in the early twentieth century and the communist revolution in the latter half of the twentieth century. Both revolutions were situated at a time when war-ridden and poverty-stricken Chinese people were desperate to ﬁnd something alternative to Chinese feudalism and Western imperialism, something that could transform China completely and make the ‘Central Kingdom’ strong and prosperous again. The communist revolution was premised on a total transformation of Chinese society, as expressed in a popular communist slogan ‘change the heaven and transform the earth’ (gai tian huan di). This promise of worldly transformation makes the Chinese communist revolution a revolutionary millennialism. Revolutionary millennialism is a secular millennialism as well as a radical utopianism.9 As a ‘systematic utopia’, to use Raymond Williams’ term, it

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can lead straight to a systematic dystopia – the very attempts to make a completely new society with radically diﬀerent social values, order and system lead by ‘its very processes and impulses, including above all planning, to the exact opposite, a more repressive, a more arbitrary, a more standardised and inhumane order’ (Williams 1983: 12). The Chinese are most familiar with how a systematic utopia led to a systematic dystopia. Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu’s book Gaobie geming (Farewell Revolution) (1995) can be taken as a public declaration of the end of revolution and communist utopianism. The end of revolution and revolutionary utopianism does not mean an end of millenarian aspirations for something new and renewed. At the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, revolutionary millennialism was being replaced by rejuvenation millennialism. This referred to a this-worldly transformation of livelihood – not the existing social–political order – that would enable the glorious return and a second coming of the ‘dragon culture’ in the new millennium. Unlike revolutionary millennialism, rejuvenation millennialism did not promise total transformation but revitalisation and regeneration of a culture whose revitalisation was predetermined by its history and pre-existent in its collective memory. Construed as a messianic belief in the second coming of the ‘Central Kingdom’ on earth, rejuvenation millennialism signalled both a break with (negative) time and continuity with (positive) history. Such politics of temporality and historicity were epitomised in the counting down to the new millennium. The making of a rejuvenation discourse ‘Rejuvenation’ was the keynote of the media event of the new millennium celebration. CCTV’s live broadcast new millennium gala was infused with emotionally charged images and narratives about an ancient China as the ‘Central Kingdom’ at the turn of the ﬁrst and second millennia. The conjuration of China of the ‘Axial Age’ spoke of a strong millennial message: China’s transformation and rejuvenation was both a destination and a predestination. This logic of pride or great nation complex was expressed in the quintessential representation of China as the great dragon culture and through the invocation of Xi’an and Kaifeng at their peaks during the Tang dynasty (tenth century) and the Song dynasty (eleventh century) respectively. As capital cities of eleven and seven diﬀerent dynasties, respectively, Xi’an and Kaifeng were the largest cities in the world at the turn of the second millennium. Both were bustling metropolises situated along the legendary Silk Road that linked their sprawling domains to their trading partners in the West. The reiﬁcation of the past in Xi’an was represented in the re-creation of a Tang-style grand welcome ceremony on New Year’s Eve 1999. This ceremony resembled the Tang imperial welcome ceremony to foreign traders and visitors who came along the Silk Road to pay tribute to the ‘Central Kingdom’ and its emperors. The reiﬁcation of the past in Kaifeng was realised through the re-creation of bustling street scenes as shown in the famous

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scroll ‘Riverside Scene at the Qingming Festival’ (qingming shanghe tu). The invocation of history transported the consuming masses back ten centuries and enabled them to experience a re-imagined glory and consume that glory at the historical juncture of the third millennium. It allowed people to consume the premodern in a post-modern fashion. With the great leap back in time, the Chinese new millennium celebration led its spectators to revisit the great nation complex. The ﬂip side of the great nation complex was the victimisation complex or the ‘logic of the wound’ (Chow 1998b: 6). Since China’s ﬁrst humiliated encounter with the West during the Opium War in 1840, a spectral West had haunted the Chinese nation for over a century. The logic of the wound was embedded in various discourses of Chinese modernity. Its combination with the great nation complex produced a nationalistic desire for China’s rejuvenation. This desire was boosted by China’s economic takeoﬀ in the last twenty years of the twentieth century. In 1998, a ‘20-year achievements’ celebration was held to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of China’s reform and open policies. Chinese media staged an extravagant media spectacle to bid farewell to the 100-year humiliation and celebrate China’s achievements under the leadership of the CCP. The end of the allegorical ‘century’ featured contrasts and comparisons between two sets of historical junctures, one between the turn of the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century and the other between the turn of the second millennium and the turn of the third millennium. Both the great nation complex and the victimisation complex were called upon to conjure a millennial dream about China’s rejuvenation. The following video excerpt and analysis of the last episode in the CCTV programme Century best illustrate the point. (Close-up of fresco on an ancient pole facing the Tiananmen Gate; camera slowly panning upwards and then rightwards to include the Tiananmen Gate in the scene) NARRATOR:

Twentieth-century China is characterised by historical vicissitudes and earthshaking changes. Looking back into the 5000year history, no other century is comparable with the twentieth century. Looking at the whole world, no other country experienced such dramatic revolutions and changes.

(Historical footage in black and white portraying a photo of three women with bound feet in late Qing attire; camera moving from a mid-shot to a close-up of the feet) NARRATOR:

At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese women were forced to bind their feet like this and were conﬁned to a small world.

(Colour video extracts of the Chinese women’s football team scoring at international competitions and the Chinese crowd rising as one in celebration)

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NARRATOR:

At the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, Chinese footballer girls’ beautiful and proud bearings have been seen throughout the world.

(Historical footage in black and white portraying street scenes contrasted with European invaders on horses entering the city, probably Beijing) NARRATOR:

At the turn of the twentieth century, China was occupied and divided by Western powers.

(Coloured video extracts of the ceremonies at Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 and Macao’s return to China in 1999) NARRATOR:

At the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, the smooth returns of Hong Kong and Macao swept away the 100-year humilities – the complete reuniﬁcation of the Motherland is not remote.

(Historical footage in black and white portraying foreign troops in large numbers marching into Beijing on horses and on foot holding guns) NARRATOR:

At the turn of the twentieth century, the capital city of China was recklessly trampled under the iron heels of allied troops from eight countries.

(Coloured video extracts of military parades on the national day on 1 October 1999 marking the ﬁftieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC) NARRATOR:

At the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, the Chinese Liberation Army’s mighty and civil troops exhibit ﬁrm determination and powerful strength to safeguard the sovereignty of the country and territorial integrity and maintain world peace.

(A montage – shifting clouds, stone lion head, May-fourth student protests, Chairman Mao declaring the founding of the PRC, red ﬂag, mass campaigns, students marching to the countryside at the call of the Party, a submarine, a new train, the nuclear test, a dam, Deng Xiaoping waving, a construction site, city skyscrapers, spaceship launching, more clips of cosmopolitan city scenes, tractors, a submarine, a busy port and, ﬁnally, the Great Wall) The Chinese people have ﬁnally found the right route for modernisation after a century’s pursuits and explorations. The history of the twentieth century tells us such a truth: only Chinese revolutions led by the Chinese Communist Party can lead to national independence and uniﬁcation and wipe out obstacles to China’s development; only open and reform policies can lead to China’s rapid development; only socialism with Chinese characteristics can lead the ship of modernisation smoothly towards the shore of glory.

NARRATOR:

(Tiananmen gate, ﬂag-raising ceremony, ﬂowers and balloons decorating the ﬁftieth national day celebrations and children running and cheering)

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Marching towards the new century, China will surely create more glories under the leadership of the third generation centred around Comrade Jiang Zemin.

(Jiang Zemin waving on the podium of the Tiananmen tower to a sea of cheering people on the square) JIANG ZEMIN’S VOICEOVER:

China’s development is dependent on the common progress of all areas in order to reach common prosperity. On the basis of the Motherland’s complete reuniﬁcation and the establishment of a prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and modern socialist country, the Chinese nation will reach its great rejuvenation.

Jiang Zemin’s speech to greet the year 2000, which called for China’s ‘great rejuvenation’, as quoted above, was played repeatedly on Chinese television. It echoed his Hong Kong speech delivered in Beijing on 1 July 1997 after the handover ceremony in Hong Kong (CCTV 1997; People’s Daily 2000). Both speeches served as oﬃcial proclamations of a centennial dream of China’s second coming. The rejuvenation discourse was put forward and explained through the contrasts of two historical junctures that were expressed as ‘at the turn of the twentieth century’ and ‘at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century’. The contrasts gave the rejuvenation discourse a historical urgency, while the comparisons between the turns of the second and third millennia made the call for China’s overall rejuvenation a historicity. The projection of China in the third millennium as a rejuvenated dragon culture rested with the contrast and comparison of positive and negative times in history. ‘Rejuvenation’ served as a point of departure as well as a comparative framework to re-imagine the past, present and future. Through contrast, comparison and projection, the rejuvenation discourse made a great leap backwards as well as a great leap forwards in time. It tactically linked the present with the future and the past. In this respect, the invocation of Xi’an and Kaifeng at the juncture of the ﬁrst and second millennia was an eﬀort to reaﬃrm the positive time in history in order to imagine the future. For the spectators and consumers of the media event, strolling in the re-created ancient streets, watching the ﬁre relay and counting down on big television screens was a secular and mundane experience of the a secular messianism, which promised a new life over a 1000-year span. It is through the projection of the future and the interrogation of the past that rejuvenation millennialism is produced to announce the cultural politics of Chinese post-socialism.

Rejuvenation millennialism and Chinese post-socialism Chinese post-socialism implies continuity with as well as departure from the residual forces of the past and the emerging forces of the present. Similarly,

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rejuvenation millennialism refers to time renewal and historical rupture at the same time. It expresses the cultural politics of Chinese post-socialism in a postrevolution, post-utopian and post-modern age. Implicated in the yearning for China’s rejuvenation, or second coming, in the new millennium are narratives about nostalgia, nationalism and consumerism. These narratives are interrelated with and explain one another. Together, they express the incoherence and contradiction of China’s post-socialism. Post-nostalgia The new millennium celebration was a nostalgia-tinted spectacle. Nostalgia saturated every moment in the counting down to the twenty-ﬁrst century and third millennium. It did not just characterise the media event in and of itself on 31 December 1999, but the last years of the twentieth century. It was a political strategy, an intellectual sentiment and a popular desire to construct and consume the post-socialist identity politics. Making history a ‘presence in absentia’ has been part of the diﬀerent narratives and counter-narratives of Chinese modernity. In the intellectual ﬁeld, nostalgia is the undercurrent logic of the native studies fever, new leftist re-evaluation of the Cultural Revolution and post-ists’ call for Chineseness by way of Western post-modern and post-colonial theories. The invocation of historical ﬁgures, such as Confucius, Confucian scholars and even Confucian mandarins such as Zeng Guofan, is a nostalgic gesture in an attempt to assuage the present. Similarly, looking backwards at China’s revolutionary history and revolutionary ﬁgures is a nostalgic act used to conjure the revolutionary spirit in order to critique the current state of aﬀaires. The conservative and inward turn in Chinese intellectual politics thus expresses a nostalgic sentiment as a corrective to Chinese post-socialism. In the popular and everyday ﬁeld, from nostalgic tourism to Mao fever, nostalgia is a fashion for the consuming masses.10 Many scholars have studied ‘Mao fever’ as a characteristic of the popular nostalgia trend in the 1990s. Chinese cultural critic, Dai Jinhua (1996), for example, regards the consumption of nostalgia and Mao fever as an expression of popular desires. Such desires have transformed the political Mao into a cultural and quotidian Mao who no longer stands for a political and economic system but is consumed as merchandise. At the same time, nostalgic reconstruction and consumption of history and historical ﬁgures functions to assuage the uncertainty and anxiety faced by the post-socialist consuming masses in their search for ‘a sense of comfort and stability’. As Dai writes: [Nostalgia] rebuilds a kind of imagined link between the individual and society, between history and the present reality, in order to provide a rationale for our contemporary struggle and to impart to us some sense of comfort and stability. (Dai 1997: 160)

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Like Dai Jinhua, Geremie Barmé sees Mao’s ghostly presence in post-socialist consumerism as a political unconscious of the people. The Mao cult expresses a yearning for order, security and moral power of the ‘golden’ years in the history of the PRC. Mao is used as a ‘ﬂoating sign, a vehicle for nostalgic reinterpretation, unstated opposition to the status quo, and even satire’ (Barmé 1996: 16). As a ‘ﬂoating sign’, however, Mao is also a vehicle for the party-state to ‘transform the “uncertainties of history” into “readable spaces” that promotes not his image but theirs’ (Dutton 2001: 353). As the master of renaming and remapping the social landscape, the CCP has also proved to be a public relations expert, gaining support for its call for national rejuvenation through its endorsements of Mao fever, Confucius studies and the series of celebrations and ceremonies that led to the ﬁnal countdown of the new millennium celebration. Indeed, the reiﬁcation, parodies, pastiche and consumption of Mao are signiﬁcant both in terms of Mao’s relation to China’s current post-socialist condition and with regard to China’s projection of its future in the twentyﬁrst century. Both the present and the future are premised upon a history that is devoid of authenticity. As Peter Hitchcock (2001: 278) points out, ‘Mao to the Market’ is ‘marked by the speciﬁcity of his relationship to history, the reform movement’s relationship to Mao, the logic of commodiﬁcation and consumption, and the Chinese people’s relationship to all three’. It is not only the communist history (represented by Mao) but also the history dating back to 100 years ago and 1000 years ago that are called upon to give people a backward vision when conjuring a rejuvenation dream. The spectre of Mao is and will remain an essential part of the phantom rejuvenation project, which expresses, to use Hitchcock’s words, ‘a condition of impossibility, of intractability in critique’, and ‘a symptom of the unrecuperative’ (Hitchcock 2001: 281). Fredric Jameson (2002: 215) argues that ‘[o]ntologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past’. The ontology of the present in the Chinese new millennium celebration, however, demanded forecasts of the past as archaeologies of the future, a reversal of Jameson’s projection. The past was re-imagined and recast as either a contrast or a comparative framework in relation to the present. By conjuring the positive time in history and rejecting the negative time of the past, counting down to zero served as a ritual to conjure the archaeology of the future, the future that had already happened in history and was happening here and now. This kind of temporal desynchronisation characterised the teleology of the new millennium celebration. There was an incoherence in the nostalgic imagination of the future. This incoherence can be described as ‘post-nostalgia’. I owe the term ‘post-nostalgia’ to Fredric Jameson. Jameson regards the allegorical encounter of the future, present and past in post-modern consumerism, through symbolic reinvention and representation of the 1950s and 1960s in the so-called nostalgia ﬁlms, as the condition of post-nostalgia sentiments and statements. He writes:

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It is by way of so-called nostalgic ﬁlms that some properly allegorical processing of the past becomes possible: it is because the formal apparatus of nostalgia ﬁlms has trained us to consume the past in the form of glossy images that new and more complex ‘postnostalgia’ statements and forms become possible. (Jameson 2005: 27) Post-nostalgia mobilises a vision of the past to celebrate the present and envisage the future. It also mobilises a vision of the future to reconstruct the past and determine the present. The allegorical encounter of the three folds of time entails three time arrows: one ‘bound for an unfulﬁlled past that had been construed as an inevitable future’, one speeding ‘toward a future as promised, though thwarted, in the past’ (the two arrows in Geremie Barmé’s description; Barmé 2001: 252) and the third arrow ﬂying from the past into the future and back to the past, both via the present, in a circular way (see Figure 2.1). Post-nostalgia unites linear time and circular time in the form of backward–forward-looking nostalgia. It is characterised by: (1) the logic of double negations and (2) the logic of the historical present. The ﬁrst characteristic of post-nostalgia is the ‘negation of the negation’ or the logic of double negations: a negation of Maoists’ negation of Chinese cultural tradition (represented by Confucianism) and a negation of socialism’s negation of capitalism. The ﬁrst double negation is realised through celebration and consumption of Chinese culture and tradition as a 5000-year civilisation. In the new millennium celebration, it was exempliﬁed by the invocation of an ancient Xi’an and Kaifeng at the turn of the second millennium. Both were the world’s then largest cities and attracted numerous foreign pilgrims who returned home with Confucian teachings as well as silk, the compass, gunpowder and papermaking and printing technologies. The re-creation of ancient cities reawakened the feeling of pride in Chinese tradition and culture. Xi’an and Kaifeng, like the body of the Chinese nation, are riddled with scars. Their historical vicissitudes are not only marked by glorious achievements, but also by natural and human disasters. Kaifeng, for example, was destroyed several times by ﬂooding from the Yellow River and by civil wars

Figure 2.1 Three time arrows.

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among warlords in ancient and modern histories. The city is famous for two historical ﬁgures: one is Lord Bao, or Bao Gong, a righteous oﬃcial of the Northern Song dynasty whose reputation as someone immune to corruption made him a local and national hero and qingtian (clear sky, roughly meaning the ‘righteous oﬃcial’) in the eyes of the ordinary people; the other is Liu Shaoqi, former chairman of the PRC who was tortured to death by his political adversaries, the Mao clique, during the Cultural Revolution in a room not far from the temple of Lord Bao. In the new millennium celebrations, however, only certain memories were recalled while others were suppressed. The temple of Lord Bao, for example, was turned into a tourist site, while its association with an uncorrupted and incorruptible government and with the CCP’s own history of violence and atrocity was forgotten. The second double negation, the negation of socialism’s negation of capitalism, is realised through the second coming of capitalism and its integration with Chinese socialism.11 Unlike the Maoist era, when capitalism and consumerism were condemned as Western and bourgeois, capitalism became the visible hand that dominated the Chinese economy, and consumerism the marker of Chinese popular culture at the end of the twentieth century. The bustling city scenes of old Kaifeng and Xi’an were brought back for celebration as well as consumption. History was fragmented into incessant moments to be kept up with and consumed. The re-creation of historical Xi’an and Kaifeng produced a millennium version of a simulacrum with its implosion of old and new images, artifacts and themes.12 It brought back something both archaic (and uniquely Chinese) and post-modern at the same time. This kind of simulation of the past is a pastiche, according to Jameson (2001), based on the consumption of historicised culture. This consumption presumed a temporal desynchronisation that justiﬁed the use of the premodern against the modern and post-modern. This temporal desynchronisation, represented by the three time arrows, was central to the post-nostalgia sentiment and characterises Chinese post-socialism. The past was a cluster of memories, a warehouse and treasure bank of artifacts that could be reproduced and consumed. The consumption of the past worked according to the logic of selected remembering and forgetting of history. Through such a process, certain pain was taken out while some pain was emphasised. Post-nostalgia was hence about memory with the pain emphasised as well as memory with the pain taken out. The media event eﬀectively produced historical amnesia through nostalgia. By editing and re-editing history and the collective memory, the mass media, to use Jameson’s words, ‘serve[ed] as the very agents and mechanism for our historical amnesia’ (Jameson 1983: 125). The historical amnesia in nostalgia served as a point of departure for the time arrow to dart towards the future as promised in the past. It is in the incoherence between nostalgia and amnesia that the future could be re-imagined as a millennial dream. This points to the second characteristic of post-nostalgia, the logic of historical present, which refers to the present as the meeting point of the three time arrows.

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During the new millennium celebration, historical junctures were invoked to revive history in order to relive history, and to relive history in order to remake history. They laboriously called upon a ‘robust spirit’ of China as the ‘Heavenly Kingdom’ (tianchao), represented by the proud smiles on terracotta soldiers’ faces that paralleled with the cheering crowds at the PRC’s ﬁftieth birthday (1 October 1999). The smiling faces formed a contrast with the miserable faces of the Chinese people as ‘the sick man of east Asia’ (dongya bingfu) in photos and ﬁlm footage taken by foreigners at the turn of the twentieth century.13 These contrasts and comparisons further aﬃrmed China’s rise as a historical predestination. They also served as footnotes to the celebrations of the CCP’s great achievements in 1997 (the return of Hong Kong), 1998 (the twentieth anniversary of the implementation of the reform politics), 1999 (the ﬁftieth anniversary of the establishment of the PRC) and 2000 (the new millennium celebrations). The reiﬁcation of the past functioned as a mechanism to aﬃrm the ‘here and now’. Post-nostalgia was not just a millennial mood and sentiment. It existed as a strategy of representation, and was therefore ideological. It helped to erase tensions among diﬀerent narratives about the past, present and future. It encouraged a renewed attachment to the party and the state-led national rejuvenation project. The past 5000 years, 100 years and 50 years were selectively recuperated as a form of departure into the past as well as the future. Post-nostalgia was a post-pre-millennium mood that articulates the ‘post’ in the time of the ‘pre’.14 It was implicated in post-nationalism, the other characteristic of rejuvenation millennialism. Post-nationalism Millenarian movements, especially secular ones, are connected with nationalist movements. As Philip Lamy notes, While their aspirations may be purely political, nationalist movement leaders often evoke doomsday predictions or a utopian millennium in order to provide a credo and motivation for followers, as well as to bring legitimacy to the sometimes questionable words and actions of their leaders or members. (Lamy 1997: 13) Chinese rejuvenation millennialism was a millenarian sentiment as well as a nationalist ideology. It provided apocalyptic texts and millennial rhetoric to fuel the nationalistic expectations of the second coming of China’s Axial Age in the third millennium. It represented a new ideology that blended a millenarian aspiration for a new beginning with a nationalistic yearning for national revival. Underlining the rejuvenation discourse was the conjunction of cultural nationalism proposed by the intellectuals, popular nationalism embodied in consumerism, and political nationalism supported by the state.

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Numerous writings were produced to capture the ‘complex weave of Chinese nationalist sentiments’ in the 1990s (Unger 1996: xviii). In this ‘complex weave of nationalistic sentiments’, the nation was not constructed as an ‘imagined community’ but composed of various ‘imagined communities’. These imagined communities represented contested narratives of Chinese modernity. Their interplay produced a discursive space that was devoid of coherence and a nebulous zone that deprived nationalism of a ﬁxed meaning. Several authors have described the incoherence and contradiction in Chinese nationalisms as ‘post-nationalism’. Although their starting points are diﬀerent, they have all noted the central theme of the post-nationalist sentiments: identity politics in the age of globalisation. Chris Berry (1996) uses post-nationalism to describe a politics of identity employed by individual producers to cut across cultural diﬀerences in the production of ﬁlms about homosexuality in East Asia. Xiaoping Li (2000) uses post-nationalism to describe the schizophrenia in the Chinese nation when it strives to construct the Chinese self against a Western other. The schizophrenia is characterised by ‘a new Chinese sense of self-importance and a desire for strength and revenge’ (ibid.: 207). Post-nationalism is hence ‘a way of making sense of the incongruity in Chinese [nationalistic] sentiment and praxis within the context of globalisation process’ (ibid.: 192). Like Berry and Li, Xudong Zhang also sees post-nationalism as a ‘postsocialist sentimentalism’ during China’s entrance into the global time of capitalism and capitalist productions. For Zhang, post-nationalism is a mixture of ‘an enhanced sense of geopolitical and economic interest and a more assertive cultural self-identity vis-à-vis the West’, especially in the context of China’s continued economic growth and renewed national conﬁdence (Zhang 2001a: 42). It expresses a sense of enthusiasm and frustration in face of an unfamiliar world brought about by globalisation. The schizophrenia or mixture of enthusiasm and frustration gives rise to ‘a pre-political and intellectually inarticulate nationalism that cuts across, but is not congruent with, the national imaginings within the boundaries of the state discourse’ (ibid.). Post-nationalism therefore describes the incoherence and contradiction among the diﬀerent expressions of Chinese nationalism. It is a discursive practice that expresses a sense of incongruity in Chinese identity politics. Under the rubric of post-nationalism, diﬀerent streams of nationalistic narratives contest and appropriate the nebulous discursive space opened up by China’s opening up and participation in globalisation capitalism. Such a nebulous discursive space, characterised by incoherence and tension, has paradoxically nurtured an ‘all-consuming nationalism’ (Dutton 1999). Post-nationalism is implicated in the dual discourses of culturalism and consumerism. Culturalism was the underlying logic of the conservative turn in Chinese intellectual trend in the 1990s. As Chapter One has shown, the Confucian revival, the call for ‘Chineseness’ and various critiques of Chineseness and West-ness are all underpinned by the yearning for a strong China, the

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qiangguo meng. This qiangguo meng was expressed as a yearning for China’s rejuvenation in the third millennium. The rejuvenation millennialism converged culturalism with nationalism, which was then interposed between capitalism and socialism. Socialism was no longer an antithesis to capitalism. Rather, capitalism was considered a driving force to revive Chinese socialism and regenerate its greatness as a culture and a nation. Culture, whether it was Chinese traditional culture, revolutionary culture, folk culture, ethnic minority cultures or foreign cultures, was historicised, reinvented and consumed, often in the form of pastiche.15 As Arif Dirlik (1996c: 260) succinctly points out, while ‘modernisation has broken down into a variety of temporalities and spatialities’, Chinese culture is embraced as ‘some kind of progressive force which breathes new life into a capitalism plagued by contradictions’. China, a nation that meshes history with culture – for history is repeatedly presented as a ‘5000-year-old culture’ – became a major promoter of Orientalist images of itself in the global market (Dirlik 1996a). Chinese tradition and culture, or simply ‘Chineseness’, provided the natural resource and index for China’s re-entry into global knowledge production. Nationalism and consumerism had been part of China’s nation-building projects envisaged by the ruling elites in most of modern Chinese history (Gerth 2003). As Leo Ou-fan Lee (1999) observes, the imaginary of Chinese modernity in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century paralleled an imaging of a modern nation-state. This imaging of the nation-state equated modernisation with Westernisation, which was then equivalent to an imaging of consumer culture and urban life represented by Shanghai. Because of its relationship with Westernisation, modernisation could be antagonistic to nationalism, as shown in Lucian Pye’s study of pre-1949 Shanghai (Pye 1996a). China’s socialist modernity was an attempt to ease the tension between nationalism and modernisation, where modernisation was considered not just a property of capitalism but also of socialism. Nevertheless, socialist modernity was still underlined by a materialistic outlook. Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–61), for example, was a utopian eﬀort to overcome material backwardness in three years. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms continued the modernisation drive, this time infusing capitalism into Chinese socialism. As a result, consumerism, which was pre-empted in socialism’s denunciation of capitalism in the Mao era, had its second coming at the end of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it promoted and in turn was promoted by nationalism in China’s national rejuvenation project. Chinese modernity again fell on the co-mechanisms of nationalism and consumerism. Long before the new millennium countdown, a rush to capitalise on the millennium business opportunities turned the new millennium celebration into a commercial revelry. Consumer goods and concepts ranging from millennium bugs (the Y2K problem), millennium marriages, millennium babies, to millennium greeting (e-)cards, stamps, coins, T-shirts, to millennium concerts, parties, banquets and tourism invaded almost every aspect of everyday

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life. They appeared in media headlines, academic writings, business promotion campaigns and oﬃcial lead-up events organised by the CNCOC. Even disputes on the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century were capitalised to promote two rounds of millennium business opportunities and two millennium celebrations for the years 2000 and 2001. Counting down to zero did not just mean welcoming the new century and millennium. It also meant zero-hour bargain shopping for the consuming masses. Already invaded by capitalism in the past two decades, China became the new frontier of global capitalism and consumerism. As a marker of post-reform China, a ‘consumer revolution’ took place under state mandate (C. Li 1998). This consumer revolution was not just an economic event, but also an ideological operation. The state played a pivotal role in promoting such a consumer revolution. It utilised both nationalism and consumerism to create a messianism of China’s rejuvenation in the new millennium. Consumer nationalism or nationalist consumerism was eﬀectively employed by the CCP to justify its legitimacy as the ruling party and maintain political stability (Lam 2000). Instead of being a counter-discourse, culturalism was complicit with state nationalism (Guo 2004: 21). Expressed variably as ‘state-mandated consumerism’ or ‘state-led nationalism’ (Zhang 1998: 1; S. Zhao 1998), consuming nationalism bestowed the logic of legitimacy for the post-socialist ideology. Implicated in the post-nationalist praxis, capitalism and socialism referred to each other as much as they were antagonistic forces. This situation justiﬁed the preﬁxing of Chinese socialism and nationalism with a ‘post’. Post-nationalism captures the tension in the production and consumption of identity politics among various social players. In post-nationalism, the consuming masses respond to global capitalism as well as to national politics. Arthur Waldron (1993: 53) once commented that China in the twentieth century was ‘plagued by two losses: of the reality of the past and of the ideology of the present’. The past was destroyed and rewritten by the communist regime. Communism, which once provided an apocalyptic vision of deliverance (with Mao as the Messiah) for the Chinese nation, had been worked over in the last two decades of the twentieth century with China’s entry into global capitalism. New ideologies, represented by nationalism and consumerism, were called upon to ﬁll the ideological void left by the ‘two losses’. Nostalgia, consumerism and nationalism referred to one another. They were implicated in post-nostalgia and post-nationalism as a way to reconstruct Chinese history and nationhood. They pointed towards a historical fantasy about China’s past and present, a fantasy that provided a new utopian blueprint to imagine its future.

Conclusion China does not have a millennium calendar, but it has its own teleology in joining in the global new millennium celebrations. It not only enthusiastically

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joined the worldwide counting down relay, but also eﬀectively commercialised and politicised the global media spectacle and transformed it into a millenarian story about national rejuvenation. The rituals of the new millennium countdown were presented as a ‘gospel’ to renew time. They proclaimed the second coming of China as a great culture and civilisation in the third millennium. If counting down to Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 was a prelude to the collective invocation of rejuvenation millennialism, counting down to the new year of 2000 was its consummation, rather than an epilogue, because rejuvenation millennialism was still in the making. Counting down signiﬁed a race against time, measured not in hours or minutes, but in millions of seconds. It signiﬁed a millennial sense of urgency to catch up with time and reconcile with history. The utopian desire for something extraordinary, which once characterised Mao’s project of socialism as ‘a grand plan of the centennial and a grand plan of the millennium’ (bainian daji, qiannian daji), has continued to haunt the Chinese nation, even though socialism has to be preﬁxed with post to signify its incoherence and contradiction. The utopian desire embodied in rejuvenation millennialism signiﬁes the logic of ‘not yet’ and hence creates a space of re-appearance. Unlike the Hong Kong case, where the end of colonialism in 1997 signiﬁed ‘a culture of disappearance’, rejuvenation millennialism implies a culture of re-appearance for the Mainland.16 Counting down is a ritualistic performance to anchor such a culture of re-appearance. The three-fold nature of rejuvenation millennialism – nostalgia, nationalism and consumerism, as expressed through post-nostalgia and post-nationalism – underlines the cultural politics of Chinese post-socialism. Rejuvenation millennialism is a form of what Catherine Wessinger (1997) calls ‘progressive millennialism’, because it enlists progress and development, mainly in the form of economic and scientiﬁc developments and historical progress. This millennial discourse of progress, however, does not entail a neat linear view of time, but is intertwined with the Chinese cyclical view of time. Through a retrospective envisioning of the future, rejuvenation millennialism appropriates both linear and cyclical views of time to project a millenarian vision of history and historicity. The cyclical view of time is not antithetic to but compatible with millennialism. This has been proved in Chinese Buddhist and Daoist millennial movements in history (Wessinger 1997: 54). The Chinese socialist movement bears further witness to the incorporation of Western linear time with Chinese cyclical time as a way to envisage a renewed China in the new millennium. The conjuration of the second coming of the ‘Central Kingdom’ and its second 1000-year Axial Age was repeatedly performed at the turn of the new millennium and new century. If the return of Hong Kong in 1997 was the ﬁrst act in the drama of conjuration, the celebrations of CCP’s twenty-year achievements in 1998 became the second act, the celebrations of PRC’s ﬁftieth birthday in October 1999 the third act, and the return of Macao in

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December 1999 the fourth act. The year 2000 millennium celebration is the ﬁfth act in the ongoing drama. Rejuvenation millennialism is an ongoing story about Chinese modernity, a story that, in the words of Theodor Adorno, ‘sound[s] so old, and yet [is] so new’ (quoted in Comaroﬀ and Comaroﬀ 2000: 334). The new millennium celebration extended its temporal span from 2000 to 2001. At the end of 2000, a second millennium celebration was held to prolong the conjuration of the rejuvenation millennialism. The Great Wall of China and the China Centennial Altar again witnessed jubilant crowds dancing, singing and counting down to meet the new millennium at the zero hour of 1 January 2001 (the year of the little dragon or snake). Chinese television screened another 24-hour live broadcast. In the 2001 new millennium celebration, more people embraced the new century and new millennium via new media rather than sitting in front of the television. They watched the non-stop live broadcast of new millennium celebrations around the world on the Internet and sent New Year wishes to friends and families via mobile phones. The use of new media in the making of a media spectacle occurred, to borrow from a China Daily report, ‘on a scale not previously seen’ (Shao 2001). New media were not only an important part of the new millennium celebrations, but played an essential role in reﬁguring people’s identity, subjectivity and citizenship. This will be examined in the following chapters.

3

Media stories The politics of AIDS and SARS

The spring of 2003 has been vividly described as the ‘spring of masks’ in China.1 Soon after the nation staged the largest ever AIDS campaign on World AIDS Day (1 December 2002), an unknown ‘white’ anxiety of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) took the place of the known ‘red’ threat of HIV/AIDS.2 Enveloped in a SARS panic, the whole nation was decorated with all sorts of masks that smelt of disinfectant. The successive red threat and white anxiety have brought about a quiet cultural revolution in Chinese society. Unlike the Maoist one, this revolution is not one of ideology led by the state; rather, it is a revolution of information vectors. It is part of what has been called the ‘silent revolution’ that is leading to the re-subjectiﬁcation of post-Mao citizens.3 Upon closer look, though, these post-Mao citizens are not silent: they talk, link and click. By talking on the radio and the television, linking with others through real and virtual networking and clicking the keyboard of the mobile phone and/or computer, these citizens, especially those from the urban middle classes, are able to appropriate and expand the circulatory matrix of narrative, subjectivity and citizenship. New media have become the venue and means for post-Mao citizens to re-form subjectivities and exercise citizenship, which in turn exposes the politics of AIDS and SARS in urban China. AIDS and SARS, as potential global epidemics that have aﬀected millions of lives in China alone, are sites of signiﬁcation and knowledge in contemporary biopolitics. As they represent social and cultural crises, as well as biomedical ones, both syndromes have provided opportunities for the state and society to reconstitute and re-situate their subjective positions in relation to each other. AIDS and SARS have also opened up space to re-examine the information revolution that is changing China’s popular media topology. Faced with a morality-loaded virus (AIDS) and a highly contagious virus (SARS), people have readjusted their strategies of expression and interaction through the use of new media, which oﬀer them channels of (relative) freedom and convenience at low cost. As a result, communication has increasingly taken the form of written rather than oral transmissions. If the viruses have opened space for the reconstitution of public discourses on subjectivity and citizenship, the use of new media has facilitated the formation and circulation of such discourses and provided new venues for subject formation.

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New media and communication technologies have spread from the urban elites and middle class to the vast social strata of urban centres in China. As detailed in Chapter One, China has the largest mobile communication market in the world and the second highest Internet usage after the United States; in 2003, the numbers of China’s Internet and mobile phone users hit 80 million and 269 million respectively. Both BBS (bulletin board system) and SMS (short message service or text messaging) are particularly popular among Chinese new media users. During the SARS outbreak, for example, the Internet and mobile phone were called into play for nearly every aspect of interaction and communication among SARS-conﬁned urbanites. In this way, new media constitute the everyday reality of urban China, as well as the politics of AIDS and SARS. This chapter examines the practices of talking, linking and clicking as they intersect with the politics of both syndromes and the concomitant resubjectiﬁcation of urban citizens in contemporary China. I view the practices of talking, linking and clicking as part of the revolution in media ideology, as well as a societal revolution. The use of new media is transforming the private and the public, as well as re-forming and dislocating networks of communicative practices. In the process, the subjectivities of those who participate in such networks are reﬁgured. By examining the use of new media by Chinese urbanites to circulate and discuss topics related to the viruses between 2002 and 2003, I look at the ways in which talking, linking and clicking have become technologies of resubjectiﬁcation, whereby people re-imagine and reconstitute themselves as subjects who are visible to the state, though without being subjected to its logic of interpellation, and as subjects who are invisible to the state, without undermining their reﬂexive subjectivity. While one becomes a visible subject when one is made to talk by the state, one becomes an invisible subject when one talks in response to calls of one’s intimate self and fellow citizens via new media. By enabling the re-formation of political subjectivities, talking, linking and clicking have become important means of exercising citizenship for post-socialist subjects of the Chinese polity.

The making of media stories Since the mid-1990s, China has undergone an explosive growth in Internet and mobile phone usage and coverage. If in the early 1990s the mobile phone was still a symbol of the new rich (Goodman 1996: 226), in 2003 when SARS broke out, about 269 million Chinese, or one out of every ﬁve people, owned mobile phones. As an essential means of communication, entertainment and networking, the Internet and mobile communication have become an integral part of the daily lives of urban Chinese. It is now the ambient Internet and mobile phones, after the ‘ambient TV’ (McCarthy 1990), that occupy the public spaces of streets, squares, bars, restaurants, shops, cafes and airports. The era of mobile communication is born.

