SURGE US-China Symposium 2022: Culture Panel

okay hello everybody um and welcome to the cultural panel for serge's 14th annual china u.s symposium it's great to see all you here and i hope you're excited to learn more about from chinese digital media and its interesting role in china-us relations my name is megan starcis i'm a sophomore here at tufts planning to major in international relations and economics and i am the panel lead for today's socio cultural discussion i'm also currently the marketing director for tough search hello everyone my name is jake rubinstein and i'll be co-hosting with megan today i'm currently a freshman um here at tufts majoring in international relations we're so excited to have you all here today hello everyone my name is caitlin wells and i'll also be co-hosting this panel with megan and jake i'm a first-year student planning on majoring in international relations and civic studies it's a great honor to be able to learn from the fantastic speakers we have coming up we hope you enjoy the panel so with that i'm just going to give you all some more context about what exactly we will be discussing so as china enters a new globalized era in terms of communication and social media the question of how the chinese government will manage and engage in its evolving digital culture is a matter of pressing concern its decisions to censor and contain certain types of digital content will not only affect those in china but also the rest of the world because china's cultural influence continues to expand beyond the scope of the sinosphere this panel will explore the multifaceted capacities of chinese digital media platforms like weibo and the relevant cultural implications on chinese society as well as the american perceptions of that media however the panelists here are free to discuss any aspect of this topic that they find particularly interesting the first speaker we have today is daria berg from the university of saint gallin although she's not able to be here to present virtually today we will be presenting her pre-recorded lecture over zoom she has a philosophy doctorate in chinese studies from university of oxford and is chair professor of chinese culture and society at the university of saint galan in switzerland she has published extensively on chinese literature art popular culture and cultural history including her monograph carnival in china a reading of the shinshur inuintron some of her edited works include reading china fiction history and the dynamics of discourse the quest for gentility in china and transforming book culture in china her monograph women in the literary world in early modern china won the international convention of asia scholars book prize their 2015 specialist publication accolades her current research explores urban culture in contemporary china including new digital media literate literature art gender audio visual culture and internet culture the second speaker we have is being from the london school of economics she is a professor in the department for media and communications where she directs the masters of sciences double degree program in global media and communications with fudan university she is also the co-director of the lse furan global public policy research center her research interests include gender in the media the political economy of media industries communication governments governance and comparative media studies she has published widely on these topics in leading academic journals from 2020 to 21 she served as a senior fellow of global governance teachers 2035 organized by the global public policy institute in berlin under the sponsorship of the bosch foundation her book the politics of chinese media consensus and contestation was published by paul grab in early 2018 she is currently working on another monograph under contract with columbia university press about ai industries in china our final speaker is florian schneider from the university of leiden he holds a phd from sheffield university and is a senior university lecturer in the politics of modern china at the leiden university institute for area studies he is the managing editor of age escape digital asia and director of the leiden asia center also the author of three books these include staging china the politics of mass spectacle china's digital nationalism and visual political communication in popular chinese television series in 2017 he was awarded the leiden university teaching prize for his innovative work as an educator his research interests include the questions of governance political communication and digital media in china as well as international relations in the east asian region wonderful so the way this panel will work is after i'm done speaking each panelist has about 10 to 15 minutes for a presentation with a slideshow and other visual tools they choose to use um if you in the audience have any questions that come up during any of the presentations please feel free to leave them in the chat and we'll address them after everybody is done speaking um then the panelists will have a chance to address each other's remarks i'll ask them a few guiding questions for discussion and then the last 20 minutes will be used as a q a um so without further ado we're going to allow professor berg to present first so i will play her recorded video is everybody able to see this oh um i have to reshare yes story telling hello and welcome to my presentation on celebrity and post-socialist china is transmedia storyline telling the authors are daria berg uh from the university of saint island in switzerland and judges strafella from pallaki university in olives the research area is connected to the areas of celebrity culture creative industries and cultural entrepreneurship women entrepreneurs and trans media storytelling the aim of this research is to understand celebrity culture and the cultural transformation in post-socialist china's media sphere and their social political implications research questions include how do china's celebrities use the different media social traditional etc for cultural production self-fashioning and communication the sources are printed media tv visual arts etc web-based literature blogs and micro blogs the best set is an analysis of print and web-based sources and has to do with both the contents and also the frames to draw connections to the commercial context market reforms and cultural commodities play an important role here is there a return to the republican era or even early modern china market principles pervade the cultural sphere in the late 1980s and early 1990s are there seats of a creative class this is marginal to the system and stigmatized by intellectuals the eleven's five-year plan in 2006 said that homegrown creativity appears as an economic policy imperative there's partial reform consumers and cultural entrepreneurs are between politics and the market there are so-called social benefits between has discovered the value of the individual creative self-expression and grassroots energy in transforming chinese economy and society jin wang says consumption celebrity is an important concept in this context what fiction prince fiction and non-fiction about life in the culture of consumption and are the texts that we are looking at the author um of the book the society of spectacle guidebook describes consumption celebrity celebrity he says is a key element of the panelization of the modern world one example is only bobby the internet writer and whose real name is lydia she's the best-selling novelist a blogger editor and columnist a photographer and more recently a buddhist recluse who now writes no longer under the name anybody or any baby but which is a buddhist name modern on traditional women writers and she also writes similarly in this case as authors who've also retreated into reclusion the consum assumption celebrity finds all of her persona linked with consumption hon han is another example of consumption celebrity he's a high school dropout who appears in the media as a multi-personality he's a best-selling teenage novelist a car racing champion the world's number one blogger a public intellectual a singer and film director also named as a playboy or a consumption celebrity all his persona are linked with consumption and he also ranks among china's top 10 best-paid writers the propaganda department's honors are something that we can