Abstract
In this well-researched and well-organized book, Guobin Yang offers an engaging account of a new type of citizen activism in China. Sandwiched between the introduction and conclusion are eight empirical chapters, organized by Yang’s analytical frame of “multi-interactionism” (pp. 6–10). Chapter One provides an overview of how China has entered an age of contention since the 1990s, which differs profoundly from the 1989 student movement in form (more mundane), content (more diverse), and style (more playful and irreverent). Chapter Two details the tug-of-war between state control and citizen resistance over the freedom to inhabit cyberspace, with the outcomes largely being shaped by “issue resonance” and “issue-specific opportunity structure.” The following two chapters shift the discussion from state-society relationship to cultures of online activism. The current rituals, genres, and styles, Yang argues, constitute a sharp contrast to those of traditional social movements in China: a contrast between the prosaic/pragmatic/profane and the sublime/spiritual/sacred. In this new age, an online group might turn its “inaugural statement into a technical manual [about how to evade government censorship]” (p. 92), expressing not only an orientation towards practicality but, more broadly, a spirit of defiance against any claims to sacredness, even that of their own activism. Chapter Five describes a symbiotic relationship between e-commerce and e-contention. Chapters Six and Seven discuss civic associations and civic ideals among online communities, revealing an emergent, grass-roots civic identity that embraces the values of liberty, justice, and solidarity. The final empirical chapter documents the different approaches to online transnational activism, such as those taken by various INGOs, diasporic activists, and domestic protestors engaging in cross-border contention.
Arguably the first of its kind, Yang’s book makes several important contributions. With his impressive empirical data—collected through ethnographic research, content analysis, participant observation (by running his own blog), and survey research— Yang provides a long-awaited, extensive account of a new type of political activity that we all sense is noteworthy yet cannot fully grasp. While Yang never loses his empirical focus throughout the book, his sociological vision is broad and multifaceted. As he guides the reader through the landscape of Chinese online activism, Yang shows how this new space is embedded in, and shaped by, both the histories of social movements in China and the nation’s contemporary social and political transformations. As such, Yang’s book joins an important and timely debate about the potential for democratization in today’s China. Some readers will question whether some of Yang’s cases (e.g., a college girl’s online plea—later found to be not entirely truthful—for financial help for her ailing mother and the online community’s enthusiastic response) are not better described as civic engagement than activism per se. But the bottom line is that Yang’s analysis is a convincing illustration of a significant recent development—the growth of a Montesquieuian vision of civil society—that departs decisively from the earlier model of corporatist civil society in China. Even as civic groups and online activists find it difficult or undesirable to challenge the state directly, their very existence serves to diversify and decentralize the articulation of power and becomes the first line of defense against political authoritarianism. Yang concludes that “as civic engagements in unofficial democracy expands, the distance to an officially institutionalized democracy shortens” (p. 226).
Yang’s bold and optimistic prediction is inspiring, even as it raises questions that warrant further debate and research. First, it can be difficult to fully appreciate the political potential of China’s “unofficial democracy” without concretely discussing its limits. Yang makes it clear that, although certain political boundaries are not to be crossed, there is a sizable gray area where “netizens” vividly and artfully display their political and cultural imaginations. Yet given that there exist serious institutional barriers that have not been—and probably cannot be—overcome by political and cultural imaginations alone, one desires a fuller theorization of the limits of the capacity of online activism to “shorten the distance to officially institutionalized democracy.” And at the risk of subscribing to the irreverent online culture that Yang describes (I am submitting this review over email, after all), I also wonder: is not there some online activism that is nonchalant or cynical about democracy? How should we conceptualize the role of such activism in the broader picture of China’s current political culture?
Second, as the world of online activism that Yang conveys is explicitly diverse, how do we evaluate the political potential of different online activities? A blogger publishing her sexual diary online and a group of “cybernationalists” hacking into foreign websites are both protestors in some sense, but the political meanings of their actions are different, ranging far beyond their shared status of being “non-state.” How are we to conceptualize such differences?
On a related note, Yang’s account portrays a commoners’ activism that challenges social injustice and pursues a sense of recognition and belonging, but as feminist and Gramscian scholars often remind us, even in doing so commoners themselves may perpetuate forms of social injustice and misrecognition. Whereas Yang’s online world is populated by people with various gender, class, and ethnic backgrounds, it is less clear how their online cultures might be gendered, classed, or racialized. Asking questions about potential biases in online activism does not contradict the political energy that Yang so skillfully documents; rather, as Jeffrey Alexander argues, through inquiring about how civic groups overcome (or not) their ubiquitous exclusionary tendencies, we can more concretely describe the reflexive and self-expanding capacities of civil society.
Overall, The Power of the Internet in China offers us not only a rich study of Chinese online activism but also raises significant questions about China’s civil society. It will no doubt be an important book for students of political sociology and contemporary Chinese society alike.