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Worldwide, mobile communication has emerged in the last decade as a distinctive marker of contemporary communicative and cultural practice. Such a mode of communication has been described as a ‘mind and societyaltering technology’ (Katz and Aakhus 2002: 2). It aﬀects the notions of private and public, patterns of communication practices (including the use and abuse of speech culture), modes of social and political mobilisation, and concepts of identity and self-identity (Harper et al. 2005; Katz and Aakhus 2002). The major features of such a mobile communication can also be found in China. Chinese urbanites are enthusiastic about mobile communication, especially with the integration of telecommunication technologies that allows users to send and receive word, video or audio texts between mobile phones and the Internet. Among other features, SMS communication (texting) has dominated the Chinese telecommunication market. It is reported that as many as 95 per cent of urban youths prefer SMS communication to communication by any other means (People’s Daily 2004a). The trend is now spreading from the young to the middle-aged. People prefer SMS communication over other means of communication for its eﬃciency, mobility (one can carry mobile phones anywhere), low intrusiveness, low cost (RMB0.10 or US$0.012 per message), integrated Internet services and the ‘personal touch’ it provides (Jiang 2003; People’s Daily 2004a). Besides functioning as an essential means of daily communications, texting via and between mobile phones and the Internet has become a key channel for sending greetings at festivals, holidays and special events such as birthdays. It is reported that more than 7.35 billion SMS were sent in the seven-day Chinese New Year (the Spring Festival) celebrations in February 2003 (Shi 2003). Shortly after the Spring Festival of 2003, rumours circulated widely via the Internet and mobile phone texting about a mysterious virus outbreak in Guangzhou and later in Beijing: about its incurable nature, about a scarcity of rice and salt (which caused large-scale panic shopping in Guangzhou and Beijing), about sealing the city of Beijing and about the imposition of martial law. Until 20 April, the day that marked China’s open campaign on SARS, Chinese ‘mobizens’ and ‘netizens’ were the major sources and carriers of information on SARS.4 It was reported that the number of SMS messages in Guangdong province alone reached forty million on 8 January, forty-one million on 9 January and forty-ﬁve million on 10 January (Qiu 2003). Nationwide, over 220 billion messages were sent from February to April 2003, an average of 300 million per day, mostly among SARS-conﬁned urbanites (Jiang 2003; People’s Daily 2004b). The ﬁrst newspaper report on SARS originated from an SMS message sent anonymously to a journalist at the Southern Metropolitan News (SMN or Nanfang doushi bao, a local Guangzhou newspaper known for its critical and investigative journalism).5 The newspaper broke the news on the outbreak of the epidemic in Guangzhou before the oﬃcial order to ban SARS reports took eﬀect. The ban on news reports on SARS, however, could not stop the ﬂow of SARS-related information via

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mobile phones. A huge body of SMS messages were sent out daily to inform and update news on the epidemic from Guangzhou to Beijing and across the whole country. They constituted a ‘mobile panic’ about SARS that led to large-scale scare shopping in Guangzhou and Beijing.6 They also created a ‘mobile guanxi network’ among Chinese Internet and mobile phone users.7 From families to friends and to all other mobile phone and Internet users, an extensive virtual network was created via mobile communication. It was a virtual network that supplemented, possibly even supplanted, the hard network of guanxi. This virtual guanxi network was ‘mobile’ in two senses: the mobile communication as the key transmission of the politics of SARS; and the ﬂexible and unstable nature of such a network. Such a network contributed to the ‘street’ politics of SARS. The mobile communication and mobile guanxi network became an ‘antidote’ to SARS, in the sense that the new media transmission of SARS-related information mirrored the transmission of the virus itself. The following SMS reﬂects this idea in a humorous fashion: ‘Urgent reminder: The newest channel of SARS transmission is by mobile phone. For your own health, whenever you receive an SMS please leave your phone for one hour in disinfectant before reusing it’.8 New media enable ordinary people to constitute themselves as active agents in narrating their own stories via emailing, BBS or SMS. In the era before new media became an everyday reality for ordinary people, individual stories about everyday lives, personal memories and reﬂections, and grievances and protests were narrated either through face-to-face communications within a limited locality or by conscientious journalists. Often journalists would insert a slice of real life about the everyday experience of ordinary people into mainstream media narratives, but only after the ‘slice of real life’ had existed long enough to cause either sensation or social unrest. Ordinary people were not equipped to narrate their own stories and make their voices heard. In the era of new media, however, new forms of publicness are created based on non-localised, non-corporal, non-dialogic and non-reciprocal forms of communication across national and cultural boundaries. Mobility and mobilisation are privatised via mediated quasi-interactions among diﬀerent publics (Thompson 1995). Communication becomes versatile, immediate and more democratising in that ordinary people can log onto a BBS to read or post a social commentary or personal story, or use their mobile phones to talk and send a synopsis of social commentary or personal story, almost anytime and anywhere. They do not need specialists and professionals to speak for them; they can be the authors of their own stories. This is testiﬁed in a series of media stories created via new media by and about people suﬀering from two epidemic crises (HIV/AIDS and SARS) from 2002 to 2003. The story of Li Jiaming HIV/AIDS has been a sustained and serious threat to Chinese society. From 1985, when China recognised its ﬁrst HIV/AIDS case, to mid-2003, an

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estimated 0.6 million to 1.3 million people were infected with HIV/AIDS, with an annual increase rate of 30 per cent and a male/female ratio of 4:1 (UNAIDS 2003). The virus, which is believed by most Chinese to be a Western disease, has spread from drug users and sex workers in the south, southwest and northwest of China to blood sellers in villages of the central provinces (such as the ‘AIDS villages’ in Henan province) and to almost every province of China. It is estimated that, by 2010, China will have ten million people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), if the epidemic is not brought under eﬀective control (Zhao and Zhang 2001: 163). Despite such an astonishing growth rate, AIDS talk – talks on AIDS given by PLWHA – remained a sensitive and prohibited zone in Chinese public discourses until the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, when representations of HIV/AIDS shifted from the oﬃcial discourse on statistics and policies to the individual discourse consisting of personal confessions and revelations. In a face-saving society such as China, AIDS talk, especially talk related to sexuality, can be as radical as the gay rights movement is in the West, because ‘coming out’ and losing face (and social security) is one and the same.9 On the ﬁfteenth World AIDS Day in 2002, the News Probe (Xinwen diaocha) – a renowned news investigation programme on China Central Television (CCTV) – introduced Li Jiaming in the feature story as ‘the most mysterious person living with HIV/AIDS in China’. The televised AIDS talk presented Jiaming as a dark silhouette sitting opposite his fully lit interviewer Dong Qian in a studio setting. Running through the forty-minute programme were fast ﬂows of information between interviewer and interviewee, accompanied by constant shifts and contrasts between dark and bright televisual frames of the two ﬁgures. Jiaming was not the ﬁrst public PLWHA, but he was the ﬁrst to perform AIDS talk with sexual implications on Chinese national television. Jiaming stood out from other PLWHA covered in the national media for three reasons. First, he was portrayed as a moral person suﬀering from the consequence of an immoral activity (prostitution); second, he came out as both a victim of and a warrior against the disease of modernity not, as other PLWHA chose to do, in the name of saving the nation, but in the name of declaring a personal war on HIV/AIDS; and third, Jiaming was persuaded by News Probe to talk about his experience as a PLWHA after he shook the Internet community by posting his personal confessions online. His coming out was rendered both visual (hence visible) and masked (hence invisible) in new ways that marked him as diﬀerent from other cases. ‘Li Jiaming’ is the pseudonym of a young man who went out drinking with colleagues on a night in September 2000 and then into a massage parlour where he was infected with HIV through unprotected sex with a prostitute. Within months, he developed full-blown AIDS, and was diagnosed as such in early 2001. Jiaming, a young university graduate full of potential in the year 2000, found himself suddenly facing a ‘death sentence’, according to his cyber-account. After months of struggles against death wishes, he decided to ‘open his heart’ and ‘declare a war’ on the virus. On 12 July 2001, he took

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the ﬁrst step of telling his story in cyberspace. His writings started to appear at www.rongshuxia.com, a famous Chinese-language literature website based in Shanghai. Jiaming immediately caused a sensation among Chinese netizens. Within days of Jiaming’s declaration of war on AIDS appearing on the Internet, a record number of visits was set at rongshuxia, when Jiaming’s column was visited daily more than 30 million times. Some called him ‘villain’ and ‘animal’ and condemned him for his imprudence that caused him to carry the ‘red cross’ of shame. Many others praised his bravery in telling his story as a warning to others about the dangers of the disease. Some called Jiaming’s AIDS story a ‘warning like an earthquake’ to people who think the virus is still far away from them. He was called an anti-AIDS hero who risked his own integrity and pride and sacriﬁced his own time and health to help others. After his talk on CCTV, Jiaming received thousands of responses through News Probe and, most of all, his ‘home’ at rongshuxia. This time, the overwhelming message was support, encouragement, advice and love. Lots of people admitted that they cried after watching the programme on News Probe and reading his writings at rongshuxia. One person wrote, ‘Lots of people cried watching Titanic. I didn’t. But I cried for you. I cried while watching your television programme on CCTV-2; I cried while reading your words on the website’. They call him their ‘friend’, ‘brother’ and ‘buddy’. One netizen wrote, ‘God bless you, Jiaming. I wish AIDS could be conquered today. … There are strangers here on the Net who understand and care about you. Feel free to open your heart’. Another netizen wrote, ‘You are a responsible man … and a brave man. Our lives are just blinks of the eye compared with the long-lasting universe. But you have used your life and story to help others and beneﬁt others. … Your life is meaningful, whether it is long or short. … I wish you a cheerful spirit and continuing with the route you’ve chosen’.10 Jiaming’s fame continued to grow with the increasing number of his netizen friends. He continued posting articles and communicating with his netizen friends in his ‘home’ at rongshuxia and his forum at jiaming.clubhi.com. Jiaming’s community included all sorts of people and attracted all sorts of discourses on HIV/AIDS, ranging from heterosexual and mainstream discourses to homosexual and other subaltern discourses that are normally excluded from the public discourse. By the time his book The Last Declaration of War (Zuihou de xuanzhang) was published in May 2002, Jiaming’s home at rongshuxia had been visited more than four billion times (J. Li 2002: 3, 249).11 As Jiaming admitted, his AIDS talk on the Internet had enriched and enhanced his life. As a bridge to connect one’s inner world with the outer world, the Internet became part of his politics on AIDS. The case of Sun Zhigang For Sun Zhigang, another hero of popular media stories circulated via the Internet, however, the Internet is a posthumous bridge to this world. Sun, a

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27-year-old graphic designer who graduated from Wuhan Polytechnic Institute in 2001, was detained by police in the southern city of Guangzhou on 17 March 2003, on his way to an Internet cafe, for failing to display his temporary resident card. He was found beaten to death in police custody on 20 March 2003 (Jiang and Yu 2003). After more than a month of futile eﬀorts by Sun’s family to get the authorities to investigate his death, the case came to the attention of Chen Feng, an investigative reporter with Southern Metropolitan News, through Sun’s classroom network (Liang 2003). It was published in the newspaper on 25 April, under the title ‘The Death of Detainee Sun Zhigang’ (SMN 2003a). Immediately after the exposure of Sun’s case, all the major Chinese BBS, personal weblogs and email groups were awash with netizens’ outcries demanding that the Guangzhou authorities deliver justice for the dead man. Sun’s case was regarded as a gross violation of citizens’ constitutional rights and freedom (Xiao 2003). Sun’s fellow university graduates and thousands of netizens, legal experts, scholars and lawyers wrote numerous articles and declarations, and staged several waves of online protests and petitions that sought juridical justice for the dead. Among the outcries was an article posted on the oﬃcial website of People’s Daily, written by a netizen called ‘Splendid Prose’ (jinxiu wen), which criticised the government for neglecting its duty and denying citizens’ rights. It triggered heated online discussions and eventually led to a strong wave of online protest against the authorities (Jin 2003). The online discussion, petition and protest were also joined by overseas Chinese-language BBS such as the ‘United Morning Post Forum’ (zaobao luntan) at www.zaobao.com.sg based in Singapore and the ‘Current Aﬀairs Review’ (shishi pingshu) at www.wenxuecity.com based in North America, which featured extensive discussions on Sun Zhigang in response to the domestic online shockwave.12 At the height of online protest, a special committee was formed by the Guangzhou government to investigate the case. The result of the investigation, however, was the usual denial of responsibility by the local police, who had hoped to force the relatives into silence and hence make the case disappear from the public sphere (Jiang and Yu 2003). But if that strategy had worked in previous cases, it did not work this time. The blunt denial of responsibility by the local police enraged Chinese netizens. They reacted immediately by posting more critical comments that criticised the legal procedure in investigating the case (Xiao 2003). A spontaneous online petition quickly spread throughout the virtual networks. Online discussion, protest and petition displayed a strong public opinion that prompted oﬃcial rhetoric to align more closely with popular feeling. Popular media such as Southern Weekly, Beijing Youth and China News Weekly quickly picked up the online mood and gave full coverage of the Sun case.13 Mainstream media, including CCTV, readjusted their agenda and started to follow the case at the impetus of the vox populi. From the end of May to June 2003, the case of Sun Zhigang remained in the headlines in

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national news on CCTV, whose SARS reporting team in Guangzhou followed the development of the case, especially the long-anticipated trial on 5 June 2003. Legal scholars were invited to give expert comments on the case and on China’s legal reforms in general (SMN 2003b). Even the central government in Beijing became alert to the brewing discontent and unrest in the virtual world and instructed the Guangzhou authorities to arrest those responsible for Sun’s death. Thirteen people were arrested, as reported on 13 May. Eighteen people were tried and convicted in an open trial on 5 June. Twenty-three other oﬃcials were punished outside the legal system. It was the ﬁrst time in Chinese media history that an ordinary person was given so much attention in the national media. This attention made Sun a nationally known ﬁgure and his case a media spectacle. The cases of Li Jiaming, Sun Zhigang and mobile phone texting constitute media stories about AIDS and SARS, not simply because of the timeframe of these events. They are also media stories because of the mediated nature of the life experiences of new media users. The above illustrations of the making of media stories show that new media and communication technologies have become new venues for people to voice their opinions and mobilise support and resources through spatially extensive networks of engagement. These new media and communication technologies enable ordinary people to constitute themselves as active storytellers and producers of a popular version of media stories in parallel with the oﬃcial version of media events narrated by the state media. People are no longer merely ‘masses’ to be led and co-opted by the oﬃcial storytellers, or as active audiences who exercise their ‘right to express’ in response to the call and rules of the state media, but also as (co)-authors and producers of media stories in the freer and more open space of new media. Their eﬀective use of the Internet and mobile phones can inﬂuence mainstream media’s agenda setting and impact state policies. More importantly, it facilitates the reformation of subjectivities of these new media users through talking, linking and clicking.

Talking In this section, I focus on Li Jiaming’s AIDS talk as a site of the emergence of ‘invisible subjectivity’ in China. Talking is used here in a broad sense to refer to spoken as well as written forms of communication via contemporary electronic platforms. Spoken forms of talking, which are usually carried out through traditional broadcast media, render the talking subjects physically visible to their audiences. Written forms of talking, which, in this context, are normally carried out in the forms of BBS (via the Internet) and SMS (via mobile phones), render the talking subjects physically invisible to their audiences. The act of talking, as I argue in the following, is the very technology of re-subjectiﬁcation, whether the talking subjects are recognised as audiences, mobizens or netizens. Talking (such as AIDS talk) allows the

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talkers to reconstitute themselves as subjects – whether visible or invisible – in relation to the state. Talking on the national television CCTV makes a big diﬀerence to a PLWHA, who is exposed to a bigger audience and community while at the same time risks exposing his true identity to family and colleagues.14 Jiaming’s visibility (on the Internet) and invisibility (on television) constitute such a paradox. This paradox also characterises the politics of subjectiﬁcation in the national discourse on AIDS. The inclusion of Jiaming in the mainstream media signiﬁes a decisive event in the national discourse on AIDS, in which the care of natural life rather than national face takes centre stage. The inclusion of natural life in political life, or the entry of zoe into polis in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, is characterised by political techniques through which ‘the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center’ (Agamben 1998: 7). In Jiaming’s case, the technique is the Althusserian subjectivisation through voice. By subjecting himself to the gaze of state power, Jiaming becomes a talking subject whose subjectivity is solicited, or interpellated (Althusser 1971: 174). He becomes a subject visible to the disciplinary technologies or the biopolitical logic of the postsocialist state. Seen from this perspective, Jiaming’s AIDS talk on CCTV is a reincarnation of ‘speaking bitterness’ (suku), the logic of confession in Chinese political culture. In Chinese communist history, all walks of people, from peasants and workers to intellectuals, have been called upon by the state to perform the rhetoric of socialist revolution in a speech form known as speaking bitterness. Speaking bitterness is a public narration of past hardship and spectacularised accusation against enemies of the people, usually performed by ordinary citizens. It is a highly eﬀective performance, a narrative form and representational means that transforms social consciousness and deﬁnes and constitutes the subaltern position of socialist subjects. As Ann Anagnost points out, speaking bitterness is a technology for inscribing onto the social body the power structure of the disciplinary state. In speaking bitterness, ‘I’ was ‘a mute body made to speak’ (Anagnost 1997: 39). Its allegorical force has continued to haunt the nation in such forms as class struggle sessions during the Cultural Revolution, ‘scar literature’ in the 1980s and lamentations from female silk workers in the 1990s, as documented by Lisa Rofel (1999: 137–49). Speaking bitterness has been institutionalised to such an extent that it continues to subject post-socialist subalterns (women, peasants and other subgroups) to the state’s claims about natural life, producing what Anagnost has called ‘a locally speciﬁc politic of perception and experience that constituted local identities as well as national subjects’ (Anagnost 1994b: 260). Even television talk shows, in the form of highly controlled interview and audience participation sessions, can be viewed as a new form of confession that testiﬁes to state strategies about ‘human improvement’ and social control to achieve what Borge Bakken (2000) calls the ‘exemplary society’ in China.

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Jiaming is made into an exemplary talking subject in the oﬃcial AIDS discourse when he is persuaded (or mobilised) to speak to the public as his targeted audience and the state as his implied audience. In the speaking bitterness tradition, women were usually made into visible subjects to articulate the patriarchal order of discourse dictated by the state (McLaren 2000). In AIDS talk, however, the male body is made visible against the invisible female body. As Jiaming puts it, on the day when he found out that he was infected with AIDS, he went back to the massage parlour where his healthy body was infected through physical intimacy with a female sex worker. He could not ﬁnd the woman who infected him; all he could hear was ‘wicked’ female laughter. He rushed out into the sunlight with the realisation that he would never go back to that place, and he urges other males to follow his example. It is at that point in the narration that he is transformed from an infected heterosexual male body into an exemplary body of morality. He is not the healthy, high-quality and cultured body that the state and elite intellectuals have trained and cultivated,15 but a body of morality required of post-socialist subjects to realise a perfect order; while he is transformed, the supposedly degendered narratives in the televised AIDS talk point to the invisibility of female bodies and narratives within male-dominated public discourse.16 Jiaming becomes a sign that circulates throughout the social body as a reincarnation of the politicised body and politicised subject.17 The reincarnation renders Jiaming visible to the state as he performs AIDS talk under its gaze. The gaze, however, does not subject him to its logic of verbality. Unlike the speaking bitterness subjects who talked in the language of the state, Jiaming talks in his own language. Called upon to confess, he speaks about himself as an individual person rather than a representative of the ‘masses’ of PLWHA; he reveals his own secret and intimate fears, pains and hopes, rather than the fears, hopes and policies of the state. The privatised AIDS talk and the ability to confess an intimate personal matter is ‘a sign of power and control’ on the part of the confessor, to use Jane Shattuc’s words (Shattuc 1997: 136). Talking for Jiaming is therefore not a simple reincarnation of speaking bitterness, but a reversal of speaking bitterness from being a technology of the state to a technology of re-subjectiﬁcation. It becomes a self-moulding process that binds the talking subject to his intimate consciousness and subjectivity. In performing AIDS talk on television, he becomes a self-recovering subject, rather than a revolutionary subject or a victim speaking bitterness. Jiaming’s AIDS talk thus represents not only a process of subjectiﬁcation to the state power, but also of re-subjectiﬁcation of an intimate self. Such re-subjectiﬁcation poses a threat to the performative display of power in speaking bitterness, as talking now occupies a private space of dreams and fantasies rather than simply a public display of one’s subalternity. The talking subject is not ‘a mute body made to speak’, but a recovering interlocutor estranged from the state interpellation. Whereas, in speaking bitterness, the body of the talking subject was rendered visible and that of the state interlocutor

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invisible, in Jiaming’s AIDS talk, the body of the journalist interlocutor was rendered visible and that of the talking subject invisible – a reversal of body politics in Chinese political culture. Jiaming does not talk through the body language and oral vehemence of speaking bitterness, but through his ﬁngers. In his televised AIDS talk, the focus is on the lit ﬁngers – his body is shaded in darkness, except for his hands, and his voice is blurred by technical means. The visual framing shows his ﬁngers transmitting his thoughts and revelations. Outside the television studio, it is also his ﬁngers that tell of his desires and fears through his writings on the Internet. Indeed, ﬁngers seem to have become the embodiment of Jiaming and his AIDS talk. But his ﬁngers are at the same time engulfed by his spectral image on television and his spectral presence in the virtual world of the Internet. Talking has gone beyond physicality and transcended the corporeal: the talking subject has been rendered physically invisible, yet his words are highly visible. It is through the transcendent form of talking that Jiaming and his fellow netizens reﬁgure an intimate and recovering subjectivity for themselves and become subjects invisible to state power. As an invisible subject, Jiaming has become a sign of reﬂexivity that circulates freely on the Internet in a manner unthinkably speedy for the speaking bitterness subjects. Jiaming and his community of PLWHA are exposed to a whole new world, where reﬂections on life/death and discussions on fringe topics such as homosexuality play a central role in deﬁning who they are. As invisible subjects, Jiaming and his fellow netizens have reversed the order of confession in speaking bitterness. Confession of one’s subjective positions on self and the external world is not called upon by the state power, but elicits the power of the speaking subjects to register alienation as well as consolidation. Numerous audience responses to Jiaming’s AIDS talk on the Internet testify that the circulation of an invisible subjectivity can form and consolidate a community of reﬂexivity across age, class and ethnic diﬀerences. Subjectivity is a social category that can be politicised, gendered, classiﬁed and imagined. It is not a single attribute but interlocked with an individual’s relations to external forces as well as to one’s intimate self. Jiaming’s case has shown that the subjectivity of a talking subject can be rendered visible as well as invisible. Jiaming is subjected to the disciplinary technologies of the state as its visible subject when he is made to talk on CCTV; but he subverts such subjectiﬁcation by assuming a spectral presence to his audiences on both television and the Internet – hence becoming an invisible subject. As a visible subject, he constitutes a sign that circulates through the social body to make supremely visible the power of the state and its ideological apparatuses. As an invisible subject, he is able to reﬁgure his subjectivity by returning to his intimate self and reﬂexive subjectivity via new media. AIDS talking has enabled Jiaming to become a sign of self-empowerment for his audiences and of estrangement from the hypervisibility of the state power.18

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Talking via television and the Internet enables Jiaming and his audiences to reﬁgure their subjectivities as invisible subjects who speak from their intimacy and privacy as well as their commitment to common causes, rather than merely as visible subjects who are solicited and made to speak by the power of the state. New media have been playing a central role in facilitating the re-subjectiﬁcation of talking subjects and promoting commitment to their rights and obligations as citizens of the nation. As the following sections show, Chinese netizens and mobizens have not only reﬁgured the concept of subjectivity, but also enhanced reﬂexivity and reshaped citizenship through the practices of linking and clicking.

Linking Re-subjectiﬁcation, reﬂexivity and technology have been central themes in social and cultural theories on modernity and post-modernity. From Jurgen Habermas’ ‘public sphere’ thesis (1989) to Anthony Giddens’ thesis on the ‘post-traditional’ society (1991), the ﬁgure of the modern subject as the agent of modernity has been associated with the concept of reﬂexivity. In reﬂexivity, people develop a heightened self and openness to ideas and information from diverse viewpoints. They engage in critical and rational discussions of public aﬀairs; they muse upon their own biographical narratives, which are in the process of ‘chronic revision in light of new information or knowledge’ (Giddens 1991: 20). Ulrich Beck’s theory of ‘reﬂexive modernisation’ in this ‘risk society’ of ours further enhances the quality of intrinsic reﬂexivity as a property of institutions and the modern way of life.19 In the stage of second or reﬂexive modernisation, people are obliged to make decisions over their lives and reﬂect upon their social conditions of existence. The individual is no longer a stable and reﬂective subject who ‘interprets her network (through pre-given boundaries)’, but a reﬂexive subject who ‘creates her network (and maintains it)’ (Beck et al. 2003: 25, original emphasis). As a reﬂexive subject, the individual is both the agent of the network s/he creates and subjected to it. As a result, the subject becomes a ‘quasi-subject’ who is ‘the result as well as the producer of its networks, situation, location and form’ (ibid.: 25). The link of reﬂexivity with the ‘quasi-subject’ is useful to think through the case studies in this chapter. As the AIDS talk case bears out, the reﬂexive subject is socially and technically constructed. In Scott Lash’s words, reﬂexive subjectivity is ‘profoundly socio-technical’ (Lash 2003: 55, original emphasis). The re-subjectiﬁcation of the talking subject is based on his heightened reﬂexivity, as seen in the construction of a mobile communication network. Jiaming’s transformation from a visible to an invisible subject and his connection with the virtual community are themselves a ‘reﬂexive accumulation’ of cultural capital.20 Technical improvements in media and communications make it possible for the talking subject to form and participate in communicative networks

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and to facilitate the circulation of invisible subjectivity and reﬂexivity. As Frank Webster (2002: 206) writes, ‘where there is heightened reﬂexivity there must also be means of making this information available to others, and accordingly there is a central role to be played by media of all sorts in today’s world’. New media are central to re-subjectiﬁcation and reﬂexive circulation – both are socially and technically constructed. They open new spaces for the formation and circulation of the reﬂexive subjectivity. They allow a variety of networks of discourses, and facilitate the formation of ‘networks of association around ideas, desires, and fears that previously may have ﬂoated alone outside ‘the public sphere”’ (Dean 1997: 274). This is witnessed in the case of Sun Zhigang, where Sun is turned into a hypervisible sign to facilitate the formation of invisible subjectivity among Chinese netizens in their reﬂexive circulation of stories, signs, anger and anxiety. Since their ﬁrst public declaration of power during the Chinese Embassy bombing in 1999, Chinese netizens have staged several ‘shockwaves’, three of which occurred in 2003.21 One such shockwave – the netizens’ reﬂections on SARS – not only brought about a shakeup in Chinese oﬃcialdom, but also a national reﬂection on Chinese socio-political systems.22 The frequencies of a second such shockwave – the case of Sun Zhigang – emitted from the virtual network of the Internet and permeated the ‘hard’ networks of actuality, resulting in national reﬂection on the Chinese legal and social systems. Commonly known in Chinese as electronic big-character posters (dianzi dazibao), BBS played an important role in circulating media stories about Sun and SARS, revising the oﬃcial agenda and re-steering public opinion. As illustrated earlier, netizens’ call for justice on behalf of Sun’s parents formed such strong public support that it eventually led to the arrest and trial of those responsible for the death of Sun. Netizens’ discussion of the Sun case did not stop with the trial. In fact, the name of Sun has become a sign of reﬂexivity on Chinese citizenship. Even before the ﬁnal trial, critical analyses and reﬂections on the case had shifted from a call for justice to a reexamination of the Chinese legal system and citizens’ rights. On 15 May, a netizen posted an article titled ‘On the Violation of “Legislation Law” by the “Holding System”: The Case of Sun Zhigang’ at the famous renmin wang (www.people.com.cn) (Zou 2003). It was immediately followed up by other postings. These postings initiated a series of discussions on the accountability of the existing anti-vagrancy regulations. The call for legal reforms extended from cyberspace to the actual world. A loose network of reformers and citizens’ rights advocators was formed through both cyber-networking and actual networking. Two appeals, one on 16 May and the other on 23 May, were signed by individuals and sent to the National People’s Congress, calling for the state prosecutors to reﬂect on Sun’s case and amend anti-vagrancy regulations (Hao 2003). In the end, national reﬂection on Sun’s case resulted in the abolition of the decades-old anti-vagrancy regulations in July 2003. A humanitarian regulation based on assistance rather than detention and forced repatriation was issued in August 2003.23

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Although dissatisfaction with and indignation at Chinese legal and police systems had always been brewing in Chinese society, reﬂections on police and legal reform were limited in scope and coverage in mainstream media. In the case of Sun Zhigang, however, a previously unacknowledged desire for legal and police reform was brought out into the open by the impetus of Internet discussion. It was one of the ﬁrst cases of popular opinion overriding and resetting oﬃcial agendas and the ﬁrst demonstration of the sociopolitical power of Chinese netizenship. Never before in Chinese history had individuals directly proposed legal reforms to the legislative body in the name of citizenship; and never before in Chinese society had a national reﬂection on citizenship and human rights, initiated and carried on via the Internet, borne fruit in reality. In the national reﬂection on the case of Sun Zhigang, the Internet facilitated public expression, social interactions, civic association, popular protest and, more importantly, the circulation of reﬂexivity and invisible subjectivity among Chinese netizens. As invisible subjects, netizens called forth the power of reﬂexivity to register alienation (from oﬃcial discourse) as well as consolidation (among society) in the name of citizenship. The Internet became a nexus of information ﬂow and (trans)national mobilisation. Furthermore, the interpenetration of popular discourse in the non-mainstream media (the Internet and local newspapers) with oﬃcial discourse in the highly controlled state media (such as CCTV and People’s Daily) has borne fruit for Chinese political culture. Mobilisation is no longer a theatrical display of the state power to summon its subjects to its politics of visibility, but a subterranean ﬂow of popular discourse that binds anonymous netizens to the politics of invisible subjectivity. The politics of invisible subjectivity is closely tied with the politics of visibility (and hypervisibility) represented by Sun, who was associated with the politics of SARS as a sign and symbol of popular citizenship during the epidemic outbreak in the spring of 2003. The exclusion or inclusion of Sun in the national discourse was not solely dependent on the will of the state, but was negotiated between the state and the non-state (represented by netizens). The hypervisible body of Sun was used by the invisible and yet reﬂexive subjects as a symbol to reﬂect the Chinese legal system and citizens’ rights and to form an alternative network of circulation still supervised by, but disembodied from, state control. In other words, the hypervisibility of Sun – a dead body, a victim of the system rather than the SARS virus itself – constitutes the politics of invisible subjectivity, and the politics of invisible subjectivity constitutes the new body politics in post-socialist China. As a new form of talking, ‘linking’ – together with ‘clicking’ – has become a technology of re-subjectiﬁcation.

Clicking Sun’s case shows that, in the practice of linking, people are constituted as subjects whose invisibility and reﬂexivity are conducive to national reﬂections

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on citizenship and legal rights. But the formation of invisible subjectivity is not always imbued with pensive deliberation; it can be simultaneously lighthearted and empowering, as well as having elements of witty merriment. Sending an SMS message via the mobile phone and linking up via new media can be enjoyable: producing, reproducing and circulating a popular witty SMS message involves pleasure and desire, as well as resistance and compromise. Sending an SMS message about SARS may not be as revolutionary as the mobile phone texting in the Philippines that generated a popular movement to bring down the Estrada government in January 2001 (Rafeal 2003; Rheingold 2002); nor can it be as radical as the paging in Singapore that enables the extension and maintenance of local lesbian communities (Yue 2003). Rather, it is empowering in its contribution to the formation of ‘mobile guanxi network’, as demonstrated earlier in this chapter. Although possessing some intrinsic politics in itself (as in the re-formation of individuality and subjectivity), SMS communication does not necessarily generate a counter-movement or a counter-culture.24 Its power rests in its political neutrality and ﬂexibility and hence ability to penetrate ‘media politics (understood in both senses of the phrase: the politics of media systems, but also the inescapable mediation of the political)’ in a playful circulation of SMS rhymes (Rafeal 2003: 400). Earlier discussion has shown how mobile communication has become a supplement to the technology of guanxi (personal networks), wherein clicking and linking were the means to gain and circulate information not accessible from mainstream media. For more than four months, people were conﬁned indoors by the SARS panic, but their words circulated freely and happily in the ether with the sounds of clicking. Sending an SMS rhyme was fun and empowering. In writing, rewriting and circulating SMS rhymes, individual citizens produced a ‘thumb version’ of the politics of SARS. SMS messaging became the everyday reality for SARS-conﬁned individuals. Besides private messages between family members and friends, there was a huge body of public SMS messages in the form of rhymes that circulated widely throughout Chinese society. No one knew or cared about the authorship of those verses: people simply clicked their mobile phone keypads, knowing that their fellow mobizens would share a bitter laugh or knowing smile when reading them. The following are a few examples from numerous text messages sent via mobile phones and the Internet in the ‘spring of masks’. Example 1: Are you hip? Have a look at this month’s most popular items Wear masks Listen to John Lennon, and Wear a T-shirt that says ‘Prevent SARS’ on the front and ‘Against WARS’ on the back.

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This ﬁrst SMS rhyme is a satirical composition about popular realities in the spring of 2003. Its strength lies in the conﬂation of oﬃcial ideology with popular discourse. To be ‘in fashion’ is a marker of being modern in postMao China. Being hip is usually associated with consuming Western cultures, such as wearing Western brand-name clothes and listening to Western music. But in this rhyme, being hip is instead linked to the modern virus (SARS). The call to ‘wear masks’, an ungainly ornamentation signifying suﬀocation and restriction, is strangely paired with ‘listen to John Lennon’, a famously anti-war Western musician, who is now emblematic of modern Chinese taste. The pairing of SARS and WARS is a parody of state policies on two kinds of warfare. While the American-led wars on terrorism and Iraq were condemned in the state media, the war on SARS (the anti-SARS campaign was constantly referred to as warfare and doctors and nurses as soldiers) was hailed as a war of justice and necessity. By putting ‘Prevent SARS’ alongside ‘Against WARS’ (although the two key words do not rhyme), the rhyme is both an aﬃrmation of the state ideology and a parody of it, because the WARS that one is against can mean both the war in Iraq and the war on the virus. Hence, this SMS rhyme demonstrates an ironic sense of humour by playing with both words and political culture. Example 2: SARS represents the demand of a special virus for development SARS represents the advancement of a culture of terror SARS represents the basic interests of the broad masses of wild animals The second SMS rhyme, called the ‘Three Represents of SARS’, is a parody of former Chinese Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin’s ‘Three Represents’ philosophy.25 It is a clear example of appropriation, by which people transplant their own wisdom onto oﬃcial idioms. The rhyme neatly summarises the SARS panic and the developmental crisis in China: the loss of complacency, as in the deﬁnition of ‘development’, previously understood as economic development; the feeling of insecurity, as in the appropriation of ‘culture of terror’, reminiscent of the terrorist attacks and the war on terrorism; and the environmental crisis, as in the call for protection on behalf of ‘wild animals’. By replacing ‘productive force’ in the original verse with ‘special virus’ (SARS), ‘advanced culture’ with ‘culture of terror’, and ‘people’ with ‘wild animals’, the rhyme generates a bizarre and humorous juxtaposition. It hyperlinks both oﬃcial and unoﬃcial ideologies in mockery. Example 3: The party can’t stop oﬃcials from eating and drinking at public expense, but SARS did! The party can’t stop junketeering oﬃcials, but SARS did!

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The party can’t stop endless futile meetings, but SARS did! The party can’t stop the deception of superiors and the cheating of subordinates, but SARS did! The party can’t stop prostitution, but SARS did! The third SMS rhyme is a sarcastic take on bureaucracy and corruption in the Chinese polity. SARS had negative impacts on the Chinese economy, but it brought about a ‘cleaner’ China: cleaner not only in terms of improved personal hygiene and public health systems, but also in terms of better state governance. By paralleling ‘the party’ with ‘SARS’ and contrasting the two, the rhyme overthrows the party logic of SARS: it is not the party but SARS that has done something good for Chinese society. This rhyme has been hailed as the most vivid and accurate description of SARS’s contribution to China, as people of all ages have taken it up and laughed in appreciation of its witty lines.26 Example 4: Guangdong got SARS then Beijing caught it The government isn’t so strict now The media dares to speak up Many people have SARS now The hospitals are full The doctors and nurses are having a tough time The masses are scared out of their wits Wearing masks to cover their faces International organisations have come to take charge SARS will soon be brought under control Take your Chinese medicine boiled in the pot Be sure to get some exercise. The fourth SMS rhyme is the most accurate description of SARS-stricken China during the height of the anti-SARS campaign (April–May 2003). It touches upon the truths that everybody knew but few would venture to speak in the mainstream media: truths about the SARS cover-up, media censorship, poor medical care and an inadequate emergency response system – and the subsequent national panic and international intervention. Amid a celebration of SARS-induced changes and SARS heroes, this rhyme reminds people in a lighthearted way of the importance of Chinese cultural traditions (for example, the advice about Chinese medicine and taking exercise), which are often forsaken in the national rush towards modernisation and globalisation. Like shunkouliu (popular sayings) (Link and Zhou 2002), most of these SMS rhymes are quite melodious (a quality that is lost in translation) and easy to recite, as they resemble verses and rhymes stored in Chinese cultural

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and political memories. China has a long tradition of rewriting such verses and rhymes in contemporary popular culture. In 1989 during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, students deliberately twisted Premier Li Peng’s declaration ‘only socialism can save China’ by saying ‘only China can save socialism’ (Saich 1994: 259). The appropriation of Mao themes in the recent Mao craze, the playful reworking of Red songs in rock music and the infusion of political icons into political pop art (Jones 1994; Huot 2000: ch. 5 and 6) are akin to the SARS rhymes in their playful use of words, symbols and themes in a deﬁant and sometimes subversive manner. What distinguishes these SMS rhymes from earlier cases is the speed and scope of circulation across Chinese society. These rhymes are sent at the click of a button. Within seconds, they can reach hundreds and thousands of people. Despite being physically separated, people are associated with one another through linking and clicking. In writing, rewriting and circulating the SMS rhymes about SARS, common people have become co-authors of media stories about SARS and its politics. Each one of them has left a footnote to the popular commentary on, and interpretation of, contemporary Chinese political culture. The play with words is thus a play with cultural and political memories by the most resourceful, humorous and cheerful creative commons. Such production of rhymes from their use in oﬃcial ideology is a complex social and cultural phenomenon. It involves deliberate playful misuse and misinterpretation of the dominant ideology and represents the ideology of invisible subjectivity. Producing and circulating popular discourse about the virus enables people to produce ‘meanings and pleasures that are, in their own right, a form of social power’ (Fiske 1987: 314). As the SMS rhymes demonstrate, the semiotic power of the ‘popular’ is manifested in producing symbolic messages that parody those of the state. Producing and circulating SMS rhymes are acts of encoding/decoding by anonymous netizens.27 They are also demonstrations of a popular tactic known as ‘transmesis’, which can mean translation plus mimesis as well as transgression plus mimesis.28 These SMS rhymes are mimesis and transgression of the oﬃcial ideology. In fact, they are able to circulate widely as they do in the public sphere because of their subtle transgressions of permissible boundaries. Like the doorway couplets studied by Patricia Thornton (2002) and the rock music interpreted by Rey Chow (1999), the SMS rhymes serve as an ‘evocative transcript’ that masquerades as fun and politically irrelevant in order to circulate throughout the social body.29 Clicking becomes the innovative and eﬃcient means to translate and reinterpret the politics of SARS. Playing with words, however, does not necessarily generate counterdiscourse.30 These SMS rhymes are better read as a tactical expression of the invisible subjects who exercise their semiotic power to form a new interpretive framework of their daily realities in parallel with, rather than against, the interpretive framework promulgated by the state. Like subtitling on television

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and stand-up comedy in Hong Kong (Lo 2000), the ambiguity of language and structure used in the SMS rhymes subverts the state system of subjectiﬁcation by disturbing the facile conferral of subjectivity, even though it cannot alter the law of subjectiﬁcation itself. Implied in the playing with words are both resistance and compromise. Clicking, together with linking and talking, becomes the technology of resubjectiﬁcation, wherein the subject becomes visible to the state without being subjected to its logic of interpellation. The re-subjectiﬁcation creates a subjectivity both intimate and invisible among the talking, linking and clicking subjects. As subjects who are invisible to the state and to one another, they have adopted a reﬂexive subjectivity through producing and circulating popular versions of the politics of AIDS and SARS via new media. New media are a portable and privatising technology that not only dislocate domesticity, but also disarticulate subjectivity from state inscription. They enable the ordinary people to narrate and circulate media stories about themselves and fellow citizens in a less controlled space than the traditional media. They also empower people to take coordinated actions based on mutual trust and support. The electronic spaces of leisure and consumption have become new venues for reﬁguring subjectivity, exercising citizenship and re-imagining the nation.

Conclusion The ﬂow of words is always imbricated with power. Actions such as talking, linking, clicking, as well as marches, parades and sit-ins are political, as they aim at changing people’s lives and perceptions; they are also inseparable from the inherent power of the society. They do not necessarily oppose the power from above, but rather foster and spread the communicative networks of reﬂexive subjectivity, which is eventually conducive to the exercise of citizenship.31 The space of the Internet can be controlled and mobile phone text messages can be regulated (Kahn 2004), but as long as the words continue to ﬂow, there is the potential for invisible subjects to assert the power of their reﬂexivity anytime and anywhere. Linking and clicking are gaining a prominence similar to reading (for example a newspaper) and watching (for example a television) as new technologies of citizenship in urban China, especially among younger generations.32 The consumption of new media forms the basis of a new authorship and citizenship that has its roots in the traditional concept of informed readership in reading, browsing and discussing. The cases of Li Jiaming, Sun Zhigang and SARS SMS messages suggest that the (relative) freedom and equality oﬀered by the electronic platforms are empowering individuals to use semiotic power to (re)construct subjectivities and exercise citizenship, especially in times of crises. Celebrating talking, linking and clicking does not entail a blind optimism towards new media’s role in re-forming democratic citizenship. New media

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and communication technologies serve as both channels for regulating the citizenry and resources for popular activism. As channels of regulation, they are extensions of Foucauldian disciplinary power: the Chinese government has been employing sophisticated ﬁrewall and ﬁltering technologies to censor information transmitted via media and communication networks; it has employed police and cyber-police forces to track and arrest cyber-dissidents and troublesome individuals. At the same time, the government has supported the development of new media and communication technologies, particularly in e-commerce. Its contradictory approach to new media management mirrors its paradoxical and confused policies towards media as a whole, where control and freedom counter-balance each other to improve and strengthen the state’s capacity to govern. As a resource for popular activism, new media dislocate the political subjectivities of the talking, linking and clicking subjects. These talking, linking and clicking subjects, albeit constituting only a small proportion of the Chinese population, are creative commons who use new media to create new forms of publicness and possibilities for political changes. Writing and sending text messages via the Internet and mobile phones are simultaneously acts of nobody – because their authors are anonymous – and everybody, owing to their wide circulation. Such circulation expands discursive spaces and encourages interactions among those who talk, link and click. New media have been regarded as the site of a quiet ‘social test of democracy’ in China (Shao 2003). In this revolution, the invisible subjects – be they audiences, mobizens or netizens – are becoming co-authors of social texts, who script their own stories and/or creatively read and rewrite ‘plots’ provided by existing institutions. In talking, clicking and linking, people have become, to borrow from Walter Fisher (1985: 86), ‘full participants in the making of messages, whether they are agents (authors) or audience members (co-authors)’. In moving their words, they are moving their world.

4

News event SARS reportage

The outbreak of SARS in 2003 saw Chinese urbanites reconstituting themselves as co-authors with journalists in narrating media stories about their everyday experience, through talking, linking and clicking. New media have been appropriated to transform networks of communicative practices and reﬁgure subjectivities so as to articulate alternative political discourses. Such transformation and reﬁguration has enabled the conﬂuence of media consumers and producers (as ‘prosumers’), and of professionals and amateurs (as ‘proams’) in media production. In fact, journalists and intellectuals – as professional media and culture producers – play a prominent role in initiating and leading the discussion on identity and citizenship. This chapter examines Chinese professional journalism in the context of modern Chinese intellectual politics, through case studies on SARS reportage in 2003. As a news event, SARS reportage refers to a constellation of news and events related to SARS. Breaking news on SARS constitutes SARS reportage. Reporting the case of Li Siyi can also be considered as part of the SARS reportage on account of its close relation with the sociopolitical context in China’s war on SARS: Li is a 3-year-old girl starved to death in her own home in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in June 2003, after her mother was arrested for shoplifting and then sent to a drug rehabilitation centre upon testing positive for drugs, and the local police oﬃcers neglected the mother’s plea for help. SARS reportage describes a series of ‘hijacked’ events during China’s acclamation of its new leadership at the beginning of the SARS battle and the celebration of victory over SARS at the end of it. SARS reportage thus provides examples of the media work of Chinese journalists, who, as some of the most important social and political players, mobilised cultural, historical and technical resources to express their narratives about SARS and the politics of SARS. This chapter locates the everyday practices of Chinese journalists (represented by investigative journalists) within the context of SARS reportage, and examines Chinese journalism from a historical perspective. Through examining SARS reportage, I argue that Chinese journalists are becoming

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mediators between the state and society in reporting discordant social dramas in contemporary China. As mediators, journalists, while representing themselves as professional, resort to non-professional means to articulate an intellectual interpretation of contemporary Chinese political culture. The professional journalism they represent is a mediation journalism built on a strategy I will call ‘double-time narration’. Barbie Zelizer (1993) applies the concept of ‘double time’ in re-framing journalists as an interpretive community in the US context. She draws this notion from Homi Bhabha (1994: 145), but reapplies it to journalism and uses it as the interpretive framework and narrative practice of American professional journalists. Zelizer argues that journalists constitute themselves, on the one hand, as objects of news accounts through a local mode of interpreting history and, on the other hand, as subjects of reﬂexive accounts of the earlier reportage through a durational mode of interpreting history. Double time guarantees journalists a double authority as both eyewitnesses of history and historians. Double time, for both Bhabha and Zelizer, encompasses narrations in and of the past and the present. Thus, double time renders the agents of history (post-colonial people in Bhabha’s work, and American journalists in Zelizer’s) as both objects and subjects of the narrations of the nation. I will argue, with Zelizer, that the notion of professionalism alone is inadequate for examining the operational and behavioural patterns of journalists. Journalists use more elaborate mechanisms than professional ethics to construct reality. The notion of local and durational modes of interpretation, which is implied in the double temporal positions of journalistic productions, is also useful in the Chinese context. The double-time narration that I use in this chapter builds on Zelizer’s contribution to journalism studies. I view ‘double time’ as an inherent characteristic of journalistic productions within any single mode of interpretation. It is realised through a doubly temporal and spatial arrangement. In other words, double-time narration a narration as events unfold and another when they are retold, and a narration of the oﬃcial time and another of the unoﬃcial time, both through double spaces – the oﬃcial space (the mainstream media such as television) and the unoﬃcial space (the Internet for example). Double-time narration is therefore doubly spatio-temporal. Through the doubly spatial and temporal modes of narration about SARS in both traditional and new media, double-time narration helps Chinese journalists open a new ﬁeld of power play with the diﬀerent forces that impinge upon them. In the eﬀorts to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between the conﬂicting forces and discourses, they are developing their craft as mediators between the state, society and the market. Mediation signiﬁes intervention, compromise and expansion. As mediators, journalists function as an organic part within a complex of relationships, producing and using knowledge for change. Mediation deﬁnes and conﬁnes contemporary Chinese journalist and intellectual politics.