look here and in this slide out of 30 top personalities the only two or four women if you look at the years 2016 to 2019 for example the stage director wang chaka the tv producer akawa sun mei the dance show produces um junction the list of personalities are praised for contribution to tourism the local economies and the official media etc are they marginal above you see images of the video blogger papi tiang on the left tin sing a dancer and choreographer in davos at the intersection of culture and cash that's where elizabeth's curry has placed such celebrities the creation and conversationalization of cultural products marketing business ventures and self-promotion play important roles here and the celebrity has both an ideological and economic role it is about exchanging cultural goods while adding to the menus of beliefs mindsets and cultural preferences from which others choose here i am referring to joel marcus research as i mentioned um is the pen name of lydia she became famous in on the literary website on the internet um under the banyan tree and she became one of the pioneers of online literature in 1997 she published a short story galbia vivian under the pseudonym of any baby or anybody she said she had no publishing connections playing around mar an important concept in the literature of the reform era writing out of bought them just for fun around 2000 she actually changed from a web writer or a hack uh esther shaw to a more prestigious print author or tortilla by publishing her books only in print after um that the year 2000. she has now about 15 books and is the member of the official chinese writers association she's also active as an editor translator colonist and so on on social media she is known for her book promotion and self-fashioning as a buddhism-inspired traveler and i managed to get an interview with her also she normally never gets interviews so i was very happy to be able to interview her she told me so once i was able to get my writings publishers books i just stopped my online writings not only was this a successful move from online to the then more prestigious print and rebranding it also points to the dense and complex connections between multiple traditional and digital media in today's mature media media sphere another example is shooting lei the actress film director and producer writer editor and blogger from my father and i um to go la lago there's a range of diverse characters that she impersonated and played that hint at the real life shooting lane transmediality as an all-around creative promotional strategy has been and character has been characterizing her career it's not just products but transmedia celebrity her trans media celebrity persona that is important for her marketing and so fashioning a shelter inside is a shooting lace that is shooting lace individuality and personal life in dominguez with her film rose and together create the shooting lay phenomenon so sitting there can also be investigated in the context of the transmedia celebrities here i would like to point to a better course distinction between the empirical author the model author and a character and and or as a narrator with trump's media strategy and the social media for example the illusion of contact with the author there's a flattening of the multi-layered characters onto the identity of the awesome both sides of the cultural entrepreneur's identity are the promotion of the product and the promotion of the mindset or lifestyle for example a strong woman character more than an um lifestyle exotic romance and so on another example of a cultural entrepreneur is the woman artist sophie she's a multimedia artist and international art celebrity she won a chinese contemporary art award as best young artist in 2006 and best artist award in 2016. salvi's art reflects on china's social cultural transformation from a detached sometimes satirical standpoint she wants to comment not criticize the new york times reports this points at globalization in internet age for example her work on renminbi city and one of the themes that she discusses or hints at is the alien nation on social media or instagram she shapes her artistic storytelling while projecting an image of a successful global artist here is an example from her instagram shining a light on chinese workers room number one and number two and normal art are works commissioned and exhibited by gucci sauerfe's other project was the bmw art car number 18 called unmanned which was commissioned by bmw it augmented reality uh in her art and she also um added a short film on a car the w a bmw art car number 18 which is based on the bmw m6 gt3 is inspired by the speed of racing cars and the tremendous changes of chinese society over the past decades she says on her website taofas it's obvious case we can see how most experimental of creative industries have broken separation between the elite serious culture and intense commercialization and social media promotion most avant-garde cultural languages and darkest commentary on modern society are fully integrated in the market logics of the creative industries to conclude there's a relative marginalization the commercial limelight in which these celebrities find themselves versus the lack of political cooperation there's a complex relation between traditional and new media such as the digital media with regard to symbolic capital and creative activities transmediality appears in cultural creation or communication and the shaping of the cultural entrepreneurs public persona as a multimedia personality artistic experimentation appears as a function of cultural entrepreneurship thank you very much great we are so grateful for professor berg's participation in the seminar given her very busy schedule a fascinating presentation as always so again thank you to professor berg now let's welcome professor mung who will be presenting next okay let me try to share screen first is it okay for you guys now oh good all right well the nice thing about doing a pre-recorded lecture is that you can make sure that you don't go over time um i i do have a tendency of talking too long though so and jake maybe you could remind me if i reach the 12 13 minutes point and then i will know what time you need when to wrap up um so my talk today is based on a project that i recently completed with two phd students about the experience of chinese overseas students during the pandemic and when jake extended the invitation to take part in this symposium i thought it's related to the overall theme of the panel in two ways one is because the overall theme of the symposium has to do with final us relation and engagement and what we did in this project is to conduct in-depth interviews with students who were studying um either in the uk or the in in the u.s during the pandemic and a lot of the questions have to do with how their views of the different political system and also their personal experience with xenophobia with anti-china sort of shaped also their their value during this this time so that that's one connection there and secondly we call this mediated pandemic experience also because in our interview there's a large chunk of the the topic guide actually asked about people's digital media usage because in a way this current pandemic compared with all the previous public health crisis is intensely mediated in an unprecedented way and for overseas chinese students because of the prevalence of social media usage they basically live in different media environments so they get the mainstream media from their host country but also they are closely monitoring and also very intensely engaged with social media accounts on wechat on weibo and constantly also getting messages from their parents and family back home so it's in a way it's quite a unique mediated experience for these um chinese students um so that's that's why i think maybe it's it's it will be relevant and interesting to talk about this project although i i do realize you know given the nature of this symposium i'm not this is not exactly a research conference so i'm gonna skip some of the parts that have um you know focus more on the the methodology and the research design um but first just to set the thing a little bit and thinking about the context um i think you know there are a few things to note here one is the outbreak of the kobe 19 takes place at the high point of um neoliberal