TFBOYS won the “Most Popular Singer from Mainland” award at the Yinyue V Annual Awards, April 15, 2014

Eileen Chang, the influential 20th-century Chinese writer, once wrote, “To be famous, one must not wait.” The iconic writer certainly walked the walk, herself rising to fame in her early 20s in the 1940s’ Shanghai. Nowadays, even the 20s look old–very old–to Chinese aspiring to be young and famous, and those in doubt need look no further than TFBOYS.

You might have already guessed, TFBOYS, short for “The Fighting Boys,” is a Chinese boy band. Its three members, Wang Junkai, Yi Yangqianxi, and Wang Yuan, are middle school and high school students, whose ages averaging between 14 and 15. The group just celebrated their second anniversary this month, and yes, when they started in 2013, they still had the kind of preteen high-pitched girlie voices. There’s a term in Chinese recently coined by netizens specifically for young celebrities like them, “young fresh meat.” You read it right. “Young fresh meat” is a thing in China. I feel like a child molester just typing it.

http://youtu.be/c0qcpmAauRQ

[VIDEO: “Heart” by TFBOYS, released in September 2013]

But TFBOYS is not just a YFM boy band. They are in fact the YFM boy band du jour in the People’s Republic, enjoying popularity comparable to hot K-pop idols like EXO and chic pop stars from other Chinese-speaking regions in Asia, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, where pop music has a much longer history than that in the Mainland which was nonexistent before the late 1980s.

Manufactured by Beijing Shidai Junfeng Media Co., who copied Japan’s idol training programs,TFBOYS became known to a cult fan base through their music videos and reality show-like shows distributed online. Before long–in fact, as if overnight–the three boys, or the “Three Little Ones” as dubbed by their fans, not just penetrated the mainstream media, but literally conquered them. They are simply everywhere. Since 2014, TFBOYS have won numerous pop music awards, many of which were voted by fans, made regular appearances on popular TV shows and in glossy magazines, and signed million-dollar advertising deals with several household brands such as Coca-Cola’s Fanta and BBK, a popular educational electronic brand.

Since then, TFBOYS’s fan base has kept growing. On the Chinese social media Sina Weibo, each TFBOYS member has about ten millions followers. In June, Guinness World Records verified that a Weibo post by the band leader Wang Junkai on his birthday last year is the most reposted Weibo post, with 42,776,438 reposts. Actually, TFBOYS’s stardom has transcended their native Mainland China and gone global. On social media such as Facebook and Twitter, countless fan pages and accounts have been created for TFBOYS fans across the world, and some of their fans such as those from Southeast Asia don’t even speak Chinese.

One thing about TFBOYS fan base that might seem bewildering to anyone who is not a TFBOYS fan, is that it consists of not just preteens and teenagers, who are mostly girls, of course, but also their moms and everyone in between–college students, young professionals, etcetera. It’s one thing when teenage girls scream at these boys when they spot them in a crowd at an event or an airport after hours of waiting with their posters, cameras, and gifts. It’s another thing that moms in their late thirties do it as well–okay, maybe not screaming, but all these other things, plus licking their screens on which these boys’ photos are displayed and their videos played.

Actually, I might have gone a bit too creative in the last imagery. Although it does seem a bit pervy for older women to be obsessed with these adorable boys, most of these moms are perfectly harmless. Different from western boy bands and young pop stars, these young Chinese idols are expected by tens of millions of fans to fulfill various fantastic roles–they are handsome boyfriends to preteens and teenager girls, they are sweet little brothers to college students and young adults, and, finally, they are outstanding academically successful sons to young moms. Fans are obsessed with their homework, their tests scores, their high school entrance exams, how much they’ve grown since last month, if they have enough time to sleep, if they get along with their classmates in school, etcetera, etcetera. The boys are expected to be model students while dutifully entertaining the mass on stage or on camera, and yes, the fans are all tiger moms, and they want their idol sons to be study gods and the next Steve Jobs, and while doing that, they must learn to sing, to dance, and to play instruments, and stay adorable, fashionable, approachable, and, bottom line, lovable. Call it Chinese characteristics.

https://youtu.be/t7HMcfgMqDQ

[“Cherish” (“宠爱”) by TFBOYS, released in June 2015.]