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The making of a news event As already pointed out in the Introduction, news events are ‘hijacked’ media spectacles; they are unplanned but newsworthy, and can happen during political crises, social disruptions or natural disasters. SARS reportage is a news event as it (almost) hijacked the preplanned and pre-hyped media events of the seventeenth National Congress and the US-led war on Iraq in the spring of 2003, when the SARS virus erupted and spread quickly throughout China, thus becoming a global health hazard. The concurrence of the abovementioned media events with the news event of SARS provides an occasion to amplify and examine the fragmented and truncated journey of Chinese journalists to professionalism and intellectual independence in contemporary China. This section gives a detailed critical description of the making of the news event about SARS. The ﬁrst round: initial breakthrough SARS broke out in Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province, in early 2003. As it spread quickly to Beijing, Hong Kong and other parts of the world, rumours about this ‘killer virus’ also spread swiftly via new media and guanxi networks in Guangzhou and all over China. In early February, fear of SARS ﬁnally developed into widespread scare shopping – millions of Guangzhou families rushed to supermarkets and drugstores, and bought up rice, vinegar, masks, antibiotics and other necessities assumed to be preventative of the killer virus. Despite this ‘killer virus’ panic, the mainstream media remained conspicuously silent. An unresolved internal political struggle between conservatives (insisting on ‘cover-up’ and ‘blockage’, wu and du) and liberals (advocating ‘education’ and ‘guidance’, shu and dao) within the Guangzhou authorities had delayed media exposure of the burgeoning epidemic. Like other Guangzhou residents, Guangzhou journalists were among the ﬁrst to be alert to the killer virus via the mobile guanxi networks. News on the scare shopping was almost in print when orders from the conservative Guangdong Propaganda Bureau (GPB) stopped it.1 In the end, all local newspapers and broadcast media reported the scare shopping based on an oﬃcial version issued by the GPB on 10 February 2003, with only one exception. The one exception was Southern Metropolitan News (SMN), the local newspaper that ﬁrst reported the case of Sun Zhigang. With tacit support from the liberals within the Guangzhou government, SMN gave extensive coverage of SARS, using two pages rather than simply a few lines in the oﬃcial version to report SARS and the scare shopping. It immediately became a market success – all news-stands sold out SMN within hours. Following SMN’s lead, the Guangzhou press put on what I call a ‘show of breakthrough’. On 13 February, Guangzhou Daily, the oﬃcial news organ of the Guangzhou government, ignored the three ‘NO’ orders from the GPB

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and extensively covered the second round of scare shopping. The newspaper became another new star and broke its sales record on that day. The breakthrough, however, was short-lived. On 14 February, Guangzhou Daily put on its conservative face as the party’s ‘tongue and throat’: no follow-up report on the scare shopping and SARS panic – not even a word on SARS – was mentioned. It is said that the editor-in-chief of Guangzhou Daily, in order to appease the GPB, which was obviously enraged at the open challenge to its authority by the Party’s own key press on 13 February, ordered the withdrawal of follow-up reports on SARS in the last minutes before going to press. As such, no serious punishment was imposed upon Guangzhou Daily’s journalists and editors. The last minute withdrawal of investigative reports on SARS, which journalists had worked overnight to produce, met with immense resentment. The resentment eventually manifested itself in the virtual world. The second round: Xinhua version The power struggle between the liberals and the conservatives within the party was a decisive factor in the Guangzhou journalists’ tortuous breakthrough in SARS reportage. The breakthrough showed how the ‘Berlin Wall’ in Chinese media was ‘cracked’ from within. The second round in SARS reportage came when increasing international attention was on Beijing and its (in)ability to contain the epidemic and inform the public. From Guangzhou to Beijing, media control of SARS reportage was ﬁnally loosened: journalists were allowed to report SARS, but only at the direction of the Xinhua News Agency, China’s oﬃcial news agency. From 11 March, when the ﬁrst press conference was held by the municipal government of Guangzhou, to 20 April, when the Ministry of Public Health in Beijing held its ﬁrst press conference to openly declare a war on SARS, the Xinhua version characterised Chinese media coverage of SARS. The Xinhua version describes the oﬃcial face of Chinese media. It gave journalists permission for SARS reportage, but not freedom to carry out SARS investigative reportage. The ﬁrst oﬃcial report on SARS in Beijing appeared on 26 March in all media outlets by Xinhua News Agency (2003), which reported that Beijing had eﬀectively controlled and contained SARS. To play down the epidemic situation further, on 2 April, the then Health Minister, Zhang Wenkang, said in an interview with News Focus (Jiaodian fangtan) on CCTV (the most inﬂuential in-depth news analysis programme on China’s national television) that Beijing had found twelve cases of SARS, only three of them fatal (CCTV 2003c). The next day, at a televised press conference, Zhang further conﬁrmed that Beijing had only a handful of SARS cases, and invited people to visit the capital for business and tourism purposes. People were caught between two dramatically diﬀerent descriptions and ﬁgures of SARS victims from the mainstream media and the Internet.

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Outraged with the media cover-up, a retired military doctor, Jiang Yanyong, who was later acclaimed as a ‘whistle blower’ and anti-SARS hero by the international community (Jakes 2003), sent a letter to CCTV and the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV to contest the oﬃcial ﬁgures of SARS cases in Beijing. Although Jiang received no response from the two media organisations in the following days, he quickly attracted attention from Western media and became a ‘SARS hero’ after Time magazine published an interview with him on 8 April 2003. This event led to a change in media policy on SARS reportage. At the 20 April press conference, the Chinese government in Beijing admitted that Beijing had 339 diagnosed SARS cases and 402 suspected cases and that the epidemic situation was serious. That day marked China’s open war on SARS. As people quickly retreated to their homes to avoid cross-infection or hospitals for treatment, Chinese journalists, together with doctors and nurses, were one of the few groups of people who rushed out of the safety zones. The open war on SARS ushered in the spring of SARS reportage; the Xinhua version was temporarily dropped. The third round: the spring of SARS reportage As the number of reported SARS cases in Beijing increased from dozens to hundreds and thousands by the end of April, the panic that enshrouded Guangzhou in February was re-played in Beijing in April and in many other cities around the country in May. In the ‘people’s war on SARS’, called upon by the state to combat the spread of the virus, Chinese media were told to go all out and to great lengths in SARS reportage. From late April to late May 2003, journalists were given the ‘green light’ treatment, and the Chinese media experienced unprecedented freedom. If in the early stage of the SARS outbreak, mobile phones and the Internet were the major carriers of information on SARS (as illustrated in Chapter Three), with the coming of the spring of SARS reportage in late April, the mainstream media became the major sources of information about SARS. The daily SARS statistics in the newspapers and on television became a barometer for the epidemic-trapped nation. A survey conducted by Statistics Observations (Shuzi guancha) on CCTV showed that, by the end of April, the majority of Beijing residents (77.3 per cent) relied on the mainstream media (especially television) for information on SARS; they were interested in daily statistics, prevention methods, national and local policies to stop cross-infection and spread of the virus (CCTV 2003d). From 1 May to 11 May, CCTV conducted a two-week live broadcast on SARS. For the ﬁrst time, live broadcast cameras ﬁlmed the internal conferences of the Ministry of Public Health, intensive care units (ICUs) in hospitals and mass quarantine areas. CCTV journalists played a major role in initiating the spring of SARS reportage, using CCTV’s leading role in the Chinese national media. Truthfulness, frankness and timeliness were the guiding principles for these frontline journalists. They exhibited a high

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standard of professionalism in recording and interpreting history. They risked their lives to bring to the living rooms of millions of television audiences real-life stories about SARS on the streets, in neighbourhoods and in hospitals.2 A few investigative journalists made their names as SARS heroes for their courageous, timely and insightful reports. One of them was Wang Zhi, producer and anchorperson of Face to Face (Mian dui mian), an investigative programme on CCTV featuring in-depth interviews with people of cultural, social, political or historical signiﬁcance. On 19 April, 2003, the day before the ‘mask’ on the information system was oﬃcially unveiled, an interview with Li Liming (a leading ﬁgure in China’s disease prevention and SARS prevention bureaucracies), conducted by Wang Zhi, was broadcasted nationwide on prime-time CCTV. The interview, which was conducted on 15 April in Guangzhou where Li was leading a team of experts to assist representatives from the World Health Organization (WHO) to inspect and evaluate the epidemic situation in the southern city, became an immediate success as the ﬁrst in-depth media report on SARS. From midApril to mid-May, Wang Zhi and his Face to Face team produced six indepth interviews with government oﬃcials, doctors and nurses, including the ‘milestone’ interview with the new Beijing mayor. Wang Zhi’s interview with the Beijing mayor was conducted on 30 April and broadcast on 2 May 2003. It immediately attracted the attention of millions of Chinese television viewers, including people from academic and journalistic circles. In the programme, Wang Zhi, who was later awarded the title of ‘AntiSARS Hero’ by the Chinese government for his contribution to the SARS war in 2003, interviewed Wang Qishan, the newly appointed mayor of Beijing. The mayor had issued two news releases in the previous ten days, announcing that he would lead the capital in the war on SARS. The interview, characterised by openness and straightforwardness, was called ‘a surgical strike’ by Wang’s colleagues (Tai 2003). It has also been hailed as ‘a milestone in Chinese journalism ideology’ (Zhang 2003). The milestone is characterised by high eﬃciency in news production – Wang Zhi’s face-to-face talk with the Beijing mayor was broadcast nationwide within two days after the interview was conducted (a similar programme in the past would normally take at least two weeks) – and by open, yet tentative and reserved, journalistic independence, as manifested in Wang Zhi’s role as an investigator and inquisitor facing a high-ranking state oﬃcial. Wang’s questions to the mayor included: When you ﬁrst took up your post [as mayor], the number [of SARS cases] was between 300 and 400. … But the number jumped to 2705 yesterday. … This is contradictory to what you described concerning implementing strict measures [to control SARS]. What does that tell us? … Can we trust you in the ﬁght against SARS? … Beijing’s spring has been vividly described as a ‘masked spring’. Summer is coming; will it, too, be masked? (CCTV 2003e)

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Rather than assuming the usual role as the Communist Party’s ‘tongue and throat’, the journalist repositioned himself between the state and society. As a mediator, or third party, the journalist used his intellect and conscience to serve both the state and the nation. He satisﬁed both party principle and people principle and, in doing so, met the market requirement of high ratings. Wang and his investigative programme Face to Face hence enjoyed increasing popularity among television audiences. Wang and his colleagues also became champions of a new face in Chinese professional journalism. SARS reportage underwent three stages (from the initial breakthrough, the Xinhua version, to the spring of SARS reportage) in three months (from February to May 2003). The spring of SARS reporting poses a stark contrast with the earlier silence, meteoric breakthrough and the Xinhua version in the making of the news event. From collaborators and victims to heroes, Chinese journalists exhibited several faces in news work. The diﬀerent faces co-exist in Chinese journalists and form an internal logic of professionalism in Chinese journalism. The co-existence of diﬀerent faces produces a kaleidoscope of yin-yang faces in Chinese journalists. The concept of yin-yang face (yin-yang lian) is rooted in ancient Chinese culture. It refers to the pairing, mixing and compromising of two diﬀerent and opposing faces: yin, which is dark, passive, downward, negative, contracting and weak; and yang, which is bright, active, upward, positive, expanding and strong. I use the phrase ﬁguratively to point to the contradictory manifestations of professionalism in Chinese journalism. In a broad sense, yin and yang mean inaction and action. The inaction of yin was evidenced in the Chinese journalists’ collaboration with the state in covering up the SARS outbreak in early 2003. The action of yang was evidenced in their bold and open SARS reportage, known as ‘media frenzy’ (chaozuo, literally ‘stir-fry’), from late April to June 2003. In a narrow sense, though, yin refers to indirect, coded or suppressed, private and behind-the-scene writings (the hidden script), while yang refers to open, direct and onstage expressions (the open script) sanctioned by the state censors. Yin and yang hence refer to the diﬀerent stages and spaces of news production. The yin-yang face of Chinese journalists is symbolic of the schizophrenic nature of Chinese media and journalism. While the yin-yang face in the broad sense reﬂects the macro-politics of Chinese intellectuals, the yin-yang face in the narrow sense mirrors the micro-politics of Chinese journalists in their daily practices. As the following analysis shows, both macro- and micro-politics characterise Chinese journalism and determine the operational patterns in daily news production.

The many faces of Chinese journalists Like the concept of objectivity in modern journalism, that of professionalism is elusive and open to diﬀerent interpretations at diﬀerent historical stages. Professional codes, such as objectivity and balance, which are universally

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recognised, may be used by journalists to conceal the constructed nature of their news productions (Gans 1980; Tuchman 1978), and by the Chinese Communist Party to promote the party principle in Chinese journalism (Cao 2000: 674; Gan 1994: 40). Professionalism, therefore, serves better as a theoretical foil, rather than a guide, in examining the intellectual politics of Chinese journalists. It can be politicised and historicised by diﬀerent political players in the making of Chinese professional journalism, during which Chinese journalists can be variably portrayed as enlighteners, propagandists and clients, professionals, or as all of these at once. These diﬀerent faces of Chinese journalists often intermingle with one another, conditioning Chinese journalists (and intellectuals in general) to live double or triple roles in their everyday media practices. Journalists as enlighteners The portrayal of Chinese journalists as enlighteners can be traced back to the Chinese Enlightenment movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Modern Chinese journalism was founded by ‘new-learning’ (xinxue) scholars in their eﬀorts to create a new-style press for China in the last years of the Qing dynasty, and promoted by ‘Enlightenment’ (qimeng) scholars in the May Fourth Movement in the years around 1919. Prominent ﬁgures, such as Liang Qichao, Sun Yatsen and Chen Duxiu, were all known as essayists, publicists and enlighteners. They either copied and domesticated the foreign press (Mittler 2004), or founded their own publications in order to propagate their Enlightenment ideologies and spread their visions of a modern China (Judge 1996). Liang Qichao, a forerunner of the Chinese Enlightenment movement and doyen of modern Chinese journalism, was one of those who saw the modern press as a weapon to enlighten the masses and ﬁght against feudalism and imperialism. Using political commentaries (and sometimes literary supplements) to debate and promulgate issues of national importance, Liang and his successors initiated a tradition in Chinese intellectual politics that emphasises active engagement with the media (de Burgh 2003a: 96–102; Judge 1996; Schwarcz 1986). As publicists and enlighteners, the new Chinese journalists were engaged intellectuals who used journalism to challenge the authorities, express popular grievances and educate and enlighten the people about the urgency to reform the nation. They were committed to the public sphere and national life as insiders, who ‘seize[d] upon the media of the day as their means’ to engage with the future of their country (de Burgh 2000: 556). This publicist-enlightener-as-insider trait of Chinese journalists echoes the cultural tradition in Chinese intellectual politics, which emphasises active engagement with state aﬀairs and moral, political and social commitments to national politics as historical–cultural actors. Like Liang himself, these men of learning are self-conscious political agents who feel they have a historical mission and moral obligation to the nation-state as advisers of the leaders

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and educators of the people.3 This intellectual tradition emphasises commitment to and engagement with the establishment rather than critical detachment (and hence intellectual independence) from it. This in turn creates two trends within modern Chinese intellectual politics: a sense of social mission and an aspiration to serve the state. The ﬁrst is a manifestation of the elitist tendency, the other of the statist tendency. The elitist tendency manifests in the journalists’ self-assigned role as people’s representatives, spokespeople, educators and enlighteners. Professionalism means using the press as an intellectual means to a political end. On the other hand, the statist tendency is evident in the role of journalists as propagandists or ideologues of the ruling party. Under such a media ideology, the mass media are propaganda machinery and journalists party propagandists. This is clearly shown in the period of the civil war between the communists and the nationalists, when journalists functioned as conduits and secondary deﬁners of party politics in both camps (de Burgh 2003a: ch. 4; Nathan 1985: 133–51). After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Chinese journalists were further institutionalised as the mouthpiece of the party, and as a result obtained a social–political status as state cadres and propagandists or propaganda workers. Professionalism is thus equated with statism and clientelism. Journalists as propagandists and clients In the context of party journalism, clientelism refers to the patronage relationship between journalists and the party-state.4 In this relationship, journalists are employed by and speak for their political patrons in return for protection and sponsorship. As state employees, journalists and intellectuals are de facto spokespersons of the state. They consider party membership and patronage as an eﬀective way to inﬂuence policymaking and exert their inﬂuence. They do not consider remonstrance to the leadership and limited criticism of the system as dissident and confrontational. Rather, both remonstrance and limited criticism are part of the Chinese intellectual tradition; they are taken as ‘an expression of service to the state’ (Ko 2001: 545). Chinese intellectuals have continued to enter client–patron relationships that subject them to the establishment in post-Mao China. John Israel has even commented that in China one is not ‘a legitimate intellectual’ if one is not some kind of establishment intellectual (Israel 1986: x). As establishment intellectuals, journalists are considered conduits and secondary deﬁners of the party principle. Serving the party and its enlightened leaders becomes the professional paradigm even among the reformist journalists who advocate freedom of the press. Establishment journalists and intellectuals such as Liu Binyan, Su Shaozhi, Sun Xupei and Hu Jiwei, who were also the chief advocates of freedom of the press in the 1980s, believed that the media should be both the ﬂagship of the vanguard party and the mouthpiece of the people (Ruan 1990). Liu even confessed that he held a

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‘second kind of loyalty’ to the party by using his pen to serve and help the party to ﬁght bureaucratic corruptions (quoted in Lee 2000a: 564). More recently, Li Xiguang, a new-left journalist and author of a series of ‘demonisation’ books, is famous for promoting Chinese nationalism by attacking Western media imperialism and for his neo-authoritarian views on journalism and media management that are in line with those of the state.5 As a result of being ideologues and collaborators with those in power, Chinese journalists have constantly found themselves caught in factional warfare within the party leadership. Journalists’ professionalism is constantly abused by the leaders they serve. Because of this, their ‘intellectual autonomy’ is ‘severely limited by the orthodoxy of the state which they helped to maintain’ (Ko 2001: 548). This results in their underdog role in the struggles for professional independence, as shown in the 1989 student movement when many journalists marched on the streets to demand media autonomy and oppose state censorship (Goldman 1994; Hood 1994). The statist tendency is closely related to the elitist one in Chinese journalists. As analysed above, intellectuals and media professionals believe and have been made to believe that it is their duty to enlighten the masses and prepare them for social transformations in new China. The two tendencies empower Chinese journalists and intellectuals in general to speak and write as representatives and priests of the nation, and as spokesmen of the party-state. A complicit cooperation with the state to maintain the existing politico-social order and a desire to create and mesh knowledge with power – be it political power or discursive/representational power – have seen Chinese journalists advocating a developmental journalism that is concomitant with the prescriptive and top-down model of modernisation. As Rey Chow comments on the political implication of Chinese intellectuals’ elitist tendency: Being society’s conscience and speaking for the people often mean a reconﬁrmation of the moral obsession which is part and parcel of a strong historical commitment to the authoritarian state as the ‘beyond’ with which the human individual must merge and mesh. (Chow 1991a: 198) The rise of a popular journalism, however, has started to change the dynamics of the propagandist, elitist and statist tendencies in Chinese journalism. Popular journalism, ﬁrst advocated by some of the reformist journalists, calls for ‘objective reporting’ to balance the party journalism and for the ‘people principle’ to balance the ‘party principle’ (Gan 1994; L. Li 1994; Polumbaum 1990). The two calls, especially the pairing of the people with the party, draw from both the enlightener–publicist tradition of Chinese intellectual politics and professional ethics borrowed from Western media. These are attempts towards relative journalistic independence from the absolute control of the party-state in the names of objectivity and the people.

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The call for objectivity and the people principle, however, is quickly inundated by the growing market forces that are greatly inﬂuencing Chinese journalism today. The market ideology, which is supported by the party-state in the post-1989 era in order to invigorate socialism, has replaced the Party ideology to become the dominant agenda for post-1989 journalists. While media management has evolved from the Leninist–Maoist style to become ‘a capitalist body’ with ‘a socialist face’ (He 2000a: 128), some journalists are increasingly adopting a socialist body with a capitalist head – claiming loyalty to the party-state while regarding the market as their patron. While it can function as a ﬁne balance with the party ideology, the market ideology also brews media corruption (Y. Zhao 1998: 72–93). A new clientelism between market and journalists takes place in post-1989 Chinese journalism. The emergence of media brokers who sell journalism for personal ﬁnancial beneﬁt is a result of such market–media clientelism. These media brokers see themselves serving the market rather than the party only. But they do not oppose or use the market principle to check the party principle. As beneﬁciaries of the state-led market reforms, on the one hand, they represent and promote the interests of their fellow members of the emerging new middle classes; on the other hand, they are willing to operate closely with the state through their market-oriented media outlets that are themselves the biggest winners in media commercialisation and restructuring. As earlier chapters have noted, with these structural transformations of the Chinese media system comes the evolution of its media policy, from propaganda to publicity, and domination to compromise. A symbiotic relationship between the state and the market is established: they are ‘mutually reconstitutive and doubly articulated, while simultaneously enabling and restricting various journalistic roles and voices’ (Zhao 2004: 69). Political propaganda and commercial propaganda have fused under ‘corporate communism’ led by the ‘Party Publicity Inc.’ (Barmé 1999; He 2000a). Consequently, Chinese journalism has been transformed from being a propagandist model to ‘a propagandist/commercial model of journalism’ (Zhao 1997). Journalists are increasingly assuming the double clientele roles as ideologists and news brokers in the name of professional journalism, serving two masters and meeting two lines (Pan 2000; Y. Zhao 1998). This creates a situation of double clientelism, where journalists serve the state and the market at the same time. The ambiguities and contradictions arising from the dichotomy of party principle and people principle in the 1980s are now further complicated by the market principle. This situation subjects journalists to a ‘tug-of-war’ and pushes them to devise situational strategies to reduce the ‘cognitive dissonance’ between the diﬀerent principles (He 2000a, 2003). Furthermore, serving the people becomes a hollow slogan, because the ‘people’ that they most keenly serve are a small group of urban elites who have enough disposable money to buy their services, while many other social groups are left out in the national march toward prosperity.

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However, not all Chinese journalists are money or oﬃcialdom chasers and opportunists. Many are keen to promote journalistic autonomy from the double clientelism; they are genuinely concerned about the weak and the disadvantaged. As the case studies in this and previous chapters demonstrate, investigative journalists have played an important role in voicing the concerns of the people and bringing to light the hidden agenda of China’s legal and political reforms. Although limited in scope and practice, the professionalism that these journalists have practised justiﬁes their watchdog role as professionals. As media professionals, they consciously choose to move ‘from the “priestly” deal of the early PRC to a “professional” contact in China’s polity’ (Cheek 1994: 199), and from the opportunist, bureaucratic and business endeavours of the post-Mao PRC to a painful mediation between various forces in China’s media work. They call themselves ‘professionals’ in order to diﬀerentiate themselves from the ‘tongues and throats’ of the party who function as propagandists, and from media brokers who sell journalism for personal proﬁt. Journalists as professionals As an elusive concept, professionalism can be appropriated by the state to curb and diﬀuse alternative discourses through the languages of discipline (jilü), standards (shuiping), quality (suzhi) and training (xunlian) – the key deﬁning frameworks in the oﬃcial deﬁnition. It can be misused by media brokers and opportunists to secure a compartmentalised ﬂow of ﬁnancial interests and personal proﬁt. It can also be adopted by investigative and reform-minded journalists to improvise situated and localised tactics to pursue their intellectual ideals of equality, fraternity and democracy. To encourage professionalism according to the party line, a journalism certiﬁcation system has been implemented since 2001.6 The annual journalism awards, in conjunction with the Journalists’ Day on 8 November and sponsored by the party’s Propaganda Department, are other methods of ensuring the institutionalisation of oﬃcial professionalism. Recipients of the awards are regarded as living models of professional journalism, and are rewarded with promotion and ﬁnancial remuneration (Pan and Lu 2003: 220–21). This professionalism, as deﬁned and sponsored by the state, like that bred by the market, risks no political controversy. It is marketable and appealing to the existing political and economic order. The third deﬁnition of professionalism derives from the Chinese intellectual tradition that emphasises active engagement with the establishment while criticising it from within. As analysed earlier, Chinese intellectuals are traditionally seen as ‘historical–cultural actors’ who are actively involved in state and social aﬀairs (Ko 2001: 539). They regard it as their historical mission to serve the leadership through either remonstrance or criticism via literary and historical allusions (Unger 1993). They also take it as their historical mission to lead and transform society, as its enlighteners (Schwarcz

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1986). Characteristic of their role as ‘organic intellectuals’ is a sense of being organic with the dominant social group and using knowledge to generate changes.7 With the structural transformation of the Chinese cultural scene in the post-1989 era, there has been a paradigmatic shift in intellectual politics, from radical to conservative, from outward looking to inward looking, and from ‘ideals’ and ‘theories’ to concrete issues. Many of the self-declared ‘spiritual nobles’ (jingshen guizu) of the 1980s have transformed themselves into producers and consumers of mass culture in the increasingly secular Chinese society. They are now no longer cultural avant-couriers (wenhua xianfeng) or prophets, but professionals, experts, artists, art oﬃcials, freelancers and even trendsetters (Zha 1995). Their transformation is ensured with the rise of popular culture and the coming of age of a new generation interested in lifestyle not revolution and in personal expression and empowerment. Self-expression and empowerment, which characterise popular intervention in national politics, has become part of the new professionalism among Chinese journalists. The journalists who contributed to the making of the news event on SARS belong to the small group of professionals who stand for (limited) intellectual independence and strive for social justice and empowerment. Their new professionalism incorporates technical excellence, eﬃciency and competitiveness (in the media market) with commitment to social missions as the nation’s conscience. Their commitment to social responsibility does not conﬂict with their loyalty to the state ideology as its establishment intellectuals. Rather, there is a mutual appropriation between the state and journalists with a social conscience: the watchdog role of professional journalism is integral to the leadership’s eﬀorts to curb corruption, neutralise social tensions, improve policing of the population and implement concrete reform initiatives; and the support from the state of professional, investigative journalism is essential to expanding intellectual autonomy and seeking social justice on behalf of the voiceless. There is also a mutual appropriation between the market and professional journalism: the market dictates that journalists put branding, niche markets and audience rates ahead of dreary propaganda and party journalism formulae; and the Western-style muckraking tradition in professional journalism is readily accepted by Chinese journalists because it works in promoting a new style of professionalism that appeals to the masses. The co-existence of diﬀerent qualiﬁcations in professional journalism has complicated the working patterns of Chinese journalists, who have to take localised actions and develop situational practices to deal with ideological and conceptual dissonance and contradictions arising from the tensions among the principles they serve (He 2000b, 2003). Their strategies range from ‘living with dissonance in the public discourse universe to radically reducing dissonance by aligning with an alternative ideology and expressing deviant ideas in a diﬀerent public discourse universe’ (He 2003: 198). Professionalism in journalism means situated actions and opportunistic calculations in everyday

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media work (Pan 2000; Pan and Lu 2003). Under such circumstances, professional journalism is an uncertain and calculated business that involves constant line pushing and pulling strategies. It also involves lots of ‘unprofessional’ practices, as in media corruption. ‘Unprofessional practices’ are also part and parcel of the new muck-raking reformist professional journalism, when censored news is made known to the general public through the Internet, as the rest of the chapter will show. This push–pull and onshore–oﬀshore work style causes great disorder and unpredictability in Chinese professional journalism. It has led Xu Yu (1994) to refer to Chinese journalism as ‘professionalism without guarantees’. Despite various criticisms of Chinese journalists and intellectuals by cultural critics and outspoken ‘liberals’ in and outside China for siding with the political and economic establishments at the expense of freedom and the interests of the majority of the Chinese populace, journalism can be a creative intellectual enterprise, ‘a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed’ (Carey 1989: 23). As Suzanne Ogden points out, harsh critiques of China’s intellectuals fail to see the relentless eﬀorts of the same group in expanding ‘the parameters of acceptable debate into uncharted and potentially dangerous topics – even if they do not eagerly court punishment for their views’ (Ogden 2004: 115). In fact, those who eagerly portray themselves as ‘dissidents’ and ‘underground’ are most likely to be cultural capital opportunists who repackage dissidence for proﬁt (Barmé 1999). It is through their localised, situational and sometimes unprofessional practices that the new professional journalists, represented by investigative journalists, create what Dewey calls ‘an intelligent state of social aﬀairs’ (quoted in Garnham 2000: 104).

Investigative journalism revisited Although generally regarded as the hallmark of professionalism, Chinese investigative journalism has enjoyed a controversial status as hero, victim and collaborator in the party publicity–enterprise media system. As selfproclaimed ‘kings without crowns’, investigative journalists strive to keep up with the professional standards practised by their counterparts in the West (impartiality, objectivity and truth). At the same time, they are contained by the ‘cage’ of double clientelism. Observers have vividly described the situation of Chinese journalists as ‘ﬁsh’ swimming in an ‘economic pond’, or ‘birds in a cage’ contained by the ‘political jar’ (de Burgh 2003b; X. Yu 1994; Zhou 2000). Investigative journalism, represented by CCTV’s News Focus and News Probe, two of the most famous investigative programmes in Chinese television, have been accused of only targeting ‘ﬂies’ (low-ranking oﬃcials and low-level corruption) and ‘dead tigers’ (high-level corruption that the state has already determined to crack down on), but rarely unrestrained ‘tigers’ (high-ranking corrupted oﬃcials). If they are watchdogs, they are not only ‘on the Party’s leashes’, but also wearing ‘an indisputable

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oﬃcial jacket’ (Zhou 2000: 588). As the imageries of ‘leashes’, ‘jacket’, ‘pond’ and ‘jar’ suggest, Chinese investigative journalists are in an awkward situation – their freedom is in eﬀect a ‘negative freedom’.8 These criticisms have done little to aﬀect investigative journalism in the Chinese media. As insiders in the system, investigative journalists are justiﬁed for their situated professionalism, as confessed by Bai Yansong, a leading investigative journalist with CCTV: Living with obstacles does not mean a loss or lack of intellectual ideals and enthusiasm … If sarcasm, indignation, and radical words and actions could solve all the problems [that China has], I would resort to them instead of suﬀering [as I am] as a media professional … [Right] direction is more important than speed. (Bai 2000: 9) Bai regards the investigative journalist as the lookout on a big ship, whose responsibility is to spot and report problems to the captain, the ﬁrst oﬃcer and all the passengers, in order to readjust the route to avoid disasters and arrive at the destination in due time. His view is shared by many investigative journalists in China, such as Shi Jian, one of the pioneers of investigative journalism in Chinese television. Shi believes that ‘television not only provides information and entertainment, but also encourages people to think and exchange ideas; thinking and exchanging ideas is an expression of democracy’ (quoted in Wang and Li 2002: 67). He calls his technique and principle of news making as ‘saving the nation via the roundabout route’ (quxian jiuguo) (ibid.). These journalists, like many public intellectuals in China, are ‘at once within the system and at odds with it’ (Mufson 1998: A1). Being within the system is instrumental for social change. Unlike the generation of Liu Binyan, ‘the last to see itself as working totally within the system for Party and government’ (de Burgh 2000: 556), the new professional journalists in post-1989 China are organic intellectuals of the system but with an outsider spirit. They are hence also ‘non-organic intellectuals’ (wuji zhishifenzi),9 whose outsider spirit is consistent with an anti-spirit – anti-elitism and anti-organism – in their journalism philosophy. They are what Michel Foucault (1980) has called ‘speciﬁc’ intellectuals, who are retired from representing the masses but function within their speciﬁc localities and institutions in order to provide localised criticisms.10 The interplay between the organic-ness and non-organic-ness, or between intellectuals as spokesmen of the nation and as producers of speciﬁc ﬁelds of knowledge, is the underlying logic in contemporary Chinese intellectual politics. As ‘a conspicuously nebulous ﬁgure’ in the contemporary Chinese cultural scene (X. Zhang 2001b: 325), journalists and intellectuals can now ‘celebrate the exciting carnival of intellectual diversity, not only in terms of conceptual discourse, but also in the roles they perform in society’ (Lin 1996: 66). The

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single-minded individuals who have voiced dissent and fought for journalistic independence and intellectual autonomy – such as Liu Binyan and Dai Qing, Chinese journalists most known in the West – are either ousted or supervised closely by the state authorities to ensure their voices are not heard by the majority of Chinese society (C. Li 1997: 279–99; Link 2003). Rather, it is the professional establishment journalists, ‘criticizing the system within the system’ (Wang 1999), who are shaping the contours of Chinese journalism in the twenty-ﬁrst century. As insiders and ‘the dominated among the dominant’ (Bourdieu 1998: 44), Chinese investigative journalists mostly advocate the developmental journalism that is prevalent in developing countries. They believe it is their role to produce positive social eﬀects by redressing social wrongs and voicing the concerns of the weak, while collaborating with the government to secure social stability and economic development (X. Li 2002). Instead of being simply ‘policy footnotes’ (Lin 1994: 79), these journalists pride themselves on giving voice to popular concerns. Concepts such as ‘zero-distance reporting’ (ling juli baodao) have gained currency. The four guidelines speciﬁed by News Probe for its investigative journalists – the spirit of questioning, perspective of equality, sense of balance and attitude of equilibrium – are examples of how the corrective to double clientelism is compromised with developmental journalism (CCTV 2003a). The spirit of questioning (zhiyi de jingshen) is exempliﬁed by Wang Zhi’s ‘surgical strike’ on the Beijing mayor. Wang regards questioning as laying a path towards truth: ‘the ultimate purpose that an interview aims at’ (Tai 2003). Wang’s questioning skills pushed the state oﬃcial upfront in addressing popular concerns about SARS in Beijing. He was able to extract valuable information that would otherwise be buried in a fusion of rumours and facts through questioning, whoever his interviewees might be. As a late-1990s’ version of the ‘people principle’ advocated by journalists in the 1980s, the perspective of equality (pingdeng de shijiao) is used not to pit the nation against the state, but to recuperate the nation from state dominance and from the elitist tradition in Chinese intellectual politics. It appeals to the civic conscience of media professionals and prompts them to treat the urban elite, migrant worker and high-ranking oﬃcials on the same basis. Under this principle, News Probe has produced several inﬂuential in-depth analyses on current aﬀairs, including Jiaming’s AIDS talk. The perspective of equality is related to the third one, a sense of balance (pingheng de yishi), referring to a balance between party principle and people principle, and between promoting the oﬃcial ideology (zhu xuanlü, ‘keynote melody’) and the unoﬃcial ideology (the voices of ordinary people). Instead of reporting from the perspective of the oﬃcials and speaking as representatives of the government, investigative journalists such as Wang Zhi prided themselves on articulating from the perspective of ordinary people and focusing on them in reporting China’s war on SARS. In the meantime, they did not relinquish their traditional role as the party’s propagandists by

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presenting the victory over SARS as another showcase of state-led nationalism and by adding the victory to the Party’s hall of fame. The Battle of Guiwei (Guiwei zhizhan), a celebrated ﬁve-episode documentary produced by CCTV in June and broadcast in July 2003, is an example of how the sense of balance is achieved. The ﬁrst two episodes describe the SARS battle as a people’s war led by a responsible government. The propagandist tone is balanced by a populist overtone in the next three episodes, which celebrate a series of ordinary SARS heroes – medical workers, scientists, journalists, volunteers and school kids – who have survived and prevailed over their traumas and losses. The epilogue neutralises and blends the propagandist and populist drives in the name of ‘national spirit’ – both the state and the nation are celebrated and embellished in the hyperbolic and ﬂowery language characteristic of socialist literary writings in the Mao era: SARS has ﬁnally left us. But we cannot forget how it attacked us in the spring of 2003, the year of Guiwei. We cannot forget how doctors and nurses fought a tragic and painful war with SARS; we cannot forget how the party and the government undertook the mission to solve the crisis when Chinese people were severely attacked [by SARS]. We cannot forget the whole nation who provided and supplied all necessities and supports to SARS-attacked areas; we cannot forget all those who were not intimidated by SARS and stuck to their posts. We cannot forget the courage and energy our nation has quickly generated in face of crisis – these are the genes of Chinese people in their strife for prosperity and strength. (Epilogue, ‘The Battle of Guiwei’) The above analysis attests to the observation that investigative journalism is where ‘the Party line meets the media’s bottom line, the legitimacy imperative of the Party leadership overlaps with the credibility imperative of the commercialised news media and the professional and social imperative of journalists’ (Zhou 2000: 585). Such a sense of balance came with a sacriﬁce – journalistic freedom – when ‘the door slam[med] shut’ as SARS faded from world headlines after July 2003 (Bezlova 2003). As the state once again tightened its control over the media, these journalists retreated to their familiar roles as accomplices of the establishment. An attitude of equilibrium (pingjing de xintai) is required to live with setbacks in the strife for journalistic autonomy. Calling themselves the ‘conscience of society’ (shehui de liangxin), the new investigative journalists have resorted to the yin-yang face strategy to maintain equilibrium in their eﬀorts to keep alive modes of popular participation in national lives. The switch between yin and yang is a salient feature of Chinese journalism. Chinese journalists have to adapt to and live with such a switch between faces and maintain an attitude of equilibrium to facilitate the formation of

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an informed citizenry at convenient times and in convenient venues. While News Probe’s ﬁrst three professional guidelines have counterparts in Western journalism, the fourth, the attitude of equilibrium, is uniquely Chinese. It is written in an authoritarian state where journalism is still an institutional force in governmentality and where propaganda is far from dead. Similarly, the yin-yang face strategy is promulgated because journalism is a calculated and sometimes risky business. In such a process, new modes of interpreting history have taken shape, as exempliﬁed in the double-time narration of SARS.

Double-time narration of SARS Manifested as the inaction of yin and the action of yang, SARS reportage was doubly articulated. Such double articulation creates what Zelizer has called local and durational modes of interpreting history – hence the SARS reportage was double-timed. The three stages in SARS reportage illustrate how the local mode of narration can be double-timed: the breakthrough versus withdrawal, and the Xinhua version versus ‘the spring of SARS reportage’ are themselves telling instances about the yin-yang face of Chinese journalists in narrating SARS at the time of the event unfolding. The retrospective re-telling of SARS stories, as shown in The Battle of Guiwei, belongs to the ‘durational mode’ of narration, which provides a hindsight perspective on the news event about SARS. Both the local and the durational modes of narration about SARS are embedded in a doubly spatial context, where the discrepancy between the oﬃcial tone and the unoﬃcial overtone and between the oﬃcial space and the unoﬃcial space creates opportunities for the doubly spatio-temporal narration of SARS. Alternative media, including internal newsletters and the Internet, constitute the unoﬃcial space. This unoﬃcial space is integral to the doubly articulated professionalism in Chinese media. Chinese journalists often use private, ‘oﬀstage’ talk and internal publication (newsletters and journals that circulate only within a certain journalistic community) to vent anger and complaints about censorship and articulate concerns about their news work. In CCTV’s News Commentary Department, two internal publications, News Probe Monthly (Xinwen diaocha yuekan) and Empty Talk (Kong tan), have become an oﬀstage arena for ‘intellectual and emotional catharsis’ among investigative journalists (personal communication 2003). These journals or pamphlets feature background stories about news production, lamentations for a topic or a programme ‘killed’ by the censors, complaints about policy intervention in news productions, and reﬂections on personal and local experiences. Although this oﬀstage talk is meant to circulate within the elite journalistic circle, it is able to get across to a much bigger audience as more and more journalists are using the Internet as an alternative space for emotional catharsis. The Internet is a new tool for ﬁnding, gathering and disseminating information. Chinese journalists habitually visit popular Chinese language websites

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for news sources, including Chinese-language websites based overseas such as the Singapore-based Lianhe Zaobao (www.zaobao.com.sg) and the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com).11 Many journalists are regular BBS contributors. ‘Journalists’ Home’ (Jizhe de jia) at www.xici. net (based in Nanjing and Beijing), for instance, is a popular electronic forum for Chinese journalists to make complaints and confessions, exchange ideas and publicise stories that cannot be published or broadcast oﬃcially. Many journalists visit ‘Journalists’ Home’ regularly because, as one commented, it oﬀers the least censored space to express oneself and to ﬁnd good sources of (alternative) news (personal communication 2003). With the rise of blogging in China, many journalists have become celebrity bloggers, whose blogs are frequented by fans, supporters and information seekers.12 The Internet not only functions as a useful tool for Chinese journalists to express and exchange opinions and gather information; it also facilitates the transformation of their expression and emotional catharsis into social actions. This was shown in the case of Li Siyi, when an investigative journalist used the Internet to expose the abuse of power by local authorities and initiate national reﬂection on citizenship and human rights among Chinese netizens. The case of Li Siyi came almost immediately after the case of Sun Zhigang. As Chapter Three has demonstrated, the exposure of Sun’s case in a Guangzhou local newspaper led to online discussion, protest and petition. The case was closed in June 2003, with the victory of the ‘popular’ over the ‘powerful’. It became part of the national victory over the battle on SARS. June 2003 was landmarked in the national media as a time for celebration. The celebration, however, was soon dampened by the story of Li Siyi that circulated widely in the virtual world in late June. Li Siyi replaced Sun as one of the hottest names in Chinese cyberspace, and caused a new fever of discussion among Chinese Internet users. As in the case of Sun Zhigang, the story of the little girl starved to death was ﬁrst picked up by a local newspaper, Chengdu Business. Published in the capital city of southwest Sichuan Province on 22 June 2003, it soon spread to cyberspace. The journalist who reported the case, Li Yaling, could not get over the callousness of local police and government oﬃcials during her investigation and her shock at seeing the tragic scene of the child’s death. She wrote in an online posting at the newspaper’s website, www.cdsb.com:13 I’ve been a journalist for eight years and have seen numerous cases of ‘darkness’. I have been too hardened to shed tears. But this time I am extremely enraged at the degree of ‘darkness’, in front of which I am no longer an ordinary journalist but an ordinary woman and mother. I cry my heart out for the poor girl. I cry for the cruel mother and cruel police, and for this society and this world, which tolerates such cruelty. (Li 2003a)

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Li Yaling was determined to pursue the case and use journalism to ﬁnd justice for the girl. To her disappointment and indignation, however, she was banned from reporting the case further as her employer at the tabloid was under great pressure from the local police bureau and government. Li then resorted to the Internet. She called upon her colleagues to help her promote the cause by oﬀering her follow-up reports to other media channels for publication. She wrote in her online petition to Chinese journalists: ‘When traditional media is no longer functional, I can only rely on the Internet. Thank you, my colleagues who still cherish justice and love’ (Li 2003b). Li’s report and online appeal were quickly circulated throughout cyberspace and immediately aroused netizens’ outrage towards the Chengdu authorities. The case of Li Siyi, also known as ‘the case of cold blood’ (lengxue shijian), replaced SARS and Sun Zhigang as the hottest chat-room topic in the country from June to July 2003. When the traditional print and broadcasting media were either silenced or blocked from news resources by the local government in Chengdu, the Internet became the most important, if not the only, platform and ‘courtroom’ to promote justice. Within just three days of Li Yaling’s newspaper report, Li Siyi’s name appeared on all major Chinese-language websites. In the electronic forums, tears, anger, indignation and curses characterised online postings. Typical online postings read: ‘You were starved to death in a time of abundance. … You died from a kind of “coldness”’; ‘I don’t know why my tears cannot stop ﬂowing. Have you heard the ﬂow of your tears? That is the sound of blood’; ‘Child, I’m late. I feel guilty, however innocent I am. We can forgive everything else but ourselves. The death of little Siyi makes our “living” insigniﬁcant’; ‘Counterrevolutionaries, be prepared to die; US admirers, be brave to go; those who have called the police names, don’t regret!’.14 A virtual memorial hall (lisiyi.netor.com) to commemorate the death of Li Siyi was set up on 29 June 2003. In July 2003, another website (www.lisiyi.org) in memory of Li Siyi was set up. Both websites are managed by volunteers, and both function as virtual spaces for people to express themselves, and as virtual libraries that collect comments and elegies on Li Siyi’s death. The last has developed into an online SOS centre for children in crisis. Its motto – commemorate [Li Siyi] in order to prevent [similar] tragedies from happening again – is in a striking position in bold characters on the homepage of the website. A virtual trial was held through those highly emotional online postings, with calls to charge with murder those who were responsible for Li Siyi’s death – the local police oﬃcers, her mother, father and neighbours. Surging discontent from online communities spilt over to local residents. Local authorities in Chengdu reacted quickly to public indignation and, on 24 June, arrested the police oﬃcers responsible for the death of Li Siyi. An open trial was held on 30 October 2003 and two oﬃcers were charged with murder. Li Yaling’s call for justice on behalf of little Siyi reverberated from print media to new media, and ﬁnally resulted in the victory of truth over lies and cover-ups.

