Media Storms in China
In her forthcoming debut book Online News-prompted Public Spheres in China (2023), the young Chinese scholar Xuanzi Xu does much more than provide details of a new study of the social media reception of news in China during the past decade. She convincingly shows why the term public sphere is so important, and why we need to rethink its meaning when making sense of a paradox of global importance: in a country where information flows are tightly regulated and controlled by state officials, public spheres regularly erupt, sometimes with serious political consequences.
Xu acknowledges, with plenty of evidence on her side, that in China strict state controls flourish in the ever-expanding field of digital communications media. China now accounts for more than one-quarter of the world’s four billion internet users. Internet penetration rates vary among regions, but over 70 percent of China’s population spend on average more than twenty-eight hours per week online, more time than on any other medium. Yet at all levels of the political system, party-state officials understandably worry that the more citizens go online, the more their power monopoly is open to challenge. They fear what they call ‘social chaos’ (shè huì dòng dàng). That is why there are constant government attempts to regulate, censor, and manipulate information flows. Xu is familiar with the well-known methods, which extend from algorithmic filters that ban users, keywords and websites, ‘rumour control’ and ‘sudden incident’ units designed to ‘guide the people’ and ‘maintain stability’, and meddling with the lives of dissenting citizens by way of warnings issued over cups of tea, trials and hefty fines, and years spent behind bars.
The central thesis of this book is that there’s no permanent calm inside China because public complaints, political jokes, euphemism, sarcasm and satire triggered by official news reports are chronic features of everyday life inside a country that is fast becoming a global power. Xu demonstrates that millions of China’s web people (wàngmìn) have learned the arts of harnessing a wide range of digital tools, including smartphones, tablets, computers, and sophisticated software, to spread their messages to wider publics, sometimes with dramatic effects. Media storms are the result.
Xu explains that these publics are not to be understood in rationalist terms. Digital publics comprise online gatherings of citizens concerned with their own well-being and wider matters of public good, but they are most often not spaces of calm reason and seminar-style deliberation orientated towards mutual understanding and the discovery of truth (Jürgen Habermas). They are usually rowdy battlefields, zones of mockery and satire, frequently laced with great tensions among opponents and outrage and anger at perceived idiocies and injustices. Xu emphasises that this carnivalesque online resistance isn’t to be seen as simply the refusal of censorship. Lives online are linked. Citizens never walk alone. Every critical comment about officials’ incompetence, every video or image about their abuse of power, every single murmur and whisper of discontent, has the potential to go viral, to become a digital mutiny. The officials find these complaints by citizens difficult to control. Their social media content is copied, shared, commented on, mashed and mixed with other postings. Xu notes that as government censorship tactics grow more sophisticated, so do citizens’ strategies of cat-and-mouse resistance, which sometimes have swarm effects, quickly turning into rowdy media tempests that the rulers anxiously call ‘mass incidents’ (qún tĭ xìng shì jiàn).
These digital publics are often locally dispersed and usually short-lived, but sometimes they quickly spread through daily life in the form of media events that rattle officials and may even rock the foundations of the whole political order. Xu insightfully analyses an intriguing selection of controversies on such platforms as Weibo, Zhihu and WeChat, the most widely used online platform. Her ‘pluralist and constructivist’ approach helps us make sense of other recent cases, among them the public strife and struggle aroused by the arrest and trial of Chongqing’s Communist Party boss Bo Xilai (March 2012); the huge public debate triggered in mid-2015 by Under the Dome, an online documentary about pollution from coal-fired power plants that was watched by at least 150 million Chinese viewers, then later blocked by Chinese government censors; the mid-2018 vaccine scandal centred on Changsheng Biotechnology Company, whose baibaipo vaccine was found to be sub-standard; and the public disgruntlement and altercation triggered by the 2022 lockdown and paralysis of the city of Shanghai.
The great significance of this book is the way it asks questions about why these wild media storms happen, in other words why the ruling officials fail to prevent digital publics from disturbing the semblance of political normality. Xu’s unorthodox answer is compelling. Her theory of ‘news-prompted publics’ notes that the appearance of digital publics is often highly context-dependent; the distributed quality of digital communication networks combined with the courage, technical skill, playful sense of humour and sheer determination of WeChat users are important drivers as well. But something much deeper is at work, she powerfully shows. It has to do with the dialectics of news production and news sharing.
Xu teaches us that news is not simply news. News in China upends the standard cliches about the worthlessness and stupefying effects of news. News is not to be understood as mere corporate entertainment, or government propaganda. When people embrace news, mistrust news, or find news to be abhorrent, they sometimes go and make their own. News then becomes information that others had neither anticipated nor wanted to communicate. News can quickly become bad news. When that happens, government censors may try to use a range of sophisticated techniques for sifting through, manipulating and blocking the personal data of millions of citizens, but the reality is that a single post can stop officials in their tracks, embarrass them, even force them to recalculate their power position. News can yield great surprises, Xu concludes. A media storm is often just a quick click away, along with confirmation of the time-tested rule that power is the ability not just to act, but to act in concert, together with like-minded others.