With their immense popularity, TFBOYS have also become targets of attacks from fans of other idols, especially those of the Korean-Chinese boy band EXO, who see them as inferior to their older counterparts. The attacks also come from those who don’t care much about their music or their “face value” (yanzhi, or 颜值, meaning physical attractiveness), and those who simply hate them for whatever reasons such as the fact that they are young and famous. From time to time, quarrels break out even among their own fans who favor a particular member in the group, which often leads to non-fans’ insults that theirs are “brain-dead fans” (naocanfen, or 脑残粉).

Despite all that, TFBOYS’s cultural significance is undeniable. Regardless their auto-tuned K-pop sounding dance or Hip Hop inspired cheesy music, namely, pop music, TFBOYS are the first truly successful pop group accepted not only in the People Republic but in the entire Chinese-speaking world, and beyond–they have a big fan base in Vietnam, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian non-Chinese speaking countries. And it is significant because this TFBOYS phenomenon marks a moment when China is truly starting to export its pop music after years of importing it from mostly Taiwan and Hong Kong, which, ironically, helps achieving the Chinese government’s goal of exerting China’s “soft power” overseas, where the official efforts have failed miserably.

TFBOYS’s success in Taiwan is especially remarkable in this regard. Unexpectedly, the Three Little Ones have taken Taiwan by storm like the Taiwanese boy band the “Young Tigers” (Xiaohudui, or 小虎队) conquered the hearts of Chinese youth in the late 1980s. This phenomenon even compelled some Taiwanese cultural commentators to ask what has happened to Taiwan’s music industry that such a Mainland pop “invasion” is even possible. Indeed, even only five years ago, it was utterly unthinkable that Taiwanese teenagers would be chasing pop stars from the Mainland China like they chase Korean, Japanese, or western pop stars like EXO or One Direction. As more and more young Taiwanese marvel about China’s economic development and job opportunities, they can also expect to be hooked by more pop culture produced in the Mainland as well. Maybe that’s the ultimate unifying force that will bond the two sides of the Taiwan Strait together despite their political differences.

UNIQLO has become a location for photo ops after the scandal.

A video of a young couple having sex in a fitting room of Uniqlo’s Sanlitun store in Beijing went viral on Wednesday and was deleted shortly after by censors. The discussion about this latest episode of “pornographic” private content leaks online that has continued in its wake, however, touches on issues that are gaining attention from the Chinese public.

The minute-long video, taken with a smart phone and showing a young couple — allegedly two college students — was spread on social media such as Sina Weibo and WeChat and viewed by millions of people before it was deleted on the order of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) for violating the “socialist values.”

This isn’t the first time that explicit images and videos were leaked online in China despite the fact that the distribution of pornography is a criminal offense in the country. In 2008, more than a thousand of naked photos of several Hong Kong A-list movie and pop stars taken by singer-actor Edison Chen were leaked, which resulted in the arrests of at least ten people. In the Mainland China, a number of sex videos of government officials (e.g., Lei Zhengfu and several Fuzhou officials) and university professors (on a side note, in 2014, an appalling 57% of female college students in China said they had been sexually harassed by their professors) were leaked by their mistresses, whom have been hailed by many as a sort of heroines in combating corruption.

The Uniqlo’s sex video leak, however, is a different case in that it doesn’t involve celebrities or public/semi-public figures. This couple in the video are private persons and their sexual act appeared to be consensual, that is, with no apparent power imbalance or coercion implied as in the cases of officials and professors. Perhaps that was partly why rumors arose saying that the leak was either a marketing stunt by Uniqlo or the young couple’s attention seeking attempt. The Japanese fast fashion giant has since issued a statement denying its role in the distribution of the video. As to the young couple, their identities have not been officially disclosed, although attempts of revealing them, or what Chinese Internet users call “renrou,” have been made by hackers and several people’s personal information has been published online. In this Internet frenzy, one also sees ultra nationalist chatters advocating boycotting Japanese goods (as every time a Japanese company is involved in a controversy) and of course, slut shaming rhetoric springing from a self-righteous sense of morality and perhaps a kind of voyeuristic impulse.

