The Party’s Greatest Ally

Navarria, Giovanni

doi:10.1007/978-981-13-3293-7_10

Giovanni Navarria²

254 Accesses

Abstract

The chapter explores the reasons behind the CCP’s fear of digital media and outlines its effects on the Party’s approach to the Internet. By closely examining the heavily contested field of digital networked media, the chapter highlights that the Party has been experimenting for some time with a variety of unusual quasi-democratic strategies, each of them designed to go beyond the need for censorship and win public consent. The chapter ultimately argues that the Internet is the Party’s greatest ally. Not only the Party has learned to adapt to the new environment and use it to its own advantage, to stave off resistance and, at times, erase memories, but it has also been successful in using the system to change its people’s attitude.

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Notes

1.
GreatFire 2014. On the weaknesses of China’s censorship system, see: MacKinnon 2009.
2.
About VPN in China see: Stone 2015.
3.
See: Paul Mozur 2012; and also Winter 2014, Chaps. 2, 3.
4.
The phrase fàn zuì 饭醉 (get rice-drunk) is a coded reference to ‘dinner gathering to discuss politics’ which is homonymous with ‘commit a crime’; the word ‘river crab’ (河蟹 - héxiè) which means ‘bully’, because it sounds similar to ‘harmony’ (和谐 héxié), the tag line of Chinese society as imagined by the Party, it is used in online discussion as code word to speak of censorship; similarly, ‘grass mud horse’ (草泥马 cǎonímǎ) which sounds like ‘f*** your mother’ (肏你妈 cào nǐ mā), is often used to criticise the Party (known colloquially as the mother). Q. Xiao 2015.
5.
See: J. Xu 2016.
6.
Global Times 2012; see also: Gao 2012.
7.
See CCTV News post at: https://bit.ly/2EabFXY.
8.
D. S. Y. Chen 2013; see also: Qingdao News 2013.
9.
Channel NewsAsia 2014.
10.
Mufson 2015.
11.
Xutao 2010.
12.
Xinhua News 2013.
13.
S. Chen 2013; Kaiman 2013.
14.
Global Times 2012.
15.
King, Pan, and Roberts 2013.
16.
Branigan 2012.
17.
King, Pan, and Roberts 2014, 891.
18.
China Daily 2013.
19.
Y. Chen 2013.
20.
Hassid 2012.
21.
50-cent is a reference to the amount paid to bloggers for each pro-government post; see: Q. Xiao 2010; see also: Xiaoyan Chen and Peng 2011, 40–45; and Shu 2015.
22.
Zhong 2018.
23.
Jing 2018
24.
Yuan 2019.
25.
Berger and Milkman 2012; Milkman and Berger 2014.
26.
The Economist 2015; BBC News 2015.
27.
See: Dikötter 2010, 292–305; Stavis 1990.
28.
Chunzhe 2011.
29.
Xinhua News 2011.
30.
Zhao Guohong 2011.
31.
Huang 2014; Hui and Wertime 2014.
32.
China News 2011.
33.
Li 2019.
34.
Hollingsworth 2017; for the full video of Ms. Yang’s speech, see: Hao Liu 2017.
35.
King, Pan, and Roberts 2016.
36.
CNNIC 2018.
37.
Xinhua News 2011.
38.
Website: http://wwwen.ipe.org.cn/.
39.
McMahon 2017.
40.
See: Yong and Jie 2005.
41.
Haizhou and Yinan 2008.
42.
See for instance the State Bureau for Letters and Calls website http://www.gjxfj.gov.cn/.
43.
D. Xu 2012.
44.
Hung 2013, 1, 76–77.
45.
The online Mayor’s mailboxes system has proved to be quite open to negative feedback. A 2004 study of the quality and frankness of the Yangzi Delta cities of Hangzhou and Nanjing found out that among the messages posted on the Mayors’ websites, ‘complaints usually outnumbered compliments and plaintive questions [were] frequent as well’, see: Hartford 2005, 234.
46.
Fukuyama 2012.
47.
Lim 2014.
48.
Yan 2019.
49.
Sudworth 2018.
50.
Rawnsley 2013.
51.
Sataline 2019; B. Xiao 2019.
52.
The Los Angeles Times 1989.
53.
Clinton 2000.
54.
China Daily 2010.
55.
Bandurski 2008.
56.
Xinhua News 2014.

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University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom
Giovanni Navarria

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Navarria, G. (2019). The Party’s Greatest Ally. In: The Networked Citizen. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3293-7_10

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3293-7_10
Published: 29 October 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
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