globalization when both global interconnection and the backlash against it on various fronts have reached an unprecedented level um already you know before the pandemic there was discussion about the so-called decoupling of the us and china there was a trade war there's also the um the the talking about whether we are witnessing um [Music] cold war 2.0 so it's uh you know really two sides of the same coin we see in um unprecedented interconnection but also there's very strong backlash against it and economically and geopolitically um compared to the 2003 stars epic epidemic china now also occupies a very different position in the global capitalist orders um and for the overseas chinese students as they and and i you know this is also partly the reason why i um started this project i started this project really because i was witnessing um the kind of experience that my chinese students were going through especially around 2020 so in the early 2020s when china was the epic center and chinese students were experiencing all the anxiety and they had to make the difficult decision about where whether they should wear masks coming to the class because at that time it's not happening you know it's not really erupting in europe yet um and they were also there was also a very you know ugly racist um attack and racial abuse happening in the uk in the at the beginning of 2020 because chinese students were somehow considered being you know infectious contagious or simply because they were wearing musk but then as the epic center shifted from china as things were put under control in china and then the epic center shifted to europe and as uk went into lockdown they then also experience also intense anxiety about whether they should stay here um or um and especially after all the teaching went online and whether they should go back home and if they decide to go back home is it possible to do that some of them bought multiple air tickets just to make sure that they can finally make the trip home so this was really um you know partly the project was really triggered by what i witnessed as as the the the struggle and the stress and anxiety that my chinese students were going through at that time but putting this um you know in an academic context the questions we are asking um in this project is what have been the lived experience of chinese overseas students during the kobe 19 pandemic especially in relation to racism xenophobia and nationalism and what are the main discrepancies and incongruences that chinese overseas students have to negotiate in their mediated understanding of the crisis as i mentioned at the beginning because you know they are getting information from both media outlets in their host country and also from their their home country um and also because of the the omnipresence of social media um you know they were basically if they choose to they can stay online 24 7. and i'm going to talk about later how they then learn to manage their own media consumption as a way also to manage anxiety and and stress um and then have their assessment of the political system in both china and their host country in any way affected by the pandemic and this of course is the continuation of the the first research question about how you know their um they experience um racism xenophobia and nationalism and putting this in a bit of a theoretical context so basically there are two sort of theoretical threats here one is uric backs notion of risk society and the extent to which the risk of society should mobilize a cosmopolitan cooperation and also to mobilize a cosmopolitan mindset so his argument is that you know as the the anticipation of global risk could result in everybody an everyday global awareness among citizens of modern societies and give rise to cosmopolitan in imperatives of cooperation um so this is you know of course you know he his notion of cosmopolitan imperative has both a normative and analytical dimension and what we want to ask is to problemize this and ask the question to what extent or whether this has really you know the current global crisis um has contributed to um the rise of cosmopolitan imperative and another sort of um theoretical threat here is is about diaspora and media consumption and especially at this day and age of social media pervasiveness how have the diaspora population negotiated their national identity and political legions with vocabularies and discursive resources provided by both you know media from their home country and also media in the host country um and you know so based on this um sort of deriving from these two theoretical threats uh we want to better understand how is the current public health risk uh makes it made sense of by an elite group that epitomizes mobility and connectivity and we do recognize very much the the the very strong elite band in our sample uh because these are students um studying in um elite uk and u.s universities and some of them even started their overseas education from secondary school so we are talking about a particular group that used to take mobility and connectivity for granted and then suddenly during the pandemic this mobility and connectivity are halted and which also prompt a lot of deliberation and reconsideration and how individuals navigate the young incongruous and uncertainty by piecing together very diversity resources in an effort to articulate a coherent narrative so i'm going to skip this um slides about the researches with design and um but just to note that basically the topic guide has three main components and and one of these components is asking about their daily media usage um and i'll also skip this slide about the sample but generally we try to achieve a balance in terms of gender major and also the length of study overseas but but as you can see here we have quite a number of interviewees who had more than five years of studying so this would um often include part of the secondary education and um you know this is this is a quote from um this is with an article published um during the pandemic um so the um colombia-based um historian adam tooth and he was saying uh that back is the most important maybe sociologists that could help us understand the current crisis and in this quote um in particular um he talked about how back was talking about you know in contemporary risk a global risk society there is this almost this demand for individuals to acquire more knowledge acquire more information and to become the so-called private expert on a very complicated issue so partly um you know the our interview question dealing with media usage and media consumption really highlights um the cost of becoming the private experts on the risk of modernization and in this case the pandemic now generally speaking in terms of media literacy and media usage across the board because of the nature of the demographic feature of this this group we see a very high level of information literacy and a fairly sophisticated pattern of media consumption and often when we ask them where they get their news from they were able to make uh this distinction between different types of um english language news media and they are critical of institutional media on both sides on both the their home country and the host country but even more so of the mainstream news media in the u.s and the uk and i think partly this has to do with the fact that it's a given that they understand that media environment in china is heavily censored so but many of them said at least when they come to study in the uk or or in the us they were expecting something different but they were many of them were bitterly disappointed during the pandemic especially at the beginning of the pandemic because of the way that international news media reported on the situation in china and in terms of social media usage also they demonstrate very um nuanced understanding of different types of social media platforms in terms of you know i go to this media platform for this type of information but i don't go there for such and such so i go to xiaohungshui if i want some everyday you know live daily life tips but i would go to juhu if i want to find more reliable informational content so they were able to to make these distinctions and this this very um you know because of the the very high level of media literacy and information literacy this daily curation of media consumption is often deployed as a protective