No surprise there, but what’s worth noting is that in the midst of all this noise, there are thoughtful voices that demand our attention. For instance, in an article titled “Uniqlo and Lewinsky: the Price and Profit of the Shaming Economy” trending on the popular social media platform WeChat, author Wen Yan draws attention to Internet privacy and public shaming. Relating to Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk in March, she argues that in the age the Internet, there’s a certain “shaming economy” at work that allows corporations and individuals to profit at others’ expense:

The shaming economy is a tightly knit industrial chain, which, relying on an central event and by leaking private content via viral distribution, shames a particular individual while extracts value from public attention and profits from it. The price to pay in the shaming economy may be a young woman’s youth and reputation, but the profits are shared by leakers and certain groups. Everyone who has shared embarrassing photos and videos is a promoter of this economic chain, who amplifies the harm done to the victims and accumulates profits for those who benefit [from such distribution].

The author then challenges her readers: “Precisely because power can be easily put in your hand, will you chose to take the whip and wave it recklessly, or keep silence and think for yourself?”

On a different note, Dou Wentao of Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based Chinese television network, reflected on the phenomenon of ungrounded speculation of publicity stunt in the aftermath of the leak, attributing it to the seemingly ubiquitous presence of marketing and advertising in every slip of the Chinese social and private life and a growing fame-seeking culture. He said on his talk show:

Nowadays in China, many things in society perplex me. My judgment on this event is no judgment, because nothing is what it appears, and people’s thinking has become conditioned [accordingly]. Our producer, for instance, at once believed it was a publicity scheme. Have you noticed that nowadays, there isn’t any serious discussion, because all the discussion is about things being a media hype. This makes one not want to discuss anything.

Not without irony — since he himself is a high profile media personality — Dou expressed a deep anxiety rooted in the suspicion of the media in the grip of the government AND corporate power. Because of the lack of transparency, both in the sense of censorship and the aggressive marketing culture in today’s China, it’s very difficult for the public to construct a reality that corresponds accurately to the reality they live in as citizens and consumers. For years, the Chinese government has been cracking down “rumors” spreading on the Internet and failed, precisely because “rumors” are only a way in which people respond to the conditions of communication greatly shaped by, obviously, the government and the cut-throat materialistic culture it supports.

Like others preceding it, the Uniqlo viral video will die down from the media — perhaps sooner than we think — as we move on to a fresh scandal. Let’s hope that next time we’ll deal with it better, with a bit more humanity and decency.

Yes, you hear it right. The Chinese IT giant Baidu is offering a promotion that gives 2 terabytes of free cloud storage to its users for life if they download its mobile app and log in from a mobile device. This is almost too good to be true. The same size of cloud storage would cost $1,200 a year with Google, and a 500 GB cloud storage service from Dropbox costs $499 a year.

Besides its size, Baidu’s cloud drive offers features that will make downloading, streaming and sharing content extremely easy. The user can download content directly from a link or via torrent file link. They can also share content seamlessly between accounts, on the web via links, and across various Chinese social platforms.

One of the advantage of such affordable storage and sharing capacity is that it can support semi-public information and content sharing among users, in a truly “social” manner as opposed to broadcasting, and in large bulks as well. And this, to Chinese netizens, is quite significant if not groundbreaking.

Compared to US internet users, Chinese netizens seem to prefer small-community based, semi-public communication to completely open and public communication. An example of this is the localization of microblogging sites in China. Compared to Twitter’s open platform, for instance, China’s Sina Weibo is designed in such ways so that it allows users to have more control over the perimeter of the reception of the information they share on the platform (for details, see my dissertation “The shapes of cultures“). These changes, however, have somewhat rendered Weibo a kind of mutant where Twitter’s open and fast information dissemination and chat applications’ ability to support specified audience for closed communication are both lost. The fast rise of Tencent’s WeChat, an application based on chat application incorporating functions for group chat and semi-public broadcast (via its “public handles” for instance), is evident of Chinese netizens’ preference to somewhat private small community sharing. (There’s a multitude of reasons for such a preference that I will not be able to expound in detail here. Historically, China being a family-centered, politically and culturally centralized society, public discourse has always been discouraged since it entails great risk, socially and politically, and uncertainty to individuals. Secrecy, thus, has been a characteristic in all kinds of communication. The Communist Party really only continued such a tradition, although at times it has exacerbated its control over public discourse. In this sense, fear is a big factor that makes netizens to desire a sense of control over who can access their speech.)

