The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online

"Yang Guobin is looking at online activism dating back to the 1990s. He writes about a number of different cases, over the years, where average citizens, because of the ability to post online, have been able to effect change. He thinks that fact, in itself, is significant and, in a sense, democratizing with a small “d.” He goes back to the case of Sun Zhigang, the migrant worker who was beaten to death [while in police custody] in Guangzhou, he talks about the slave labour and brick kilns, cases where information spreading online helped lead to action, by generating attention, and putting on public pressure. He is not a cyber-utopian, but he’s saying that this is a real effect that the internet has had, it has empowered regular Chinese citizens. He recognizes it’s not just a rosy scenario, but he’s presenting an optimistic case for use of the internet in China. Overall his view is quite hopeful about where it is leading. He presents these examples within his own conceptual framework of “Where is the Chinese internet heading?”. I don’t think he offers a definitive answer. But he talks about the internet’s ability to build communities online, its changing the behaviour of official institutions, forcing the Party to react. He talks about the Party’s efforts at control meeting resistance, and that while this doesn’t necessarily lead to democracy or democratizing the political system, it changes the terms on which society is ruled, between the rulers and the ruled. It depends on how you put it. If you hit enough keywords, you’re pretty safe to assume that your tweet will be automatically deleted. But it’s pretty smart censorship. If you’re a person with two followers who no one cares about, if automatic keyword detection hasn’t found your post, it might just kind of sit there. It’s more likely to be discovered if it develops velocity online, gets retweeted, and more people see it. They pay much more attention, as they should, from their perspective, to people who have 30 million followers than those who have two. “If you hit enough keywords, you’re pretty safe to assume that your tweet will be automatically deleted. But it’s pretty smart censorship. If you’re a person with two followers who no one cares about… it might just kind of sit there. It’s more likely to be discovered if it develops velocity online, gets retweeted, and more people see it.” Certain types of post will automatically get deleted, but all evidence we have indicates that there is a human element to all of this. There’s a lot of human individuals involved in reading through tweets and deciding whether something should be deleted. There’s hundreds [of employees] at any large internet site, and probably a lot more than that at Sina and Weibo. What they’re looking out for is whether your tweet actually leads to collective action or generates some sort of more collective sentiment online. Censorship has become pretty fine-tuned, despite the fact they have to keep adding sensitive words to their list. You can use the word “freedom,” or say “this is a free society” or “we should have a free society,” but it depends on the context. If it’s about a very sensitive issue, it might get deleted, and if it’s not, and just gets popular, people liked it, they’re probably going to let it slide. It’s a little bit too general to nail down."