mechanism to shield themselves from negative feelings such as anger distress or anxiety and in reality these students experience often an acute sense of fragmentation confusion and contradiction while living abroad during the pandemic as much as these feelings were psychologically discomforting and emotionally draining they also enabled um opportunities of introspection and reflection which is um sort of the the second part of our um the result of our data analysis so we call it the the personal is is political so you know in the meantime as they experience anxiety trauma um and and and all this um you know the the stress there was also a sense of political awakening um and this happened of course not just during the pandemic some of them said it happened after they leave mainland china um and one of the the interviews said here um you know when i was in china i was discouraged to to talk about political issues but when i was studying in hong kong i suddenly realized that i am part of the political discussion of other people so there's no way for me even to escape this this discussion um they also um feeling there is also you know a sense of feeling stuck in an increasingly polarized world in the sense that they feel that they are constantly compelled um or demanded to take sides um and often they say you know the issue is more complicated i don't always want just what want to to take sides but i'm you know called upon all the time to do that and they as a coping strategy they try to separate the political from the personal but of course this is not always possible and actually in the article probably this is a very long quote you won't be able to to read through it given the limited time but in the article we had quite a few lengthy on original quotes from interview transcripts is when our interviewees really open up and talk about their personal experience with um with race with with class and sometimes also this experience is also really um closely connected with their the intimate relationship that they went through so you know partly as a because we are talking again i'm talking about an elite group who have very high level of cognitive capacity so in the middle of this kind of confusion um and the um you know the stress there is also a conscious effort trying to articulate a counter-harmonic discourse trying to trying to make sense of all this and trying to also make sense of the discrepancy and the incongruence that they went through after leaving china and after going through the pandemic um so we were able to schematize um what we call four types of counter-her demonic discourses um the first one is the you know at the most surface level the criticism of the political system in the u.s or the uh the the uk and the um you know the also the shifting boundary of multiple identities and this is related to what i said earlier about this discontent with the imperative of taking sides in the polarized world and um the the four types of um counter harmonic this courses we identified um there's a there's a tiny slice among all our um 45 interviews there was actually one vocal trump supporter um and he was able to articulate a a you know a reason for for for being that um and he was also very much aware that he said no i'm probably in the minority and i don't always tell my friends that i support um trump um and there's also anoth a second type which has is is also more or less in the minority among our interviewees but um it's of larger number than the first one that those are the people who were able to link the racial problem and racial tension in the u.s or the uk with the class issue and sometimes they say you know this is not about race it's about class and and they were actually able to claim that i'll actually now i'm rediscovering marx that even though i was sort of indoctrinated in my middle class politics textbook back in china and i never liked it and suddenly now i'm rediscovering so so that's that's the second um type of counter-hardmonic of course and the third one is what we call the status developmentalism people and this is probably i would say more in the mature more or less in the majority and this is also the group that has the strongest the nationalist tendency in the sense that the way they evaluate different political systems is based on economic growth um and the ability to govern or the efficiency to govern so in that you know regard when they compare they um you know the the effort the government-led effort against the pandemic it's quite clear for them you know which which side or which system is is better but there's also another i would say probably um also in the minority um an articulation of or more of a social democratic value those are the people who were questioning this developmentalism mindset um and um some of them were even saying that i don't understand how people in china nowadays can evaluate everything based on economic development that's just insane so so these are the people who are questioning whether a good society requires more than the efficiency of governance and economic growth but they are also very critical of the new liberalism in that the witness they witnessed in um us and the uk um so in in conclusion i know i'm going over time um we we would um conclude that leaving china has been an enabling and empowering experience but um returning for many of them when they we asked about their longer-term plan um returning is an increasingly desirable option for many and the pandemic serves as a prism through which overseas chinese students reflect on a host of interesting intersecting issues including race national identity and ideological affiliation and the elite population has more resources undoubtedly including the capacity of buying multiple tickets just to make sure that they can eventually travel back home and they are definitely privileges both that they have the both the material and the intellectual privilege in mitigating the global uh risk um but they are also experiencing and some of them were already able to articulate the frustration with um neoliberal globalization and their very critical comments on liberal democracy so i think it remains an open question if we think about you know these are the people who are going to occupy um you know important positions in the future and think about the sort of longer term implication of of this experience i think a lot of the issues remain open-ended depending on you know how their trajectories develop but um this is the gist of our study thank you for your time and attention thank you so much professor hmong we really appreciate it that was a fantastic presentation our final speaker will be professor schneider from the university of leiden um you may go ahead and share your screen all right well let me go ahead and uh see if you can see this my prezi here just gonna switch to full screen uh yeah so let me switch to a topic uh that is slightly different from what we've heard so far i think you're going to notice a whole lot of connections in the moment i'll try to stick to 15 minutes i myself work mostly on digital nationalism but today i wanted to reflect a little bit more broadly about what happens when people come together online what kind of community formations we see coming together and what that has to do with politics specifically uh in the cases where the community sentiments turn into a kind of tribalism the sort of thing that you do indeed see in nationalist movements so just to get us started i wanted to create a little bit of a connection to politics more broadly and to give you a brief rundown of why looking at popular culture at uh subculture groups might have something to do with politics and i'm going to start us off with the us so that you have that connection and then you'll see in a moment uh what we might uncover in the chinese instances uh so uh this is just a brief relationship diagram here from the 2014 uh infamous gamergate case you know the age that you might know this right so um in 2014 there was this uh moment where um right-wing gamers were criticizing women in gaming and gaming in the gaming industry uh designers and journalists under the guise of trying to criticize game journalism and supposedly the corruption happening in gaming journalism there was really just a misogynist rant against women in gaming to the extent that a lot of women were receiving death threats you can see this here