With China’s increasingly harsh crackdown on “illegal” content online, Baidu’s cloud drive can become a channel for relatively safe content sharing, including large file sharing such as movies and videos, among smaller groups of users. Its P2P feature can step up once websites that distribute “illegal” content, such as foreign movies and TV shows, are close down by the government. That, however, depends on whether Baidu can protect users’ privacy from the government, which, with the lesson we learned from the NSA in the US, is probably an unreasonable expectation. On the other hand, such surveillance at least will allow Baidu to continue to provide this service. As a user myself, although it probably means that I’ll have to self-censor when I upload and share content on Baidu’s cloud drive, I still hope the life-long offer will last as Baidu promises.

Tsinghua University senior Han Yanjun, a worshipped “Study God.”

Yesterday, tweets and pictures of a cute American teenager scanning items for customers in Target went viral and #AlexFromTarget became a trending hashtag on Twitter as well as other social media in the U.S. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, a Chinese young man became as famous as, if not more so than, Alex from Target, on social media, although for very difference reasons. On Sina Weibo, the hashtag #WorshippingTsinghuaStudyGod (in ZH) occupied the top of the trending topics yesterday, and a page hosted by People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the CPC, is dedicated to it, attracting tens of millions of viewers. The young man in the center of this public attention, Tsinghua University senior Han Yanjun, may not be as cute as Alex (or is he?), but he is sure smarter than most of his peers. One of the most viral weibos on the topic, posted by the People’s Daily, reads:

[Stop claiming you have a solid math and sciences foundation. . .] Yesterday at the defense of Tsinghua 2014 Special Award, the transcript of Han Yanjun, a senior in the Department of Electronic Engineering, was shown, and some students said, “The result of the defense is really not important anymore. Look at the photo below, and I think it says a lot.”

A photo is attached to the weibo, which shows a powerpoint slide projected on a screen that lists the student’s perfect grades for the core courses required in his major.

The “Study God” weibo from the People’s Daily

To those who haven’t experienced the brutal competition that Chinese youth are faced with in their education, it seems absurd that a college student should make national news solely because of his perfect grades, let alone be crown as a “Study God.” However, anyone who has experienced or witnessed such pressure will know exactly why such a academically successful student is set up publicly as a sort of demigod for students and parents to worship. As academic performance is an overwhelmingly dominant criterion in students’ evaluation that determines the quality of college education they receive and their future career opportunities, Chinese students, their parents, and their teachers put enormous emphasis on exams and grades.

The most notorious hoop that most high school graduates have to jump through is the college entrance exam. For many students, from elementary school through high school, all those years of hard studying all comes down to this one exam. Although college admissions have been growing exponentially since 1999, and since 2008, the number (in ZH) of high school graduates who participated in the college entrance exam has declined (due to, among other factors, an increasing number of students seeking college education overseas), the exam remains extremely competitive. According to the latest available records (in ZH), in 2012, 9.15 million high school graduates took the college entrance exam, and 6.85 million, or 75 percent, were admitted. The admission rate does not seem low, but, due to the vastly varied quality of education across colleges and universities, high school students are competing with each other for the few spots in better universities that will give them an edge when they go on to the increasingly competitive job market after graduation. For rural students, especially, getting a college education and landing a job in the city is not only a way to escape the fate of low wage jobs as those that tens of millions of migrant workers have, but an opportunity to change their resident status from rural to urban and have access to many resources and services that are unavailable to the rural population.

In any case, you get the picture. Academic competition is fierce in Chinese schools and universities. In addition, unlike in the U.S., for instance, where students’ grades are considered privacy and not for disclosure without students’ consent, in China, the competition is done publicly, where students’ grades are published in school and students are often ranked according to their grades. Top-ranked students are praised by teachers and revered by students and their parents, and those on the bottom and their parents are often shamed. Such public ranking of students according to their grades puts even more pressure on not only students, but their parents as well. In fact, academic pressure is a leading cause of suicides among youth in China, where youth suicide rate is higher than any other country in the world (see some of the reports here, here, and here, in ZH).