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While some continued to express their anger and grief, others started to question the socio-political system behind the tragedy. They deliberated on issues of China’s social welfare systems, legal procedures and human rights. One poster wrote: The incident of little Siyi exposes the absence of a responsible government: there is no social welfare and service system within the government to help children in need, or legal procedure to deal with parents or guardians’ lack of abilities to look after their children. … Chengdu Police dealt with the incident quickly and public opinion has been led to target moral and behavioral misconducts of the girl’s drug-addict mother, neighbors and police oﬃcers. But I think what should be brought up and examined, above everything else, is the dysfunctional system and legal procedures. The government is not mending the fences without mending its system and laws. (Anonymous 2003a) Another poster wrote: From the case of little Siyi, I have seen the corruption of our society, the incompetency of our government, and the low quality of our people. … We should stop arguing against other people’s accusations of our human rights conditions. How can we argue against them? Just think of little Siyi. She died so tragically. But the press cannot even have follow-up reports, and the trial for the murderers won’t materialize in the foreseeable future. Where are human rights? I cannot see a trace of them. All I can see is rampant power [over lives]! (Anonymous 2003b) The online activism in the case of Li Siyi not only prompted a virtual trial and discussion of Chinese politico-social systems, but also initiated a ‘fasting relay’ in reality joined by volunteers to commemorate the hundredth day of the death of Li Siyi. It started on 19 September when a poster named Qin Geng disseminated an article entitled ‘I accompany Siyi for one day’ on several Chinese BBS. In the article, he writes: ‘for 17 days no one cared about Li Siyi. On the 100th day of her departure from us, I want to fast for one day, just one short day, to experience what this little innocent life went through on her way to death. It counts for the ﬁrst day of her starvation experience’. This move was quickly joined by other netizens, who each volunteered to fast for one day in memory of Li Siyi and as a silent protest. The fasting relay did not last for only seventeen days, but lasted for one month, and was joined by more than 200 people (Han 2003; Han and Tang 2003). It became a spectacular and extraordinary event in the history of Chinese online activism. As discussed earlier, in China, professional journalism is an uncertain and calculated business that involves constant line pushing and pulling. Chinese journalists have to devise situational tactics to get across an idea or a course.

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The Internet provides a space to locate a type of situated action and tactic when they are completely blocked out in the traditional media. In the case of Li Siyi, the journalist’s online activism exposed the abuse of power by state authorities, brought about judicial justice for the victim (albeit posthumously) and prompted people to reﬂect on inequality and injustice in their society. It also elicited a conscience awakening among Chinese journalists who sell journalism for personal gains. Encouraged by Li Yaling’s use of the ‘virtual courtroom’ to promote social justice and conscience, some journalists experienced an awakening of conscience. In an online posting, in the ‘Development Forum’ at www.xinhuanet.com, entitled ‘My ﬁrst teardrop for news’, a journalist expresses his conscience awakening in this way: Tears that I have held back for ten years rushed out for the death of a three-year-old girl on 22 June 2003. … I shed my ﬁrst drop for news. Like many ‘ﬁrsts’, it signals a new beginning; a beginning when doing news is no longer a means of earning dough. It is the beginning of my soul coming back to life. My future life may be more burdened and troubled. But I’m so excited at the awakening of my soul that enables me to walk as a digniﬁed man between heaven and earth. (Zeng 2003) Fragmented and truncated as it is, Chinese professional journalism experienced cleansing and reshaping in the virtual world when the situated actions and tactics of journalists were transformed into popular protests and petitions. This happened through coordinated eﬀorts between professionals and non-professionals both online and oﬄine. Investigative journalists played a crucial role in initiating reﬂection on the politics of SARS through the double-time narration. The emphasis on self-expression and empowerment, which is shared by an increasing number of post-Mao subjects, has sustained Li Yaling and her fellow journalists as mediators between the state and society and as champions for human rights and citizenship in China. Despite the ‘cage’ of the state control, the ‘pond’ of the market inﬂuence, their cooperative approach, their symbiotic relationship with the state, and their establishment and elitist nature, the new investigative journalists can still function as mediators among various forces and agents in China’s cultural transformation. Their relentless eﬀorts to expand the space of popular expression and initiate discussions on sensitive topics, sometimes even at the risk of their own livelihood and career, deserve credit rather than unconcerned critiques from outsiders. The following passage written by a Chinese netizen succinctly summarises the spirit of double-time professional journalism embodied by the Chengdu investigative journalist Li Yaling: In Guangzhou, a Chinese youth was beaten to death; in Chengdu, a Chinese child was starved to death. The Internet is not cold; it will not

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be silenced. There are numerous Li Yalings on the Internet. The Internet, occupied by people like Li Yaling, can console the dead and help their spirit rest in peace. (Shu 2003a) Through diﬀerent stages, modes and spaces of production, Chinese journalists present a kaleidoscope of yin-yang faces, which resemble Beijing opera masks, in the double-time narration about SARS. These yin-yang faces reﬂect both the macro- and the micro-politics of Chinese journalism. They create a continuum of ambiguities and contradictions that fragment the current history that the state has carefully constructed and presented, and deconstruct any eﬀort to write the national history. Through both professional and ‘unprofessional’ means in news production (as in the oﬀstage talk via internal newsletters and the Internet), Chinese journalists produced a series of inter-related stories about SARS. These stories represented not only a series of yin-yang face performances, but also local and durational modes of interpretations of the current history. As such, double-time narration represents more than situational tactics; it signiﬁes a systematic strategy – or ‘noble hypocrisy’ as some journalists lightheartedly refer to it – for testing and expanding a public sphere that is conducive to the exercise of citizenship in post-socialist China. Double-time narration does not simply mean the different phases of media production; it also incorporates diﬀerent venues and natures of news production. It speaks of doubly articulated professionalism in Chinese journalism.

Conclusion As knowledge producers, journalists are conditioned by ‘relevance structures’ that entail personal biography, interest, schooling, ‘paradigmatic commitment, the larger politico-economic history, and the epochal worldview surrounding them’ (Lee 2000b: 7). External forces, most notably the market and the state, have continued to serve as a point of departure in studies of Chinese journalists and journalism. But, as this chapter has demonstrated, internal forces play an essential role in determining the operational and behavioural patterns of Chinese professional journalists. The internal forces are related to Chinese intellectual politics, especially through the complex relationships they have with power structures. Chinese modernity is, in Rey Chow’s words, ‘the continual trauma’ that constantly deﬁnes Chinese intellectuals as its active agents (Chow 1995b: 74). As active agents in China’s cultural transformation, Chinese journalists, like all other intellectual groups, are conditioned in a web of relationships and forces, and associated with a series of structures – ‘the “dominant structure” of communist ideology (party propaganda)’, ‘the “residual structure” of Confucian ethos (intellectual ethics)’ and ‘the “emerging structure” of imported media professionalism in tandem with the market logic’ (Lee 2003: 17). In

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‘battling a conﬂuence of ideological currents and molding a hybrid ideology ridden with conﬂicting identities, images, and subjectivities’ (ibid.), Chinese journalists have become mediators, as exempliﬁed by the double-time narration of SARS. The double-time narration around SARS reveals a distinctive feature of Chinese professional journalism, that is, journalism as a mediation business. The journalistic mediation in contemporary Chinese politics requires intellectual intervention into national politics, compromise with existing power structures, expansion of discursive space and connection with various social forces at the same time. It signiﬁes contestation and mutual appropriation in their interactions with the state, market, general populace and the intellectual community that journalists belong to, albeit via unprofessional and nonconformist means and technologies. As mediators, the new investigative journalists present to the Chinese public multiple regimes of truths, thus rendering the dominance of any regime of truth increasingly impossible. In the process, journalists are made both subjects and objects of the current history they record, interpret and mediate. They are objects of history when news production is invested with the moralistic structures of trust with power and incorporated into a nationalist pedagogy stamped with such a trust relationship with their patrons. They are subjects of history when news production constitutes a process of signiﬁcation that must evade, if not erase, any prior rules and pedagogy in order to assert their subjective positions as witnesses, recorders and interpreters of history. SARS reportage is used to show that Chinese journalists are organic intellectuals engaged in non-organic practices and strategies when recording and narrating the nation during its crisis. Mediation and double-time narration may cause great disorder and unpredictability in Chinese professional journalism. Professionalism and non-professionalism are doubly articulated. If professionalism is equated with technical rationality such as eﬃciency, productivity and editorial quality (Chang 2002: 112–14), Chinese journalists have attained professional standards that are recognised universally in the world; but if professionalism is measured by the degree of journalistic autonomy, Chinese journalists have not achieved the kind of professionalism that their colleagues all over the world would aspire to. In the Chinese context, professionalism is a discursive strategy used by the new breed of investigative journalists to justify their ‘meddling’ eﬀorts in order to keep alive intellectual intervention and foster new modes of popular participation in national politics. Chinese journalism is embedded in Chinese intellectual politics. It is an evolving process, in which journalists are both propellers and impact sites of Chinese modernity. Wang Guangwu’s view on the modern Chinese intellectual is pertinent to the current discussion on Chinese intellectual politics: ‘[He] was open to change. He was master of his pluralist environment and, had the conditions continued, there is no doubt that he could have consolidated a new tradition of free, imaginative, and wide-ranging inquiry and

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opened up a new era of creativity for China’ (Wang 1991: 295–96). While the pace of consolidating the new tradition of intellectual enquiry remains to be determined by the evolving cultural transformation in post-socialist China, a ‘new era of creativity’ has started to take shape, as the SARS reportage has demonstrated. Mediation may magnify, but not erase, the contradictions within Chinese media culture. As an index of Chinese media culture, it will continue to shape the behavioural and operational patterns of Chinese journalists, and impact on the Chinese public sphere.

5

Media citizenship

The discussion in the previous chapters draws our attention to the concept of citizenship and the role of new media in its transformation. The mass media have been among the most powerful forces in promoting socio-political changes in post-traditional societies. Through media events, the state and its ideological apparatuses are able to bring individuals and families to the centre of national life and connect them with an imagined community, imagined times and imagined narratives about nation, tradition and culture. With the increasing integration of new media such as the Internet and mobile phones into people’s lives, however, media and cultural production is no longer a privileged profession monopolised by intellectuals and professional journalists; it can be an everyday practice for ordinary people, whose creative uses of media and communication technologies not only redeﬁne their subjectivity and identity but also reﬁgure citizenship through media stories and news events. New media have played an important role in decentralising ‘citizenship’ through journalists’ and urbanites’ online activism. As the cases of Li Jiaming, Sun Zhigang and Li Siyi bear out, talking, linking and clicking are both aﬃrmations of the semiotic power of individual consumers and expressions of their rights as citizens. New media have become a public forum for the discussion and construction of alternative political discourses. As such, they can be viewed as an important institution in their own right in mobilising public opinion, resetting socio-political agenda and fostering new communities. New media can become a new venue to (re)-imagine the nation. In the process of (re)-imagining, the creative commons are constituted not only as active audiences who exercise their ‘right to know’ and ‘right to speak’, or as watchdogs on the party leashes who are constrained by their other roles as underdogs of the system and lapdogs of the political and business elites (Zhao 2004). They are also (co)-authors and producers of media stories in the freer and more open space of the Internet. These practices have not only informed the politics of AIDS and SARS but have also constituted postmodern technologies of citizenship in post-socialist China. The Internet and the creative commons, as constituents of a media citizenry, determine how citizenship can be redeﬁned.

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This chapter examines the concept of citizenship by referring to the previous case studies. It argues that ‘citizenship’ can no longer be thought of as a formal and institutional given, but as a concept of ﬂuidity and ﬂexibility that rests on the spatial and subjective positions of the socio-cultural agents in question. Citizenship is no longer an abstract concept discussed in ivory towers among elite intellectuals, but a mediated social practice when people exercise their rights as citizens of the nation through talking, linking, clicking and double-time narrating (in journalism). The media practice of the creative commons can inﬂuence public opinion, check the authority of the government and, to a certain extent, reset the government’s political agenda. This media practice is the practice of ‘media citizenship’. It is a sign of empowerment for the awakening ‘masses’ of certain factions of Chinese society, for whom participation in the circulation of ‘lay’ knowledge about social and political issues is equivalent to exercising citizenship. Journalists play a crucial role in initiating reﬂection on citizenship. They can become crusaders of media citizenship when joined and supported by their fellow prosumers (producer plus consumer) and proams (professional plus amateur). Media citizenship is, however, fragmented and truncated, as it is with Chinese journalism. Its paradoxes and dilemmas mirror those of new media culture and its socio-technical infrastructure in China.

Deﬁning media citizenship Citizenship is an elusive concept. It can be constructed in diﬀerent ways in diﬀerent societies and at diﬀerent historical stages.1 As a multi-tiered construct, citizenship may apply to people’s membership in a variety of collectives or communities divided according to political and cultural diﬀerences at local, national and transnational levels, or according to subcultural and subpolitical diﬀerences in gender, sexual, ethnic, biological and techno-cultural categorisations and preferences. The typology of citizenship is also witnessed in Chinese citizenship studies. Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (2002), a volume co-edited by Merle Goldman and Elizabeth Perry, captures the dynamic and elusive features of citizenship in the Chinese context. As the book shows, various historical actors have imposed diﬀerent conceptions of citizenship upon the population of twentieth-century China: the Manchus, warlords, foreign imperialists, Nationalists, Communists, modern intellectuals and ordinary people (women, workers, peasants, students and ethnic groups) have all played important roles in deﬁning citizenship in China. Awakening – or being awakened – to the (Western) enlightenment concept has dominated various discourses on nation, state and self since the onset of Chinese modernity in the early twentieth century (Fitzgerald 1996a). Despite various ‘awakening’ discourses, a state-centric view of citizenship has prevailed in Chinese intellectual and political thinking and continued to subject ‘the people’ to metadiscourses of nationalism in China’s nation-building project. This view has been successfully established through mobilisation of

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the masses in political and economic activities selected and deﬁned by the partystate. As Goldman and Perry (2002: 7) summarise, ‘The exclusion or inclusion of various social categories – whether based upon political consciousness, economic class, ethnicity, gender, or other criteria – by the authoritarian state has been a notable feature of Chinese citizenship over the past century’. The state-centric view of citizenship has always been challenged in modern Chinese history. Despite the lingering eﬀects of the communist legacy and traditions such as ‘speaking bitterness’ (see Chapter Three), the rise of popular discourse on citizenship that centres on selfhood, identity and rights is further complicating citizenship in post-Mao China. As such, street politics has occupied post-Mao citizenship studies. Taking to the streets and public squares has become characteristic of popular contestations of citizenship, whether it is in the form of intellectuals’ and students’ pro-democracy movements, workers’ protests, peasants’ riots or the public grumbling of the ﬂoating population (referring to the internal migrants who are normally poor and destitute, and regarded as criminal and undesirable) in the city (Solinger 1999; Wasserstrom and Perry 1994). An emphasis on the institutional basis of citizenship – public protests, civic associations, a burgeoning press and electoral process – still characterises studies of citizenship and the public sphere/civil society in China. Some have noted the eﬀects of modern journalism and the press in fostering a new audience for opinion, information and mobilisation; moulding a national identity; and building a modern nation-state (Judge 1997; Strand 2002). But few have noted the subtle change in citizenship brought about by new media. As this book has demonstrated, a new subjectivity and citizenship has emerged in the practices of talking, linking and clicking and through practising mediation journalism. New media not only contribute to the emergence of invisible subjects and the formation of reﬂexive subjectivity, but also constitute a new citizenship based on spontaneous and individualised deliberation on matters of public importance, through textual ﬂows of written words rather than direct, oral and physical engagements. New media have become an important venue in which to exercise citizenship – to express, to protest and to mock. Spatial re-conﬁguration of citizenship The co-authoring of media stories via both old and new media, between the ordinary media storytellers and professional journalists, points to the spatial re-conﬁguration of citizenship. When the public sphere is no longer thought of as a stable and homogenised space but as being composed of spatially extensive networks of publics and communities, citizenship needs to be conceived of as being mobile and ﬂexible in its spatial arrangement. The following analysis oﬀers a conceptual discussion of the relationship between citizenship and spatiality, as both are essential to the democratic potential of media and communication technologies.

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Media citizenship concerns the relationship between popular media practices and participation in national politics. It is therefore closely related to the concept of the public sphere. The Habermasian concept of the public sphere is pertinent to the relationship between communicative rationality and the cultural condition of citizenship. This issue has been extensively explored in cultural and media studies. Nicholas Garnham, for example, is among the ﬁrst to engage extensively with the Habermasian concept in his survey of mass communications in Britain and Europe. Despite his critiques of Habermas, Garnham regards the concept of the public sphere as crucial to thinking about the democratic potentials that are inherent in modern media of communication (Garnham 1992, 2000). His conceptualisation of the public sphere, ‘made up of a series of subsidiary public spheres, each organised around its own political structure, media system and set of norms and interests’ (Garnham 1992: 371), is based on the Habermasian idea of media publics as being territorially bounded and uniﬁable. This view has been criticised for ‘[underestimating] the potential of a multiplicity of networked spaces of communicative practice to induce changes in organisations and political institutions’ (Barnett 2003: 78). Drawing on John Keane’s conceptualisations of overlapping and interconnected public spheres at the subnational level (micro-public spheres), the national level (meso-public spheres) and the international level (macro-public spheres) (Keane 1995), Clive Barnett argues that media publics and media citizenship should be discussed based on the question of ‘whether and how actors embedded at particular territorial scales are able to mobilise support and resources through spatially extensive networks of engagement in order to pursue their interests and objectives at home’ (Barnett 2003: 78). Barnett’s argument points to the dialectical relationship between territorialised and de-territorialised conditions of media citizenship. The concurrency of territorialisation and de-territorialisation, or distantiation and suspension, and the contradictory dynamics of mobility/dislocation and privatisation/domestication have been central to studies of the spatial politics of electronic media and communications. Since Raymond Williams used the term ‘mobile privatisation’ to describe the role of television in transforming suburban lifestyles, there have been various new formulations, such as ‘privatised mobility’, to describe the state of mobility versus domestication, space-disembeddedness versus space-re-embeddedness (Spigel 2001: 71; Williams 1974: 26). David Morley, in an analysis of the ‘contradictory dynamics in the domestication of technology and the dislocation of domesticity’, points out that, as there is nothing new in the (re)colonisation of the public sphere by new media and communication technologies, the pertinent question is not whether but how these technologies transform the relations between the private and the public spheres and at the same time are regulated by these relations (Morley 2003). To answer this ‘how’ question, we need to recognise that the proliferation or concurrency of sites and modes of media practices produces multiple subjectivities and modes of citizenship. We also need to ask, in tandem with

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Barnett’s conceptualisation of media publics, how the creative commons conditioned in particular spaces are able to mobilise support and resources and exercise citizenship through spatially extensive networks of engagement. As the mobile transformations of the public and private ‘point to a proliferation of multiple “mobile” sites for potential democratisation’ (Sheller and Urry 2003: 108), what is pertinent to the discussions about the democratic potential of the mobile sites created by new media and communication technologies is not whether but how the spatial re-conﬁguration of citizenship concerns people’s ‘rights’ consciousness and how the re-conﬁguration can be constituted as part of citizenship in an authoritarian nation-state such as China. Media citizenship as a post-modern concept The concept of citizenship can no longer be thought of as institutionalised and territorialised, but as one of ﬂuidity and ﬂexibility that rests on spatial and subjective positions of the individual in action, whether as a prosumer or a proam. This approach to conceptualise citizenship falls within a post-modern framework of the relations between media, citizenship and the public sphere in Western critical theories. Modernists see a pertinent relationship between communicative rationality and the cultural condition of citizenship, as in the Habermasian concept of the public sphere. They argue for the democratic potential of globalising media and communication technologies, and for media publics that are uniﬁed and territorially bounded for such democratisation. Post-modernists see new media (the Internet, mobile phones, video and Walkman) as new venues to form new publics based on non-localised, non-corporeal, non-dialogic and non-reciprocal forms of communication across national and cultural boundaries; these media publics open new possibilities to voice concerns that have previously been excluded from the public culture. The term ‘citizenship’ becomes a plural, encompassing such categories as intimate citizenship, terminal citizenship, DIY (do it yourself) citizenship and cosmopolitan/global citizenship.2 The post-modernist view on media and citizenship directly challenges the modernist conception of citizenship and media publics as uniﬁed and territorially bounded concepts. Instead, the post-modernists point out the potential of a multiplicity of networked spaces of communicative practice to induce changes in organisations, political institutions and everyday life. Citizenship, like the concept of the public sphere, is no longer thought of in terms of a stable and homogenised space, but needs to be conceived of as being mobile and ﬂexible in its spatial arrangement. The spatial re-conﬁguration of citizenship through new media and communication practices has signiﬁcantly altered the subjective relationships one has with oneself and others. The spatial re-conﬁguration of citizenship does not entail an elimination of space and place in the mediated forms of citizenship. Rather, there is a

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dialectical relationship between old and new media, and between territorialised and de-territorialised conditions of subjectivity and citizenship in the post-modern condition. John Urry’s notion of the ‘citizenship of ﬂows’ captures the post-modern condition of citizenship in our techno-media cultures. For Urry, ‘a citizenship of stasis’ is linked to the membership in certain nation-states, while ‘a citizenship of ﬂows’ describes ﬂows or movements of people, together with things, images, concepts, risks, rights and responsibilities, across nation-state boundaries (Urry 2000: 63–64). Media citizenship is also a citizenship of ﬂows. But it is less about transnational ﬂows of people and rights than mediated ﬂows of words and subjectivity across spatial, temporal and social boundaries. Once a message is posted on a BBS or sent via an SMS message, it is impossible to track its origin and destination without highly sophisticated technologies and expertise. As the case studies in the previous chapters have demonstrated, the ﬂow of words not only breaks down national, social and political boundaries, but also overcomes barriers among SARS-conﬁned individuals and people who are living with or those who care about HIV/AIDS. It can generate networks of public opinion strong enough to inﬂuence the agendas of mainstream media and state policies. In the mediated interactions between nation and state, the subjects who facilitate the ﬂow are transformed into media citizens, for whom meaningful and constructive engagement with (new) media is equivalent to exercising citizenship. As a citizenship of ﬂows, media citizenship heightens reﬂexive subjectivity among the talking, linking and clicking prosumers and proams. Sending an SMS message or posting a message/article on a BBS is the very technology of media citizenship, through which people can turn themselves from consumers of media into citizens of media. As media citizens, people are not fully informed citizens, capable of open and direct political engagement with the state; they are simply one step beyond being merely consumers and audiences of the media. As citizens of media, people may approve, applaud, petition and debate issues of personal, national and international signiﬁcance, even though they may not even have a vote in reality. In other words, as netizens and mobizens, people are invisible subjects in response to the call of their fellow citizens and intimate selves, rather than visible subjects in response to the interpellation of the state. But when oﬄine and not SMS messaging, or when targeted by cyber-police, they may become subjects who are visible once again to the disciplinary technologies of the state. Such a paradox characterises media citizenship in authoritarian states.

The paradoxes of media citizenship The paradoxes of media citizenship not only rest with the mobile and ﬂexible nature related to the spatial re-conﬁguration of citizenship; they also include three other features: the privatisation of circulation, the unreliability of technologies and the minoritised community. These three aspects answer

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three questions related to the concept of media citizenship: what do most people do with new media and communication technologies; how do these technologies facilitate or hinder public communication; and who are those media citizens? The privatisation of circulation As products of China’s opening up and capitalist revolution, the Internet and mobile phone have ushered in a new individualism in China, which in turn produces a new culture of circulation. The term ‘culture of circulation’ refers to the production and circulation of symbolic values and discourses in our age of technocapitalism. Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma (2003) use ‘cultures of circulation’ to describe the epochal change in modern social imaginaries, from ‘production-centric capitalism linked to modern social imaginaries privileging the nation-state’ to ‘circulation-based capitalism and its concomitant, a transformed set of social imaginaries that privileges a global totality’ (Lee and LiPuma 2003: 211). This prompts one to think of circulation not simply as a ﬂow of people, commodities, ﬁnances, images and ideas as in Appadurai’s paradigm of ﬁve ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1990), but more as a cultural process, ‘with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between speciﬁc types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them’ (Lee and LiPuma 2003: 192). As a cultural process, circulation has two key components: the circulating forms and their respective interpretive communities. The circulating forms include reading texts, televisual texts and the equity-based derivatives and currency swaps of transnational ﬁnancial markets. They presuppose their respective interpretive communities who set the protocols of interpretation and determine the means of dissemination or circulation. Thus, the circulatory matrix requires both technical equipment and social conditions. The technical equipment includes ‘hardware’ such as mobile phones, fax machines and computers. In the 1980s, personal media and communication technologies such as mobile phones, faxes, audio- and video-tapes and computers provided the technical base for the pro-democracy movement of 1989 (Ganley 1992: 149–66). At the turn of the millennium, the rapid development of new media and communication technologies has further fulﬁlled the technical requirement for a new culture of circulation in China. The evolution of technical ‘hardware’ is accompanied by a change in the social conditions, which are determined by the ‘software’ such as communicative competence and rationality. Such a change, characterised by the rise of an individual-based and -oriented communication culture, produces a variety of interpretive communities that are themselves productive communities at the same time. Central to the ‘software’ evolution is the emergence of individualism, which stands out to characterise the communicative practice and competence among young Chinese urbanites.

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China is a group-oriented culture where self-eﬀacement is regarded as a virtue, while individualism is traditionally understood as a pejorative term. This lack of individualism was embodied in the work unit system during the Mao era, which rendered everyone an indistinguishable member of the ‘masses’, an anonymous screw in the giant machine of state socialism. Selfinterest, expression and private space were condemned as evidence of ‘bourgeois liberalism’ (Lin 1994: 17–18). The emergence of individualism in the post-Mao era, concomitant with the increasing secularisation of Chinese society ensured by the economic reforms, allows the expansion of private spaces.3 Although often manifesting itself as consumer individualism constructed to mark out one’s success or opportunities for greater proﬁtability, but not necessarily to ‘mark out one’s own individuality’ (Dutton 1998: 274), this individualism has nevertheless opened up new spaces for private networking and expressions hitherto excluded from the ‘public sphere’. As a privatising and individualising technology of communication, new media have facilitated the normalisation of individualism in consumption and social networking. People are increasingly constituted as social subjects instead of politicised subjects. As social subjects, mobizens and netizens are a collection of individuals whose private desires and interests consitute the culture of circulation in the media sphere. Although often interpersonal and trans-spatial–temporal when mediated by Internet–mobile phone communications, these public spaces remain by and large private and individualised. For most Chinese new media users, the Internet and mobile communication provide aggregated sources of a rich variety of content: a platform for online commerce, a huge virtual billboard for advertisements, games and social networking (including cyber-love and mobile match-making). Furthermore, most forms of communication take place among individuals, and circulation of symbolic values is limited to an exclusive interpretive community, despite the openness of the Web. Although earlier discussions have suggested that people can ﬁgure as invisible subjects organised through a variety of networked spaces online and that their meaningful and constructive engagement with new media is a form of exercising citizenship, in reality such cases do not characterise the everyday use of new media in China today. The privatising eﬀect of new media use tends to restrict the culture of circulation, such that it is used for individual consumption, entertainment and networking, rather than for deliberation on issues of public concerns. This has characterised the use of new media in China. The privatisation of circulation produces multiple sites of social imaginaries and modes of citizenship. It corresponds with diversiﬁed interpretations of Chinese new media culture. The entertainment–consumption–networking pattern of new media use at the micro- and individual level is often put side by side with a control model at the macro- and institutional level, which views information and communication technologies (ICT) as a means of control (for example, Qiu 2007). People in the West are frequently told about

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suppression of freedom of speech by the Chinese government (for example shutting down politically sensitive websites and arresting cyber-activists), and how foreign media companies collaborate with the Chinese government to impose self-censorship and control the ﬂow of information into the PRC. Both the privatisation of circulation and the control model of Chinese ICT are supplemented by an activism view that takes the Internet as a platform for democratisation and political purposes (for example Schroeder 2005). All these positions – the macro-, meso- and micro-perspectives – on Chinese new media culture only testify to the mobile and ﬂexible nature of media citizenship. In other words, they imply multiplicity and uncertainty in the modes of exercising citizenship in China. Based on this mode of interpretation, media citizenship is not simply determined by a culture of circulation that Chinese urbanites and intellectuals have facilitated via the Internet and mobile communications. It is intertwined with a far more complex net of relationships, which is composed of two major parts: technical requisites and social conditions. These two components – as the socio-technical infrastructure for exercising citizenship – determine how media citizenship is exercised in contemporary China. Diﬀerent perspectives on the components of the socio-technical infrastructure, particularly diﬀering views on how technologies can facilitate or hinder communication, have rendered the concept of media citizenship more perplexing. The unreliability of technologies The second paradox of media citizenship relates to the uses of technology by the socio-cultural agents in forming and transforming their relationships. The changes in spatiality and subjectivity can open up the scope and scale of democratic citizenship. They also entail a large degree of uncertainty in the role of new media and communication technologies to cultivate active citizenship. Media and communication technologies are by nature ‘neither automatically democratic nor demagogic’, and ‘both their democratic potential and demagogic potential can be consciously tapped’ (Grosswiler 1998: 149). As Noam Chomsky (1989) has pointed out, ‘electronic town halls’ can empower ordinary people to express, discuss and debate issues of common interest, while at the same time they can be used strategically by business and political interest groups to control public opinion. China’s state media control and censorship have had a notorious history. Besides continued control and censorship of traditional media, China is building a sophisticated Internet censorship system dubbed the ‘Great Firewall’ in an eﬀort to grip the electronic public spaces that are consistently in danger of veering out of the state’s control. There has been an increasing body of literature from academics, Western media and human rights groups to document the control of the Internet in China in recent years (for example, Amnesty International 2002; Harwit and Clark 2001; Martindill 2003). Reports on how Chinese Internet users circumvent state censorship to access

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blocked sites and web pages by using proxies or anti-blocking software add another touch to the control-versus-freedom pattern of Chinese Internet culture. China’s state Internet censorship has been called ‘the most sophisticated eﬀort of its kind in the world’, and it has grown ‘more reﬁned, sophisticated, and targeted’ (Open Net Initiative 2005). Such a picture of panopticonism tends to pit the party-state as a ﬁresnorting dragon against a society that is rebellious. It neglects three basic facts: (1) self-censorship, rather than enforced punishment, forms the cornerstone of all forms of media censorship in China; (2) inter-ministerial rivalry, or the turf war between bureaucracies, makes the control of the Internet inconsistent and unpredictable; (3) there is a relationship of reciprocity between state and society in new media uses. The unreliability of technologies is implicated in these three aspects of public communication in China. Self-censorship has been a powerful tool for media regulation in the PRC. Chinese journalists, publishers and Internet service providers have formed the habit of checking the ‘unacceptable’ according to the ‘political wind’ (that is, shifts in leadership position and national priority at the time) before any piece of work is sent for publication, broadcast or viewing. Everybody is aware of the consequences of post-publication censorship, however inconsistent such censorship may be. Perry Link’s analogy of the anaconda in the chandelier best describes such a situation: the Chinese government’s censorship is less like a man-eating tiger or ﬁre-snorting dragon than a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. Normally it doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its silent message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which everyone below makes his or her large and small adjustments – all quite ‘naturally’ (Link 2001) Furthermore, the conﬂicts over control and responsibility between diﬀerent ministries and their desire for maximum proﬁt mean that there is inconsistency in implementing censorship. Chinese Internet infrastructure, for example, is regulated by the Ministry of Information Industry, while its content is jointly supervised by the Propaganda Bureau of the State Council and State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. But in reality, there has been signiﬁcant rivalry and overlapping of responsibilities between these diﬀerent ministries and bureaux. This situation is further complicated by independent intranet networks that are controlled by diﬀerent ministries, such the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Transportation. Each keeps its own turf and competes with the other for more ﬁnancial gains. The overlapping of responsibilities and the complexity of the gigantic information networks have made any kind of censorship inconsistent and unpredictable. Although the Chinese government cannot censor everything on the Internet, it has been successful in managing certain types of content, such as that

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pertaining to the Tiananmen Pro-democracy Movement of 1989 and Falun Gong. While such a practice has been decried in the West, it has not bothered Chinese Internet users. On the contrary, critical observations and commentaries on Chinese Internet control made by opponents of the CCP and scholars who adopt a Western liberal point of view tend to annoy Mainland Chinese, for whom some form of censorship is desirable and necessary. These Mainlanders, especially from the neo-authoritarianism, new leftism and postism camps, argue for national self-determination. They view media management practices in China as expressions of Chinese or Asian values, and a viable alternative to ‘Western values’. Such an argument can easily be translated into a popular nationalism, especially on issues of China’s involvement in international conﬂicts, with Japan and the US for example. Not only is Western criticism used to promote a popular nationalism that is to the government’s advantage,4 but the online activism of a small number of Internet users is also manipulated to strengthen the state’s hold on power and the party’s image. The state has allowed debate, discussion and dissenting views aimed at local and speciﬁc issues to circulate on the Web. And the party leadership at the senior level then intervenes in a traditional righteous Mandarin (qingtian) way to correct the wrong, punish corrupted local oﬃcials and redress social problems. The Internet is thus used as an outlet of public outcry and a transmission belt of public opinion (Yang 2001). It can also be used as a publicity tool that presents the party-state as the protector of popular tastes and interests. This is reﬂected in the cases of Sun Zhigang and Li Siyi. Both cases were allowed to stand out in both new and traditional media at a time when international attention was on China and its governance during the SARS outbreak. They also provided opportunities for the new party leadership to prove its ability to govern despite the epidemic crisis. The fact that the central government in Beijing reacted to public opinion quickly and dealt with the cases eﬀectively made a propaganda point, namely to show the government’s respect for human rights and willingness and ability to improve its governance. The use of (limited) online activism to serve the political purposes of the state has characterised Chinese Internet politics, most recently exempliﬁed in the ‘nail house’ incident in 2007 when critical discussion was allowed in the Chinese Internet, particularly blogs, without much governmental intervention at a time when the National People’s Congress was debating a new property rights law to protect individual homeowners (Southerland 2007). Rather than weakening the rule of the CCP, new media and communication technologies have strengthened the role of the party-state. Online activism may beneﬁt the state in improving its governance and social control. At the same time, the society beneﬁts from the increased space for exercising citizenship opened up by new media and communication technologies. This kind of reciprocal relationship between state and society makes the exercise of media citizenship even more ﬂuid and mobile. Another question pertinent to the above analysis of the concept of media citizenship and its nascent

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socio-technical infrastructure is: whose citizenship is it if citizenship becomes a mediated reality and when deliberation on issues of public concerns can reach out from the privatised spaces of circulation? The minoritised community The new media can become a site of disciplinary power that reduces the prosumers and proams to being objects of control strategies. It can also become a new venue for the creative commons to exercise citizenship, as the previous chapters have demonstrated. The individuals who creatively and courageously use the new media for exercising citizenship, however, belong to a small section of Chinese society – a minoritised community. I use ‘minoritised community’ to refer to micro-public spheres at both subnational and transnational levels containing anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of people. As already pointed out, Chinese Internet users who can be called netizens constitute only a fraction of China’s total population. According to recent surveys, only 11.3 per cent of the population are Internet literate, of which only 25.8 per cent are suﬃciently equipped to use the Internet (Chinese Search Engine 2004; Guo 2002; Leng 2003; X. Li 2004). By June 2006, an estimated 123 million Chinese had access to the Internet, still only 9.4 per cent of China’s total population of 1.3 billion. These Internet literates are primarily male, educated and single, living in eastern, coastal and highly urbanised regions. While a small (and growing) percentage of this online population have started to utilise the relative freedom provided by online spaces to express, reﬂect on and debate issues of national importance, the bulk of this privileged strata of the population use the Internet primarily to share and exchange views on lifestyles, thus privatising the culture of circulation online. Media citizenship thus privileges a minoritised community composed chieﬂy of the urban, educated and male. For this community, the Internet can be the site of a quiet ‘social test’ of democracy in China (Shao 2003). For the main strata of Chinese society, however, ‘rights’ consciousness and online and mobile phone activism are urban phenomena in a largely rural country. They are elite and urban enterprises in an extremely unequal society where the majority of people are rural, poor and uneducated. The networks and sites for exercising citizenship are not naturally inclusive. The availability of and access to resources necessary for participating in national life and hence exercising citizenship – such as money to buy the hardware, time and knowledge invested in certain socio-political agendas, and membership of social groups – determines one’s inclusion in or exclusion from the ‘imagined community’. Despite the ambitious plans of the state and its IT (information technology) elites to launch a ‘Great Digital Leap Forward’ that would make China one of the biggest digital economies in the world, the ‘Great Digital Divide’ has undoubtedly undermined such eﬀorts towards and hopes for digital democratisation (Giese 2003). It is premature to claim that ‘ICT

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[information and communication technologies] has torn down the “Great Firewall of China”’ (X. Li 2004: 256). On the contrary, the Great Firewall plus the Great Digital Divide make it even harder to credit the social test of democracy in Chinese cyberspace. In other words, continued media control and the minoritised nature of new media communities contribute to the paradoxes of media citizenship in China. The minoritised nature of media citizenship has two overlapping characteristics: the elitist and statist tendencies. The Internet literates – 9.4 per cent of China’s total population – are mainly students, teachers, engineers, journalists and other ‘winners’ in China’s capitalist revolution. Their reciprocative relationship with the state means that they need the state to protect their group interests and that they support the state’s objectives at the same time. When using the Internet as a political forum, these social elites are either guided by a strongly nationalistic or patriotic sentiment on international relations, or led by group and faction interests on issues of domestic disputes; and when issues of national concerns do come up, they do not criticise the government vehemently until the issues of concern directly aﬀect them or their group interests (Wong 2003). We have seen such elitist tendencies in 2004 when students protested against the detention of a university student (Liu Di) for her critical essays that called for more freedom of expression on the Internet. This online protest was far more widespread than any protest against the detentions of pro-democracy activists (Borton 2004). We have also seen such elitist tendencies in the case of Sun Zhigang when university students, teachers and lawyers joined hands to bring the case to the centre of national life as part of the politics of SARS. They wrote articles both online and oﬄine; they called upon the oﬃcial media to bring public opinion to bear upon the government’s agenda. Although there had been numerous cases like or even worse than that of Sun, never before had an ordinary person been brought into the spotlight of national media. The case became extraordinary because Sun was not just any ordinary migrant worker – he was a graphic designer with a university degree, an intellectual. Therefore, it is no surprise that what was mostly talked about was not that ‘a citizen was beaten to death’ but that ‘a university graduate was beaten to death’. In Li Siyi’s case, however, there was no lobbying group to bring online public opinion into the agenda-setting mechanism of the mainstream media. No open letter or proposal was written to the National Congress to address the violation of the rights of ‘little citizens’. Nor was any free legal advice or representation provided to Li Siyi’s family. Unlike the high-proﬁle Sun case, the Li case ended in October 2003 with twelve local policemen punished (only two were tried in court), and with very low-proﬁle coverage in the media. As sadly pointed out by some netizens, it was because Li was a little girl without a high level of education and from a problem family: she was less ‘worthy’ than an educated male. Nevertheless, the minoritised community, comprising an elite fraction of the Chinese people, is vital in building and consolidating the socio-technical

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bases for exercising citizenship in contemporary China. There are people who venture to speak for the weak and underprivileged, such as Li Yaling, the journalist who ﬁrst exposed Li Siyi’s case and called for netizen support online. Another elite intellectual, Kang Xiaoguang, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, did not stop at calling for justice for the little girl, but used the case of Li Siyi to examine dysfunctional systems in China’s anti-poverty projects. In his report, Kang calls for an awakening of people’s conscience. He writes: ‘Cry out for the silenced; safeguard rights for the deprived – this is the most serious social and political problem we are facing’ (Kang 2004). Kang also calls upon the media to play a central role in exposing corruption and injustice and safeguarding the human rights of the disadvantaged. Although such a battle cry for the mute and the deprived is mainly limited to the minoritised community in their virtual world,5 the frequencies emitted from such a cry can help lead and shape public opinion, to which the state must respond. This is especially the case when investigative journalists are involved. As the cases of Sun Zhigang and Li Siyi have shown, journalists have played a primary role in exposing abuses of power by local authorities and in initiating national reﬂection on citizenship and human rights. Such cases provide occasions for journalists to push boundaries and test new ground, despite their symbiotic relationship with the state authorities. I quote the following confession by a senior journalist in Nanjing during my ﬁeld trip in August 2003 to shed some light on the extent of self-censorship in Chinese journalism: We know when we can vent anger; we also know when we cannot make a fuss over the most outrageous issue [in our society]. We know when to say what and when to shut up; we also know whom we can slash and whom we cannot. It is an art of calculation that has gone into our subconscious. It is also an art of survival that we have to perfect in everyday practices. This private confession is echoed by an open statement by Hu Shuli, a noted journalist and managing editor of China’s Business and Finance (Caijing), who admitted to the New York Times: ‘I know how to measure the boundary lines. We go up to the line – and we might even push it. But we never cross it’ (Barboza 2005). The boundary line is set by the state, to which Chinese journalists must respond. The art of calculation has gone into the subconscious of not only Chinese journalists, but also the elites who have initiated media citizenship through creative media uses. The vitality of media citizenship is thus weakened by elitist tendency and statist character at the same time. This statist character is seen in the central role that mainstream media have played to bring grassroots Net-activism to the national media agenda and eventual attention of the state authority. Whether it is Li Siyi in Chengdu Business

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News, Li Jiaming on CCTV or Sun Zhigang in Southern Metropolitan News, the traditional mainstream media played a major role in bringing the cases to public attention in the ﬁrst place. It was also the mainstream media that people relied on to transform online outpourings into public opinion and open a conversation between the state and society. Through providing a means to recognise and validate popular wishes, the mainstream media proves that it is still part of the ideological apparatuses and in itself a powerful political institution in Chinese politics. It is this statist character that further fragments and truncates the practices of media citizenship. Self-censorship and line-pushing tactics have seen Chinese journalists as opportunist champions of citizen rights. They wave ﬂags of justice and cry aloud for the weak and deprived only when allowed by the state and within the prescribed boundaries. The journalists of Southern Metropolitan News who ﬁrst reported Sun’s case admitted, in an online posting shortly after the ﬁrst report, that they could not carry their investigation further because of resistance from local authorities.6 Their breakthrough came only after online public opinion was too strong to be ignored by state authorities (who subsequently ordered Guangzhou oﬃcials to take the case seriously). Similarly, other mainstream media did not cover Sun Zhigang’s story in a comprehensive and critical manner until it aroused an ‘earthquake’ in online communities. On the other hand, the tremendous wave of online protests, petitions and vows of abstinence for Li Siyi was not eﬀectively reﬂected in the mainstream oﬃcial media. Unlike Sun’s case, where traditional media eventually played a vital role in bringing online public opinion into the public sphere and making it a top priority on the national political agenda, Li Siyi’s case remained a largely cyber-phenomenon, and the mainstream media were conspicuously silent in the face of strong online ‘public opinion’. Except for a few local and popular newspapers and magazines, nothing was mentioned until December 2003, when a report entitled ‘Beijing protects minors through legislation’ was published and circulated in the major mouthpiece media such as People’s Daily. The report mentioned Li Siyi only brieﬂy in highlighting the beneﬁt of the new regulation to protect children (People’s Daily 2003a). An online discussant succinctly pointed out that Li Siyi did not die at the ‘right’ time: June 2003 was a time for celebration of the nation’s war over SARS, a time for good news; none of the mainstream media dared to cry aloud for an obscure little girl from the margins of society when their ‘patron’ (the state) wanted them to sing a diﬀerent tune. This poster called such tacit cooperation of media with government ‘the rape of media’ (Shu 2003b). Fortunately, both the elitist and the statist tendencies have been challenged from both within (by intellectuals themselves) and without (by the ‘ordinary’ people). Despite constant detentions and punishment by the communist state for their controversial opinions, public intellectuals and journalists are still able to get their ideas discussed and circulated on the Internet, via the black

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market and by writing under pseudonyms. Furthermore, they have shown a desire to set up diﬀerent political agendas and strategies from those of the elitist tradition. As Merle Goldman observes: [W]hereas until the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, public intellectuals acted as an elite who did not join with other social classes in political actions, in the 1990s they began to join with workers and small business people in organised petition drives and political groups to try to bring about political change. Therefore, at the start of the twenty-ﬁrst century there has been a qualitative change among public intellectuals, a willingness to join with other social groups in political actions. (Goldman 2005) This ‘qualitative change’ in intellectual politics is accompanied by a qualitative as well as quantitative change in popular politics as the ‘ordinary’ people are increasingly aware of their rights and violations of them, through both traditional and new media and communication technologies. More and more ordinary people who are not aﬃliated with any political or religious groups have started to use the Internet to ﬁght for their rights as citizens of the nation in recent years (Wong 2004). The dynamics of resistance and repression have consequently taken a more populist turn (Perry and Selden 2003). These ordinary people turn to the new media and to the streets at the risk of their livelihood and freedom. It is these eﬀorts that keep the idea of democracy alive in the concept of citizenship in China.