at the bottom freight threats of rape uh was absolutely horrific uh and it was um at the time by a lot of gamers brushed away as oh yes either boys being boys was just it's just games and a lot of people were if they weren't in the gaming industry and and plugged in with cultures and subcultures weren't really paying a whole lot of attention to this but they should because as uh subsequent research and especially investigative journalism has shown a lot of the themes that have come up in that 2014 movement directly informed other right-wing themes and connected with groups like the so-called alt-right or the incel movement if you're not familiar the people who think the men who think that their inability to find a sexual partner is somehow involuntary and is caused by evil women who are all inferior to men so an absolutely misogynist group of people um some even qualify them now as a terrorist movement uh because they're out to murder women and then there's the maga movement which has an interesting intersection with some of these groups as well and all of that provides a foundation of right-wing discourses and practices and cultural themes that all provide the feeding ground for what we've seen most recently and that is not to say that the gamergate people are the same people who are here in this picture storming the capital but just to say that they have provided much of the foundation that then later in terms of discourses symbols uh practice and so on uh lived on in these other more egregious contexts or similarly egregious but now very very political context now let's turn to the chinese case where fandom practices are uh in some cases even more extreme than what you see in europe or america i mean fan groups are often very emotional and engaged and [Music] often also very activists all around the world but in china these dynamics often take on a whole new dimension and a good example is what happened in 2020 i don't know if you're familiar uh with uh xiaojian who's a famous uh actor soap opera actor really uh he was in a tv series called the untamed which had hormone erotic undertones and was a big hit and so a lot of his fans started writing gay fan fiction about him and about his character uh on archive of our own which is a fan fiction uh website and another group of his fans got so upset with this because they didn't want their icon to have this gay label that they petitioned the government and agitated against archive of our own until the ccp shut down access from within china to this resource for cultural production and so the archive of our own folks were infuriated and there was a backlash calling for a boycott of the actor um and of the boycott of all the brands he was associated with doing significant amount of damage and was really just a toxic uh slugfest between these two groups of fans uh over who owned the symbol of xiaojian and what it should mean and there's so much to unpack i don't have enough time to unwrap at all in terms of the political economy in china and how all of this works but what i wanted to draw attention to you here is how some of the practices that we see on display here have been on display also much earlier and all across cultural forums in china when fandoms emerge and how that can be connected to politics and for example also to nationalism so my question here i want to discuss with you is how do digital media interact with tribalism in china and with these kind of community sentiments and i myself as i said work a lot on nationalism so you also see the nationals and then spilling into the streets for example when uh diaspora students in this case in london uh protest um this was uh on hong kong and uh we've heard from professor among the the complexities of how people try to come to grips with their chineseness in often quite hostile environments but a lot of that is also underscored by activities online and here's another example this is a satire i suppose rather tasteless one that appeared in a danish broadsheet at the start of the pandemic which casts the prc's national flag as on these viral particles this did not go over well with a lot of people especially of course people from the prc the ambassador to denmark the chinese ambassador even wrote a follow-up piece in which he was attacking essentially the danish people for having heard the chinese people's feeling you have to always imagine the scare quotes i'm putting in here uh so that's already quite interesting that state active state officials would get involved and have opinions on this and voice them but of course the cultural sphere was very quickly ablaze with retaliation with chinese uh internet users creating memes and mocking the danes and using the danish flag in various more or less offensive ways to drive home that point but then there was a backlash to the backlash as well especially among people from taiwan from hong kong people who are critical of the prc who picked up the original symbolism of the flag and the viral particles and then reproduced it in all sorts of other cultural products this is a video game that was very briefly available in april 2020 on the steam platform a very simple game really but um yeah offensive racist really uh pretending or making you pretend that you are murdering all the evil chinese zombie folks who are trying to leave the prc to spread the virus on i don't know why how it fits that you are playing the virus but yes that's that was the premise and it got pulled relatively quickly because it uh doesn't meet the the platform criteria but i have also looked at the discussions around that game in the comment sections while it was still available and you very quickly see these entrenched groups uh forming each defending its own side not really having any conversation with each other and you know what does that remind us of so overall these kind of fan practices are important because they already establish a set of uh of strategies of tactics of how to behave online how to agitate and how to achieve things that includes doxing people so identifying who is doing things online and identifying where they are available in the real world for retaliation bullying people cyber bullying informing on people in sensitive context so that their employees that their employers might punish them as employees or drowning out opposition or sometimes called the water army and we can talk a little bit more also about the 50 cent army the more official people who are going online to defend the prc but there's a lot of voluntary defenders as well and they use a lot of these strategies that people have developed in fandom communities now i want to say a thing to you about really three factors that i think drive how these kind of dynamics can turn especially toxic how they congeal into communities and what that might mean not just in china but also for the rest of us both in terms of how maybe people in the us deal with chinese online culture and interact with it but also how we might deal with our own internet cultures in various different places so let me just uh so three three points one is technology one is political economy and one is the state let me start with technology and just point out to you that communities are pretty much always constructed right they're often imagined uh when we see and know people face to face that has a very specific dynamic but as soon as we're talking about people who you don't all know all communities are imagine whether it's you know all the all the students at tufts university you don't know everyone right that's an imagined community but so are nations uh so our fan groups so they already have something in common they really exist because people are circulating symbols and engaging in rituals with each other that are recognizable to others and that creates this uh illusion really in people's minds that they all have something in common and that illusion can become real because people are able to leverage it and mobilize around it in certain moments under certain conditions what's important when people share these discourses these symbols is that they're using media and so the medium matters as a delivery mechanism i'm always reminded of marshall mcluhan's famous victim that the medium is message uh it matters that something happens uh in social media rather than just in the newspaper or on television the technology has its own affordances that it enables so