In this context, the state sanctioned celebration of a “Study God” no longer seems that strange. However, the term “Study God” itself is no ingenious invention of the People’s Daily. Rather, it is a term coined by the tormented and self-mocking Chinese students. Besides, the term is not one of a kind, either, but one of an array of terms that characterize different types of students based mainly on their academic performances, while addressing, at times, some nuanced characteristic demeanors of the students in each category. The Beijing Youth Daily summarized some of these terms:

• Study maniac (学魔, xuémó): They are obsessed with studying, unable to live without doing exercises in their workbooks.
• Study Master (学霸, xuébà): They’re highly intelligent, social, and well adjusted. Good at everything, they’re born with charisma and class.
• Study God (学神, xuéshén): They’re tall and handsome/beautiful, spirited, and aloof. They’ve gone through countless advanced workbooks yet still are able to keep the cool with little effort.
• Study Punk (学痞, xuépî): They sleep in class, and fucking around outside class, yet they always get high grades.
• Study Plebeian (学民, xuémín): With average intelligence, they worship Study Masters but despise Study Scums (see below) and the ranks below them. They only have one belief, that one day, they’ll surpass Study Masters, for which they work extra hard.
• Study Imbecile (学弱, xuéruò): They burn the late night oil all the time, frail, unable to bear the pressure for long.
• Study Ash (学渣, xuézhā): Half of their intelligence has been burned in studying. They work hard, but never succeed.
• Study Disabled (学残, xuécán): They’re completely burned by studying. They’re in much pain and unrecognizable from the torment of studying.
• Study Scum (学沫, xuémò): They always feel lacking in intelligence, but they’re not hard working either, getting by each day, hoping to get something for nothing.
• Study Water (学水, xuéshuî): Regarding them, intelligence is no longer relevant. They’ve given up long ago.

Certainly, a hierarchy is assumed in such a lexical invention. Indeed, some of the terms are quite humiliating and it is not hard to imagine the damages they can do to kids who are labeled with them. On the other hand, one cannot help being amazed by the kids’ sense of humor under such pressure to perform. Even the most derogatory terms among them have been used by kids in such self-mocking ways that express no other than their resistance and rejection to an educational system they resent, for good reasons perhaps.

On a final note, one may not see many high school students working in retail stores in China, saving money for his first car or the next iPhone, like Alex, since most of the Chinese kids are hard at study, stuck between the pages of their textbooks, notebooks, and workbooks. However, Americans may see more and more Han Yanjuns landing in graduate schools in American universities after they graduate from Tsinghua University, Peking University, or other top Chinese universities. After all, more than a quarter (in ZH) of undergraduates from Tsinghua and Peking University went on to attend graduate schools overseas after they graduated in 2013. As to Han Yanjun, word on the street (actually, according to the People’s Daily, in ZH) says that a professor in Stanford has remarked that he “has exceeded the requirements for a Ph.D. student.” I guess one would hardly expect anything less than that from a “Study God.”

Xi surrounded by the public

Xi in a car waving to the public

China’s new president, Xi Jinping, paid a visit to Shenzhen, China’s most burgeoning Southern city in Guangdong province over the weekend. This was no small tour. Xi was literally stepping in Deng Xiaoping’s footprints twenty years ago, when/where Deng delivered one of his most important speeches, three years after Tian’anmen, in which he reassured China’s course to a marketing economy and its deeper integration into the global economy. New to the most powerful position in China (and some might argue the second most powerful position globally), Xi was quick to take advantage of the 20th anniversary of Deng’s speech in Southern China and acted like the incarnation of Deng in 1992. He was even accompanied by four of the former officials who accompanies Deng during Deng’s tour when he visited Deng’s memorial in Shenzhen.

Like Deng, Xi reassured China’s reform and opening up policy. “The Party and the Central government have made the correct decision of reform and opening up,” Xi said on this tour, “in the future we will still take this correct way; we will go in this way to an affluent country and an affluent people with conviction and determination, and we will have innovation.”