Conclusion Media citizenship moves beyond the formal and institutional dimensions of citizenship that have characterised much of the theory on political communications, and has become informal and un-institutional in its formation. This citizenship also moves beyond media production and consumption to focus on media circulation as integral to its realisation. Unlike traditional institutions that entail formalised and supervised citizenship, new media and communication technologies provide an un-institutionalised, less supervised and more ﬂuid form of citizenship. In view of the non-institutionalised nature of new media practices, citizenship can be thought of in relation to spontaneous and individualised deliberation on matters of public importance, through textual ﬂows of written words rather than direct, oral or physical engagements. It can be actualised in relation to formal and informal, public and private, and territorialised and de-territorialised domains and spaces. Thus, media citizenship rests on mobile sites and ﬂexible modes of media practices. The mobile and ﬂexible nature of media citizenship, however, is conditioned by its own internal paradoxes. These paradoxes – the privatisation of circulation, the unreliability of technologies and the minoritised community – are

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related to and overlap with one another. They are symptomatic of the symbiotic and contesting relationships of the state and non-state players. The concept of media citizenship also brings into question the liberal view on new media and communication technologies in transforming underdeveloped democracies. As this chapter has demonstrated, new media serve as both a resource for action and a channel for regulating the citizenry. As a channel of regulation, it is an extension of Foucauldian disciplinary power, allowing the state to monitor and sensor its subjects. As a resource for action, it does not obliterate time and space, but opens possibilities for new forms of public action based on temporal and spatial contingencies. As a citizenship of ﬂow, media citizenship allows prosumers and proams to use the hypervisible signs of AIDS and SARS as a metaphoric frame to register solidarity, to articulate alternative political realities and to form a new set of values outside the state’s control. The exclusion and inclusion of such signs in national discourses are not solely dependent on the will of the state, but negotiated between the state and non-state. Netizens who wrote, commented on and circulated the stories about Li Jiaming, Sun Zhigang and Li Siyi, and mobizens who wrote, rewrote and circulated rhymes about SARS, may not have considered themselves, or been considered by state authorities, as opponents of the system. Their exercise of citizenship was enacted through mediated ﬂows of words and symbolic values across spatial, temporal and social boundaries, rather than through direct engagement with and challenge of the state authorities. The state’s tolerance and even support of such popular media practices testiﬁes to its symbiotic relationship with the minoritised community. Media citizenship, therefore, is not about democratic citizenship in the sense of Western liberalism; it is closely related to creative consumerism. This creative consumerism has brought about a new individualism, which, as Lucian W. Pye has noted, represents ‘for the individual a half-way point between the tradition of being a passive, parochial participant in face-to-face group structures and being an autonomous citizen capable of political relationship with the Chinese state’ (Pye 1996b: 38). Here, we see the intriguing relations of consumerism, individualism and citizenship. Like the new individualism, media citizenship represents a halfway point between informed and active citizenship capable of direct political engagement with the state and active consumership and audienceship that celebrate individuality and pleasure. As such, new media and media citizenship represent a third realm. They are, to use Philip Huang’s words, ‘the source of new kinds of power relations, more negotiatory than commandist’ (Huang 1993: 237–38). Peter Golding (1990: 99) once commented, ‘Communicative competence and action, and the resources required to exercise them, are requisites for citizenship’. I have shown how a mature socio-technical infrastructure is essential for the exercise of media citizenship. In contemporary China, communicative competence and freedom are prerequisites for citizenship. If citizenship can be imagined spatially, it is not just a contestation over the right

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to urban spaces or streets and squares (Zhang 2002), but also a contestation over the right to communicative means and space. The co-authoring of stories and news via both old and new media, and between ordinary media storytellers and professional journalists, points to the contestation over the right to communicative space and freedom in order to exercise citizenship, however limited such eﬀorts may be. Media citizenship is therefore not only about spatial re-conﬁguration, but also about spatial contestation in both virtual and material senses. The paradoxes of media citizenship not only imply a struggle against the state’s media control and censorship, that is, the contestation over communicative space; they also entail a battle against the minoritised nature of new media uses in China. Even though Chinese netizens and mobizens can sometimes reach out from their immediate group and community to make battle cries on behalf of the most obscure and disadvantaged individuals in society, they have not been prepared to share resources with peasants, laidoﬀ workers, migrant labourers and other marginalised groups of people in order to invigorate the social and cultural conditions of citizenship. The paradoxes of media citizenship are therefore representative of the tensions and contradictions in Chinese post-socialism. They characterise Chinese media culture in general.

6

Media campaigns The war over Falun Gong

New media and communication networks have allowed the creative commons – whether professional journalists or ordinary urbanites – to produce and circulate media stories and news events about their everyday lives and social realities across geopolitical borders and assume national and sometimes transnational signiﬁcance via the shared space in the media sphere. In the process, not only are subjectivity and citizenship reﬁgured, but body politics are also contested. This is evidenced in the state’s media campaign against Falun Gong, a quasi-religious movement banned in China as a cult in 1999, and the latter’s counter-media campaign against the Chinese state. The media campaign war over Falun Gong refers to systematic, sustained, institutionalised and highly visible propaganda clashes between the two parties, through the integrated uses of both old and new media at a level of transnational signiﬁcance. This war draws on representation politics that ultimately leads to an examination of Chinese body politics. Literature on Falun Gong has been increasing since 1999 when the qigongcum-religious and spiritual movement made news headlines internationally as the crusader, victim or vandal of human rights in China. The Chinese state media, pro-government scientists and scholars have denounced Falun Gong as an ‘evil cult’, and its practitioners ‘cultists’ or innocent people blinded by the cult leader Li Hongzhi, whose vicious personal interests are aided by hostile international anti-China forces. The followers of Falun Gong, however, have portrayed Li as a modern-day prophet and Falun Gong as an ultimate truth whose signiﬁcance and global inﬂuence is comparable to that of Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. Western media and other third-party organisations tend to associate the saga of Falun Gong with that of human rights in China.1 At the same time, scholars of religion, history and politics in Chinese studies view Falun Gong as: an intriguing part of the Chinese spiritual continuum; an integral part of Chinese cultural traditions and the cultural revitalisation movement; and a consequence of China’s rapid modernisation and globalisation (L. Li 1999; Ownby 2002). The historian David Ownby has described Falun Gong as an example of ‘modern incarnations of a popular religious tradition with an appeal capable of reaching north and south, town and village, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, and … Chinese and foreigner’ (Ownby 2003: 239).

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Falun Gong is intriguing to academics, journalists and China observers for two main reasons: its doctrine and practice of internal cultivation, which is central to Chinese cultural and spiritual tradition; and its utilisation of various media and communication technologies for national and transnational campaigns in networking, organisation and recruitment, which is tightly tied to its claim of Western concepts of human rights and religious freedom. The ﬁrst feature – the aspect of traditionality or oldness – is closely related to its self-cultivation doctrines, derived from the three pillars of Chinese religious and spiritual traditions, Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism. The second feature – the aspect of modernness or newness – is tied to its global vision, strategies and organisation, all facilitated by media and communication technologies. Falun Gong’s high-proﬁle presence in and use of the Internet in its media campaigns has earned it such labels as ‘new religious movement’ and ‘new cybersect’ (Karaﬂogka 2003; Thornton 2004). This chapter locates Falun Gong’s media campaign war with the Chinese state within this historical and theoretical background. It will not, however, focus on the complex historical, spiritual, religious, political and international implications of its emergence, growth and transnational appeal, which can be found elsewhere.2 Rather, I take Patsy Rahn’s advice to go ‘beyond the headlines’ (Rahn 2000), and look into the national politics beyond visual representations of Falun Gong, rather than the politics of Falun Gong itself. As a counter-movement, Falun Gong exempliﬁes the ‘newness’ and ‘oldness’ of China’s cultural transformation through the interplay with the state. This interplay, as in all other cases that previous chapters have examined, is characterised by contestation as well as mutual appropriation. In the media campaign war, the Chinese state and Falun Gong have employed two epistemological paradigms to represent nation and tradition. The hypervisibility of body images is central to such representations. As such, it is necessary to examine their representational politics in order to investigate Chinese body politics. This chapter argues that the systematic, sustained and institutionalised propaganda clashes between the Chinese state and Falun Gong tell a tale of two representations and two narratives of the body. While the body in the state narrative is believed to be nationalistic and malleable through scientiﬁc training and intervention, the body in the Falun Gong narrative is regarded as being individual and natural. Falun Gong’s self-cultivation and representational politics represent a new body politic, whereby the politics of the self and the nation are separated from the politics of the state.

The making of a media campaign war This section examines the media campaign war between Falun Gong and the Chinese state that began in 1999 and continues to the present. China’s war on Falun Gong can be viewed as part of the state’s eﬀorts to control religious beliefs.3 The state media has been instrumental in propagating the state

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anti-cult policies, which include diﬀerentiating scientiﬁc qigong from anti- or pseudo-scientiﬁc qigong and attacking the latter for being ‘evil cults’. Falun Gong’s war with the Chinese state also started with the media, represented by the news headline event of the 25 April Zhongnanhai demonstration in 1999. The 25 April demonstration was triggered by an anti-Falun Gong article written by He Zuoxiu, a physicist in Tianjin who was later hailed as an ‘anti-cult hero’ by the state authorities. This criticism by an oﬃcial scientist in a state media outlet, accusing Falun Gong of being cultist and warning youths not to practise it, was viewed by Falun Gong followers as improper and an inaccurate representation of a practice that they believe is beneﬁcial to both physical and spiritual attainment. They demonstrated outside the publishing house in Tianjin following the publication of the article on 11 April 1999, and demanded a withdrawal of the article and an open apology from the author and the journal.4 The police arrested many Falun Gong demonstrators on 22 and 23 April. The Tianjin event led to the 25 April peaceful demonstration by 10,000 people in front of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese equivalent of the Kremlin, and the subsequent crackdown on Falun Gong that started in July 1999. Since then, Falun Gong has gradually evolved from a non-politically engaged practice of bodily cultivation to a protest movement and an anti-CCP (Chinese Communist Party) force. It has also grown from a Chinese domestic issue to an international matter. In the accelerated confrontation between the Chinese state and Falun Gong following the crackdown, both parties have employed various media technologies to justify their own policies and attack the other. Media campaign against Falun Gong The crackdown on Falun Gong was accompanied, on the one hand, by imprisonment of thousands of Falun Gong followers who refused to renounce their beliefs and, on the other hand, by a virulent media campaign to demonise Falun Gong and justify the crackdown. In the ﬁrst few months after the Falun Gong ban on 22 July 1999, the living rooms of Chinese households were bombarded with incessant images and messages about the ‘evil cult’ Falun Gong. All media were mobilised to join the media campaign, with the Party’s mouthpiece media China Central Television (CCTV) and People’s Daily taking the lead. In the weeks following the crackdown in July 1999, CCTV suspended its thirty-minute evening news in its prime time (7–7.30pm) and replaced it with a series of one-hour anti-Falun Gong special reports, followed by detailed investigative news and news analyses to elaborate the key themes of the anticult campaign. These programmes featured scientiﬁc evidence, victims’ stories, oﬃcial proclamations and announcements, citizens’ comments and international practices on cults to justify the crush on Falun Gong. Their anti-Falun Gong themes range from labelling Falun Gong a superstition (with testimonials from state-sanctioned scientists), to criticising its pseudo-scientiﬁc vision that

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led innocent people astray from Marxist scientism, and stigmatising Falun Gong as a killer cult that caused suicides and homicides.5 Its leader, Li Hongzhi, was portrayed as an archetypal doomsday cult leader with a poor level of education, a criminal and corrupt swindler amassing a large fortune (on which he did not pay taxes) and a pawn of international forces hostile to China and the Chinese nation. This kind of intensive media campaign characterised all national, provincial and local television, radio and newspapers. Besides news and current aﬀairs programmes, popular talk show programmes such as Talk As It Is (Shi hua shi shuo) were also mobilised as ‘loudspeakers’ that relentlessly chanted the ‘mainstream melody’ of the state. Scientists and popular science writers such as He Zuoxiu and Sima Nan became champions and heroes in the ‘popular’ war against the pseudo-scientiﬁc qigong. In the years following the 1999 crackdown, Talk As It Is produced a 20-episode series entitled ‘Secret Disclosures’ (ﬁrst broadcast on 21 September 2002) to propagate state scientism and expose the pseudo-scientiﬁc nature of state-banned qigong practices and their masters’ supra-normal ability (CCTV 2002). Increasingly, the state media campaign against Falun Gong resorted to universally recognised terminologies such as human rights and the rule of law to justify its crackdown on Falun Gong and other qigong-like sectarian movements that have been labelled ‘cults’, in the face of numerous criticisms from world leaders and human rights organisations (Keith and Lin 2003). It also referred to counter-cult movements in other countries to justify its own crack-down on cults. A barrage of media reports examined the Branch Davidians, the Aum Shinryko, Jim Jones’ Solar Temple and the ‘Restore the Ten Commandments’ sect in Uganda to justify the banning of Falun Gong.6 As the title of the feature programme from CCTV’s anti-Falun Gong website (www.yangqing.com.cn) suggests, China’s war on Falun Gong is staged within the bounds of law and international practices to ‘combat cults and protect human rights’. Market logic, which had been stressed repeatedly in the commercialisation of the media and cultural industries, gave way to party logic in this virulent media campaign. It carried a high price tag: millions of dollars, time and people were involved in the anti-Falun Gong and anti-cult campaign. In July 1999, CCTV alone lost more than 60 million yuan (approximately US$7.5 million) of its revenue from advertisements (Zhang 2000: 626). This ﬁnancial loss did not include the money spent to produce the sustained campaign. The eyeball-share war gave way to the mind-share war, with a high price tag. The high-cost incessant media campaigns had a tremendous impact on public opinion. The images of Falun Gong victims and their testimonials were themselves telling about the cultic nature of the movement. The images of the noisy and disordered bodies of Falun Gong protesters in front of state institutions, of the deformed and twisted bodies of Falun Gong practitioners and their victims (including family members allegedly killed by Falun Gong practitioners who had gone insane through qi-deviation in practice) and of

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the four burnt and deformed bodies of the self-immolators at Tiananmen Square in January 2001 – all these are contrasted with the healthy, beautiful, happy and ordered bodies of Tai Chi practitioners, group dancers and individual joggers in public parks. For uninformed citizens, these images were worth thousands of words. After the self-immolation incident in January 2001,7 a renewed media campaign against Falun Gong occupied Chinese media vectors. Television images of emotionally charged hospital scenes of self-immolation victims, particularly the repeated (contrasting) images of the young college student and the primary school girl before and after the incident, worked to dispel any initial doubt, indiﬀerence or even antagonism that many people had towards the state-led media campaign against Falun Gong. Many people were led to believe that ‘the nature of Falun Gong is a cult that destroys lives’ and ‘the Party’s decision [to ban Falun Gong and other cults] is wise, correct, and timely’ (CCTV 2001). Owing to the lack of access and data, there has been no survey done on mainland Chinese’s opinions on the anti-Falun Gong campaign, except for observations and speculations. Some scholars in the West may doubt the eﬀectiveness of the Chinese state’s media campaign (Schauble 2001: 27). However, my observations during my trips to China in 2002, 2003 and 2004 conform to those of Western observers such as Barend J. ter Haar (2002) and Danny Schechter (2000: 74–75). These observers note that, although many people in China were sick of the media campaign against Falun Gong, they had been persuaded by the ceaseless one-sided propaganda and had a negative opinion about, if not against, Falun Gong. Even though the post-Jiang Zemin regime has tried to keep the Falun Gong issue in a low proﬁle in the public sphere, Falun Gong remains a sensitive topic in the public discourse.8 The media have been keeping a constant alert to Falun Gong inﬁltration, especially after the satellite hijacking incidents, making most journalists wary and weary of Falun Gong.9 As Falun Gong has been driven overseas, the state’s anti-Falun Gong media campaign has also gone oﬀshore. There are many reports in Falun Gong literature on the harassment (including document thefts and jamming of phone calls) of Falun Gong practitioners, supporters and sympathisers in foreign countries by Chinese embassies and intelligence staﬀ, and reports on the curtailment of Falun Gong activities by their host country governments under pressures from the Chinese government. The ‘mind-share theft’ incident of the New Tang Dynasty Television (NTDTV) by the CCTV during the 2004 Chinese New Year celebrations is an illustration of how the media campaign war is integrated into Beijing’s cross-border media campaigns.10 Beijing’s clashes with Falun Gong reverberate both in and outside China. In the cross-border mission to contain and crush Falun Gong, the Chinese state has gradually changed its strategies from high-proﬁle mass arrests and torture of Falun Gong practitioners to secret police operations and cyberspace. While the secret police operations have continued both in and outside China without any open acknowledgement from the Chinese government,

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the Internet has become the terrain for the Chinese government to openly attack Li Hongzhi and Falun Gong. The Chinese government’s Internet war on Falun Gong has four aspects: blocking, censorship and self-censorship, arresting, and attacking and hacking. The ﬁrst three aspects are all related to the control of the Internet in China. As already pointed out in Chapter Five, Chinese state Internet control and censorship have been described as the most sophisticated in the world. An increasingly sophisticated ﬁrewall, teamed with a strong cyberpolice who constantly watch over Chinese Internet users, has been eﬀective in promoting self-censorship among Internet users and Internet content providers. Noticing that users can circumvent its ﬁrewall by using a proxy server, the government is making every attempt to control the ‘uncontrollable’ by investing in research and development into new technologies in tracking and controlling Internet content, enlisting foreign IT companies in such eﬀorts and strengthening cyber-police teams to regulate Internet cafes and ﬁnd cyber-dissidents (Hachigian 2001; Sinclair 2002). Since 1999, all Falun Gong and pro-Falun Gong websites have been blocked and are inaccessible from within China (unless using proxy servers). Anyone who uses the Internet to disseminate pro-Falun Gong messages or provide email services to (suspected) Falun Gong activists will be arrested for the crime of ‘subversion of the state’. In December 2000, the Internet ban on Falun Gong was extended to include all ‘evil cults’ (Marshall 2000).11 In addition to blocking, censorship and arresting, the government has also set up anti-Falun Gong websites and encouraged major Chinese Internet service providers to set up anti-Falun Gong web pages to attack the ‘cult’. Extensive anti-Falun Gong articles have been written and transmitted on the Internet. These websites or pages are generally electronic versions of the mainstream media, with hyperlinks to all major anti-cult sites operated by the state. The strategy of attacking also involves hacking Falun Gong websites.12 Despite denials from the Chinese government, Falun Gong and Western media have reported hacker activities on Falun Gong websites, which originate from the Chinese Police Bureau or the Public Security Ministry. Although the hacker attacks are sporadic, they pose a nuisance to Falun Gong, who have responded by strengthening their technical team to store and duplicate information and counter-hack (Clearwisdom.net 2000). Observers view the vitriolic media campaign against the ‘cult’ as ‘a saturation propaganda oﬀensive, reminiscent in its intensity to the strident sloganeering of the Cultural Revolution, in which millions were punished for being of the wrong class or consciousness’ (Schechter 2000: 11). The war on Falun Gong – and in a broader sense, the war on cults that encompasses a wide range of unoﬃcial religious and spiritual groups and heterodox sects – indicates how seriously the Chinese party-state views an alternative vision of progress, development and China’s socio-political order (Chen 2003). The aggressive media campaign has succeeded in crushing some cults and forcing others to go underground or overseas. While most of them have largely gone

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unnoticed and disappeared from world media attention, Falun Gong has succeeded in sustaining itself as a counter-community and -movement, and arresting transnational media attention through its counter-campaign. Falun Gong’s counter-media campaign Li Hongzhi and his followers are media savvy and highly manipulative of the media in their survival of the persecution. They have utilised Western media in defence against persecution in China, and have set up their own global media networks consisting of websites, newspapers, magazines, media production studios, radio and television broadcasts, newsletters, leaﬂets, booklets and VCD/DVDs. In 2000, they began to use radio broadcasts to propagate their ideas from America to China. Since 2002, two more media outlets with global operations have been added to this eﬀort: one is a New York-based, Chinese-language television station broadcasting 24 hours a day via satellite to global audiences – the NTDTV; the other is a New Jerseyregistered, globally distributed, bilingual and free newspaper – The Epoch Times. Both have a global mission and a virtual presence on the Internet. Falun Gong’s counter-media war mobilises the traditional face-to-face communication, the communist/Maoist mass movement-style campaign and high-tech media and communication methods. Its members each act as a media watcher, analyst, dissector, hacker, as well as a self-promoter and public relations expert. They keep a close eye on Western media coverage, encourage Western media to use less pejorative language (as in changing the term ‘cult’ to a more neutral one such as ‘sect’ or ‘movement’) and present a favourable image of their leader and movement. They seek every opportunity to gain moral support and recognition from international organisations, local governments, businesses and the general public by making themselves visible in public places and on public occasions. They put up signs at university campuses, set up booths and do their slow movement exercises in public places, circulate ﬂyers, participate in parades, organise and attend press conferences, obtain Falun Dafa proclamations and talk to anyone who is willing to listen about Falun Gong and their persecution by the Chinese government. They organise global vigilance and march for the victims of persecution by the Chinese government; they have sued former Chinese president Jiang Zemin in several countries and put him on mock trials; and most recently, they have started a series of attacks on CCP’s claim of legitimacy as China’s ruling party and declare the demise of the CCP in the ‘Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party’, which can be accessed freely on Falun Gong websites. Falun Gong also diligently watches Chinese media coverage and refutes every accusation made against it and its members by producing and disseminating audio-visual materials to explain and rectify the ‘truth’ about Falun Gong and the persecution of Falun Gong, both in and outside China. Inside China, Falun Gong followers have, since 1999, changed their strategies

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from a high-proﬁle showdown in protests and demonstrations outside state media institutions and at Tiananmen Square to guerrilla media warfare. They have sent a barrage of mysterious, automated voice messages praising Falun Gong to mainland phones; they have slipped pro-Falun Gong content into oﬃcial Chinese newspapers; and they have interrupted local television broadcasting and sabotaged local cable television transmission lines to relay their own audio-visual material.13 Since 2002, they have started hijacking the Sinosat satellite signals to insert pro-Falun Gong videos and slogans to the mainland television audiences. Even CCTV and CETV (China Education Television), the only two national television networks, have both been hijacked. During the World Cup soccer ﬁnals in June 2002, for example, Falun Gong inﬁltrated nine CCTV channels and at least ten provincial television channels to insert pro-Falun Gong video footage. Since then, Falun Gong has repeatedly hijacked the state media and disrupted the state’s eﬀorts to crush the ‘cult’ on many nationally important occasions, such as the anniversaries of Hong Kong’s return to China (July 1), the National Day (October 1) and the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year).14 Falun Gong’s counter-media campaign has been accused of disturbing social stability and national development. The satellite hijacking, for example, has been used as new evidence to justify the state’s policy on Falun Gong and reiterate anti-Falun Gong themes, such as Falun Gong being antisociety, anti-human, anti-science and anti-China. Falun Gong members justify their actions as acts of ‘truth clariﬁcation’ war against the ‘Evil Jiang (Zemin)’ regime that lies and fabricates news. The former Chinese president Jiang Zemin is called a liar and a devil (see Figure 6.1) who uses hate-provoking propaganda to force people to choose between survival and their conscience, and who has persecuted millions of virtuous people who believe in ‘truthfulness’

Figure 6.1 Caricature of ‘Evil Jiang’. Source: Clearwisdom.net photo archive (www.clearwisdom.net/emh/article_images/ 2001-9-3-xiee-jzm-7.jpg)

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(zhen), ‘compassion’ (shan) and ‘forbearance’ (ren), the three pillars of Li Hongzhi’s teachings. Outside China, besides publicity, self-promotion and media monitoring eﬀorts, Falun Gong has staged a cyber-war against the Chinese state by resorting to the Internet as the main terrain of contestation. Since its ﬁrst website was established in 1995, the number of Falun Gong websites has grown quickly. Falun Gong is now thoroughly wired. Its practitioners have maintained hundreds of sites around the world. The Internet has been used eﬀectively by Falun Gong as a cheap and fast means to distribute literature, evangelise, facilitate communication among members, organise local and international gatherings and mobilise transnational membership for concerted movements. The 25 April Zhongnanhai demonstration in 1999 may be the earliest incidence of Falun Gong’s cyber-activism (Lin 2001: 224). Cyberspace has now become an important part of Falun Gong as a community and a movement. It also constitutes an important part of being a Falun Gong practitioner. Noah Porter’s ethnographic study of Falun Gong practitioners in America ﬁnds that they either look at Falun Gong sites regularly (ideally on a daily basis) or read articles from the sites via subscribed emails when they do not have direct access to the sites, especially for those living in China (Porter 2003: 227). Falun Gong’s Internet savviness is a crucial factor in its ability to survive and even prevail over persecution by the Chinese government both in and outside China. Its global vision and visibility directly relate to and result from its strategic use of the media, especially the Internet. This distinguishes Falun Gong from earlier popular (religious) movements. Many observers and commentators have noted Falun Gong’s high-proﬁle presence on the Internet. Danny Schechter, for example, points out that the Falun Gong story appears to be ‘as much about technology as it is about religion; it oﬀers a fascinating glimpse of an ancient religious tradition that is mutating rapidly as it makes the leap into cyberspace’ (Schechter 2000: 190). Mark Bell and Taylor Boas call Falun Gong ‘the largest religious movement born alongside the rapid global proliferation of the Internet’ (Bell and Boas 2003: 277). Chinese academics in the West call it ‘a radical movement through “traditional” spiritual methods with innovative communication networks’ (Deng and Fang 2002). The New York Times describes it as a ‘vast, silent, virtually invisible movement … that came together not on the streets but on the Internet’ (Crossette 1999). Patricia Thornton has succinctly called it ‘cybersectarianism’ (Thornton 2004). The tactical integration of new media (the Internet) with the oldest means of communication (oral and print media) has sustained Falun Gong as a counter-ideology and -movement. Falun Gong’s counter-media campaign – through its own media production, cyber-networking, news analysis and dissection, media inﬁltration and hacking, combined with extensive public relations eﬀorts – presents a selfdeclared oppositional force to the Chinese party-state. It is increasingly staged on the transnational level, targeting para-diasporic audiences. Falun

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Gong’s concerted and consistent eﬀorts to stage the counter-media campaign are an illustration of how an alternative ideology can be sustained through the manipulation of representational politics.

The representational politics of Falun Gong After the media hysteria of the self-immolation incident in early 2001, news on Falun Gong has declined. Falun Gong has managed to stay in world media as the ‘movement’ and continued to expand its community. While the Chinese government tries every means to exclude ‘noise’ from its propaganda machinery, Falun Gong has continued to make ‘noise’ in world media by working on its representational politics. Falun Gong’s representational politics is characterised by two diﬀerent but intersecting trajectories: the visibility of concealment and the politics of revelation. The visibility of concealment means making visible to world audiences the denial and concealment of ‘truth’ about Falun Gong by the Chinese state. It is a ‘reactive’ strategy to defend oneself. Such a strategy is, to use an old Chinese saying, using the other party’s sword against that party (yi biren zhi jian huanshi bishen). In other words, when one is attacked (by a sword), one turns the tip the other way to attack the attacker. Falun Gong uses the Chinese state’s visual representations to counterattack without making claims on the authority of the visual images, thus avoiding the accusation of fabrication in the age of digital reproduction. Falun Gong’s tactical deconstruction of CCTV’s video footage of the Tiananmen self-immolation incident is an example of how the reactive strategy can be used to expose the concealment of truth by the Chinese state media. The self-immolation incident provoked a second wave of media oﬀensive against Falun Gong after the ﬁrst wave in July 1999. Emotionally charged hospital scenes of self-immolation victims were repeatedly invoked to enlist the audience’s sympathy (towards victims), hatred (towards Li Hongzhi and Falun Gong) and support (towards the government’s decision to crush the ‘cult’). Wang Jindong, one of the six immolators, for example, was chosen by the oﬃcial media to show how a normal and sane person could supposedly lose his mind after practising Falun Gong. More importantly, Wang was chosen to show how a former diehard Falun Gong member could be transformed into a ‘new’ man with care from the government. He is quoted as saying that Falun Gong is spiritual opium garbed as ‘religion’ (People’s Daily 2002). The same video footage, however, is used by Falun Gong video technicians to expose the tricks of news fabrication by the state media. CCTV’s video footage is dissected frame by frame in a video programme called False Fire produced by NTDTV. Through detailed video analysis, every selfimmolation victim is revealed as the victim of a staged show, directed by the state secret police, in order to demonise Falun Gong. The same Wang, for example, is revealed by Falun Gong news dissectors as a clown in such a

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staged show: his diﬀerent hairlines before and after the immolation, the unburned plastic Sprite bottle between his legs, his meditation posture (including the way he crossed his legs and ﬁngers), the man behind him holding a blanket and the slogan he shouted (‘The only way to heaven is through practising Falun Dafa’) are all exposed as being either illogical or ‘un-Falun Gong’. In fact, Falun Gong video analysts claim that Wang is a PLA (People’s Liberation Army) soldier posed as a Falun Gong practitioner in order to put on the show. Frame-by-frame video analysis also shows that the dead victims were killed, not by ﬁre, but by secret police, during the ‘incident’. In the Chinese cultural sphere, the visibility of concealment can be an intellectual strategy to resist the opaque order of suppression (of intellectual independence) through ‘playing’ with this opacity in artistic performances. This strategy is evident in the stage performance of Chinese rock n’roll star Cui Jian, who mocks the opaque order by wearing the red ﬂag (the national ﬂag of the PRC) as a blindfold. The blindfold becomes ‘an ironic sign of the opacity of order and of his furtive wit within its tightly wrapped darknesses’ (Wark 1994: 136). In the case of Falun Gong, the visibility of concealment becomes a direct, rather than ‘blindfolded’, attack on the opaque order of the state. Its reactive approach has turned out to be a proactive strategy of protest. Making the opaque order clear and visible is the ﬂipside of making oneself visible and visually arresting for the international communities, where the opaque order does not have the absolute restrictive power over Falun Gong. The politics of revelation represents a ‘proactive’ strategy, by making oneself visible and heard. Falun Gong’s eagerness to make news headlines plays upon the politics of revelation. Its eﬀective use of human rights standards in its public relations eﬀorts is another example. Its sustained eﬀorts to inﬁltrate the Chinese state media also testify to the proactive aspect of the politics of revelation. A major mission of Falun Gong’s representational politics has been to reveal the ‘truth’ to Chinese audiences who are won over by the oﬃcial propaganda and to international audiences who are ignorant of the atrocity inﬂicted on Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese police. Apart from the tactics of self-exposure and truth revelation, a striking feature in the politics of revelation is the mobilisation of non-Chinese practitioners and Western media to reveal the truth about Falun Gong. Until the end of 2001, Falun Gong practitioners inside China were the major force resisting their brutal suppression. As the police surveillance at Tiananmen Square has tightened since the 2001 Tiananmen self-immolation incident and most Chinese Falun Gong protesters have been put in jail or placed under close supervision, Falun Gong has adopted guerrilla tactics to reveal the ‘truth’. Non-Chinese practitioners have also become the champions of the counter-movement. In November 2001, a group of Western Falun Gong practitioners from North America, Europe and Australia gathered at Tiananmen Square in a

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symbolic gesture of protest against the Chinese government’s persecution of Falun Gong. The whole protest action – from the transcontinental and transnational coordination in preparation for the trip to China, the making of the Falun Gong banner in a Beijing hotel, to the actual sit-in at the Square and Chinese police arresting the demonstrators – was recorded by Falun Gong members.15 When the Canadian Falun Gong practitioner in Figure 6.2 shouted ‘Falun Dafa is good’ and when he was forcibly taken away by the Chinese police (while still trying to maintain the lotus position), his (non-Chinese) face and posture became hyperimages of the Falun Gong protest movement. As hyperimages, they are not just images of what they represent, but a kind of ‘more image than image’ representation.16 They function as the iconic images of the Falun Gong movement, rather than simply those of individual protesters. Their symbolic signiﬁcance has a heavy ideological overtone. In the case of the November 2001 Tiananmen sit-in, the appearance of non-Chinese protesters at Tiananmen Square has changed the nature of Falun Gong from being a Chinese qigong practice to being a counter-movement and community of transnational signiﬁcance. As hyperimages, the images of the Western practitioner being carried away by Chinese police, the ‘man being trodden upon’ (Figure 6.3) and the ﬁre at Tiananmen Square are not only iconic images about the Falun Gong movement itself, but also invoke the collective memory about other images in contemporary Chinese history, such as the images of ‘one man and tanks’ and the ‘Goddess of Democracy’.17 They thus situate the Falun Gong movement in a historical background, and refer to an imminent threat: sooner or later, tanks would appear. But tanks did not appear this time. What appeared was a large number of police at Tiananmen Square.18 If in 1989 transnational visuality turned into its opposite when the Chinese government reversed the theatrical order of

Figure 6.2 A Canadian practitioner (one of thirty-six Western practitioners) making a peaceful appeal and being arrested at Tiananmen Square. Source: Clearwisdom.net photo archive (http://photo.minghui.org/photo/selected-En/ u_tiananmen_appeal/2911231657181.htm; http://photo.minghui.org/photo/selectedEn/u_tiananmen_appeal/2917332138291.htm)

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Figure 6.3 Image of the ‘man being trodden upon’ by plain clothes policemen. Source: Clearwisdom.net photo archive (http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/perse cution_evidence/evil_scene/images/2003-7-13-shibao01.jpg)

the gaze by turning the force of visuality into the force of soldiers and tanks (Chow 1995b: 166–67), in and since 1999 the transnational visibility of violence has turned into a dominion of the police: in the Chinese media, it is a visibility of disturbance (by Falun Gong followers) and restoration of order and stability (by the police); in the Falun Gong media, it is a visibility of brutality (by the Chinese police) and forbearance of brutality (by Falun Gong followers); and in the Western media, it is a visibility of human rights violation (by the Chinese police) and human rights championship (by Falun Gong followers). Falun Gong hit the headlines again in the world’s media less than ten months after the Tiananmen self-immolation incident. The non-Chinese Falun Gong practitioners became new crusaders in China’s human rights movement. Western media have played a signiﬁcant role in transmitting the politics of the streets, Zhongnanhai and Tiananmen Square into visual images about Chinese politics. It is inevitable that their coverage of Falun Gong carries a very negative image of the Chinese government and often invokes historical memories about the Tiananmen Square violence in 1989. The representational politics of Falun Gong is expressed, on the one hand, through the visibility of concealment playing against the Chinese media vector and, on the other hand, through the politics of revelation resorting to both the Western media and Falun Gong media networks. Through such representational politics, Falun Gong is able to sustain and institutionalise its ideological clashes with the Chinese government over expanded parameters of time and space. In such a media campaign war, Falun Gong becomes an abstract monumental concept, just like the monumental space of

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Tiananmen Square, which can be a double or multiple transmitter of images and ideologies, as represented by diﬀerent media vectors. It thus becomes the frontier of the hyperimage of the body, a buﬀer zone and a privileged site for encounter and confrontation of diﬀerent body politics. Representation, according to Derrida, is not a new phenomenon. Our epoch is characterised by ‘the authority, the dominant generality of representation’ (Derrida 1982: 310). The newsworthiness of Falun Gong’s confrontation with the Chinese state has seen foreign media personnel (re) presenting Falun Gong stories from China, of China and on China. Rey Chow calls it the ‘King Kong syndrome’, which is a ‘cross-cultural syndrome in which the “Third World,” as the site of the “raw” material that is “monstrosity,” is produced for the surplus-value of spectacle, entertainment, and spiritual enrichment for the “First World”’ (Chow 1991b: 84). The locus of such representations is China – familiar stories about China’s human rights abuse. The locus of representation of Falun Gong in Chinese oﬃcial media is also China, a repeated story about nation and tradition represented by the partystate. Each representation tends to replace ‘what-is’ with ‘what-should-be’; each representation misplaces ‘what-is’ with ‘what-is-not’. This ‘what-is’ lies in the locus of the media campaign war between the Chinese government and Falun Gong. This ‘what-is’, as I outline in the following section, embodies two versions of body politics. The translation of representational politics into body politics is a cultural event. Such translation, to borrow from Rey Chow again (1995a: 193), is ‘an activity, a transportation between two “media,” two kinds of already-mediated data … because, for one reason or another, the “original” as such is unavailable – lost, cryptic, already heavily mediated, already heavily translated’.