um this is another famous historian of technology who said that technology is neither good nor bad so we should be careful with technological determinism but it's also not mutual right design matters we design things for certain purposes and the way something is designed like facebook the fact that you can have a angry button or sad button changes the dynamic of a conversation compared to if you only had like buttons for instance right and so that is true for technology all around and certainly also in the chinese context this is an example for me studying uh sino-japanese relations and how they played out especially in 2012 when there was a major dispute between the two countries and i was looking at uh issues in the east china sea as one of my cases the diauria islands in china senkaku islands and japan and if you put diarrhoea islands into baidu which is the chinese search engine comparable in a way to google in terms of certainly it's market share it's very influential if you put uh dao into the search engine what comes up among other things is a widget that shows you the weather on these rocks which doesn't make any sense because you cannot go there it doesn't matter other than to maybe some fishermen what the weather there might be like and even the fishermen might have trouble uh going to those waters considering their controversial nature and yet you get the impression here that it's just a place just like shanghai or beijing it goes even a little bit further by the actual website chinese weather whether logging this as the dyawi islands china if you speak chinese you can see here that the autocomplete automatically adds this as china and it even registers the yawi islands as a city district bizarrely in fujian province which makes very little sense uh but this tells you already a little bit about how seemingly banal uh little choices which are informed by a combination of social interaction and technological interaction someone inputting something algorithms doing the rest creates an impression that people may not even notice is quite political here's another example a little bit older one from 2010 but you see comments like this on the internet of course on all internets all the time this is a hate comment by someone commenting on the news paper article on the nanjing massacre and writing that you know anyone uh who kills a japanese person will receive a thousand rmb you know once this person has some money and then just says kilco kill over and over so i'm not showing you this to imply that everyone on china's internet produces this kind of garbage that's not the case uh this might just be a quite exceptional comment in many ways but when these kind of discourses emerge they sometimes float to the top of algorithmically governed platforms as is the case here you can see on the top right a red stamp and even if you don't read chinese you can see this must be important it means particularly popular response to that article and that comes up because people have liked it and interacted with it shared it and commented on this comment enough for it to move to the front and so you know of course these popularity mechanisms that you also see on other platforms like reddit and so on that then also produce the impression that some things that might not even be worth of much attention are actually representative and important a final example here technologically is billy billy this is a video sharing and streaming platform which has this special feature where you comment or can comment on the video in the video itself or sort of across the video which is called the bullet commentary or bullet curtain and i did a study on bullet commentary on videos that dealt with covet at the beginning of the pandemic during the wuhan lockdown and one of the things that i found was that these comments often are almost like people just leaving the note you know i've been here it's asynchronous by the way so you leave a comment and weeks later people will still see that comment together with all the other comments but they also then sort of start merging into a conform message where people start commenting in the same manner because they presumably assume that this is expected this is the correct way to write about things so you can see in these videos that people frequently use phrases like uh go wuhan go china right jungkook yaya or wuhanjay obviously that's a classic comment at that time and similar uh phrases recurring phrases that mark them both as all being part of a similar community with a repertoire of signs and language but also that signal to others you know i know what i'm supposed to be doing i'm getting active here uh even though it's probably mostly clicktivism as it's sometimes called but i'm interacting with these materials in the appropriate manner whereas other people who might have criticism or have more nuanced views don't find necessarily the space in this forum on this format to voice them or they stay silent because they're worried about not offending the the mainstream in these instances so i've called that viral villages i refer to networks of social technical engagement that generate recursive feedback loops in which these various kinds of people share their community sentiment and it becomes amplified and amplified through these algorithmic mechanisms and i use the word village viral village because i'm again i like marshall mcluhan on what he wrote about villages uh he used the term global village and coined it but he didn't mean what people often mean which is of the cosmopolitan wonderful world were all closer together he meant this when people get close together they get more and more savage impatient with each other village people aren't that much in love with each other and the global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations and so you can probably see why i have this quote here this is from 1977 and i think marshall mcluhan would have recognized many of what we're much of what we're going through in that context now i'm pretty much out of time but i just wanted to point out beyond the technological level uh the state level the way that uh nationalism and techno nationalism on this chinese state side and the communist party side is creating a context in which national discourses and that kind of tribalism that they breed are a logical response to politics and to international affairs even though the communist party has a very specific understanding of what it thinks patriotism means compared to what people in china mean and then also many many different nationalisms in china emerge but there is already a infrastructure that pushes a particular kind of national and nationalist narrative and perspective in china and then there is the commodification the political economy that the digital capitalism really that fuels these various platforms just one image a trigger warning this is uh pornography and some violence as well uh these are images from a supposedly a military history picture archive uh but it's mostly porn snuff film um really nasty stuff in many ways which sits alongside political commentary and discussion of sino-japanese relations and that is because the people who run a platform like this notice that people click this stuff and so that's what gives them money what makes the money and the algorithm feeds back into it uh signaling to the makers that this is something that is lucrative and so they produce more and more racy content and it kind of spirals out of control regardless of what the people who make the content might think about it or what even the viewers and people click on it think about it we don't really know but it creates a context in which discourse becomes more and more toxic so let me just conclude very briefly here by uh telling you why any of this matters matters because these guys think it matters right so legitimacy concerns are at the top of what the chinese communist party has to worry about domestically to assure social stability um the uh party monitors uh big data social media data bizarrely it has sort of a dual track goal on the one hand it's trying to guide public opinion on social media at the same time it is trying to measure public opinion on uh weibo for instance in order to inform politics uh create five-year plans that are responsive to the audience and so on uh but that means that they're basically measuring something of their own creation and