PrintIn May 2000, Qiu Qingfeng, a student at Beijing University, was raped and murdered while walking back to her dormitory, which was several miles away from her classes. University officials, still tense over the Tiananmen Square student protests in the city 11 years earlier, initially tried to cover up the killing. But students, upset over the campus’s permissive security, and inadequate bus system, and the loss of a fellow student, took to the Internet, breaking the story on the school’s online bulletin board system, spontaneously triggering online protests, unsanctioned demonstrations, and candlelight vigils across the university. News spread within hours across China’s nascent cyberspace, and a few days later the BBC picked up on the story. The school’s administrators were left with no choice but to address the murder and admit negligence: They agreed to meet with students and to hold an official memorial service.
This scenario would have never played out in the China of 10 years ago, and Guobin Yang knew it. Some 6,800 miles away, in Brooklyn, Yang steadily monitored the situation in his home country. For about two weeks after the murder, he averaged six hours a day scouring Beijing’s bulletin board systems, tracking the development of the online protest, and he realized that the success of the student protests in 2000, compared to crackdown at Tiananmen Square in ’89, was due in no small part to the Internet. Now a sociologist at Barnard, Yang this semester has published “The Power of the Internet in China,” a culmination of nearly a decade’s worth of research on China’s online political terrain.
Even though the Internet turned 40 this year, it is still relatively young in China. Only a few Chinese academics had e-mail in the late ’80s, and only in 1994 did the National Science Foundation, then the Internet’s governing body, allow China officially to log in. In the early ’90s, the Chinese were quick to embrace the Internet as a sign of modernity and technological advancement, blind to the political implications it would have in the decades to come. Scholars and journalists for the past few years have been clamoring about how the recent upsurge in Internet users will help democratize China, an argument not without its merits: For example, a 2005 petition opposing Japan’s being granted a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council garnered over 30 million signatures, and in 2007 residents in the coastal city of Xiamen used the Internet to organize a campaign that successfully stopped a chemical factory from being built in the area. But Yang isn’t interested in making a direct connection between the growth of the Internet and democratization. “It’s a big jump, of course, to link the Internet with democratization directly, and it may not directly lead to democracy: It’s not like turning on a switch. But what’s more interesting is what happens in the process of people using the Internet,” he says. “What I try to show is what happens between Internet and democratization.”
For how many activists there are at Columbia, few, if any, use the Internet as a means of protest like the Chinese do. According to Yang, because of China’s restrictive political climate, a “uniquely Chinese Internet” has developed. The normal avenues of expression in the West, such as public protesting, petitioning, or a free press, are restricted or absent in China, and for the Chinese, the Wild West of cyberspace is the only place where they can air their grievances. “Here the Internet is really just a tool, not a crucial tool, but a supplementary tool,” he says. Chinese netizens used to use the Internet primarily to arrange offline protests, such as those addressing the murder at Beijing University, but today online-only protests are the norm. But exactly how do you protest without taking to the streets? What does such a protest look like?
“What happens typically is a few people post messages about particular cases, as in the 2000 case,” Yang explains. “Sometimes these postings are neglected. Other times they attracted a lot of attention, people begin to voice their own protest and they will also try to mobilize online in the sense that they forward or post these kind of messages in other forums. These Chinese Internet users have an interesting habit of cross-posting a lot.” News is disseminated quickly, and outside of the state-sponsored press, this is the only way Chinese learn about many happenings throughout the rest of the mainland.
But according to Yang, the ever-increasing prominence of the Internet in China may not necessary weaken the central government. More and more citizens are posting about local corruption on blogs and bulletin boards, allowing the central government to target and weed out inept officials. And the political landscape in today’s China is much different from the culture that gave rise to the Tiananmen Square protests two decades ago—the majority of Internet users aren’t interested in establishing a democracy. In China, like the rest of the world, the Web has mainly become a tool for connecting with others. “In this time of rapid change, people are trying to hold on to something.”