From representational politics to body politics The media campaign war between Falun Gong and the Chinese state is ultimately about representations of the body. In the Chinese state media, Falun Gong is represented as a mass of noisy, disordered, deformed and twisted bodies that threaten the existing ordered, manageable and qualiﬁed socialist bodies. In the Falun Gong media, it represents itself as a community of peaceful, healthy, moral and harmonious bodies that challenge the spiritually and morally corrupted and twisted bodies of an inhumane system and evil regime ruled by the CCP. The contention between the two sides is not a struggle over the control of the state, but a struggle over deﬁning the body and the nation. Falun Gong’s war with the Chinese state is, to use Claire Rasmussen and Michael Brown’s words, ‘not a struggle among preconstituted entities, whether nation-states or individual bodies, but is instead a constant struggle for and against the imposition of order and attempts to give the body politic a single, ﬁnal form’ (Rasmussen and Brown 2005: 479). Body politic recognises the individual body as a project that can form and transform a community and a nation. ‘Body’ incorporates both the individual

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body and the collective or national body. Its politic requires both personal resources and social capital to represent, manage and shape the body. The body becomes a politic because of the imposition of the political economy onto the body, where ‘a set of material elements and techniques’ is deployed to ‘serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge’ (Foucault 1979: 28). Two aspects are central to the current discussion on body politics: the care of the body and the transformation of the body. The following discussion examines two versions of body politics: the state narrative of the qualiﬁed socialist body and the Falun Gong narrative of the qualiﬁed dafa body. These two body politics represent their respective ideologies about identity, citizenship and ethics. In the state media, the excess of images about destroyed and deformed bodies of Falun Gong practitioners, in comparison with the healthy and beautiful bodies of good citizens, relays an important message about the state’s body politic, that is, its concern for the ‘bare life’ (to use Giorgio Agamben’s term again) as an integral part of its nation-building and nationrejuvenating project. As illustrated earlier, the burnt and twisted bodies of the Tiananmen self-immolators are used to highlight how innocent lives can be saved and transformed as lives worth living through a timely intervention by the state. Like the spectacle of the scaﬀold, which functions as a political ritual to reactivate the sovereign power over the condemned body, the spectacle of the ﬁre at Tiananmen Square is invested with political power over the burnt bodies of Falun Gong followers. Like the scaﬀold, the burnt bodies are invested with a political investment that functions as ‘a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination’ (Foucault 1979: 26). Likewise, the healed and transformed victims of the cult are made productive bodies that are worth caring for and investing in, and hence worthy lives. In the process of transformation, the ‘bare life’ becomes a politically qualiﬁed life. The individual body is invested with political power and used as a tool for social control. This version of body politic has occupied a central place in Chinese political culture. The qualiﬁed socialist body The Chinese state has always claimed the care of individual lives as a way to intervene in the social body and preside over the national body. Since the early twentieth century, Chinese elite intellectuals and politicians have believed that training, framing and disciplining the individual body is essential to remoulding or remaking the Chinese character, a prerequisite for Chinese modernity. This has been incorporated in the Maoist body politic. The Maoist body is a mass/collective/nationalistic body, a masculine and disciplined body, and an egalitarian, militaristic, proletarian and revolutionary body all at once. Although the post-Mao body is more feminine, and less militaristic,

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egalitarian and revolutionary, it remains nationalistic and disciplined according to socialist scientiﬁc principles. The ‘masses’ of the nation are governed by meticulous disciplinary techniques that subject them to relations of power and domination. Speaking bitterness, as examined in Chapter Three, is a typical Maoist technology to politicise the social body. Individuals who participate in speaking bitterness are rendered visible subjects interpellated by the state; they are made exemplars for the realisation of socialist ideals. In the post-Mao era, the discourses of spiritual civilisation (jingshen wenming), culture (wenhua) and quality (suzhi), among other political technologies, have continued to inscribe the Chinese body with a socialist ideology and morality. The discourse of spiritual civilisation was raised by the state ideologues in the 1980s to counter Westernisation in the face of the increasing secularisation of Chinese society, the end of communist ideology and Western cultural inﬂuence. As a political discourse, spiritual civilisation governed almost all aspects of national lives such as economy, cultural production and sports. In Susan Brownell’s study of Chinese sports culture, for example, the intrinsic relationship between body training and the call for a civilised morality is regarded as central to China’s political culture (Brownell 1995: ch. 6). She notes that constructing ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ has governed every sportsman and woman, inscribing onto them a system of socialist ideology and disciplinary technologies. Discipline is central to the socialist spiritual civilisation: discipline and self-discipline are means towards the goal – ‘training the body for the nation’. As Brownell points out, ‘the most minute disciplines of the body are conceived of as having civilizing eﬀects with very general consequences for the fate of the nation’ (Brownell 1995: 155). The discourse of spiritual civilisation is thus part of the disciplinary technologies of the state. Whether using the West as a point of departure or Chinese tradition as a point of reference, spiritual civilisation aims at producing qualiﬁed and ‘docile bodies’ to serve the purpose of the state.19 Through such a discourse, the mass of individual bodies can be trained into nationalistic bodies, which in turn are forged as one body. Nationalism becomes somatic and the body becomes nationalistic. A somatic nationalism is produced through the discourse of spiritual civilisation. This somatic nationalism requires each and every body to follow the ‘party head’ and be absorbed into the one body of the people. Claude Lefort points out that the foundation of socialist party-states lies in the representation of the people as one body, or as part of the one body. The collective body of the people, headed by the party, is required to hear, speak and read reality through the head, and hence acquires its consciousness (Lefort 1986: 192–306). In socialist China, two campaigns have been carried out in order to remake the people as one body: the campaign against the class enemy through mass movements and the campaign to remake the national character through meticulous techniques such as the discourse of spiritual civilisation. Both campaigns are carried out at the level of the

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individual. While the campaign against the class enemy ended with the end of the Cultural Revolution, the campaign to remake the national body persists. Nationalism becomes somatic when training, framing and disciplining of the socialist body is regarded as a symbolic gesture to bid farewell to ‘the sick man of east Asia’ and to herald the awakening or second coming of the ‘giant dragon of the east’ (dongfang julong), as symbolised by the dragon-shaped candle lights on the Great Wall on the eve of 1 January 2000. As an underlying logic in the (re)production of the qualiﬁed socialist body, somatic nationalism is central to the body politic of the state. Bodily training and physical education are regarded as leading to national strength and prowess, especially in the face of external threats (Uberoi 1995). Although the military connotation has gradually diminished during China’s ‘peaceful rise’ as a new dragon culture at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, somatic nationalism has continued to serve as a useful point of departure to imagine a Chinese axial age in the new millennium. Through the discourses of spiritual civilisation, culture and quality, it serves to dissolve, even temporarily, the incoherence and tension among the various expressions of Chinese post-nationalism. ‘Culture’ is an intellectually inspired discourse that has been incorporated into the state discourse of quality. There is a widespread understanding among Chinese intellectual and political elites that, in order to remake the Chinese nation, one needs to start remaking the body, making it more cultured and hence qualiﬁed for a rejuvenated China. From the May Fourth New Culture Movement in the early twentieth century to the Cultural Fever in the late twentieth century, culture – referring variably to Chinese traditional culture, socialist culture, Western culture and civilisation associated with Enlightenment thought – has been invoked from time to time by Chinese intellectuals in their visions of Chinese modernity at diﬀerent stages. Whatever interpretation it has, culture has been used to mark out the qualiﬁed from the unqualiﬁed for the socialist course. Lacking culture (mei wenhua) or having a low cultural level (di wenhua shuiping) means low quality and lack of value, while having culture (you wenhua) means high quality and having value. The discourse of quality signiﬁes a value system that produces subject positions among the populace during China’s aggressive accumulation of capital. As Ann Anagnost’s comparative study of the rural migrant and the urban, middle-class only child suggests, quality is ‘the quintessential expression of how subjects are set up for the rational choice making that grounds China’s capitalist transformation’ (Anagnost 2004: 192). Like the discourse of culture, quality functions as a regime of representation and a form of power adhering to individual bodies to measure their worth as human capital. For the migrant labourer, it stigmatises rurality while celebrating her social mobility; for the urban middle class, it deﬁnes her social distinction and justiﬁes practices of consumption. Quality deﬁnes the subject position of both the migrant labourer (as a body without value) and her antithesis, the

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middle-class child (as a body with value and potentiality). Pairing the two groups of people through the discourse of quality suggests how the body has become a value that can be measured according to low and high, have and have not. The body becomes ‘a site of social and familial investment through the accumulation of embodied competencies along a division between mental and manual labor: education for the middle-class child and labor discipline for the migrant’ (Anagnost 2004: 194). The interplay of political, intellectual and popular discourses of spiritual civilisation, culture and quality produces a post-socialist political culture that subjects all, from intellectuals to migrant workers, to a nationalistic body politic. In this bodily paradigm, those with a high value enjoy more rights of citizenship, while those with a low value deserve less or none. This explains the moral panics among the elites and urbanites about rural migrant workers in the cities and Falun Gong practitioners. As explained earlier, in the state media, Falun Gong’s leader Li Hongzhi has been described as a swindler with a low-level education and humble beginnings, and his followers as lowquality people (represented by laid-oﬀ workers) who can easily be led astray by a low-culture and low-quality but somewhat cunning leader. Falun Gong demonstrators are portrayed as mobs without any quality or regard for national interest and image. As such, theirs are lives not worth living. The discourse of quality, as in other discourses propagated by the state, has been appropriated by the populace as the technology of the self, as shown in the migrant worker’s strategy for social mobility. But, as Anagnost observes, ‘the particular modalities out of which moments of resistance emerge are themselves conditioned on the power of suzhi discourse and its limits, not to mention the potential of these moments to give birth to subject-eﬀects that were never intended by the logics of neoliberal politics’ (Anagnost 2004: 205). As long as the state narrative is still used as the framework to construct and interpret popular realities, non-state narratives will remain subjected to the hegemony of the ‘mainstream’. Sadly, apart from a small number of people who are willing to ‘cross borders’ between classes and venture into ‘uncharted waters’, most people in China are still inscribed by the mainstream discourses of quality, culture and spiritual civilisation. Diﬀerent from the high-quality male graphic designer beaten to death in Guangzhou in 2003, Falun Gong practitioners are believed to have low value and hence no rights of citizenship. This may explain the general apathy towards the brutal persecution of the Falun Gong in China. The qualiﬁed socialist body is not only nationalistic but also scientiﬁc. In other words, it is a nationalistic body that can be moulded and trained through scientiﬁc methods. This scientiﬁc view of the body has been consistent with Chinese enlightenment tradition, which regards ‘Mr Science’ as synonymous with modernity and progress.20 From the Self-Strengthening Movement in the late nineteenth century to the May Fourth Movement in the early twentieth century, numerous youths and intellectuals rallied behind the banner of science to pronounce their anti-traditionalism.21 ‘Mr Science’

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did not stand for natural science and technology alone, but was identiﬁed with a new scientiﬁc view of the world based on Western instrumental rationality and later on Marxist scienticism when the communists took over China in 1949. The CCP has always claimed itself to be the avant-garde of the proletariats and used Marxist scienticism to build a new China. ‘Science’ has been a discursive signiﬁer of truth in the party-state’s social experiments. A consequence of this romanticisation of science, when combined with the urge to modernise, is a Great Leap Forward-style utopianism that resulted in social and natural disasters with millions of human casualties, and a Cultural Revolution-style social movement that led to denial and the destruction of Chinese traditional artifacts, architecture, landscape, values, teachings and practices (including religion). In the post-Mao era, science, like religion, is ‘rehabilitated’. Science – referring to empirical science in most cases – has been used to justify the reform policies, as exempliﬁed in the ‘four modernisations’ blueprint for socialist China in the Deng Xiaoping era, and has continually been paired with technology as the ‘primary force of productivity’. The century-long qiangguo meng (the dream to make China strong and powerful) seems to have been realised with China’s rise as a super economic power and a leading power in science and technology, as celebrated in the Three Gorges Dam project, the Tibetan railway project and manned spaceship programmes. Science has become the guiding principle in constructing a new social order, where human behaviour, ethics and politics can be reshaped. The postMao scientism not only draws on Western empirical science; it is also connected with Chinese traditional epistemology and native Chinese scientiﬁc tradition. The combination of old and new furnishes contemporary Chinese political philosophy (H. Wang 1995). This state interpretation of science, like that of culture, quality and spiritual civilisation, is a regime of power and governmentality over the national body. Therefore, training the body for the nation is guided by scientiﬁc principles; crushing Falun Gong and other popular qigong practices is also justiﬁed on the grounds of scientism. In the revival of tradition and traditional scientism, China witnessed a boom of popular qigong practices in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Claiming oneself to be scientiﬁc had become a trademark for many of the revived qigong practices. This had been recognised by the state authorities, who promoted some qigong practices as being speciﬁcally ‘Chinese’ and ‘scientiﬁc’. The state media even espoused eﬀorts by some qigong masters and scientists to ﬁnd scientiﬁc explanations for some qigong practices (Xu 1999: 965). These ‘scientiﬁc’ qigong practices are absorbed into ‘the PRC’s “new nationalism,” a frequently chauvinistic claim to cultural greatness and superpower status’ (Ownby 2003: 233). Nancy Chen (2000) has observed, ‘Even with unruly masters and the potential for subversive actions, the Chinese body politics continues to promote qigong as an eﬃcient healing practice primarily because it is uniquely Chinese and promotes an important element

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of state identity’. Furthermore, she points out, ‘the politics of healing is thus also the politics of the nation’. In 1986, the state-run Chinese Qigong Scientiﬁc Research Association was established in Beijing to monitor and register more than 2000 national-level qigong organisations (and countless local branches). Falun Gong was one of those scientiﬁc qigong practices recognised by the Chinese government and became a member of the association in the early 1990s. The recognition of Falun Gong as a scientiﬁc qigong and later accusations of it being unscientiﬁc, superstitious and cultic testify to how the discourse of science can function as a discursive signiﬁer to include or exclude individuals and groups in or from the category of qualiﬁed socialist body. In the war against qigong and Falun Gong in 1999, Marxist scientism was called upon to justify their exclusion from the national life.22 The medical care controversy – especially in relation to Li Hongzhi’s teaching to his followers on practising qi rather than resorting to medicine to cure ailments and illnesses – is repeatedly used by the state media as evidence of Falun Gong’s anti-science nature (Porter 2003: 153–77). The accusation against Falun Gong as being anti-science (so as to justify its crackdown) highlights the vulnerability of the state’s scientiﬁc pretensions and its sensitivity to any alternative body politic that is a potential challenge to its authority. The individual body needs to be immersed into the national and collective body, which is realised through socialist scientiﬁc methods. It is invested with value and power. Falun Gong’s alternative vision of the body challenges the qualiﬁed socialist body at the levels of both individual and group/community. As the following analysis shows, the qualiﬁed dafa body is not the nationalistic body that can be trained and moulded through scientiﬁc methods, but an individual and natural body that can be transformed through the enactment of ‘truthfulness’, ‘compassion’ and ‘forbearance’. The qualiﬁed dafa body is a microcosm in itself; one able to construct alternative political realities and a counter-narrative about spiritual civilisation (Vermander 1999). The qualiﬁed dafa body The revival of native studies and popular religious and qigong practices in the late 1980s and the early 1990s paved the way, in both theoretical and popular practices, for the emergence of the individual and natural body. Falun Gong, situated in such a historical background, was one of the most popular qigong practices for constructing an alternative body–mind paradigm that would promise its practitioners the ultimate freedom from thisworldly limitations and restraints. The new body–mind paradigm, which can be called ‘somatic individualism’, diﬀers from the somatic nationalism in that its ultimate goal is remoulding the self, both physically and spiritually, towards a reunion with the universe, rather than moulding the individual body so as to incorporate it with the nation and state. Individual choice and will is the only way towards the ultimate truth, which lies beyond the

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geopolitical conﬁnes of the nation-state. Somatic individualism has no regard for the discourses of spiritual civilisation, culture and quality, and uses a diﬀerent framework – the mysterious qi, which is roughly equivalent to the English word ‘energy’, innate in each and every body – to describe and interpret an alternative body politic. As a mystic energy stored, channelled and regulated in the individual body, qi and qi-cultivation is a totally personal experience unrelated to the level of culture or quality of the individual cultivator. A migrant labourer is equally as valued as the middle-class only child in qigong practices. Qigong helps to construct an alternative space for the cultivation and reinvention of the individual body and mind, with no regard for the existing socio-political orders. The qigong boom is concurrent with the ‘end of ideology’ and the emergence of individualism in the post-Mao era. As previous chapters have discussed, the new individualism has opened up new spaces for self-realisation and networking. As a halfway point between being a passive subject and an autonomous citizen, the new individualism has found an alternative outlet in popular qigong and religious practices. These practices allow people from diﬀerent walks of life to gather together as equals in qi-cultivation and healing. Healing is not only about curing diseases but more about recovering from emotional traumas, from social, familial and relational dysfunctions. As in religion, resorting to tradition and the supernatural does not work towards the realisation of citizenship. But individual identities and subjectivities can be refashioned through qigong practices (Weller 1999). Several authors have noted this ‘counter’ nature of qigong practices. Thomas Ots (1994) points out that qigong provides an outlet for emotional catharsis, a symbolic lessening of the control of mind over body and a ‘communitas’ of withdrawal from the culturally and socially inscribed and constructed body. Nancy Chen (1995) regards qigong practices in urban China as a strategy adopted by the urbanites to rewrite and redeﬁne their identity and individual body within the conﬁned space of an orthodox socialist state. Jian Xu (1999) further relates the body politics of qigong to the symbolic order of Chinese modernity. Xu argues: ‘Qigong discourse has in the past ﬁfteen years helped open a private space in the symbolic order of Chinese socialist modernity for those who want to cultivate their individual bodies’ (Xu 1999: 985). The politics of somatic individualism can thus be viewed as part of a political unconscious, a fantasy space and an expression of the repressed desires of the individual in post-socialist China. As a counter-narrative to the state’s body politic, Falun Gong and other qigong practices oﬀer free and individual spaces to cultivate the natural body in public spaces and at home, even within the scope of state supervision. Their discourse of healing is premised upon individual eﬀort and attainment through bodily cultivation. This individualising of bodily cultivation embodies an alternative hierarchy of value that is antithetical to that imposed upon individuals by the discourses of spiritual civilisation, culture and

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quality. The emphasis on self-cultivation and self-care has made qigong and Falun Gong an alternative universe in which to construct an alternative body politic to that of the state. In this alternative universe, the body is no longer a possession of the party-state, but the property of each individual practitioner. In the articulation of alternative political realities, the natural and individual body is regarded as transformable through the cultivation of qi and the enactment of ‘truthfulness’, ‘compassion’ and ‘forbearance’. The politics of somatic individualism hence accounts for a counter-narrative to the somatic nationalism and constitutes a new body politic. Interestingly, it is not somatic individualism but Falun Gong’s scientiﬁc claims for the body that eventually drive the two body politics apart. Falun Gong’s discourse of healing, which has been used in the health care controversy by the state to testify as to its anti-science nature, is regarded by its followers as the higher science of the body–mind paradigm, and the ultimate science for improving health and transforming the body. David Ownby observes that, from his surveys of Falun Gong practitioners in North America, the scientiﬁc nature of Falun Gong is as important as its spiritual enlightenment, and both aspects draw people to the movement (Ownby 2001). In fact, what distinguished Falun Gong from other qigong movements in China is its emphasis on scientism. It views modern science as being a ‘religion’ and a ‘cult’ that traps people in purely materialistic pursuit rather than spiritual development; it accuses state-sanctioned scientists of being pseudo-scientists who use the name of ‘science’ for political gains. Its version of scientism is closely tied with a morality discourse, which is represented by the three pillars of Li Hongzhi’s teachings – ‘truthfulness ‘, ‘compassion’ and ‘forbearance’. ‘Truthfulness’ is the guiding principle behind the cultivation practices required of a Falun Gong practitioner. It calls for a return to one’s ‘origin’ so as to realise one’s potentials. The ‘origin’ is the natural body with limitless potentials that include such supernormal abilities as the opening of the celestial eye, clairvoyance and clairaudience (H. Li 1994: 50). One needs to be a moral being in order to be truthful to bare life. As a qigong-cultivation practice rooted in ancient Chinese culture – drawing on teachings from Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the three spiritual pillars of Chinese culture – Falun Gong oﬀers a moral vision and an apocalyptic myth. It calls for a return to one’s true self, a source of purity uncorrupted by worldly pursuits; it calls upon its followers to accumulate virtue in moral deeds in order to purify the universe. One’s bodily transformation is part of the worldly transformation. Central to Li’s discourse of bodily transformation is the disregard for contemporary Chinese morality discourse and the respect for traditional Chinese culture and its moral visions. Mao’s Cultural Revolution is regarded as responsible for destroying China’s historical role as a great nation and culture. The post-Mao moral degradation and social maladies are consequences of the loss of a sound moral and value system that would sustain

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China as a great nation. This critical morality discourse on post-Mao China is further expounded in the ‘Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party’, in which the CCP is vehemently attacked as an ‘evil cult’ that poisons human hearts and kills innocent lives, and an ‘anti-universe force’ that has destroyed traditional culture, persecuted Falun Gong and manufactured lies in order to perpetuate its existence. The relationship between bodily transformation and morality discourse in Falun Gong has been noted by several scholars. Patricia Thornton (2002: 674) reads Falun Gong’s bodily cultivation techniques as ‘a type of evocative frame registering a series of highly contentious claims against the present regime’. David Ownby also notes the association of moral practice with physical transformation in Falun Gong. He traces the moral practice of Falun Gong to Chinese cultural and religious traditions represented by Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, and points out that ‘physical transformation is eﬀected most often by moral practice’ in popular sectarian movements: ‘Thus we see embodied in these traditions what must surely be one of the oldest, most common, and most widely shared wishes in the world: that the righteous have the power’ (Ownby 2003: 238). Commenting on Falun Gong’s call upon Chinese tradition and traditional values to combat contemporary social maladies, especially moral degradation in post-Mao China, Ownby writes: [T]he traditions in question did not necessarily create new moral precepts or a dissenting point of view (or a point of view which would diﬀer from dissent as expressed from within more mainstream traditions). Instead, to the extent that the traditions criticise the mainstream, it is from what one might call a fundamentalist point of view, calling on the institutions in question to live up to their own claims to morality and legitimacy. (Ownby 2003: 238) Using tradition to criticise the contemporary and mainstream is not a new phenomenon. It has characterised intellectual and popular social critiques throughout Chinese history (Unger 1993). But Falun Gong has gone beyond the boundaries tolerable to the state by recruiting millions of people to believe in Li, accept his criticism of contemporary Chinese politics and participate in a morality-loaded revolution. Called upon by the second principle ‘compassion’, Falun Gong followers are driven by a universalistic mission to spread the ‘true’ law to all human beings, so as to save them from total destruction at the end of the universe.23 In Falun Gong’s texts, the reattainment of a moral body remains the goal of cultivation for both the individual practitioner and the human race as a whole. Through ‘compassion’, the individual body can be transformed into the universal body, and somatic individualism into somatic universalism. The mission of morality, as an integral part of ‘compassion’, is not only a personal matter but also a

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collective enterprise. It requires both attitude and labour – the attitude is ‘truthfulness’ and the labour is exempliﬁed in ‘forbearance’. ‘Forbearance’ recognises the diﬃculty of fulﬁlling the morality mission. It equips individual practitioners with faith and endurance in the face of physical and emotional tests, which are believed to be necessary to get rid of ye (the dark element in the universe that leads to immoral conduct). It disciplines one’s body, chastens one’s mind and enables one to attain a higher self and higher morality. ‘Forbearance’ – ren 忍 in Chinese script composed of a ‘knife’ 刀 above the ‘heart’ 心 – has vividly described China’s national ideology expressed by Rey Chow (1998a: 126) as ‘we endure, therefore we are’. Using Zhang Yimou’s 1994 ﬁlm To Live (Huozhe) as an illustration, Chow points out that ren represents the ideology of the people in their endurance and survival of diﬃculties and traumas imposed by external structures. As the ideology of the people, ren is not invested with the value of political resistance; rather, it explains the resilience of the power structure at work. Chow writes: China is governed, managed, and fantasized as a collective by the selffulﬁlling, self-perpetuating ideology of endurance and survival – by an ethical insistence on accommodating, on staying alive at all costs. (Chow 1998a: 129) This ideology of endurance and survival still characterises the everyday existence of the ‘people’ of the People’s Republic, especially the disadvantaged, deprived and marginalised, who manage to stay alive at all costs. But in Falun Gong, particularly in the context of the fa-rectiﬁcation movement (a synthesis of ‘studying and validating the fa’, ‘clarifying the truth’ and ‘sending forth righteous thoughts’), ren or forbearance becomes an ideology and a practice of resistance, especially in protests against the Chinese state. It enables a large number of ordinary people from all walks of life and of diﬀerent age groups and nationalities to make coordinated appearances at Zhongnanhai, Tiananmen Square and in front of Chinese embassies to stage a continual protest against the instances of inhumanity. It enables those imprisoned and persecuted by the Chinese state to endure physical, psychological and emotional tortures without compromising their belief in and adherence to Falun Gong, the dafa. As such, Gareth Fisher (2003: 295) comments: ‘It is forbearance that characterises the struggle between Falun Gong practitioners and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and that has made a group of elderly retirees with no weapons or political slogans the greatest threat to the Communist rule since the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989’. As a new body–mind paradigm, Falun Gong oﬀers an alternative scientism and alternative discourse of morality embodied in the truthfulness– compassion–forbearance triumvirate. The qualiﬁed dafa body is somatic as well as moralistic; both aspects are intertwined in Falun Gong’s claim of scientism. The politics of healing and the fa-rectiﬁcation movement make Li

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Hongzhi and his ‘entire body of dafa disciples’ the de facto crusaders of a post-socialist moral revitalisation. The body, in both its individualistic and its universalistic aspects, has become ‘a metaphoric or metonymic frame within which to register alienation, disaﬀection and protest, and to articulate alternative political realities’ (Thornton 2002: 673). It is not the qigong-style exercise and healing practices but the inherent body politic that makes Falun Gong an alternative ideology, a new system of ethics and a serious threat to the CCP.

Conclusion The systematic, sustained and institutionalised propaganda clashes between the Chinese state and Falun Gong tell two narratives of the body and two visions of body politics. These narratives and visions are essential to sustain a coherent sense of identity and (imagined) community on both sides. As a form of ‘ﬂexible accumulation’ of social capital, Falun Gong’s representational politics presents the movement as an alternative body politic and alternative ideology.24 Its media campaign war with the Chinese state suggests how representation is realised through eﬀective use of both old and new media forms and how an alternative body politic can be sustained through a metonymic attack on the qualiﬁed socialist body. As Nan Lin (2001: 225) points out, Falun Gong serves as ‘a vivid contemporary illustration of how social networks and capital provide the mechanisms and processes by which an alternative ideology, challenging prevailing ideology and institutions, can be institutionalized’. Emphasising the unmistakeable diﬀerences in their ideologies on the body should not disguise the similarities between the two parties. The body politic in Falun Gong draws a resemblance with that of the state, in their use of culture and tradition, particularly Chineseness, in their millennial visions about human existence, and even in their deployment of bodily techniques through training and cultivation. As a historical product of contemporary Chinese politics, Falun Gong is not only Chinese but also apocalyptically Maoist. As Benjamin Penny shows, not only do the images of Li Hongzhi in the Falun Gong publicity literature bear a strong resemblance to those of Mao, the bodily transformation discourse of Falun Gong is also Maoist. As in the Maoist discourse, the creation of a new society and humanity requires ‘a transformation of the individual at the level of the self rather than simply being generated as a product of the transformation of the means of production and exchange’ (Penny 2002: 10). In both discourses, the bodily transformation leads to societal transformation. Falun Gong’s metonymic attack on the state’s body politic oﬀers an alternative framework to counter the state’s eﬀorts to give the body politic a single and ﬁnal form. Its alternativeness, however, does not translate into progressiveness. As Yuezhi Zhao (2003b) cautions us, although Falun Gong can be regarded as symptomatic of the malaise of Chinese modernity, it does

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not necessarily develop in the direction of emancipation. On the contrary, its conservative and retrogressive nature (in both ideology and media politics) makes it even harder to predict the continued appeal of Falun Gong on the global scale. Falun Gong’s continued media campaign against the Chinese state and CCP, even after the latter has dropped media oﬀensive strategies against the movement, at least in the public sphere, is an annoyance to lots of Chinese who sincerely believe that China deserves the best opportunities (such as the right to hold the Olympic Games) in its national rejuvenation. As Zhao succinctly points out, ‘The escalation of Falun Gong’s media tactics is a sign of both determination and exasperation’ (Zhao 2003b: 222). Falun Gong has transformed itself from a healing practice to a popular civil disobedience movement in China, and from a spiritual movement to a protest movement outside China. As a protest movement, it is two-tiered: ‘an exoteric movement (the rational, respectable pursuit of human rights expressed in the international arena)’ and ‘an esoteric movement (an apocalyptic ideology and ethic of martyrdom)’ (Palmer 2003: 355). The rational and irrational natures of Falun Gong, as expressed in the ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ aspects, are manifestations of its modernness (in the use of modern technologies and terminologies) and traditionality (related to its self-cultivation doctrines in Chinese religious and spiritual traditions). The case of Falun Gong demonstrates how opposites can be reconciled or split in writing the ‘nation as narration’ (Bhabha 1994). This theme will be explored further in the next chapter.

7

Media spectacles and cultural transformation

The media spectacles that this book has examined – the new millennium celebrations, media stories about AIDS and SARS, SARS reportage and the media campaign war over Falun Gong – are examples of how the interplay between state and non-state forces shapes Chinese cultural transformation at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Such interplay produces contesting and yet conjunctive narratives about subjectivity, identity, citizenship and ethics. A counter-hegemonic process is implicated in the interplay: these sites illuminate how various cultural activities enacted through diﬀerent mediums (e.g. television, newspaper, the Internet, mobile phones and staged display and performance) can be read as signs of resistance and subversion as well as evidence of complicity and compromise. The theatrical media war between Falun Gong and the Chinese state, for example, demonstrates, on the one hand, a split in writing the nation and, on the other hand, a tendency for mutual appropriation between state and non-state socio-cultural agents. While the split and contestation characterise the relationship between the state and Falun Gong or any other oppositional groups, appropriation and reconciliation are the distinctive features in contemporary media and cultural production in China. These four case studies illustrate the internal dynamics of the symbiotic yet conﬂictual relationships among the diﬀerent cultural agents of Chinese post-socialist modernity. To put it in another way, they are sites of transculturation among local and global, elite and grassroots, state and nonstate forces and inﬂuences – the heterogeneous dialogues associated with globalisation. Chinese cultural transformation is implicated in the many forms of heterogeneous dialogues. In the production of the nation as narration, according to Homi Bhabha, ‘there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation’ (Bhabha 1994: 297). Understanding the conceptual ambivalence between the ‘pedagogical’ and the ‘performative’ is key to China’s cultural transformation in the new century. As earlier analysis has shown, the heterogonous dialogues between the state and non-state ensure a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic process, in which

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dominance is not total and resistance not absolute. Such a situation calls for a rejection of the normative baggage in discussing media and cultural transformation in China. Each and every cultural agent in China’s cultural transformation constitutes a factor that is in itself an entity of tension between the pedagogical and the performative. The pedagogies of the state, journalists, urbanites and the Falun Gong group are exempliﬁed in their accumulative eﬀorts to assert their own ideologies and agendas. These eﬀorts are also themselves part of the performative, embedded in the everyday media and cultural practices. Take the concept of citizenship as an example: the pedagogical narrative argues for natural and universal rights for members of an ‘imagined community’; the performative narrative, however, in eﬀect favours a minoritised community. Such a split has seen not only a tension between the state and non-state but also a battle within the non-state in order to reconcile the performative and the pedagogical. Like China’s war on the Falun Gong, which has been described as ‘a giant ﬁghting a ghost’,1 the conceptual ambivalence in the production of the nation as narration means a continual ghost battle, perpetuated by diﬀerent actors, both in and outside China. The conceptual ambivalence in writing the nation produces counter-narratives of Chinese modernity (in relation to the state) and Chinese counternarratives of modernity (in relation to the West). These counter-narratives can be explained by the conjunction as well as the disjunction between the various socio-cultural agents. The chapters in this book have demonstrated through four types of media spectacles that various narratives about nation, identity, subjectivity and citizenship are all part of a culture of circulation that permeates various discursive publics in modern social imaginary. These discursive publics pronounce counter-discourses that are ‘more than the expression of subaltern culture and far more than what some Foucauldians like to call “reverse discourse”’ (Warner 2002: 87). Rather, as Michael Warner has argued: Fundamentally mediated by public forms, counterpublics incorporate the personal/impersonal address and expansive estrangement of public speech as the condition of their own common world. Perhaps nothing demonstrates the fundamental importance of discursive publics in the modern social imaginary more than this – that even the counterpublics that challenge modernity’s social hierarchy of faculties do so by projecting the space of discursive circulation among strangers as a social entity, and in doing so fashion their own subjectivities around the requirements of public circulation and stranger-sociability. (Warner 2002: 87) Although such a comment on counterpublics is located in the Euro-American context, it is still relevant to the current discussion on Chinese media publics and their counter-narratives. It is important to note the dialectic relationship

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between the private and the public, the privatisation of circulation and stranger sociability in the contemporary media and communication environment. It is also important to bear in mind that ‘active’ does not equate with ‘powerful’ or ‘counter’ with ‘oppositional’, in the sense of taking control and prevailing at a structural and institutional level. Instead, compromise and appropriation have characterised the interplay between various socio-cultural agents. Appropriation can be multi-directional. It is no longer a register of marginality and resistance, but can be a tactic of the consumercitizens to assert their normality through the performative; it is also a strategy of the ruling elite to reclaim political and ideological legitimacy in China’s capitalist revolution. Indeed, mutual or cross-appropriation has characterised contemporary popular cultural production in China. As such, an array of cultural phenomena is at once consumerist, propagandistic, artistic, performative, deliberate and spontaneous. The minoritised community – journalists and intellectuals in general and the urban middle class who have access to and dominate media resources – is given the historical responsibility to mediate the micro- and macro-levels of cultural production, to share resources and form strategic alliances with various social, cultural and political forces so as to reduce the level of social injustice and mount resistance to the hegemony of dominant media practices. Appropriation facilitates the heterogeneous dialogues between the various narratives and counter-narratives of modernity in China. This last chapter brings together the central themes of earlier chapters and pushes them further within the above analytical framework on the split/ reconciliation in narrating the nation. It works ‘backwards’, starting from the Falun Gong’s media campaign war with the Chinese state, to SARS reportage and media stories about AIDS and SARS and, ﬁnally, to the new millennium celebration. If the ﬁrst section on Falun Gong can be viewed as an example of the ‘split’ in narrating the nation, the second section on the urbanites and journalists shows how mediation has characterised the process of cultural production in China today. Such a split and mediation can be reconciled in a new utopianism associated with China’s post-socialism and post-modernism. This is discussed in the third section. By way of conclusion, I propose a post-political critique of Chinese media culture.

From body politics to ethics The Falun Gong movement exempliﬁes a counterpublic’s paradoxical quest for survival, recognition and conquest. Moving underground, overseas and online has enabled the survival of the quasi-qigong religious movement; its media campaign war embellished with human rights and religious freedom discourses has sustained itself as an alternative ideology and counter-movement. The struggle for recognition has rendered the body – be it the individual body or the body of dafa disciples – the key site in Falun Gong’s representational

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politics. The body is no longer a physical entity, but ‘an action-system, a mode of praxis’ (Giddens 1991: 99). It concerns a way of life and a practice of freedom. As such, the media war over Falun Gong constitutes a crisis not only for body politics, but also for ethics. The term ‘ethics’ is used here by way of two layers of signiﬁcance: a way of life (as an individual) and a structure of existence (as humanity). It concerns ‘convictions about which kinds of lives are good or bad for a person to lead’ as a private person as well as a member of a community (Appiah 2005: xiii). Unlike the concept of morality, which concerns the ‘principles about how a person should treat other people’ (ibid.), ‘ethics’ is more than human relationships. In fact, ‘an ethical thought may entrain a moral thought’, but ‘moral obligations can play catch-up with ethical ones’ (ibid.: 233). Ethics, as explained by Michel Foucault, can be ‘a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure’ (Foucault 1997: 260). The two basic components in ethics – a way of life as a person and a structure of existence as a nation or humanity – both concern a practice of freedom. The Falun Gong case illustrates how a popular qigong practice can become a monumental conceptual space to transmit multiple layers of signiﬁcance about the body and body politics. Those layers of signiﬁcance can be summed up as the ethics of the self and the ethics of the nation or, to put it in another way, relational ethics and transformational ethics. The ethics of the self concerns one’s free relationship to oneself as the fundamental principle of the structure of existence. It constitutes what Foucault (1997: 281–301) calls ‘the ethics of the concern for the self as a practice of freedom’. For Foucault, the ethics of the self is not just a theory; it is a practice and art of life; it is ‘the considered form that freedom takes’ and ‘freedom is the ontological condition of ethics’ (ibid.: 284). ‘Freedom’ is the underlying principle in the cultivation practices and representation politics of Falun Gong in its media war with the Chinese state. The body has become a representational framework, an action system and a mode of praxis. The politic of healing through qi cultivation, for instance, is not simply about bodily transformation, but more about self-realisation through emotional catharsis. As a universal energy, qi is not contained by any existing juridical system or disciplinary structure. Hence, it allows the freedom to reﬁgure one’s subjectivity and identity even within the physical conﬁnes of the authoritarian system. The reconﬁguration of subjectivity has been the central theme of Chapters Three and Four. Through talking, linking and clicking, Chinese urbanites and investigative journalists are able to reconﬁgure subjectivities and exercise citizenship even within the conﬁnes of state control. These practices and technologies constitute a way of life for the non-state. Likewise, the freedom to cultivate qi and the body politic is fundamentally, to use Foucault’s words (1997: 256), an ‘ethico-political choice’ on the part of individual qigong practitioners. The somatic individualism embodied in Falun Gong’s body

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politic enables one to be true to oneself and to recognise one’s private aspect of existence (truth), in order to be able to care for others through moral conduct (compassion) and persist despite resistance and suppression (forbearance). The task of taking care of the body and mind does not rest with physicians, scientists or the party, but with each individual in their willingness to embody and enact ‘truthfulness’, ‘compassion’ and ‘forbearance’. It requires the practitioners to be masters of themselves, rather than being mastered by external forces and energy. The technologies of cultivation – such as meditation, daily exercises, reading Zhuan Falun (the ‘bible’ of Falun Gong) and writing testimonies – constitute the ‘invisible techniques’ that are required to produce new subjects and subjectivities.2 These technologies do not heed class, gender, racial or cultural diﬀerences. The cultivated body is no longer a category in the somatic nationalism of the state, but rewritten as an autonomous entity disembodied from the state even within the restrictions and conﬁnements of the existing socio-political order. As a result, re-subjectiﬁcation can be read as an ethical choice and a way of life for the individual cultivators. It is a technology of the self, in opposition to the technologies of governmentality. It is realised ‘not through a system of signs denoting power over others’, but a ‘sovereignty that one exercises over oneself ’ (Foucault 1988: 88). The re-subjectiﬁcation and the care of self require both an attitude and labour – that is, the ethical work includes both thought and action. The ethics of the self is not about withdrawal from but active participation in establishing relations with oneself, as well as engagement in social, civic and political activities. As Foucault (1997: 287) points out, ‘the care of the self is ethical in itself; but it implies complex relationships with others insofar as this e-thos of freedom is also a way of care for others’. The e-thos of freedom through social activities is exempliﬁed in Falun Gong’s fa-rectiﬁcation movement. The fa-rectiﬁcation movement has three components: studying and validating the fa, clarifying the truth and sending forth righteous thoughts. It requires fa (falun dafa or Falun Gong) practitioners to reach out from individual and private spaces and to participate in group practices, study sessions, international conferences, protests and demonstrations. In Li Hongzhi’s words, they should ‘cultivate among ordinary people’, ‘save sentient beings’ and ‘work against the persecution’ (H. Li 2004, 2005). As a way of life, the ethics of the self is not solely about self-realisation but more about the ethics of relationships. This relational ethics is unlike that which governs the interpersonal relationship conditioned by the gift economy. The latter, according to Mayfair Yang (1988: 414), ‘speciﬁes commitment to particularistic relationships such as friendship, kinship, and those of personal obligation and indebtedness’. It is a production of the socialist redistribution economy typical of state socialism. The relational ethics represented by the fa-rectiﬁcation movement emphasises social practices and group activities as an expression of freedom on the part of the self. It is an extension of the ethics of the self. It is not a

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relationship of obligation, indebtedness and reciprocity, but a voluntary and free relationship of giving and sharing. Through caring for others both in and outside the Falun Gong community, one is believed to be able to accumulate virtue (de), attain enlightenment and attract the universal energy to transform this-worldly existence. This relational ethics explains the willingness of Falun Gong practitioners, Chinese or non-Chinese alike, to talk to anyone who stops to listen to them, to demonstrate their slow exercise movements, print and distribute ﬂyers, join one another to demonstrate in front of Chinese embassies and at Tiananmen Square and, most remarkably, contribute to the digital archive of Falun Gong despite the ‘Great Firewall’ of the Chinese state. The mutation of Falun Gong’s apocalyptic activism from the streets and Tiananmen Square to the Internet is not only a strategy for survival but also a technique for growth. Cyberspace constitutes an important part of being a Falun Gong practitioner. For those inside China, cyberspace is the only channel to connect with others and for self-growth through sharing personal stories and testimonies. All Falun Gong websites feature personal stories, witness reports and other forms of testimonies on how they have experienced physical transformations, endured suﬀerings or become a ‘better’ person and brought about a harmonious family and social life through practising Falun Gong. They also provide technical support to those who have to use encryption technologies to upload and download articles. These writings by anonymous practitioners both in and outside China have a binding eﬀect on the writers and readers through creating a sense of support, solidarity and group identity. Writing, talking, linking and clicking become technologies of re-subjectiﬁcation, an exercise of the self on the self, an expression of relational ethics and a practice of freedom. The fa-rectiﬁcation movement therefore is not only targeting the Chinese party-state against its persecution; it is also about the development of an art of life and ‘existence that revolves round the question of the self, of its dependence and independence, of its universal form and of the connection it can and should establish with others, of the procedures by which it exerts its control over itself and of the way in which it can establish a complete supremacy over itself ’ (Foucault 1988: 238). Such a practice produces what Nancy Chen (1995: 360) calls ‘altered states’, referring to the changed ‘state of consciousness that shape certain experiences in qigong’, as well as ‘a reﬁguration of the state through qigong practice’. The altered state of consciousness is a personal matter, through a practice of freedom that revolves around self and relationships with others. This leads to an altered relationship with the party-state, hence the reﬁguration of the partystate. The ethics of rewriting the self thus leads to the second component of ethics: rewriting the nation as a structure of existence. In the case of Falun Gong, rewriting the nation is shown in the invocation of a diﬀerent version of Chinese tradition or Chineseness. As pointed out earlier, Falun Gong’s morality discourse represents a deep dissatisfaction

