ABSTRACT
On 28 May 2009, Chinese Central Television news channel broadcast a sensational report on the dangers of Internet cafés (wangba) for the young. The news flash was timed to coincide with a nationwide crackdown on illegal or unlicensed Internet cafés, and indeed on local authorities that turn a blind eye to their existence (presumably in return for favours and bribes). The report opened with camera footage of a male teenager walking out of a side door in an unremarkable backstreet, taking a few steps and then staggering and falling out of sight behind a garbage can, apparently seriously ill. This disturbing footage was repeated four times in a seven-minute broadcast, which also contained interviews: with a teenager who used Internet cafés for gaming and other activities for ‘up to 11 hours a day’; younger school students who, as 13-year-olds are wont to do, reported with glee the gossip about their older peers accessing ‘bad stuff’ online and failing at school; and the mother of the young man in the footage who said that he had always been physically well in the past, so it had to be the Internet that was causing his school performance to drop and his health to disintegrate. Thus, causal links were made anecdotally between evidence of risk-taking and other developmental shifts in the behaviour of an adolescent male, on the one hand, and unsupervised access to the Internet, on the other. While this particular youth’s usage levels may indeed have been extreme, and while this may be symptomatic of a wider issue of Internet abuse, the easy assumption that the technology caused the problem is a concern. This crackdown was launched in May 2009, not coincidentally the month
preceding the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square on 4 June, and in the lead-up to the 1 October celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It followed the usual yundong systems of popular motivation and included emotionally framed investigative news reports, such as the one described above, and the publication of email and telephone hotlines for members of the public to report illegal wangba in their district. It is perhaps ironic that the ‘movement and action’ (yundong) method of harnessing public energy to pursue a policy aim, is employed in this
particular instance. Yundong work by identifying and fuelling a certain heightened perspective among the population, often with strong background political support, and then by encouraging mutual surveillance and community-based information gathering to seek out and deal with perpetrators. Yundong are successful as they are linked to development initiatives (Luo 2004), and are tied to rule-based systems of governance but have a sense of immediacy and urgency for added potency. The yundong, familiar since the 1950s, and used both to excoriate resistance and to promote it (Barmé 2003: 51), might be seen as a natural partner to the much vilified ‘viral gossip’ (Yu 2007b) that is made possible through social networking sites – and mobile Twitter mechanisms – occupied mainly by the young, but increasingly also by young adults. A punitive approach to managing contemporary youth cultures of media
use is not unfamiliar to other nations in the region. In Australia, there are frequent media panics around the idea of youth communications, often focused on particular schools (usually because they are deemed to occupy either end of the Australian class/race/gender spectrum and therefore open to the careless scrutiny and ruthless contempt of the self-defined politically correct classes), or extreme incidents which are reported as evidence of a pandemic of youth immorality caused by online access. The policy response has been to trial national firewall systems that will further impede fast broadband delivery while very possibly failing to capture the true (usually adult) villains of the Internet, who will doubtless use sophisticated secondary IP and peerto-peer systems to evade scrutiny (Dudley-Nicholson 2008). In Japan, despite the national policy of media ubiquity, there is adult disquiet at the idea of young people enjoying this omnipresent cloud of connection, which is seen rather as a means to surveil their activities through GPS, thus limiting both actual and virtual mobility in their daily lives. These various responses are couched in the language of ‘protection’, but also serve to undermine the cyber-mobility of the young in ways not unlike other regimes of spatial control which children experience at the hands of adult authorities (Fotel and Thomson 2004). Fotel and Thomson refer, among other processes, to the middle-class surveillance embedded in car culture: ‘mobility is often equated with driving a car – which children are obviously not permitted to do’ (ibid.: 2), but there is often a differently classed element to the processes of surveillance, which thus inhibit the social and educational mobility of the group as much as the autonomy of the individual. Free-flowing physical mobility, which both derives from and occasions social advantage – whether that means being able to drive from one end of the city to another, or to fly between states, provinces and transnationally – is limited by relative wealth. Migrancy, however, entails movement but not mobility in the same sense of control over one’s spatial arrangements, which are often highly constrained by poverty and prejudice. The four-month crackdown on illegal Internet cafés in China is especially focused in areas where migrant workers are clustered and where they and their children access the Internet for entertainment.
Most wangba in these areas are likely to be illegal, as only establishments with adequate surveillance software and hosting 200 or more computers on the premises can apply for a licence. In small, poor urban districts and in semi-rural townships, these requirements are unsustainable. Thus, those who are already disadvantaged by reasons of socio-economic position, and whose mobility is driven by extreme financial need, which entails an urban existence with significantly poorer access to schooling and the various advantages of a comfortable and well-resourced home base than that enjoyed by the established urban population, are further excluded from the possibility of self-taught digital literacy. I suggest that they are thus also deprived of areas of competency which might allow access to even minimal social, political and cultural power. What is more disturbing, this action criminalizes the notion of access to Internet competency for the poor, and the young poor in particular. Shutting down illegal wangba will hamper, but not stem, the urge to com-
municate and to seek ways to play and relax through technological platforms. An alternative might be deemed available in smaller personal technology, although here too there are problems of control and regulation. The mobile phone is a very successful technology, and mobile networking, through players such as the online chat program QQ, supports migrant workers who need to keep in touch with family relatively affordably, as well as acting as their portal for government e-information and for e-business. The shanzhai ji (‘banditphone’) phenomenon (Guo 2009; Tao 2009; Yang and Li 2008), whereby copies or adaptations of brand originals are sold at vastly decreased prices, helps younger people gain access to the application platforms of highend brands, and to the illicit sim cards available in many small street shops. As the authors of a 2008 blog comment, ‘The other interesting change of attitudes in youth (in big cities like Shanghai and Beijing) would be the diversified meaning of “status”’ (Yang and Li 2008); while big brands may embody a ‘status’ in conventional way, shanzhai phones may imply a ‘status’ of rebellion, and the iPhone a ‘status’ of innovation (ibid.). Such boundaryjumping forms of digital access may not comprise a sustained platform for the development of digital literacy, and access to international flows of knowledge transfer, but they do signal a determination to be included on terms that are not dictated by flows of value in the international market. Shanzhai are also symptomatic of a wider debate on how domestic categories of change and rebellion are understood in Chinese society. Cultural critics such as Tao (2009) and Guo (2009) have situated the shanzhai as a phenomenon with roots and effect deeper and more ambivalent than either a simple refusal of brand culture or a statement of creativity might suggest. They remind us that the etymology of the term is ‘a mountain stockade’, epitomized in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century vernacular epics of Song dynasty outlaw-heroes. In particular, of course, Shui hu zhuan (The Water Margin/ Outlaws of the Marsh), allies the shanzhai characteristics of parody, anarchy and ridicule – all of which arise from the displacements of exile, with an ironic
media and against the official declarations of social harmonization, which in their hubris are in themselves a parody of idealizations of the past. Shanzhai might for some audiences translate best as Robin Hood culture meets British satire Little Britain or, to cross a few borders, the Australian political outlaws in The Chaser’s War on Everything meets Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin from the 2008 United States election campaign. Like shanzhai bandits, shanzhai phone firms and their customers ‘have a discrete economy and organizational logic and structure, with internalized rules and notions of relationship’ (Tao 2009). Likewise, the youth on the peripheries of China’s success occupy spaces and pursue modes of access to the larger worlds of the Internet that are not harmonious, organized, or perfectly managed.