that also means that some of the problems i've just outlined now might feed back into policy making choices by convincing politicians that the nationalists might be more influential than they actually are in making choices that are more radically say anti-western anti-american anti-anything else really and more domestically oriented uh then might be uh good from a more cosmopolitan perspective and so in the end we have a construction of a sense of homeland as an existential problem whether it's during political crises whether it's during pandemics that combine the human psychology of what people do online with technological design uh the state's position and commercial rationales and that uh then gets feet fed back through various other groups as they challenge these narratives and create more conflict i could say more about the milk tea alliance if we have time in the in the section uh or in the q a in a moment but essentially what emerges here is um nationalism or various forms of nationalism that are despite or attempts uh to the contrary not under anyone's control also not the ccps so i'm going to conclude here looking forward to your questions and comments uh and yeah thank you for your attention thank you so much professor schneider that was really amazing um so now we'll open up the floor to anybody in the audience who wants to ask a specific question um or if the panelists themselves would like to address each other's presentations anything they find interesting we can also do that um so yeah leave any and all questions in the chat people are a little bit scared to ask a question i do have one for professor hmong in a moment but uh well maybe we'll give our participants a chance first right um i'll give a general question to start um professor schneider and hmong feel free to answer as you see fit um china is is very actively digitizing many aspects of everyday life arguably at a greater pace than the united states um what kind of social consequences does this um rapid development in technology and government-sponsored acceleration of these things what sort of consequences and implications does that have on the public and the government's relation to the public as well being sure you want to get get started sure um well i i guess um i'll mention maybe two aspects um one is that um they i think this kind of very aggressive rolling out of digital technology and digital infrastructure is part and parcel of this state-led development developmentalism mentality and i think it also helps to reinforce that mentality and and i see that also in some of my interviews for that for that study and it certainly also helps to because it's all part of that discourse it helps reinforcing the legitimacy in the sense that the legitimacy comes from development come from technological superiority and what we see is that increasingly now when chinese people traveling overseas they would initially be startled at the backwardness of digital infrastructure i think especially in europe i think in the uk for example um so that firstly is part of this developmentalism mentality that that adds to the the legitimacy um and it gives the sense of pride and superiority but on the on the other on the social side um what i see as a very sort of under discussed um negative consequence of this is the kind of exclusion this creates and we see this very clearly during the pandemic when the the qr code the qr health code was rolling out for the old folks who don't really know how to use smartphone or who don't want to use smartphone especially when they are you know going out it becomes a real issue so as you roll out this and and as you lay this out as the daily informational infrastructure you are also basically setting up the the digital barriers and barriers that make it um difficult for the underprivileged for the more marginalized group to enjoy the full service um and this is of course you know it's not something new we've been talking about digital divide but in china i think this become particularly acute because you know now your everyday life relies on how much of your everyday activities are is now you know being conducted on wechat it's it's being taken for granted but it's being taken for granted who have the resource and the capacity to do that but not for everyone so and and then when at the moment like the pandemic you do see the negative um exclusive you know the negative consequences of this yeah i can only second that um my my acquired note on what my colleague here around the corner dutrett university england hoff calls speed leads so only very specific groups of people are actually in the position to make the most use of digital technology and that's certainly the case in this at this rapid pace in china so you have urban audiences who are very good at this not everyone of course in urban centers but it's a very different story in rural areas um and also the the rollout of digital technology interacts with uh capitalist ambitions in a very interesting and often very worrying way pushing people uh to follow a highly individualist life i find it quite interesting how chinese students in the uk are commenting on individualism in the uk they're not wrong uh but there's so much individualism in china as well when it comes to elbows out and i have to be on top um to the point where um you see the the streamer culture video streaming people trying to make money of that uh only the the smallest amount of people can ever live off that and there's a long tale of people uh my colleague jungkook has written on this who are just in front of their camera streaming their entire lives from morning to evening and have zero views or one view right uh and they're hoping to at some point maybe make a buck of it uh it's it's incredibly depressing so you have an entire large group of society that is switched off and that's going to be a serious problem and you have dynamics uh in which it's easy to make a big a quick buck uh by exploiting people and by scamming them and so that's something that a lot of people outside of china don't always see and i don't want to defend the communist party's online regulation i have a lot of problems with it but a lot of it is not informed just by the attempt to keep political oppositions quiet or shut down the activists and so on it's often a direct response by grant from for grassroots initiatives and grassroots pushes from the public to say you know i as an urban middle class person and not safe shopping online i get scammed you have to do something right or here's all these celebrities and these celebrities are cashing in in weird ways or spreading body shaming images and do something about it that is these are concerns also the sort of misinformation fake news concerns that we all recognize uh across the globe and that the communist party is also acting on it just so happens that it then also happens to be one of the biggest spread of disinformation on the planet on top of everything else right but there's so this is a very complicated dynamic and i think it reveals some of the contradictions that you see emerging in digital capitalism great thank you so much for those insights um we have a couple questions in the chat so the first one comes from michelle lynn and she says a question for dr schneider would you say china's internet controls or interests are threatening the liberal world order ah that's a big question um i don't know uh i have my problems with the threat stories um i like professor mong's comments on ulrich beck and on risk i think that's a much better way to understand how our world works and there are actors in our world that create risks for others it's certainly the case that we see the communist party rolling out a campaign to influence public opinion abroad and to become active for its own gains actually i think in many cases that's not that different from what other countries do necessarily but it is often illegal so i can see how liberals would be worried and we see for example this is documented uh chinese uh often official actors intervening in taiwan for instance in order to undermine democratic processes there or doing similar things in hong kong also to shut down discussion so there is a concern but i'm also concerned about that narrative about threat which is so old and so tried uh i think it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which a lot of chinese actors feel the