However, besides the speech, Chinese media have also focused their coverage on Xi’s image as an approachable and low-key leader who cares about ordinary people’s lives. Headlines about Xi’s Tour read like “Xi Jinping Touring Shenzhen, No Roads Blocked for Security,” “Visiting Families in Poverty in Shuide City, Giving Children English Dictionary,” “Visiting Residents in Luohu Fishing Village, Encouraging Villagers to Continue Walking on Deng Xiaoping’s Way,” “Visiting Shenzhen, No Welcoming Parade, No Banners,” and “Opened Window and Waved Goodbye to the Public, Shenzhen Netizen Meeting President.” Xi’s photos surrounded by the public are posted on news websites, and accounts about “foreign media’s” positive opinions about Xi. There also Xi’s family photos published, which is very rare in Chinese media.

Efforts to create a personable image for Chinese top leaders have been rare. Xi may showcase a shift in how Chinese approach politics as the public has been gaining more power–if not substantial, at least in speech–in China’s politics. This could be a positive shift, but at the same time, the image-oriented way of doing politics as most well represented in the U.S. is perhaps not the best option to promote democracy either. The worst, though, will be a marriage between sophisticated image management and highly centralized power structure. For now, it seems that Chinese and the Western media are enjoying a rare common ground that sees Xi representing a possibly more liberal future of China.

The photos that got Wang, a 23-year old model in China, in serious trouble

We live in a world that’s anything but shy of conflicts. That’s why I’m constantly amazed by how much we citizens of the world share many similarities in our taste in uniforms. We love babes in police uniforms, I mean, both Americans (Hello, Magic Mike!) and Chinese, except, while posting sexy photos of oneself wearing, or almost wearing, a police uniform on the social media can get one a few followers and likes, or, with some luck, the status of the “Internet sensation,” in China, that can actually get one some sweet jail time. That’s how “dignified” the Chinese police uniform is. Or not.

That’s what happened to Wang, a 23-year old model who was convicted on the charge of “fraud” — for the lack of an appropriate translation for zhaoyaozhuangpian zui, or 招摇撞骗罪 — and sentenced to 9 months in prison with a one-year reprieve by a district court in Beijing earlier this week. A few months ago, Wang posted on Weibo as @馨儿徽安:

I became a police officer in my hometown, and everything is starting from zero, so I’m learning very hard. As a jinghua (or a “police flower,” a term used in China to refer to female police officers — author), I have a lot of presure on me… Jinghua is just a title. I use these titles such as “jinghua” or “model” for business negotiations at the dinner table, and get deals and investment.

To this post, Wang also attached three photos of herself wearing a police reniform and bikinis.

Wang was reported to Weibo by a user and her post was flagged as “false information” by the website’s administrator. The post was taken down by Wang shortly after, and by then it had been reposted and commented on for hundreds of times, which was, however, pretty inconsequential considering Weibo’s 300 million users.

It’s unusual for somebody to be prosecuted for a post that has so little impact. In fact, Wang is reported to be the first in China who has been sentenced to prison for posing as a police officer online. Many people expressed on Weibo that they think the punishment she received is too severe for her deed. “I don’t think [Wang] should have been punished so severely. Wang was just wearing a police uniform; she didn’t con anybody out of money,” as @笔者楚觉非V commented on Weibo.

The problem with the case, however, is not just about the degree of punishment, but about principles too. What really constitutes “fraud” in China is unclear, both in principle and in this specific case. As a netizen @lucan路璨 has pointed out, Wang has stated in her profile (and her account is “verified” for her identity) that she’s a model. If she did reveal her true identity, that means that she didn’t have the serious intent to mislead others to believe her false identity as police officer. In that case, her posing would be a performance — Wang herself also stated herself that she did it just “for fun” — rather than serious impersonation, or fraud.

If that’s the case, Wang shouldn’t be punished for “fraud,” an opinion shared by some netizens, such as @lucan路璨, who wrote, “Please tell me which law prohibits people from wearing police costume?” Technically, @lucan路璨 was right. Wang’s “uniform” was just a “costume” that she kept after a photo shoot where she was hired to pose in it. So where should we draw the line between performance and fraud? Or, in other words, where should we draw the line between speech and action, for performance is a form of speech, while impersonation is an act?

Now, speech can be the basis for legal action in China, but many Chinese are aware of the lack of freedom of speech in China and their expressions of grievances and demands for the rights to free speech are not rare in online discourse in recent years. However, unfortunately, few have brought up the issue of speech in the debates surrounding Wang’s case. (I have made some comments on Weibo about Wang’s case and free speech. The responses I got were pretty negative and off the point.)