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with what people perceive as a crisis of morality in Chinese post-socialist modernity. Their attempts to retrieve and revive moral values are embedded in a nostalgic search for tradition embodied in the Central Kingdom as ‘the land of ceremony and propriety’ emulated by world nations (H. Li 1999). Unlike the post-nostalgia mood embodied in the new millennium celebrations that mobilises a vision of the past to celebrate the present, the invocation of traditional moral values does not serve to aﬃrm, but to criticise, the contemporary state of aﬀairs. As David Ownby observes: Qigong and Falun Gong have oﬀered a return to a timeless cultural pride based on reasserted Chinese values. Neither appears to have had overt political ambitions at the outset. But their evocation of a diﬀerent vision of Chinese tradition and its contemporary value is now so threatening to the state and party because it denies them the sole right to deﬁne the meaning of Chinese nationalism, and perhaps of Chineseness. (Ownby 2001) Ownby captures the crux of the ideological struggle between Falun Gong and the Chinese state: both look backwards and call upon Chinese cultural tradition to reshape the Chinese body; both call for a return to a timeless cultural pride in traditional Chinese culture. But the underlying logic is: it is not ‘Chinese tradition’ but the evocation of a diﬀerent vision of tradition and Chineseness that marks the reﬁguration of the state. Like the concept of professionalism and citizenship, Chineseness is a sliding concept with no ﬁxed content. For the Chinese diaspora, Chineseness ‘operates as an open and indeterminate signiﬁer whose meanings are constantly renegotiated and rearticulated’ (Ang 1998: 225). In Chinese intellectual discourse, Chineseness serves as a convenient reference, to both state socialist modernity and Western Enlightenment modernity, for the construction of alternative discourses on Chinese modernity. It can also be appropriated by the party-state as a nationalist pedagogy synonymous with patriotism and support for the CCP’s leadership to register support, consent and solidarity in the making of a rejuvenation millennialism. The ‘“patriotic” code of ethics’ determines the exclusion and inclusion of individuals and groups as a category of Chineseness.3 When an individual or group (such as Falun Gong) is labelled as ‘anti-Chinese’, it is equivalent to saying that, by saying ‘no’ to the state, one is saying ‘no’ to the Chinese nation and culture. Under such a logic, nation and state are merged as one and equated with civilisation and culture. Turning back on any of them would constitute a crime of treason against Chineseness. Such a simplistic pedagogy, which meshes nation and culture with the state and the party, functions as a force of legitimacy whereby the party-head is endowed with the sole power to dictate the national body as its representative. Mayfair Yang (1988) has called the absorption of nation into the state the ‘universalistic ethics’. The universalistic ethics entails a ‘loyalty to an

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abstracted state, class category, or abstracted collective entities and institutions which look after each individual’; it ‘substitute[s] the population and the masses for the state as the new end’ (Yang 1988: 22, 414). In modern Chinese history, especially since 1949, the universalistic ethics has entered the Chinese cultural unconscious as ‘a highly productive and personalised nationalism’, which Tani Barlow (1991: 214) calls ‘hyper-nationalism’. According to Barlow, hyper-nationalism is ‘an ideology and politics of nation building that transform its agent or subject into an imaginary equivalent of the nation’ (ibid.). In the historical processes of nation salvation (jiuguo), nation building (jianguo) and nation strengthening (qiangguo), the personalised hyper-nationalism has gradually taken the form of ‘party-state-representingthe-nation’. Hyper-nationalism manifests in Chinese intellectuals as a strong elitist–statist tendency. In the intellectual narratives, loyalty to the nation tends to verge on patriotism to the state and loyalty to the party. Although the intellectual ﬁeld has become diversiﬁed and de-centred from the state discourse, hyper-nationalism has continued to subject many intellectuals and journalists, consciously or unconsciously, to their traditional roles as ideologues of the state and enlighteners of the nation. Despite their courageous eﬀorts to seek the truth and voice the concerns of the voiceless, Chinese journalists have shown a veiled nationalist pedagogy in representing the spirit of the SARS war: as a historical agent one must identify with the nation; there is no personal war on SARS but only a national war under the leadership of a trustworthy and responsible government – this is represented as the ‘national spirit’ in the SARS battle. Unlike post-nationalism, which merges nationalism and consumerism as a discursive practice to describe a sense of incongruity in Chinese identity politics, hyper-nationalism describes a personal relationship with the nation and the state. As a personalised nationalism, hyper-nationalism is consumed by the universalistic ethics. The celebration of individual endurance and survival in the SARS reportage is easily transformed into a nationalistic pedagogy, in which the abstracted state absorbs the abstracted body of the nation. But with Falun Gong and other popular qigong and religious movements, we see a refusal to be absorbed and consumed. The ideology of endurance and survival, or ren (forbearance), is central to Falun Gong’s ideology of resistance. As Chapter Six has detailed, ren is furnished with a morality discourse that calls upon the current regime to live up to its claim as the rightful leader of the Chinese nation. Still part of the national character, ren has nevertheless furnished an ideology of resistance that questions and challenges the power structure at work. Its association with Chinese culture and tradition, however, does not subject such a resistance discourse to China and Chineseness only. Being truthful, compassionate and forbearing are not only desirable for the Chinese but also desirable for all human beings.4 Chineseness has become a condition, instead of a location (Chan 1999). It has also become a strategy of representation and resistance. Like the intellectual

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call for Chinese cultural essence and Chineseness to criticise the current state of aﬀairs and redeﬁne the national identity, Chinese tradition and Chineseness are called upon by Falun Gong as a critique of post-socialist morality and modernity. This alternative Chineseness, when coupled with an apocalyptic expectation of this-worldly salvation through bodily transformation, fuels Falun Gong’s civil disobedience both inside and outside China, joined by Chinese and non-Chinese alike. Chineseness is no longer deﬁned and used by the state as the nationalistic pedagogy to consume and conﬁne the nation, but becomes a counter-narrative to such pedagogy. It is here that we see the split in writing the nation. Falun Gong represents one of the many undercurrents challenging the existing power structure in post-Mao China. It demonstrates how a qigongstyle self-cultivation practice turns out to be a force to reconﬁgure the nation–state relationship. The reconﬁguration is embedded in the changing socio-cultural landscape characterised by the de-state-iﬁcation of the Chinese society, accompanied by a growing urban population with an increasing ‘rights’ consciousness and technical means to exercise citizenship. This is characterised by a sense of end, loss, confusion and void. The birth and rise of Falun Gong is situated in such a socio-cultural context. The ghost battle over Falun Gong represents a continual eﬀort of the Chinese and humanity as a whole to reconcile the irreconcilable diﬀerences between the pedagogical and the performative in narrating the nation.

From minoritised community to mediation community While the diﬀerences between the pedagogical and the performative may be irreconcilable in the broad sense, one should not lose sight of localised eﬀorts at mediating the heterogeneous dialogues between the pedagogical and the performative. In our era of technocapitalism, the minoritised community composed of urban and intellectual elites is best equipped to take up the challenge. Mediation provides a critical perspective from which to reconsider the role of the minoritised community in contemporary Chinese politics. SARS reportage and media stories about AIDS and SARS illustrate how journalists, intellectuals and new media users negotiate among themselves and with the state in order to exercise citizenship. They have shown how a hybrid of inﬂuences – Chinese cultural tradition, revolutionary history, socialist experience and Western liberal thoughts – and a mixture of media – including broadcast, print, the Internet and mobile phone – can be appropriated to furnish a vantage point of entrance into knowledge production. Situated in the nexus of those inﬂuences and media, the minoritised community has been able to mediate between the state and society, the pedagogical and performative. Mediation theories in television studies privilege the medium and the message as the critical sites for the construction of the audience. Television, for example, is doubly articulated in the sense that it is doubly consumed,

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both as technology and as meaning, as object and as content; and hence it eﬀectively mediates between consumption (of the subject) and articulation (of the content). It is also doubly situated in the sense that it mediates between the private and the public, the local and the trans-local, the real and the ﬁctional, and between idea and ideology, culture and cultivation, text and context (Silverstone 1994: 134–43). For audiences, the doubly articulated and doubly situated nature of televisual mediation creates a sense of being present and yet powerless. In other words, the proximity of time and space creates a sense of displacement for audiences at home. In such a theory of mediation, the journalist and audience are often regarded as dependent variables, as a creation and product of the medium rather than the creator and producer of the mediated articulations. But as the Lasswellian formulation in journalism (Who says what, to whom, in what channel, and with what eﬀect?) suggests, a message depends on an agent, principally its producer, for the primary and secondary meanings that are encoded in it. Journalists and their amateur equivalents online either have specialised knowledge in news production required by the mainstream media such as newspapers and television, or have the capacity and technical means to narrate and circulate media stories in the new media. They are active agents in cultural production and occupy a privileged position as brokers and mediators of information, knowledge, symbol, story and ideology. In fact, mediation has been the focal point linking journalism and intellectual politics in Chinese media ideology. Chinese journalism tradition that sees journalists as intellectuals and enlighteners views them also as an intermediate layer between the state and the masses. Liang Qichao, the doyen of Chinese journalism, for example, saw the press as performing two major functions: communicating ideas to, and disseminating them among, the public; and supervising and mobilising public opinion in order to inﬂuence government (de Burgh 2003a: 96–99). The new scholars in the late Qing and early Republican eras were conscious of their historical position as a middle realm and used the print media to open a ﬁeld of mediation ‘between past and present notions of society and politics’ and ‘between foreign and indigenous ideals and concepts’ (Judge 1996: 12). The Enlightener-journalists became cultural brokers and mediators. This functionalist view of intellectual politics still deﬁnes Chinese journalism today. In the words of one Chinese journalist, Journalists are the mediators between people and government. Their tasks are the communication of news and scrutiny. The responsibilities of the journalists are to make a news programme that keeps the interest of the people – but not all stations are the same. Impartiality is very necessary but the absolute is impossible. We can only do our best. (cited in de Burgh 2003a: 140; emphasis added) As mediators contained by the system, Chinese journalists resort to the technique of double-time narration, which allows them to comment on or

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criticise the system from within and to produce diﬀerent narrative representations within the given ideological framework. As the double-time narration of SARS has shown, the production of diﬀerences within oﬃcial boundaries does not signify a total rejection of or revolt against the dominant ideology; nor does it suggest a complete acquiescence and cooperation with it. The production of diﬀerence via double-time narration creates a conjunction in which to press, test and negotiate the boundaries of what is permissible. Mediation signals both opposition in alliance and alliance in opposition. This kind of mediation through double-time narration has been characteristic of Chinese intellectual politics. Stanley Rosen, for example, gives an account of how Beijing Youth Daily reporters used ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ to envelope debate on controversial issues and consequently stimulated public reﬂection on citizenship and democracy (Rosen 2000). Paul Pickowicz shows, in his study of popular Chinese cinema in the early 1980s, that the privileged ﬁlmmakers of the system could produce ‘oﬃcial’ work (funded and sanctioned by the state) with ‘unoﬃcial’ themes to represent alternative and minoritised political realities (Pickowicz 1989). This ‘unoﬃcial within oﬃcial’ or ‘unoﬃcial disguised as oﬃcial’ tactic is similar to what Michel de Certeau calls ‘la perruque’: ‘the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer’ (de Certeau 1998: 25). In producing the ‘unoﬃcial’ and disguising it as the ‘oﬃcial’, Chinese journalists are developing their craft as mediators to intervene in national politics. The mediation eﬀort takes a populist turn when the new media and communication environment enables journalists and elite intellectuals to form occasional alliances with the ‘grassroots’. Through digital communication, journalists and an increasing number of new media users are able to work together to get the real story. They share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives and resources. Through online networking, such as blogging (Yu 2007), these ‘privileged’ media storytellers can become the mediators between people and government when they reach out from their group interests to voice the concerns of the underprivileged, as the cases of Sun Zhigang and Li Siyi have demonstrated. Under such circumstances, journalism becomes a collaborative venture, through which the public can be the editor and journalists the collaborator rather than the ‘gatekeeper’ in the newsgathering, presenting and disseminating processes. The collaboration between professionals and non-professionals expands the scope of journalism, making it part of the perpetual circulation loop of mass communication, rather than the traditional centralised, top-down and one-way communication process. It is this eﬀort that keeps alive various modes of citizenship in China today. Opening a ﬁeld of mediation between the heterogenous forces that govern the post-socialist mediasphere, Chinese prosumers (producer plus consumers) and proams (professionals plus amateurs), are able to get popular grievances heard, debates of national politics expressed and social justice achieved,

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however scarce and unpredictable such instances can be. Mediation creates multiple ‘regimes of truth’ (to use Foucault’s words) within a single news event. These multiple ‘regimes of truth’ predetermine multiple interpretations and reactions. As such, mediation may produce a particular truth that reinforces the power structure at work, and at the same time undermines the hegemonic power structure through another regime of truth. Mediation signiﬁes a dual dynamic of conﬂict and dialogue, resistance and compromise, or domination and accommodation. Through mediation, the minoritised community, composed mainly of urbanites, journalists and intellectuals, forms multiple relationships and modes of interaction and exchange between various social forces and actors. Situated in such a theoretical framework, the multiple positions of Chinese journalists – as enlighteners or educators of society, propagandists for the party-state, as clients or media brokers in the growing media market, and as professionals and media intellectuals in relation to the Chinese intellectual tradition – can be explained through a framework of synthesised consciousness in intellectual politics. As Radhakrishnan says, following Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, To be located within a relationship does not mean the same thing as being condemned to that complex of relationships in a spirit of passive acceptance. Through a synthetic consciousness of these relations, knowledge can be produced as change and as a theory of change. (Radhakrishnan 1996: 49–50) Being in complex relations with various power structures and technologies does not entail passivity. For Radhakrishnan, an eﬀective intellectual is situated between ‘multiple positioning and multiple determinations and multiple alliances’ (Radhakrishnan 1996: 56). Mediation provides a pivotal point to combine the Gramscian organic intellectual with the Foucauldian speciﬁc intellectual. That is, an eﬀective intellectual provides localised criticisms from his speciﬁc locality and situation, and at the same time fulﬁls the organisational needs of the dominant social group and grows organically with the masses. This is an arduous task. But only through mediation can the minoritised community function as an organic part of a multidimensional reality, and produce and use knowledge to generate change. Chin-Chuan Lee once called for new discourses to ‘account for the role of China’s journalism in the growing interpenetrating web of the local, the national and the global to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between universal principles (human rights, freedom of expression) and national narratives (sovereignty)’ (Lee 2000a: 572). Mediation may provide a new paradigm to explain the roles and strategies of Chinese journalists in maintaining ‘a dynamic equilibrium’ between conﬂicting forces and discourses that shape Chinese journalism and intellectual politics in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

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From millennialism to post-utopianism This section pulls back to the ﬁrst case study in this book, the new millennium celebration of 2000. This celebration illustrates how the party-state eﬀectively uses media events to utilise social, cultural and political resources and forces in the name of national rejuvenation. It testiﬁes to how the state can appropriate non-state narratives about nation, culture and history into its legitimating ideology. ‘Rejuvenation’ became a utopian fantasy in ﬁn-de-siècle China. The imagination of a rejuvenated China in the new century and new millennium, albeit mainly in the sense of materialistic achievements, is in an important sense utopian. In the utopian desire for rejuvenation, revolution gives way to evolution; history is conjured to serve the purpose of the present. And any critique of the present is directed towards the West as an undesirable alternative or the socialist/Maoist experience as an unrealistic alternative. Now native culture and tradition is left as a desirable alternative to achieve national rejuvenation. But culture and tradition must be reinvented for such a purpose. So is socialism, which must be aﬃxed with ‘Chinese characteristics’ in order to describe a departure from ‘traditional’ socialism and a refusal to return to capitalism. Post-socialism is thus awkwardly ﬁtted to the projection and interrogation of the future. In the absence of any credible emancipatory project, post-socialism becomes a kind of utopianism, or rather ‘post-utopianism’ after the end of socialist utopianism and all other forms of utopian alternatives. The ﬁrst feature of post-utopianism then is its association with China’s post-socialism. As explained very early in this book, post-socialism implies an uncomfortable accommodation of capitalism within socialism. It also implies the lack of an immanent vision of the future that existing socialism may make claims upon. The incongruence between vision and practice is a deﬁning feature of China’s post-socialism, which is conditioned by the postutopian age of ours. This view on the relationship of China’s post-socialist condition with post-utopianism is shared by Christopher Smith, who points out that post-1989 China is in a post-utopian age, in which there seems to be no sense of purpose, no ideology, no plans for the future, and none of the feelings of fraternity and solidarity associated with the old days. The people have managed to rid themselves of the authoritarian communist institutions, but they have not been able to pursue their need for such institutions to provide jobs, housing, and schools for the poor and unemployed, and to feed the hungry, treat the sick, and care for the elderly. As a result, people are now held hostage to their memories and fear. In spite of the new found freedom, what is missing from their lives is the all-embracing presence of socialist paternalism. (Smith 2000: 12) Post-utopianism announces a sense of uncertainty and anxiety among the post-socialist people. In the post-utopian age, the present and the future

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cannot be imagined using existing utopian modes and forms. One has to go back to the past in order to imagine the future. Looking backwards into the future becomes ‘a strategic need, a necessary spiritual space for imagining and for consolation’ (Dai 1997: 147). This is implicated in post-nostalgia, a millennium mood that articulates the ‘post’ in the time of the ‘pre’. But the ‘pre’ time is already vacated and reﬁlled with selected memories so the ‘post’ time can be re-imagined. Post-utopianism announces the ﬁnal victory of the past, rather than anything new. Paradoxically, its claim on the future is implied by the logics of ‘not yet’ and ‘already’. Marshal Berman ascribes the ‘not yet’ feature to nonWestern modernity. Using nineteenth-century Russia as an example, he describes it as ‘something that was not happening; or else as something that was happening far away, in realms that Russians, even when they traveled there, experienced more as fantastic anti-worlds than as social actualities’ (Berman 1982: 175). The ‘not yet’ signiﬁes a ‘time lag’ (shijian cha) and ‘epochal diﬀerence’ (shidai cha) in narrating Chinese modernity (Li and Liu 1995). Modernity is yet to happen in China, in comparison with developed countries whose modernity has already happened. In the words of Lu Duanfang (2005), the ‘not yet’ expresses ‘a combination of absence and anterior presence, longing and potential satisfaction, and anguish of scarcity and hope of fulﬁllment’. The desire for something absent has been central to socialist utopianism. The Great Leap Forward and people’s commune movement (1958–61) are examples of how state utopianism that aimed at achieving the ‘not yet’ modernity could leave a history of disasters and tragedies in their wake (Lu 2005). In the post-Mao era, particularly after 1989, the ‘not yet’ is no longer the register of consolidation, as some part of it, particularly in material satisfaction, has been achieved. What is unachieved, the ‘not yet’, is no longer clearly deﬁned. The incoherence, uncertainty and contradiction of the postutopian age give people little hope to grasp hold of. It is inevitable that people are held ‘hostage to their memories and fear’. The past, the ‘already happened’, becomes a resource for re-imaging the future. It furnishes a new utopian fantasy that dashes backwards in order to aﬃrm the present and imagine the future. The past, especially positive times in the past, serves as a point of emotional and spiritual consolation for those who feel trapped in the post-utopian age. Conjuring the ‘already happened’ becomes part of the rejuvenation millennialism at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century. China’s future is no longer a counter-discourse to what has happened elsewhere, but can be recuperated from China’s own historical past through selected remembering (nostalgia) and selected forgetting (amnesia). It is through the recuperation that the ‘not yet’ reconciles with the ‘already’ to articulate the utopian vision of China’s rejuvenation in the post-utopian age. Post-utopianism articulates the ‘not yet’ through the ‘already’: what has happened before in the Central Kingdom will happen again in the same space now known as the People’s Republic of China and reign for the third

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Axial age. This is a dream and a fantasy that is not without its socio-economic basis. The Chinese economy at the turn of the new century has been the fastest growing in the world. This has led the World Bank and The Economist Intelligence Unit to estimate that a reversal of history – China was the world’s largest economy until 1820 – will see China as the world’s largest economy by the year 2020, with only a 200-year interlude (Lehmann 1998: 9). This bold prediction has fed the nationalistic millennial dream for the second coming of the Central Kingdom. If the twentieth century for China is ‘apt to be a haunted time, where what is done locally is always shadowed by its equivalence (or mismatch) with what goes on elsewhere’ (Saussy 2001: 97), the twenty-ﬁrst century is also a haunted time, where what is being done here and now is believed to be echoing what has happened ‘already’ and ‘right here’. The second feature of post-utopianism is its implication with postmodernism. Chinese post-modernism is characterised by ‘spatial fracturing and temporal desynchronisation’ (Dirlik and Zhang 1997: 1). It does not come after modernism or modernity, but has always been part of the modernisation movement throughout modern Chinese history. Although mainly an aesthetic term for literature and the arts, post-modernism is used by Chinese intellectuals to describe the spatial and temporal teleologies of modernity in China. Many have used post-modernism to describe urban popular culture in China. The use of revolutionary themes in contemporary art and the appropriation of nostalgia for a pure socialism in consumer goods have been described as typically post-modern in China. The juxtaposition and fusion of the premodern, modern, socialist realistic and Western abstract forms and themes in art, literature, architecture and consumer goods justiﬁes the use of post-modernism as an abstract term to describe the abstracted post-socialist state of aﬀairs. Despite its rejection of utopias, post-modernism may ‘retroactively release the utopian vision of a revolutionary tradition’ (X. Tang 1996: 111). It is in the tension between the rejection of utopias and the endorsement of an ‘already realised Utopia’ that post-modernism merges with post-utopianism. This is derived from Mikhail Epstein, who points out that post-modernism in the post-communism Russian context is the ‘last great Utopia, precisely because it situated itself after everything; it concludes everything with itself ’. He writes further: Where Utopias once strove towards the future, laying down a fast track for themselves through bloody revolutions, postmodernism establishes itself as an all-accepting, already realized Utopia. (Epstein 1995: 360) In the Chinese context, post-modernism invokes not only the ‘not yet’ but also the ‘already’ to construe the millennial modes of nostalgia, nationalism and consumerism. The desire for utopias never ceases to prevent the ‘time arrow’

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that is bound for an unfulﬁlled past to be re-construed as an inevitable future. As a conclusion with itself and the already realised utopia, post-modernism and post-utopianism eagerly announce the second coming of the Central Kingdom as ‘here and now’ with the rise of the ﬁrst dawn of the twenty-ﬁrst century. This ‘here and now’ conﬁrmation of China’s rejuvenation and second coming in the new millennium is itself a post-utopian vision. In such a vision, the future is no longer imaginable in utopian terms or through revolutionary movements, and the foreclosure of the future is realised through a reiﬁcation, reinvention and consumption of the past. Like post-modernism, post-utopianism is, to use Epstein’s words, ‘more utopian than all previous Utopias as it falls in line with the mode of supra-history, not then and later, but here and now’ (ibid.). The aﬃrmation of ‘here and now’ may explain why rejuvenation is appropriated as a state ideology to conjure a post-utopian vision of China’s future through the ‘already’. The evocation of the ‘already’, however, can also be appropriated by diﬀerent political and religious groups to transform the secular into the sacred and serve their political purposes. Chinese history has witnessed numerous communities and movements of a utopian nature that ﬂourished beyond the state’s surveillance and sometimes even beyond its control. At the historical juncture of two centuries and millennia, history seems to have repeated itself when popular movements represented by the Falun Gong have incorporated the post-utopian vision of history and historicity into their visions of Chinese modernity. It is important to note that post-utopia does not equate with dystopia. Even though it rejects all other existing utopias, post-utopianism still invokes vision and dream. The millennial dream about China’s rise in the new century and millennium is construed, in the words of Andreas Huyssen (2000: 34), as ‘a phantasmagoria of loss generated by modernity’, in order to ‘secure some continuity within time’. The sense of loss may explain why people are held hostage to their memories and fears in the post-utopian age. The same sense of loss can also explain why people feel the necessity to secure some kind of continuity within time. Giorgio Agamben (1993: 91) points out that the original task of a genuine revolution is ‘never merely to “change the world”, but also – and above all – to “change time”’. The end of revolution and revolutionary millennialism does not mean the end of the eﬀort to ‘change time’. Counting down to zero at the new millennium celebrations signiﬁes a renewed eﬀort to ‘play’ with time, through its three-fold time arrows. In historicising a utopian fantasy and consuming the fantasy, rejuvenation is presented as both destination and predestination. This prompts one to ask, following Baudrillard (1998), ‘Are we at the end of history, beyond history, or still in an endless history?’

Towards a post-political critique of Chinese media culture: in lieu of conclusion This book has demonstrated, through four types of media spectacles, that the interplay between the state and the non-state produces counter-narratives

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of modernity in China. It has shown that the heterogonous dialogues between the various socio-cultural agents ensure a counter-hegemonic process, whereby contestation (featuring resistance and subversion) and conjunction (characterised by mutual accommodation and appropriation) refer to each other in media production and cultural transformation in contemporary China. The split or reconciliation in writing the nation has not replaced the hegemonic ideology with a viable alternative. Rather, the interplay between the state and the non-state has witnessed a ‘reproduction of hegemonic ideology’ (H. Wang 1998: 29). The ‘hegemonic ideology’, with its concerns about national identity, culture and history, is no longer a property of the party-state alone; it has been shared and reproduced – at least some part of it – by the non-state via an array of media forms. Chinese postsocialist modernity is produced in the interplay of the heterogeneous forces and agents. In the post-socialist and post-utopian age, many cultural phenomena, such as modernism and nationalism, need to be preﬁxed with a ‘post’. So does ‘politics’, which was so much abused in the Mao era that it still haunts most ordinary Chinese today as a spectre. ‘Post-politics’ has been used variably to describe very diﬀerent situations. It expresses the ideology of the ‘Digital Nation’, referring to the digital community and its politics online at the end of the twentieth century in the US (Katz 1997: 51–52). As an ideology of the digital age, post-politics enables new means of political communications that start from the people rather than the government. It constitutes an extraordinary powerful factor in determining civil life in the US today. Many scholars have cautioned against this technological determinism on democracy. I have argued in Chapter Five that new media and communication technologies alone cannot determine the formation and content of media citizenship. Rather, a mature socio-technical infrastructure is needed to ensure the exercise of citizenship for all people, not just a minoritised community, in China. ‘Post-politics’ is therefore not used to describe the ideology of the digital community. Rather, it is used to describe the ‘micro’-politics in contemporary Chinese cultural production. The post-political ideology in Chinese cultural production has been noted as a central feature in the post-Mao era. It is most telling in the Fifth-Generation ﬁlmmakers who, according to Chen Xiaoming, create a post-political ideology in contemporary Chinese ﬁlm through displacing political and aesthetic images and languages in their so-called art-house ﬁlms. In such an ideology, ‘everything is politics, and nothing is political at one and the same time. Politics is everywhere and yet it subverts itself at any moment’ (Chen 1997: 124). The post-political ideology represents a strategy as well as ‘a power struggle for obtaining symbolic capital’ (Tao 1996: 92), among the ﬁlmmakers, artists, journalists and intellectuals of the humanities. When a post-political perspective is used to examine the ﬁeld of popular culture, we see the creative commons as agents rather than victims or martyrs of history. As consuming masses, these creative commons surge onto the

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central stage of history in the post-New Era. The terrain of the ‘popular’ is transformed into a battleﬁeld where the ‘micro’-politics of the everyday meets the ‘macro’-politics of nation and state. This battleﬁeld can ‘serve as a site that critiques the contradictions and fallacies of the present and provides a space for imagining and practicing cultural transformation and reconstruction’ (Liu 2004: 99). In the cultural transformation at the everyday level, nothing is political in the ﬁrst place, yet everything can become political in the end. The most mundane form of media practice may contain ‘the most egregious form of “dissent” in the Chinese media today’ (Barmé 1994: 272). Sending an SMS message via mobile phone and the Internet, for example, is a common practice of communication nowadays across the nation. But it can also turn out to be a popular form of political engagement in national aﬀairs and with state authorities, as the SARS cases have demonstrated. Viewed from the post-political perspective, the ‘reproduction of hegemonic ideology’ is a product of a mutual articulation between the state and the non-state. In such a mutual articulation, neither the people nor the state is waging a frontal assault on one another. On the contrary, the state is prepared to absorb popular desires, accommodate market demands and private sectors, and appropriate some of the intellectual discourses. This is witnessed even within the ‘dominant modes of resistance’ in the reform era – ranging from labour insurgency, inter-ethnic riots, economic, gender, religious, environmental and anti-corruption protests, pro-democracy demonstrations to suicide – where contestation is always imbued with accommodation and compromise (Perry and Selden 2003). The state’s capacity to contain and absorb its counter-narratives, however, does not always ensure a tacit agreement with the non-state on certain ‘boundaries’ – be these spatial, temporal, cultural or political boundaries. This is especially so in our age of digital communication. Not only can the spillover and reproductive eﬀects of digital communication render a local event into a global media spectacle; the new modes of communication can also eﬀect a reversal of mediated visibility. As John Thompson puts it: Whereas the Panopticon renders many people visible to a few and enables power to be exercised over the many by subjecting them to a state of permanent visibility, the development of communication media provides a means by which many people can gather information about a few and, at the same time, a few can appear before many; thanks to the media, it is primarily those who exercise power, rather than those over whom power is exercised, who are subjected to a certain kind of visibility. (Thompson 1995: 134) This reversal of mediated visibility is demonstrated in the media campaign war between the Chinese state and Falun Gong. While the Chinese state has eﬀectively manipulated its ideological apparatuses to crush Falun Gong inside China, Falun Gong practitioners have tactically used global media

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and communication networks to propagate their struggle against the persecution. Their eﬀorts have subjected ‘a few’ who exercise power over Falun Gong to a transnational visibility and hence to world vigilance over China’s human rights condition. This book has used these four media spectacles – the new millennium celebration, popular media stories about AIDS and SARS, SARS reportage and the media war over Falun Gong – to represent four narratives and counternarratives of Chinese modernity at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century. A post-political perspective has characterised the analyses of these four case studies. The post-political critique of Chinese media culture does not view the struggle between the state and the non-state as an insurmountable disjunction. Rather, conjunction and mutual articulation have always been central to the interplay between the state and the non-state. Such interplay will continue to produce and deﬁne Chinese media spectacles in the twenty-ﬁrst century. This book has conducted a vertical media analysis to investigate the social, political and historical contexts of Chinese cultural transformation. It has also carried out a horizontal media analysis to examine the everyday and concrete cases in order to illuminate the dynamics of such transformation. The combination of a broad scope in subject matters with detailed analyses of case studies is a response to the call from Chin-Chuan Lee for a new method to reconstruct a new narrative about Chinese media and culture at the debut de siècle; that is, to integrate ‘speciﬁc narratives’ from local and individual texts with ‘master narratives’ arising from the national, regional and global contexts (Lee 2000a: 571, 2003: 24). This research has just begun the journey to invigorate media and cultural studies in and about China. Like any other research, this volume has not been able to provide a comprehensive analysis of the evolving Chinese media culture. By necessity, it has not focused on Chinese subalterns, such as gendered and sexual others, Muslims and other minorities, the ‘people of liu’ (liumin, the ﬂoating population) (Dutton 2001) or any ‘peripheral’ people (Gladney 2004). Bearing the burden of Chinese economic success, these subaltern subjects should not be rendered invisible or written oﬀ in any critical analysis of Chinese media, culture and society. More serious work is needed to incorporate issues related to class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality into studies about Chinese media and cultural transformation in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

Appendix

SMS rhymes in original Chinese SMS message 紧急提醒，非典型肺炎最新传播方式是由手机短讯来传播，为了您的健康，收到短讯后，务必将手机浸泡在消毒液中一小时后方可使用。 SMS example 1 你够时尚吗？来看本月最流行装饰：听约翰·列侬的歌，穿一件Ｔ恤，正面印”预防非典”，背面印”反对战争”。 SMS example 2 (in comparison with Jiang Zemin’s ‘Three Represents’ theory? SARS 代表特种病毒的发展要求；(中国共产党代表先进生产力的发展要求) SARS 代表恐怖文化的前进方向；(中国共产党代表先进文化的前进方向) SARS 代表最广大野生动物的根本利益。(中国共产党代表最广大群众的根本利益) SMS example 3 大吃大喝党治不了,非典治了! 公款旅游党治不了, 非典治了！文山会海党治不了, 非典治了! 欺上瞒下党治不了, 非典治了! 卖淫嫖娼党治不了, 非典治了！

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Appendix

SMS example 4 广东流行非典了, 北京也被感染了。政府不再严管了，媒体也敢呐喊了。患者已经不少了，医院也都住满了。医护人员辛苦了，前线冲锋冒险了。群众吓得没胆了，戴着口罩捂脸了。国际组织监管了，控制日子不远了。三副中药熬好了，身体必须锻炼了。

Glossary

bainian daji, qiannian daji 百年大计, 千年大计 a grand plan of the centennial, a grand plan of the millennium chaozuo 炒作 media frenzy; stir fry chiru 耻辱 humiliation chunjie 春节 Spring Festival or Chinese New Year dakou CD 打口CD punched CD

dao 导 guidance or direction De xiansheng 德先生 Mr Democracy di wenhua shuiping 低文化水平 low cultural level dianzi dazibao 电子大字报 electronic big-character posters dizhi 地支 earth branches

daikouzhao de chuntian 戴口罩的春天 spring of masks

dongfang julong 东方巨龙 giant dragon of the east

dang’an 档案 personal dossiers

dongya bingfu 东亚病夫 the sick man of East Asia

dang xing 党性 party principle

du

danwei 单位 work unit

falun 法轮 Dharma wheel

堵 blockage

172

Glossary

fayan quan 发言权 right to speak

jianguo 建国 nation building

guanxi 关系 personal relations and networks

Jiaodian fangtan 《焦点访谈》 News Focus

guanzhong/shouzhong 观众/受众 audience

jilü

Guiwei zhizhan 《癸未之战》 The Battle of Guiwei

jingshen guizui 精神贵族 spiritual nobles

He shang 《河殇》 River Elegy

jingsheng wenming 精神文明 spiritual civilisation

hexie 和谐 harmonious

jiuguo 救国 nation salvation

hou xin shiqi 后新时期 post-New Era

jizhe de jia 记者的家 ‘Journalists’ Home’

hou xue 后学 post-ism

kong tan 《空谈》 Empty Talk

houxue dashi 后学大师 post-master

lengxue shijian 冷血事件 case of cold blood

huanqing 欢庆 jubilant

ling juli baodao 零距离报道 zero-distance reporting

hukou 户口 household registration

liumin 流民 ﬂoating population

huli jing 狐狸精 fox fairies

luohou 落后 lagging behind

huozhe 《活着》 To Live

mai ke shang shi 买壳上市 listing via buying a shell

纪律 discipline

Glossary mei wenhua 没文化 lacking culture

qunzhong 群众 masses

Mian dui mian 《面对面》 Face to Face

quxian jiuguo 曲线救国 saving the nation via the roundabout route

mofa 魔法 evil law Nanfang dushi bao 《南方都市报》 Southern Metropolitan News

renao 热闹 boisterous rongshuxia 榕树下 (name of website)

pingdeng de shijiao 平等的视角 perspective of equality

Sai xiansheng 赛先生 Mr Science

pingheng de yishi 平衡的意识 sense of balance

shehui de liangxin 社会的良心 conscience of society

pingjing de xintai 平静的心态 attitude of equilibrium

shidai cha 时代差 epochal diﬀerence

qiangguo 强国 nation strengthening

Shihua shishuo 《实话实说》 Talk As It Is

qiangguo meng 强国梦 the dream to make China strong and powerful

Shiji 《世纪》 Century

qimeng xuezhe 启蒙学者 Enlightenment scholar

shijian cha 时间差 time lag shishi pingshu 实事评述 Current Aﬀairs Review

qingming shanghe tu 清明上河图 Riverside Scene at the Qingming Festival

shu 疏 mediation or education

qingtian 青天 clear sky; righteous oﬃcial

shuiping 水平 standard

173

174

Glossary

shunkouliu 顺口溜 popular sayings

xiangfeng 2000 nian 《相逢2000年》 Meeting the Year 2000

Shuzi guancha 《数字观察》 Statistics Observations

xin shiqi 新时期 New Era

sixiang gongzuo 思想工作 thought work

xin zhuangtai 新状态 new mode, new state of aﬀairs

suku 诉苦 speaking bitterness suzhi 素质 quality tianchao 天朝 Heavenly Kingdom tiangan 天干 heaven trunks tongzhi 同志 comrade wenhua 文化 culture wenhua re 文化热 Cultural Fever wenhua xianfeng 文化先锋 cultural avant-couriers wu 捂 cover-up wuji zhishi fenzi 无机知识分子 non-organic intellectuals

Xinwen diaocha 《新闻调查》 News Probe xinwen diaocha yuekan 《新闻调查月刊》 News Probe Monthly xinxue xuezhe 新学学者 new-learning scholars xinyang zhuyi shi de xuezhe 信仰主义式的学者 ﬁdeist scholars xunlian 训练 training yangge 秧歌 (a folk dance) yaomohua jiaoshou 妖魔化教授 demonisation professor yi biren zhi jian huanshi bishen 以彼人之箭还施彼身 using the other party’s sword against that party yin-yang lian 阴阳脸 yin-yang face

Glossary Yongbao xin shiji 《拥抱新世纪》 Embracing the New Century

zhishi fenzi 知识分子 intellectuals

you wenhua 有文化 having culture

zhiyi de jingshen 质疑的精神 spirit of questioning

yuandan 元旦 Western New Year

zhongguo 中国 the Central Kingdom

zaobao luntan 早报论坛 United Morning Post Forum

zhonghua shenghuo 中华圣火 holy ﬁre of China

zhen, shan, ren 真、善、忍 truthfulness, compassion, forbearance

zhongqing luntan 中青论坛 China Youth Forum

zhiqing quan 知情权 right to know

zhu xuanlü 主旋律 mainstream melody; oﬃcial ideology

175

Notes

Introduction 1 The term ‘non-state’ is used as an umbrella term to refer to any category – things, persons, groups or publics – that is not strictly ‘oﬃcial’ and controlled by the state. The non-state may exist inside the state or outside it; it can be collaboratory or confrontational to the state. 2 The term ‘new media’ refers mainly to the Internet and mobile phones in this study. For ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’, see Hall (2000). 3 These themes on creative industries in China can be found in the articles of the International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.3 (2006). 4 Xiaomei Chen (1995), for example, describes the anti-traditional and counteroﬃcial stance through the appropriation of Western discourse as ‘Occidentalism’. The television series, River Elegy (He shang) (1988), which is characterised by a favourable depiction of Western culture and a negative rendition of Chinese culture, represents the strategies of Chinese intellectuals to form a counter-discourse to the oﬃcial one. 5 In spring 1992, Deng Xiaoping, the so-called architect of China’s reform policies, made his famous tour in Shenzhen and other southern cities in China. During the tour, he made a series of speeches to local party oﬃcials and urged them to take ‘bolder’ steps in economic reforms. This tour has been regarded as a landmark event comparable to the third session of the eleventh Meeting of the Central Committee of the CCP in 1978 when the Deng reformists gained an upper hand over the conservative Maoists and subsequently oﬃcially initiated the open and reform policies. 6 ‘Document 82’ refers to the ‘Notice on strengthening the construction and management of broadcasting and television cable networks’, issued jointly by the State Council, Ministry of Information Industry and State Administration of Radio, Film and Television in 1999. 7 ‘Six favourables’ indicates that the formation of the media group should be favourable to the leadership of the party and the media’s mouthpiece function, favourable to domestic competitive capacity, favourable to streamlining resources, favourable to social enthusiasm and creativity, favourable to business development and proﬁt increase and favourable to the improvement of employee qualiﬁcations and their lives. ‘Five no-changes’ means that any operations of media groups should incur no change to the party’s ideological control, no change to the party’s control of the media, no change to the party’s control of personnel deployment, no change to the nature of mass media as state-owned enterprises and no change to media’s tongue and throat function. 8 An example is Hu Jiwei, former editor-in-chief of the communist state’s ﬂagship press, People’s Daily, who argued: ‘Freedom of the press for citizens is the right to

Notes

177

be informed as masters of the country, their right of political consultation, their right of involvement in government and their right of supervision over the Party and government’ (Y. Zhao 1998: 36). 9 The term ‘unicorporate communication order’ is borrowed from McKenzie Wark (1994: 133), referring to the asymmetrical relationship between communication at the top of the hierarchy (characterised by transparency) and communication at the bottom (characterised by opaqueness). 10 The two conferences are landmark events in Chinese political history. They mark the end of the Jiang Zemin era and the beginning of the Hu (Jintao)–Wen (Jiabao) era, or the fourth-generation leadership. 1 Chinese media and modernity 1 ‘Micro-media’ is used by ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel (1993) to describe cheap and reproducible forms of technology, such as audio cassettes. 2 ‘Say-no club’ refers to the group of leftist intellectuals represented by the authors of the book China Can Say No (Zhongguo keyi shuo bu) (Song et al. 1996), who denounce Western cultural imperialism. 3 Tao Dongfeng (1999) characterises the cultural trends in the 1990s as moving from ‘calling for (Western) modernity to reﬂecting on modernity’. 4 Literature on post-Tiananmen Chinese intellectual politics and strategies abounds in Chinese studies. It is beyond the scope and capacity of this chapter to provide a comprehensive literature review on the topic. My schematic review and analysis of the three major trends in the following analysis provides a synopsis of the multifaceted intellectual narratives of Chinese modernity. 5 Liu is one of the ‘Say-no club’ and co-author of the 1996 bestseller Behind the Demonisation of China (Yaomo hua Zhongguo de beihou), after the 1993 bestseller China Can Say No. See Li et al. (1996). 6 Gan Yang, a liberal in the 1980s famous for editing the book series ‘Culture: China and the World’ which introduced Western liberal ideas into China, adopts a new left stance in the post-New Era. In re-evaluating the May-Fourth tradition, Gan (1989) regards ‘order’ as the missing link between ‘science’ and ‘democracy’ and advocates ‘order’ as the road to freedom. 7 The point about subjectivity and identity as a reconstructed and symbolic project is closely related to Western theorisation about modernity and reﬂexivity as in the works of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. See Chapter Three for further discussions. 8 Ma (2001) uses ‘satellite modernities’ to refer to the magnetic sites between centres of high modernity and developing modernities. These are sites that engender physical and imaginary boundary-crossing experiences and reproduce other satellite sites in less modern communities. 9 The making of a new Chinese nation and, as a result, the transformation of ‘proto-nationalism’, which is replete throughout Chinese history, into a modern concept of nationalism, were an integral component of the discursive constructs of Chinese modernity in the early twentieth century. After 1949, nationalism has proved a useful natural resource in constructing a socialist modernity that aims at conﬂating the nation and race into a single entity represented by the partystate. Further discussions about Chinese nationalism follow in this chapter and mostly in Chapter Two. For ‘imagined community’, see Anderson (1983); for ‘proto-nationalism’, see Hobsbawm (1990). 10 The ‘thought liberation’ movement was initiated by the Deng Xiaoping regime to justify its open and reform policies that started in 1978. It aimed at eradicating the radical leftist thought from the Mao era and prepared the nation to embark on a developmental theory of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, of which a

178

Notes

‘socialist market economy’ is an essential component. Both are oﬃcial terms to describe China’s transition from a planned economy to a capitalism economy. 2 Media event: the new millennium celebration 1 ‘Central Kingdom’ is the literal translation of ‘China’ (Zhongguo). It tells an ancient belief that China stands at the centre of all kingdoms on earth. 2 Yellow symbolises nobility and prosperity inherited from the Yellow Emperor, and red symbolises vitality and happiness inherited from both Chinese cultural tradition and communist tradition (the red China). 3 For a discussion of how the meaning of the Wall evolved in modern Chinese history and how it was transformed into a symbol of Chinese nationalism in post-1949 China, see Waldron (1990: ch. 11, 1993). 4 The reversal of time was marked by the eightieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement (1919), the ﬁftieth anniversary of the establishment of the PRC (1949), the fortieth anniversary of the Tibetan Revolt (1959), the twentieth anniversary of the Democracy Wall Movement (1979) and the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen movement and the June-Fourth massacre (1989). Not all anniversaries were celebrated openly and oﬃcially. The Tibetan Revolt, the Democracy Wall Movement and the Tiananmen massacre were never mentioned in the oﬃcial countdown ceremonies. 5 The video extract is taken from Shiji (Century), VCD no. 4 (produced by CCTV, distributed by China International TV Corporation, December 2000). 6 For thousands of years, the Chinese have been using ‘the 12-Earth Branch’ (12 di zhi) combined with ‘the 10-Heaven Trunk’ (10 tian gan) to signify time. A complete sixty combinations of tian gan di zi is used to mark the cyclical period of every sixty years. There are also the twelve animal signs, the traditional Chinese horoscope. Every year is assigned an animal sign: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and boar. Every twelve years, the same animal sign would re-appear. For example, year 2000 is the year of the dragon. The dragon will re-appear as the sign of the year in 2012, together with all its characteristics and symptoms. 7 For a discussion of the ‘Axial Age’ among Chinese scholars, see articles by Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, Liu Xiaofeng, He Weiye, Zhang Ying, Chen Fangzheng, etc. in Ershiyi shiji (Twenty-ﬁrst century) 57 and 58 (2000), and 66 (2001). For a study of the original thesis on the ‘Axial Age,’ see Jaspers (1953). 8 Beginning with Norman Cohn’s seminal works, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957, 1970), in which he examines millennialism as a religious as well as a political and cultural concept, there has been a growing interest in secular millennialism among sociologists, political scientists and cultural critics. Rebellions and revolutions in Chinese history have provided fascinating cases studies for Michael Barkun (1974, 1996) and Rinehart (1997). 9 Geremie Barmé (2004) points out that the Chinese revolution is a religious ‘fundamentalism’ and epitomises our thinking of utopianism in the twentieth century. 10 In nostalgic tourism, people return to areas that have distinctive revolutionary and socialist history to encounter images and styles of behaviour often associated with China’s past. Travelling to North Korea is part of the phenomenon of nostalgic tourism, through which people experience the kind of energy and fever associated with high socialism; the kind of socialism that China has turned its back on in its march towards post-socialism. It also includes ‘red tourism’, which describes the trend in the Chinese tourism industry that sends millions of people each year to communist revolutionary sites such as Mao’s home in Shaoshan (Hunan Province) and the communists’ base in Yan’an (Shanxi Province) during the anti-Japanese war (1937–1945).

