On Feb 27, a hot topic attracted attention on Weibo: Xiao Zhan fans reported AO3. At present, this topic is blocked by the microblog platform, but we can still see that the topic related to it has over 100 million views. It’s enough to know how popular this topic is. Let me explain: Weibo (or Sina Weibo) is the Chinese version of Twitter, with 290 million users. Xiao Zhan is a Chinese actor and singer who has many crazy fans. The Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction (fic) and other fanworks contributed by users.
What was this topic, which came to be known as the February 27 incident? To put it simply, the reason was that a user published an article on AO3 featuring Xiao Zhan. After reading the article, Xiao Zhan’s fans thought it insulted their idol, so they reported the website to the Cyberspace Administration of China, the government agency that manages China’s Internet, and the website was blocked by the Chinese firewall. This means that the site, like YouTube and Instagram, cannot be used in China. AO3 users are angry that Xiao Zhan fans are infringing on their creative and reading freedom. So, on Weibo, two opposing groups fought a war of words that continues to this day.
However, in my opinion, the positions of these two groups are not the root cause of this “war”. Was it not the existence of “the Wall” that caused this incident? And I did not see on the Weibo to use this event to ridicule the firewall. I think these comments should exist, but are deleted or blocked, after all, Weibo and even the entire Chinese Internet are under strong control.
There is a typical example to express the discontent of Chinese Internet users. In 2009, a song called “grass and mud horse” appeared on YouTube and quickly became popular, along with a massive official campaign to clean up the Internet. The grass-mud horse, a previously unknown animal, has been included in the song because of its Chinese pronunciation, which resembles the f-word. It appears in the lyrics along with river crab, which is pronounced “harmony” in Chinese. It’s both fun and creative to let off steam. This is winning because it bypasses controls and voice prohibitions and succeeds in expressing itself in innovative ways. Like a political satire, the song challenges and mocks the authorities. (Lijun Tang and Peidong Yang, 2011)
Although the Internet in China is controlled by the government, some of the criticisms are still widely known and serve their intended purpose. China central television once criticized Google during prime time, an important example of which was an interview with a college student who said Google had poisoned him into pornographic websites and made him upset. However, Chinese Internet users who searched for the student’s personal details discovered that he was actually an intern at CCTV. The news spread quickly. The station’s action was seen as paving the way for the authorities to try to introduce a new law. The law requires filtering software (” green dam “) to be installed on every new computer sold in China. Finally, the law was not implemented due to widespread criticism. In many ways, netizens beat CCTV. (Tang and Sampson, 2012)
For young Chinese, Weibo is the main social media tool. It shows what the logic of operating in a post-totalitarian system is: with the possibility of flow control, an undemocratic order like China can allow things to happen and rely on security and surveillance practices in the online environment. The practice of flow control has allowed the post-totalitarian order to preserve itself, even in a power map that is characterized more by an open network than a tightly closed one. Such a chart makes it possible to use freedom as a means of authoritarian government. Indeed, beyond the limits of liberal democracy, the role of freedom and authoritarianism has been reversed in the operation of insecure politics. (Vuori and Paltemaa, 2015)
Reference
Vuori, J. and Paltemaa, L., 2015. The Lexicon of Fear: Chinese Internet Control Practice in Sina Weibo Microblog Censorship. Surveillance & Society, 13(3/4), pp.400-421. Available at: <https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/china_lexicon>.
Lijun Tang and Peidong Yang, 2011. Symbolic power and the internet: The power of a ‘horse’. Media, Culture & Society, [online] 33(5), pp.675-691. Available at: <https://journals-sagepub-com.uow.idm.oclc.org/doi/abs/10.1177/0163443711404462>.
Tang, L. and Sampson, H., 2012. The interaction between mass media and the internet in non-democratic states: The case of China. Media, Culture & Society, [online] 34(4), pp.457-471. Available at: <https://journals-sagepub-com.uow.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1177/0163443711436358>.
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