A couple of people did bring up the idea of “thought crime.”

One of them is @NOD净化者, who wrote, “Faint. Only when there’s a victim who has been conned and when her action resulted in serious consequences should we use the Criminal Law. Should we prosecute people for thought crimes?”

@NOD净化者‘s comment is in response to the comments by a user who claims to represent “Central China University Law School Student Union” (@华中大法学院学生会), who supported the court’s decision because “many countries have criminal laws that include crimes of impersonating public servants.”

However, even if the question of speech is put aside, the truth is, Wang is not in trouble just because she’s an impostor, but also because she’s a “slut.” Not only her originally post attracted much criticism, but even after she was convicted, many continued to attack her unsympathetically:

This whore wants a good reputation. Die! — @东坑家人.

[Wang] deserted morality for fame? So sad. — @-必修课.

Look, [you’re] obsessed to be famous, and can’t you be famous in jail now? This is what you get by following the fad. — @zeeyorl

Stupid, you deserve it. Hahaha… Still want to show off, want to be famous? — @红烬Ash

It is safe to read these allegations as misogynistic vent of anger, jealousy, and hatred, from both men and women. Sexism, coupled with the good old authoritarianism, are what Wang is truly up against.

@笔者楚觉非V‘s comment seems to have hit the hail on the head here:

As to her indecent poses, they got her in jail because she tarnished the image of people’s police force. [However,] imagine if Wang was dressed up as a nurse, a teacher, or a maid; would she be punished like this? No. They’re all occupations, but are treated so differently. Why?

The logic behind this hypocrisy is that it’s acceptable to degrade nurses, teachers and maids — occupations traditionally taken by women — but it’s a crime to degrade police officers — an occupation traditionally taken by men — remember? A woman police officer is sexualized as a “police flower” — and, more importantly, an occupation that represents the state and its (masculine) power over its people.

The truth is, Wang’s offense doesn’t lie in her posing as what she is not. There have been plenty of images of beautiful young women and men posing as police officers “with dignity” in the public space but no one would have even bothered to ask whether they are models or real police officers. There’s also plenty of sexy photos that can be considered way more indecent than her photos floating online, but rarely anybody has gotten into trouble with the law for them. (“What if she didn’t wear any clothes? What would that be? Pornography, body art, or body painting… I want to ask how many years can she get for that?” as @烦人先生2447486305 asked.) Wang’s offense lies in her juxtaposing an image of a desired — sexually objectified — young woman with the image of the police force. At the same time, she dared to do so with a certain “shameless” spectacle. And that — THAT is the worst HUMILIATION thrown in the face of the stern-faced paternal state. (Even the name of her crime, zhaoyaozhuangpian zui, screams out this frustration of a self-righteous patriarch. Literally, zhaoyao means to bluff, to show off, or to parade. Zhuangpian means to con, to trick, or to swindle.)

“Don’t you repeatedly make fun of the system. [Remember,] the system has power,” as netizen @林水邑风 wrote. Read: if you dare to disgrace the state, you’re going to jail.

The Beijing municipal government updated the flood death toll to 77 a couple of hours ago. This was on the evening of July 26, Beijing time. This update was announced via the municipal government’s official weibo account (ZH) and was published on People’s Daily‘s website (ZH).

No one knows whether the City would have made this move if there were no public pressure for transparency on this issue, but anyone who has some understanding of China’s politics wouldn’t discount the power of public opinion expressed online. The City has been standing by their initial number of 37 since the torrential rain caused the deadly flood in the city. In fact, about 24 hours earlier, at the 2nd press conference held by the Beijing City Press Office after the flood, the reported death toll was still 37 (ZH). One would wonder if the authorities changed their mind in response to the public outcry for transparency.

One thing is for sure. The Chinese government is taking what people say online and what they think about official information seriously these days. On the afternoon of July 26, People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the government, published an article titled, “The Casualty Number Is Not a ‘Sensitive Topic’” (ZH). Apparently, this article is written in response to people’s suspicion about the official death toll and their outrage about the government’s suppression of information and discussions about the flood online.