Notes

179

11 The ﬁrst coming of capitalism in China is represented by the capitalist revolution led by Sun Yat-san in 1911 and ended with the communist revolution and its success in 1949. 12 The Kaifeng riverside scene is a ‘simulacrum’ (Baudrillard 1994) or an attempted copy of the ‘original’ in the Ming painting that is itself a copy of the ‘real’. Fredric Jameson (2001: 562) would call this culture of nostalgia without memory ‘the culture of the simulacrum’. 13 ‘The sick man of East Asia’ was used to describe China during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century period, when it was subject to invasion by Japanese and Western imperialists. The phrase is still deeply felt by the Chinese and carefully kept alive by the state propaganda. 14 I acknowledge Audrey Yue for the term ‘post-pre-millennium mood’ from her own term ‘pre-post-1997’ in Yue (2000). In the article, Yue treats ‘pre-post-1997’ as ‘a form of belated panic consciousness articulating the “pre” in the time of “post”’ and ‘the third time–space of transition – a place of postcolonial translation, intervention and reformulation’. 15 Dru C. Gladney (1999) utilises rich ethnographic materials to argue that the ethnic minority-other is commodiﬁed and used as the ‘symbolic capital’ in China’s nationalisation and modernisation project. 16 Ackbar Abbas (1997: 13, 14) uses the term ‘culture of disappearance’ to describe Hong Kong’s transition from being a colonial city of Great Britain to a postcolonial city and special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. Disappearance does not imply non-appearance or absence, but ‘a question of misrecognition, of recognizing a thing as something else’ and of ‘conferring plausible identities on the postcolonial’. 3 Media stories: the politics of AIDS and SARS 1 The ‘spring of masks’ (daikouzhao de chuntian) is a popular term in Chinese to describe the spring of 2003 when people had to wear masks for fear of contracting the SARS virus. 2 Here, I use red threat to refer to the AIDS crisis, for its association with blood, and white anxiety to refer to the SARS crisis, for the unknown nature of the virus and the extensive media coverage of medical workers dressed up in white. 3 I owe the term ‘silent revolution’ to Li Fan (1998). Li uses this term to denote the emergence and development of civil society in post-Mao China. 4 ‘Mobizens’ refers to active participants in mobile communications. They are active mobile phone users who become active citizens through engaging in public discussions and expressions of citizenship. The term is coined in reference to ‘netizens’, the term for active participants in the online community of the Internet. 5 The SMN reporter admitted during a television interview that she was alerted to the SARS outbreak upon receiving an SMS message while still on holiday. 6 The term ‘mobile panic’ is borrowed from Gerard Goggin (2006) to refer to a moral panic created by the transmission of mobile text messages. 7 ‘Guanxi networks’ is a central concept in Chinese culture to describe personalised networks of inﬂuence. Guanxi means ‘connections’ or ‘relationships’. It can be used to describe a network of contacts (as in business), a state of understanding between two people (as in nepotism) or a sexual relationship. ‘Guangxi networks’ and ‘guanxi’ are used in this book in a fairly general sense to refer to networks of interpersonal relations and personal contacts in terms of information sharing. 8 This and other SMS messages discussed in this chapter were collected during my ﬁeld trip to China in August 2003. Many of the SMS rhymes are also widely circulated and accessible via the Internet, such as Xu (2003). See Appendix for the original Chinese version.

180

Notes

9 For a study of face culture in China, see Kipnis (1995) and Lee-Wong (2000). 10 All netizen comments on Li Jiaming are taken from the following websites: www. rongshuxia.com/channels/zl/lijiaming/index.htm; my.clubhi.com/bbs/660777/. 11 The majority of media representations of AIDS are related to blood (through blood transfusion or blood contamination). AIDS cases related to sexuality are often loaded with moral judgement in China. Although denounced, questioned and condemned by many people as a sinner and hypocrite, Jiaming has not stopped writing on the Internet about his ﬁght with the virus in order to warn other people, especially young people like him, of the dangers of imprudent and irresponsible behaviour. He has hence been acclaimed by the majority of his audience as a moral person who deserves sympathy, understanding and support. His online publications quickly attracted a publisher who saw the value of his confessional stories. The publication of his book, Zuihou de xuanzhan (The Last Declaration of War) (Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Press, 2002), made Jiaming the most mysterious and famous PLWHA in China. Jiaming’s BBS was subsequently set up at my.clubhi.com/bbs/660777/. It is under such circumstances that News Probe chose Jiaming to perform AIDS talk to commemorate World AIDS Day in 2002. 12 Online Chinese-language forums, whether based inside or outside China, form a Chinese cultural sphere that is transnational by nature, as the forums are accessible from any networked computer in the world. Overseas forums can spill over into mainland forums and mainland forums can feed overseas forums. As Guobin Yang (2003) has noted, these online cultural spaces have the potential to mobilise transnational activism and facilitate worldwide protests. They can also impinge on civil society development in China. 13 Chinese media are mainly composed of oﬃcial or party media, on the one hand, and popular media, on the other. Both camps can be divided into national and local (including provincial and municipal), traditional (the print and broadcast media) and new media. The so-called ‘popular media’ are generally ﬁnancially and administratively independent from the Chinese government, even though they are not free from government control through licensing and taxation. 14 Jiaming takes care not to expose his condition to family and colleagues for fear of social exclusion, loss of his job and most of all for his ﬁlial love for his parents. His guilt towards his mother permeates his writings. Obviously he was brought up by orthodox parents who had expected him to bring honour to the family, have children to continue the family blood and take care of them in their old age. But to Jiaming, all his dreams and plans disappeared the moment he found he was infected with AIDS. 15 The body politic has always been central to China’s nation-building and nationstrengthening projects. To train and cultivate the desired bodies of its citizens is an integral part of its mission to maintain social order for national (economic) development. Chapter Six provides further discussion on this topic. 16 Female discourses on and representatives of AIDS are overshadowed by the dominant masculine discourses in the mainstream media in China. When they do appear in the media, women are represented as either devoted partners to the male PLWHA or fallen angels who deserve both despite and sympathy. In the latter case, the uncivilised, immoral and invisible female body is often implicated through the focus on the civilised, moral and visible male body. They are often depicted as spirit-sucking fox fairies (huli jing) (as in Chinese classical mythology), who come out at night to destroy men’s potency. In both cases, females are made ‘mute’: they are represented by their male counterparts. 17 For ‘politicised body’, see Anagnost (1994a). In the article, Anagnost explores post-Mao body politics in relation to the issue of subjectivity through close reading of a realist text. She argues that the body (both individual and collective) is

Notes

18

19 20

21

22 23

24

25

26

27 28

29

181

politicised by the Party-state to ensure its social and ideological domination over ‘the people’ and to create and consolidate its own self-identity as the way and the history. I owe the point on hypervisibility of the state power to Ann Anagnost (1994a). In ‘The Politicized Body’, Anagnost explores how the operations of power in the Chinese socialist context can produce a hypervisible body of the party while at the same time making its subjects visible. Ulrich Beck has written widely on ‘reﬂexive modernisation’ in German and English. The most prominent discussions on the term and its application to contemporary society can be found in Beck et al. (1994) and Beck (1992). The term ‘reﬂexive accumulation’ is used by Scott Lash and John Urry (1994) to describe the increasing culturisation of contemporary economies. It emphasises the centrality of knowledge and information, the integration of production and reﬂexive consumption, and the centrality of communication structures in economic life. The proliferation of online protests against the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by America-led NATO forces in May 1999 is regarded as the ﬁrst showcase of netizens’ power in eﬀecting public opinion. See Tang and Shi (2001: 396). The three shockwaves refer to the case of Sun Zhigang, reﬂections on SARS and reversal of the verdict in the case of Liu Yong by the Liaoning Supreme Court. All are available online from major Chinese language portals. The ‘shakeup in Chinese oﬃcialdom’ refers to the dismissal of Zhang Wenkang as Minister of Public Health and Meng Xuenong as Mayor of Beijing in April 2003. The new vagrancy regulation stipulates that the police cannot ‘hold’ (arrest) people without identiﬁcation cards or imprison them as vagrants. Instead, police have the duty to ‘inform beggars and vagrants that they can ask for shelter’ (CCTV 2003b). This view echoes Gerard Goggin’s advice on studies of mobile culture. Goggin (2006) points out: ‘It is important not to over-play the role, signiﬁcance and force of such texting culture in the exercise of power, or the formation of collective action and identities (whether mobs, crowds, masses, movements, or multitudes)’. Jiang Zeming’s ‘Three Represents’ philosophy – ‘CCP represents the demands of advanced productive force; CCP represents the advancement of advanced culture; CCP represents the basic interests of the broad masses of the people’ – is an eﬀort to redeﬁne the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), originally deﬁned as an avantgarde party of proletarians, in order to expand the social strata of its members. Wei Lanfen, a retired doctor living in Qingdao, Shandong Province, commented to the author with a big smile upon reading the text message: ‘How right it is. SARS is not all bad. We should now view the virus in a dialectic way according to Marxism’. Such popular appreciation of the sarcastic SMS rhymes explains their wide circulation in Chinese society. These SMS are products of collective wisdom. They go through constant rewriting and reﬁning in the process of circulation. Circulation is therefore also reproduction, which in turn is a process of encoding and decoding. ‘Transmesis’ is a term proposed by Thomas O. Beebee (2004), who deploys it to question the ‘black box’ of translation in post-colonial writings. He argues that the black box contains the ‘impure reason’ of post-colonial subjects, whose desire to portray a state of ‘pure language’ betrays the Kantian pure reason through the diversiﬁed phenomenon of transmesis, that is translation plus mimesis. Here, I expand Beebee’s original concept by adding a second meaning to it: transgression plus mimesis. For ‘evocative transcript’, see Carol Humphrey (1994). Humphrey uses the term to refer to texts that are ‘ambiguous by design’ and ‘intended to elicit or evoke a particular interpretation beyond the surface meaning’ (ibid.: 23).

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30 Many scholars have warned of overly romanticising the semiotic power of the popular as resistance. For example, Nick Stevenson (2002: 89–101) criticises John Fiske for romanticising popular resistance. Michael Dutton (1998: 278) advises people not to overly romanticise playing with words in the Chinese context. 31 For detailed discussions on citizenship, its mediated nature and its relationship with new media in contemporary China, see Chapter Five. 32 A survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on the use of the Internet found that 25 per cent of the Chinese population are frequent Internet users and 63.3 per cent of urban youths are netizens who use the Internet for communication, study and entertainment (People’s Daily 2003b). 4 News event: SARS reportage 1 It is said that the GPB issued three orders to the Guangzhou media forbidding the extensive coverage of the scare shopping, which is neatly referred to as the ‘three NO orders’ by Guangzhou journalists. The three No orders were given on the grounds of maintaining ‘social stability’ in the events of the Guangzhou International Trade Aﬀairs and the seventeenth National Congress, both to be held in March 2003. 2 During the SARS outbreak, everyday life was disrupted, as most people chose to stay at home and avoid going out in order to eliminate physical contact with any other people (let alone those who were diagnosed as SARS suﬀerers). Only two kinds of people – journalists and medical workers – did the opposite. They rushed in wherever there was a SARS case. Some of them were infected with SARS as a result of frequent exposure to the virus. 3 Timothy Cheek’s (1997) study of Deng Tuo, for example, shows that the Chinese intelligentsia were able to live the dual roles of servant (to the CCP) and savant (to the people) in Mao’s China. 4 Clientelism is not just typical of Chinese journalism, but has been a deﬁning characteristic of Chinese society, where patron–client networks extend from villages, enterprises, local governments and intellectual politics. For a study of client–patron networks in villages, see Oi (1989); for a study of clientelism in enterprises, see Walder (1986); for a study of client–patron networks among local governments, see McCormick (1990); for studies of clientelism in intellectual politics, see Goldman (1981) and Cheek and Hamrin (1986). 5 Li has been known among the Chinese intelligentsia as the ‘demonisation professor’ (yaomohua jiaoshou). For Li Xiguang’s demonisation books, see Li et al. (1996) and X. Li (1999). 6 The journalist certiﬁcation system requires all journalists to sit and pass tests in order to acquire the certiﬁcates that allow them to function as journalists. The tests are designed to remind journalists of the party principle. Many journalists have to cheat in order to pass the tests. 7 The term ‘organic intellectuals’ is drawn from Antonio Gramsci (1971) to refer to intellectuals who grow organically with, and fulﬁl the technical, directive and organisational needs of, the dominant social group and/or class. 8 ‘Negative freedom’ was coined by Chin-Chuan Lee (2000a: 563) to mean relative freedom from state interference in Chinese journalism. It contrasts with the state’s ‘positive freedom’, freedom to negotiate and incorporate market forces for its own political and ﬁnancial gains. 9 The term ‘non-organic intellectuals’ is proposed by Jian Shao (2000) to describe intellectuals who generate knowledge as specialists, experts and professionals, and who use such knowledge in exchange for material necessities for survival. These people are critical of the organic intellectuals whose close relationship with the dominant political group and dictatorship in knowledge

Notes

10

11

12 13 14

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production are regarded as a new form of hegemony. Non-organic intellectuals regard people as the active agency of history who are equipped to speak for themselves, and regard intellectuals as elements rather than representatives of knowledge. For Foucault (1980: 126), the speciﬁc intellectuals ‘have got used to working, not in the modality of the “universal”, or the “exemplary”, the “just-and-true-for-all”, but within speciﬁc sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them’. Chinese journalists are well aware of Internet censorship in China. When ‘big’ news events happen, they often refer to the overseas-based Chinese language websites for more comprehensive and/or new content unavailable from resources based in China. Those websites, although sometimes diﬃcult to access directly due to Internet censorship, are accessible via proxy servers. Many Chinese journalists are skilful at using proxy servers to access censored websites. See Chapter Five for further discussions on Internet censorship in China. Blogging is a new phenomenon in Chinese Internet culture. J-bloggers – journalists who blog – belong to celebrity and cultural elite bloggers, whom many Chineselanguage Internet service providers have recruited and promoted. Li’s writings on the case of Li Siyi, original posted at www.cdsb.com, are no longer accessible from the website. All quotes of online postings, including those that follow, are taken from the above-mentioned BBS. They are collected by websites dedicated to Li Siyi: http:// lisiyi.netor.com/ and www.lisiyi.org.

5 Media citizenship 1 The concept of citizenship has been debated extensively since T.H. Marshall’s (1950, 1964) classic studies of citizenship in Western Europe. Besides Marshall’s famous triplet of civil citizenship, political citizenship and social citizenship, a barrage of categories has been used to describe various subcategories of citizenship. It is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter to review the whole body of literature on the subject. 2 For debates on the relationship between the media, citizenship and public sphere and related terms, see Kellner (1995); Morley and Robins (1995); Plummer (1995); Thompson (1995). 3 The expansion of the space of society is often associated with the retreat of the state and the rise of civil society in China. For examples of scholarship on public sphere/civil society in China, see Modern China 19.2 (1993) and Brook and Frolic (1997). 4 The rise of nationalism, particularly popular nationalism, among Chinese youths and urbanites in post-Tiananmen China has been a double-edged sword for the party-state. As Chapter Two has demonstrated, nationalism and consumerism refer to each other in constructing identity politics. Nationalism has been employed by the CCP to justify its legitimacy and maintain political stability. However, it should be pointed out that the Party-state is intolerant of extreme nationalism and imposes censorship on expressions of xenophobic and narrow nationalism, which is regarded as harmful to its economic and foreign relations. 5 Kang’s research and report on the case of Li Siyi and China’s anti-poverty projects are self-funded. The report is not allowed to be oﬃcially published, but it circulated via the underground book market and is discussed and accessible on the Internet and among Chinese intellectuals. 6 The posting was circulated by a few Chinese-language BBS at the time, such as ‘Journalists’ Home’ at www.xici.net.

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6 Media campaigns: the war over Falun Gong 1 Human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch (1999) and Human Rights in China (1999) immediately responded to the ban. 2 Besides studies done by established scholars, students of religion, politics and history are also contributing to the Falun Gong studies. For example, see Noonan (2001) and Thurgood (2003). 3 The Chinese state has issued a series of regulations and laws to control and contain religious and qigong practices, especially in the light of the popular religious revival since the 1980s. For regulations on religion, see Potter (2003) and Xu (1999). 4 Falun Gong staged several large-scale protests against unfavourable media coverage in Tianjin, Beijing, Jinan and other cities when it still existed legally in China. 5 The kinds of death that practising Falun Gong apparently leads to include suicide (by wasting to death for refusing medical treatment when sick, or killing oneself in order to ﬁnd the ‘Dhama wheel’, falun, in one’s lower abdomen and reach consummation) and homicide (killing other people or causing the deaths of other people as xiaoye, meaning getting rid of ye, a dark element in the universe) (Collective 2002). 6 As claimed by the Chinese government, the banning of Falun Gong ‘not only complies with international rights instruments but also follows the common practice of all other governments in the world regarding cults’ (Xinhua News Agency 2000). 7 The self-immolation incident took place on 23 January 2001 at Tiananmen Square, when six individuals (two men, two women and two girls), who were later identiﬁed by the state media as Falun Gong practitioners, attempted to set ﬁre to themselves (only ﬁve succeeded). Chinese police reacted quickly to the selfimmolation incident, rushing them to either hospital or prison. Two died from the incident. This incident caused lots of controversies among Falun Gong and international commentators. See next section for furter discussion. 8 People were generally sensitive to the topic of Falun Gong in China. Whenever I mentioned Falun Gong in China in 2003 and 2004 (especially when I said I was doing research on Falun Gong), there were weird, puzzled or shocked expressions on their faces. My family and friends in China refused to mention Falun Gong on the phone for fear of phone tapping by the security oﬃces. Falun Gong was taboo even in academic conferences. My mentioning of Falun Gong at an international conference in Beijing in June 2004 caused a wave of unease among Chinese participants. 9 The ‘satellite hijacking incidents’ refers to Falun Gong’s high-tech counterattack by inﬁltrating Chinese satellite and cable transmission networks to broadcast proFalun Gong videos and/or slogans. See the next section for more details. After the satellite hijackings, all broadcasting outlets in China are required to have a ‘responsibility system’: anyone who allows pro-Falun Gong news items or comments to slip into the programmes (especially live broadcast and audience participation/talk radio programmes) faces several punishments that normally lead to the loss of job/position, self-criticism sessions and a hindrance to promotion. 10 On the night of 24 January 2004 between 24.00 and 03.00 hours, Washingtonbased Channel 56 (a Chinese-language TV channel) saw its much advertised inaugural Chinese New Year Global Gala programmes produced by NTDTV replaced by the CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala. It was later found out that a media spy working for the Chinese state had inﬁltrated Channel 56 and facilitated the ‘mind share theft’ incident (Epoch Times 2004). 11 Evil cults, as deﬁned by the Ministry of Public Security, include virtually any religious organisation that could threaten China’s ‘unity and stability’. In addition

Notes

12

13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21

22

185

to Falun Gong, the CCP has so far listed fourteen cults as illegal, twelve of which are Christian and two are Buddhist. For a report on the reality of cults in China, see Xu (2002). Hacking and counter-hacking are underhand dealings that neither party would openly admit. Western media reports, such as Forney (2002), have mentioned Internet hacking incidents by China’s Ministry of Public Security on Falun Gong servers. Regarding Falun Gong hacking Chinese oﬃcial websites, I have not seen any report so far. But my experience working as a journalist in Chinese oﬃcial media tells me that there are cases of the Falun Gong hacking Chinese oﬃcial websites. The website of the television station I once worked with (www.jstv.com) was hacked once by Falun Gong, but the hacking incident was given a low proﬁle, and was only intimated to the IT administrator and higher ranks within the station and local public security bureaux. Since 2002, Falun Gong followers have broken into local terrestrial television broadcasts in northeast China and hacked into cable television networks in half a dozen diﬀerent cities including Laiyang, Yantai, Chongqing, Changchun and Harbin (Murphy 2002). Falun Gong acknowledged the television sabotage activities in China. It was reported that in February 2006 in Haicheng and Liaoyang, Liaoning Province, Falun Gong practitioners successfully tapped into the regular TV programming to broadcast the ‘Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party’ (Clearwisdom.net 2006). For an oﬃcial Chinese account of Falun Gong satellite hijacking incidents, see Zhengqing.net (2003). The video has been made into a VCD and distributed freely on the streets of Melbourne by Falun Gong. It is worth pointing out here that my interpretation of images about Falun Gong as hyperimages draws a similar parallel to Roland Barthes’ myth analysis. Barthes (1992: ‘Myth Today’) regards myth as metalanguage, a global sign and speech stolen and restored. Like the image of a negro who salutes a French ﬂag, the images that I use in this chapter also have ‘mythical’ signiﬁcations. The ‘one man and tanks’ and the ‘Goddess of Democracy’ are ironic images of the 1989 Tiananmen Democracy Movement, one representing civility versus military brutality, the other representing a Chinese desire for (American) democracy. It is said that uniformed police and secret police at Tiananmen Square outnumbered tourists after the two incidents in 2001, which were considered a big disgrace by the Chinese government. The term ‘docile bodies’ is used by Foucault (1979) in examining modern disciplinary technologies that are imposed upon the governed. ‘Mr Science’ (Sai xiansheng) refers to one of the two slogans of the May Fourth Movement. The other one is ‘Mr Democracy’ (De xiansheng). In the historical urgency for national survival, ‘Mr Democracy’ was later abandoned by the intellectual and political elites in both Nationalist and Communist governments and gave way to ‘Mr Science’. See Wang Hui’s article (1995) for discussions on the evolution of scientism in modern Chinese intellectual thought. ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’ refers to the ﬁrst modern reform movement led by the ruling elites of the Qing dynasty in the aftermath of the Opium War, in order to modernise its weaponry and machinery. ‘Learning from foreigners in order to contain them’ was raised during that period of time. The following extract from a Chinese oﬃcial document summarises the key points in the rationale of the anti-Falun Gong campaign: ‘Marxist dialectic materialism and historic materialism are the worldview and methodology of proletarians, and powerful intellectual weapons for the proletarian and their party to know and change the world. Based on this worldview, Marxist scientiﬁc theory is the basic guideline to promote the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics

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and the spiritual support for us communists. Falun Dafa, created by Li Hogzhi, advocates mentalism and theism and denies all scientiﬁc truths, which is in a fundamental opposition to the basic theories and principles of Marxism and to the grand enterprise of people led by the party in the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (Government document 1999). 23 Li (1994: 37) claims that the current cycle of the universe is bound to end in catastrophe and that dafa disciples are in ‘the Final period of the Last Havoc’. To be saved from destruction, rid of mofa (evil law) and obtain the bodily transformation, one must practise Falun Dafa. 24 ‘Flexible accumulation’ describes the new modus operandi of late capitalism as opposed to the rigidity of Fordism. Since David Harvey (1990) proposed the concept in 1990, it has become one of the central terms to map the political, economic and cultural conditions of transnational capitalism. Aihwa Ong’s conceptualisation of ‘ﬂexible citizenship’, for example, is a successful attempt to appropriate Harvey’s ‘ﬂexible accumulation’ for her human agency-centred ‘cultural logics of transnationality’ (Ong 1999). 7 Media spectacles and cultural transformation 1 Lu Xiaobo, a political science professor at Barnard College in New York, said of the political struggle between Falun Gong and the Chinese government: ‘I see an image of a giant ﬁghting a ghost – you know it is there and haunting you, but you don’t exactly know where to attack, or when it will attack you’ (quoted in Rosenthal 2001). 2 The term ‘invisible techniques’ is borrowed from Foucault, who writes, ‘the techniques of the self do not require the same material apparatus as the production of objects; therefore they are often invisible techniques’ (Foucault 1997: 277). 3 The term ‘the “patriotic” code of ethics’ is used by Tu Wei-ming (1994: vii) to refer to the static, rigid, stereotypical deﬁnition of Chineseness, which also includes ‘belonging to the Han race, being born in China proper, speaking Mandarin’. 4 Many have noted the universal appeal of Falun Gong. Adams et al. (2000: 125– 34), for example, write that, for Chinese, Li oﬀers a piece of the great traditions (Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism) wrapped up in a fresh package; for the Westerner, he oﬀers a familiar structure of belief and self-cultivation practices based on the Chinese concepts of ‘consummation’ (an ascension beyond this life to one’s true essence) and ‘enlightenment’ (once attained, it enables one to perceive the truth of the cosmos): zhen (truth), shan (compassion) and ren (forbearance) have resonance with the Western Christian tradition.

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Index

Adorno, T. 3, 60 advertising 17 Agamben, G. 69, 165 AIDS: see HIV/AIDS AIDS talk 65 altered states 155 Anagnost, A. 69, 140 Appadurai, A. 112 audiences 9–11; active audiences 9–11, 13 Axial Age 44–45, 47, 59–60 Bai, Y. 95 Bakken, G. 69 Bao gong 54 Barkun, M. 46 Barlow, T. 157 Barmé, G. 19, 26, 52 Battle of Guiwei (CCTV) 97 Baudrillard, J. 165 Beck, U. 72 Beijing millennium celebration 38–39 Beijing Youth Daily 160 Bell, M. 132 Berman, M. 163 Berry, C. 56 Bhabha, H. 82, 150 Boas, T. 132 body–mind paradigm 143 body politics: to ethics 152–58; qualiﬁed dafa body 143–48; qualiﬁed socialist body 138–43; from representational politics to 137–38 Brown, M. 137 Brownwell, S. 139 capitalism 31–32, 54 CDs 17–18 censorship 18–19, 114–16, 119, 129 Centennial Altar 39–41, 60

Central Kingdom 37, 44–45, 47, 59–60, 156 Century (CCTV) 43, 48–50 Chan, J. Changing Meanings of Citizenship (Goldman) 114–15 Chen Duxiu 88 Chen, N. 142, 144, 155 Chen, X. 166 China Central Television (CCTV): alternatives to 8; Battle of Guiwei 97; Century 43, 48–50; Falun Gong 126–30, 131; investigative journalism 94–95; Li Jiaming 68–72; Meeting the Year 2000 36–37, 38–39; News Focus 84, 94–95; News Probe 65, 94–95; SARS live broadcast 85–87; Spring Festival Gala 37–38; Sun Zhigang 67–68; Talk As It Is 127 China National Radio 8 China Radio International 8 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 31, 130, 146 Chineseness 26–27, 56–57, 156–58 Chomsky, N. 126 Chow, R. 78, 90, 103, 137, 147 circulation, privatisation of 112–14 citizenship: minoritised community 117–21; overview 14; paradoxes of 111–12; post-modernism and 110–11; privatisation of circulation 112–14; spatial re-conﬁguration 108–10; technology unreliability 114–17 clicking 74–79 clientelism 89–92 commodity culture 11 communist revolution 46 compassion 146–47 Confucianism 24–25, 56–57

214

Index

consumerism 57–58 counter-hegemony tendencies 8–9 counterpublics 151–52 counting down 41–45, 59 creative commons 11 creativity 3–4 critical theory 2–3 Cui Jian 134 Cui, Z. 25 cults 129–30 see also Falun Gong Cultural Fever 4–5, 23 cultural imperialism 22–23 Cultural Revolution 25 culturalism 56–58 Culturalist School 24 dafa body 143–48 Dai, J. 51 Dayan, D. 41 de Burgh, H. 159 de Certeau, M. 160 Debord, G. 12 decentralisation 16–22, 29 Deleuze, G. 45 Deng Xiaoping 5, 31, 49, 57, 143; Southern Tour 5 Derrida, J. 137 Dholakia, N. 10 digital revolution 19 Dirlik, A. 5–6, 22, 25, 28, 33, 57 Donald, S. 21 double-time narration 98–103, 159–60 dragon culture 39, 44, 47 dystopia 46–47, 165 economic achievements 48, 164 elitist tendency 89–90, 96, 102, 119–21, 157 Empty Talk 98 endurance 157 Enlightenment 32, 88 Epoch Times 130 Epstein, M. 164 ethics, from body politics to 152–58 everyday life 33–35 False Fire (NTDTV) 133–34 Falun Gong: body politics 137–38; counter-media campaign 130–33; ethics 152–56, 158; media campaign against 126–30; overview 14–15, 124–25, 148–49; qualiﬁed dafa body 143–48; representational politics 133–37

Farewell Revolution (Li) 47 Film and TV Exchange Centre 8 Firat, F. 10 Fisher, G. 147 Fisher, W. 80 ‘fold’, concept of 45 forbearance 147, 157 Foucault, M. 95, 154 Gan, Y. 25 Gaonkar, D. 31 Garnham, N. 109 Golding, P. 122 Goldman, M. 114–15, 120 Gramsci, A. 161 Great Leap Forward 57, 142, 163 Great Wall 39, 60 guanxi 64, 75, 83: mobile guanxi network 64, 75 Guangzhou Daily 84 Guangzhou Daily Press Group 7–8 Guo, Y. 24 Haar, B.t. 128 Habermas, J. 109 Halloran, J. 10 Hartley, J. 14 He, Z. 21, 126, 127 hegemonic ideology 8–9, 32–35, 141, 150, 166 Hitchcock, P. 52 HIV/AIDS: media citizenship 122; overview 61–62, 64–66; reﬂexivity 72–73; talking 68–72 Holy Fire of China 39–41 Hong Kong 36, 50, 59–60 Hong Kong Clock 41–42 Hu Shuli 119 Huang, P. 35, 122 Huyssen, A. 165 identity politics 22–30 ideology 22–30 individualism 112–14, 143–44; somatic individualism 143–44, 153–54 intellectual: discourses of modernity 23–28, 33; elitist tendency 89–90, 96, 102, 119–21, 157; establishment intellectual 89, 93; non-organic intellectual 95; organic intellectual 93, 95, 104, 161; statist tendency 89–90, 118–20, 157 Internet: cyber-activism 132; growth of 18–19, 18t, 62–63; journalism and

Index 98–103; linking 72–74; media campaigns 129; media stories 64–68; minoritised community 117–21; privatisation of circulation 112–14 investigative journalism 94–98 Jameson, F. 52–53 Jiang Yanyong 85 Jiang Zemin 50, 130, 131, 131f journalism: enlighteners 88–89; Internet and 98–103; investigative journalism 94–98; mediation community 158–62; overview 103–5; professionalism 87–88, 92–94; propaganda 89–92; self-censorship 119; studies 81–82; transculturation 20–22 Kaifeng 47–48, 50, 53–54 Kang Xiaoguang 119 karaoke 30 Katz, E. 41 Keane, J. 109 Keane, M. 21 Kellner, D. 12 knowledge culture 11 Lamy, P. 55 Lankshear, C. 32 Lash, S. 72 Lee, B. 112 Lee, C.-C. 161, 168 Lee, L.O. 57 Lefort, C. 139 Levy, P. 11 Li, H. 154 Li Hongzhi 124, 127, 130, 141 Li Jiaming 64–66, 68–72, 79, 122 Li Siyi 81, 99–101, 118–19, 122 Li, X. 56, 90 Li Yaling 99–100, 102–3 Li, Z. 47 Liang Qichao 88, 159 Lin, N. 148–49 Link, P. 115 linking 72–74 LiPuma, E. 112 Liu Binyan 89–90 Liu, K. 25 Liu, Q. 24 Liu Shaqi 54 Liu, Z. 47 Lu, D. 163 Lu, S.H. 6, 21 Lull, J. 8–9

215

Ma, E. 20 Macao 36, 59–60 McLuhan, M. 11 Mao era 29, 31–32, 139 Mao fever 51–52 marketisation 16–22, 29 Marxism 24, 31 mass appeal media 17 masses/audiences 9–11 May Fourth Movement 23 media campaigns see also Falun Gong: making of 125–26; overview 14–15 media citizenship: deﬁning 107–8; overview 106–7, 121–23 media conglomeration 7–9, 12 media culture 1–3 media events 36–37, 41 see also millennium celebration media spectacles see also millennium celebration: from body politics to ethics 152–58; from millennialism to post-utopianism 162–65; from minoritised community to mediation community 158–62; overview 1–2, 12–13; pedagogical/performative 150–51; post-political critique 165–68 media stories: making of 62–68; overview 13–14; talking 68–72 mediation community 158–62 Meeting the Year 2000 (CCTV) 36–37, 44 micro-media 17–18 millennialism 45–47, 162–65; Christian millennialism 46; Confucian– Buddhist millennialism 46; Confucian millennialism 46; Daoist millennialism 46; Maitreya millennialism 46; revolutionary millennialism 46; secular millennialism 46 millennium celebration: beginning/end 36–37; Holy Fire of China 39–41; live event 38–39; new millennium clock 41–44, 59; overview 13; rejuvenation discourse 47–50 Ministry of Information Industry (MII) 17, 115 minoritised community 117–21, 152; to mediation community 158–62 mobile phones: clicking 74–79; growth of 18, 18t, 62–63; linking 72–74; media stories 62–64, 75; privatisation of circulation 112–14

216

Index

modernity: counter-narratives 31–35; dichotomies to interplay 16–22; identity politics 22–30; imaginary of 57; linking 72–74; overview 13 Morley, D. 109 music 17–18, 30, 134 nationalism 55–58, 138–43, 157; hypernationalism 157; post-nationalism 55–58; somatic nationalism 139–40 nationalistic dream 23 native studies 24–25, 33, 51 neoconservatism 24, 26, 28 neoliberalism 22, 28 New Era 4–7; post-New Era 4–7 new leftists 25–26 New Tang Dynasty Television (NTDTV) 128 New Year events 37–38 New York Times 132 news event: making of 83–87; overview 14; about Li Siyi 99–102 News Focus (CCTV) 84, 94–95 News Probe (CCTV) 65, 94–95 News Probe Monthly 98 ‘Nine Commentaries’ 130, 146 Nonini, D. 32 nostalgia 51–55; post-nostalgia 51–55 NTDTV 130, 133–34 Ogden, S. 94 Ong, A. 32–33 Ots, T. 144 Ownby, D. 124, 145, 146, 156 party principle 87–91 96 Party Publicity Inc 21, 91 pedagogical/performative 150–51 Peking Man 40 Penny, B. 148 People’s Daily 50, 63, 67, 74, 120, 126, 133 people principle 87–91, 96 Perry, E. 114–15 Peters, M. 32 Pickowicz, P. 160 police brutality 66–68, 73–74 Porter, N. 132 post-ism 26–27 post-modernism: counter-narratives 32–35; features of 10–11, 164; media citizenship and 110–11; overview 6–7 post-nationalism 55–58 post-New Era 4–7

post-nostalgia 51–55 post-political critique 165–68 post-socialism: features of 162; overview 4–7, 13; post-nationalism 55–58; post-nostalgia 51–55; rejuvenation millennialism and 50–51 post-utopianism 162–65 professionalism, journalistic 82–104 propagandist 89–92 public spheres 109 Pye, L. 57 qiangguo meng 23, 53, 69, 154 qigong 143–45, 152–56 Radhakrishnan, R. 161 radio, growth of 7–9, 7t Rahn, P. 125 Rasmussen, C. 137 re-subjectiﬁcation 68–79, 154; reﬂexive subject 72; quasi-subject 72; visible subject 62, 68–80, 111, 113, 139; invisible subject 62, 68–80, 108, 111, 103, 139 reﬂexivity 72–73 rejuvenation millennialism: expressions of 37; making of 47–50; overview 59–60; post-nationalism 55–58; postnostalgia 51–55; post-socialism 50–51; post-utopianism 162 relational ethics 154–55 representational politics 133–37 River Elegy (He Shang) 38–39 Rosen, S. 160 rural migrant workers 141 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome): double-time narration 98–103, 159–60; initial breakthrough 83–84; investigative journalism 97; media citizenship 122; minoritised community 118, 119; mobile phones 62–64; overview 61–62; reﬂexivity 73; reportage 81–82, 104; spring of reportage 85–87; Xinhua version 84–85 say-no club 23 Schechter, D. 128, 132 Schwartz, B. 45 science 141–43, 145 self-censorship 119, 129 self-immolation 128, 133–34, 136 Shanghai Media Group (SMG) 8 Shi Jian 95

Index silent revolution 61 Silk Road 47 Smith, C. 162 SMS communication: see mobile phones SMS rhymes 74–79 socialisation 16–22, 29 socialism 5–6, 31–32 socialist body 138–43 somatic individualism 143–44, 153–54 somatic nationalism 139–40 Southern Metropolitan News 63–64, 83–84, 119 speaking bitterness 69–71 spiritual civilisation 139 sports culture 139 Spring Festival Gala 37–38 State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) 8, 17 statist tendency 89–90, 118–20, 157 street politics 108 Sun Zhigang: media citizenship 79, 122; media story 66–68; minoritised community 118, 119; national victory 99; reﬂexivity 73–74 suzhi 140–41

universalist ethics 156–57 unofﬁcial China 34 Urry, J. 111 utopianism 46–47, 57, 59, 142, 162–65

Taiping rebellion 46 Talk As It Is (CCTV) 127 talking 68–72 technology, unreliability of 114–17 television, growth of 7–9, 7t third realm 35 third world studies 33 Thompson, J. 167 Thornton, P. 78, 132, 146 Tiananmen Square 128, 133, 134–37 time arrows 53f time renewal 44–45 tradition 146 transculturation 20–22 truthfulness 145

Xi’an 47, 50, 53–54 Xinhua 84–85, 87, 98 Xu, B. 27 Xu, J. 144

217

VCDs 17–18 visibility 74–75, 134 Waldron, A. 58 Wang, G. 104–5 Wang, H. 23, 27 Wang, J. 34, 133–34 Wang Zhi 86, 95 Warner, M. 151 Webster, F. 73 wenhua (culture) 139–40 Wessinger, C. 59 Western Falun Gong practitioner 135, 135f White Lotus rebellion 46 Williams, R. 46–47, 109 World Trade Organization (WTO) 7–8, 23 Wu, H. 42

Yang, M.M. 5, 30, 154, 156–57 Yang, X. 6 Yu, X. 94 Zelizer, B. 82 Zhang, L. 27 Zhang, X. 6, 33, 56 Zhang, Y. 5, 9, 26 Zhao, Y. 19, 21, 26, 27, 148–49 Zhongnanhai demonstration 126

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