need uh to step up the more aggressive uh hawkish aspects of their policies in response to what they see as a antagonistic quote-unquote west because china is not monolithic it's not just one actor it's many many different ministries and organizations that all have different interests and it's i think a question also for people in europe or america who are we empowering with our own responses who is served by a trade war for instance or by uh shutting down certain technology companies uh abroad and so on uh and i'm a bit worried that it steps on the agenda of more liberal-minded potential allies in china and empowers the people who are maybe closer to the pla or the domestic ministries that mainly care about domestic status development rather than say for ministry people who are much more liberal so i i hesitate as a good academic i would question the question in that sense now to step on michelle's uh indie very very good question uh but just as a little bit of a warning on how we frame these kind of issues i hope that answers your question um okay so we have um just one more question um this is from oh we can do that two two more if we have time if you just want to quickly touch on these um one is from artem how has chinese state media and censorship responded to the public's interest in russian in the russian invasion in ukraine england you want to start us um yeah that's that's an interesting question i i i don't think i've witnessed a lot of examples of censoring in this particular case because if you think about the timing of the russian invasion of ukraine that coincided with the covet situation getting out of control in shanghai so i think it's fairly easy for you to draw the conclusion which one gets much more attention from the sensor which is that it is deemed as you know um much closer management and and monitoring um so i you know at least i haven't really but um witnesses um the the the the censoring of this case but i would also make two observations one is that in terms of the state media it has been sticking to the official you know foreign ministry sort of a spokesperson official lying saying that we are against any war um any invasion um we don't think um any for any country in just for the sake of securing their border they could wage a war and we stick to the you know we we are we have concern with people in ukraine and and but of course you know as everyone know what happened during the week before the winter olympics sort of this special sort of alliance being declared um so so i think the official media has been walking a very tight line here trying to not offend both either ukraine or russia both are important partners to to china but on the other hand i think interestingly on social media though the range of views is quite diverse that we see people saying that you know calling for the separation cheer good you know we need to we need to get clear with russia we shouldn't maintain this special um relationship and that was by a quite a high profile academic international nation but then on the other hand of course there are people saying that um this war the the the it's because of the expansion of nato it's because of the u.s so russia was only responding to that and and there was also a lot of support and and there's also of course as you can imagine the energy between the situation in in taiwan so i would say generally you know the official media has been sort of controlling the narrative quite um carefully but there's a diverse um view on social media yeah i mean if you're interested in this um i don't think it's published yet but uh our colleague jennifer punn at stanford university is uh doing research on this with a team of people and she's been tweeting about it so i can only repeat what she said which is that there's about about fifty percent of the way board tweets that they've been analyzing are pro-russian and produces kind of misinformation that we're familiar with also from russian television from rt but the rest of the commentators fall somewhere along all sorts of diverse spectrums uh including liberals and critics and so on um so it is indeed quite complicated also on the chinese internet i am a little bit worried about how much disinformation is circulating though uh but that is not just the case in china you also see this in europe i think 40 percent of people in greece uh are supporters of putin i mean that is that shocking in the netherlands is 15 i find that shocking already but 40 so we don't have to point to russia to say you know added to china say 50 yeah it's not that different than other places sometimes right thank you oh yeah go ahead um uh if professor mung and professor schneider have time for one more question um there is one from dr straffella who co-authored the speech that daria berg gave today um i know that we're over time it's about 2 50 p.m uh here in boston um would you like to stay behind for one more question i'm happy to stay a moment yeah actually no way wonderful so the question goes when researching online culture in china or elsewhere how do we deal with comments like the one you mentioned which is highlighted by the algorithm but not otherwise representative in our analysis of the culture as a whole this is for dr schneider um i like goffman the sociologist anthropologist right uh and the idea of the front stage and the backstage i find it very important to distinguish these two things there's a public-facing communication element that we can analyze but we're really just analyzing discourses we're analyzing the resources the statements the symbols that are available to people and that they reuse in visible ways we're observing something people do we're never observing what people think we don't have no idea what people think um and we're also not observing what people do in their private home you know what do they take home uh from these comments we don't know who's behind this comment maybe they ate something bad and posted it then you know we don't know what the people thought who were liking it or interacting with it uh so i always make sure to have additional caveats in place uh to ensure that we're not um insinuating that we're actually studying public opinion like real public opinion uh sadly i'm not so sure the chinese government is always doing that because i think there's people there who do think they're studying public opinion by looking at big data which is never the whole story uh so in that sense it's i think it's important because of the way these non-representative but very visible shouts and screams that we see online affect the discussion how they can push political decisions we see this in cases with a xiaojian example there were other cases with a taiwanese pop star where it was basically became an international realm because she had a taiwanese flag and a little video and she got criticized extensively and so you see these online debates and suddenly the the polls for um saying when in taiwan go up by a couple of points because taiwanese people are so angry that this pop star is forced to make an apology so words have have consequences right even if we don't know who um who's making them but we should be careful about what happens on the backstage um i'm always reminded of some very good scholarship on the soviet union um right before it fell all the russian experts the vast majority of russian experts had no idea uh that russians were dissatisfied or at the degree to which they were dissatisfied they thought uh that the story everyone was telling on the front end was the real story and that's a mistake because uh that may not be the case right so uh careful with buying the propaganda or the hegemonic discourse it might just be there because it circulates the best not because people actually buy it um great so i think that concludes our culture panel um a special thanks to dr schneider dr mong and of course uh dr burke who was unable to be here synchro synchronously today and of course dr straffelo who um co-wrote her speech we're so appreciative of your contributions thank you so much for making this a wonderful experience if anybody in the audience has any more questions i'm sure all of our speakers would be happy to talk to you through email and such and we can provide you with those after in an email but uh yeah i think that's everything thank you guys so much um bye thanks for having me thank you bye have a great weekend