In the article, the author, People’s Daily‘s columnist Fan Zhengwei, first defended the government’s slow release of information in times of crises:

There is a well-known saying on the Internet, “When the truth is still putting on its shoes, the rumors have travelled across half of the world.” Different from citizens publishing information as individuals, the government has a process of verifying and synthesizing information; also, different from publishing information in real time online, the government has to follow a process of publishing statistics as well. Especially with the advances in new media technologies, mobile devices and weibo have pluralized the ways information is communicated, and the authorities today are met with more serious challenges [than ever before]. To a certain degree, we have to admit to a fact: in many cases, no matter how fast and timely official information is communicated, it always falls behind rumors and heresay on the Internet.

But then Fan cited the “international experience” in emergency response and information transparency, and seemed to try to appease people by acknowledging that the government has to communicate with the public better:

It is required qualities in authorities on every level to study the nature of communication in the Internet era, to respect the laws of public opinion development in the era of social media, to recognize the public concerns in a society of increasing awareness of rights, and to be able to build credibility through interactive communication. In fact, in terms of “negative news,” people are more concerned with the government’s attitude to the “negative news” [than the news itself]. As a comment about the casualty number a netizen left on the People’s Daily‘s official weibo page goes: “Only by confronting [problems], can [the government] resolve [them]; only [through its] dedication to resolving problems, can [the government] win people’s hearts and minds.”

Of course, this piece is still full of bureaucratic platitudes, and one would doubt whether this commitment to better communication is sincere. In other words, no one knows whether the government will truly commit to transparency or it will just use technologies and media with more sophistication so as to manipulate the public opinion. Nevertheless, when we see that the government has to directly answer to people’s outcries on weibo and other social media, we know that no one can discount the power of media technologies in empowering people to make their voices heard and to pressure the government to do better — despite the censorship.

An old Chinese saying goes, “To muzzle people’s mouths is more dangerous than to block the course of a river.” It is a piece of advice for the emperors of China — to suppress criticism from the masses is futile and will lead to disastrous consequences. If the ancient wisdom still holds true today, those in power in today’s China don’t seem to take it seriously, or perhaps too seriously.

The recent deadly flood in Beijing exposed the municipal government’s poor infrastructure and emergency response. The government didn’t have any effective warning system in place for the public. Taking advantage of the high cell phone use rate in China, some cities use text messaging to send out warnings to the public in case of emergencies. Of the 20 million permanent residents in Beijing, more than 95 percent own cell phones, but the city doesn’t have a text messaging warning system in place. The municipal government’s excuse is that it takes too long to send out text messages to such as big population, but a few days after the flood, telecommunication service providers such as Beijing Mobile and Beijing Telecomm issued statements that there is no such technical barrier as claimed by the Beijing city authority.

The authority is slow in response to the flood, but it has been quick to muzzle people’s mouths. Webmasters, under the pressure of the government, have been deleting the discussions about the flood, its casualty, and criticism of the government. The official death toll released on July 22, a day after a monstrous storm was 37. Days later, despite the increasing doubts raised in the public, the authority still stands by this number. In the cyber sphere, weibo users have been posting photos and witness accounts of the disaster, which have amounted to more suspicion in the public that the actual death toll is way larger than the officially released number.

“Liangxiang residents witnessed with their own eyes, that more than 20 bodies were recovered from the water this morning, and there are more under the water,” a netizen 鸥orianna posted. Liangxiang is a neighborhood in Beijing’s Fangshan District, where the food caused the most damage in the region.

Another post showed a still shot from a video in which a group of government officials waited for other people to pull out the bodies in the water and then took off their pants posing for publicity photos.

Both of these posts, however, were deleted by “little secretaries,” a name weibo netizens have given to the “security editors” hired by Sina to self-censor the site, shortly after they were posted. In fact, posts like these will only survive for a few hours on the website.

But the netizens haven’t given up. As the original posts are getting deleted, images of screen captures of these deleted posts started to be circulated fast. Because texts in the images are not searchable, it is harder for little secretaries to search for sensitive posts and delete them. Sometimes, instead of reposting, some people attach these images to their posts so that when the original post gets deleted, their posts won’t be affected.

Li Kaifu, an IT entrepreneur and opinion leader on Sina Weibo, even posted a tutorials of how to avoid posts getting deleted. “Don’t repost the original, but post the screen shot. This way, you can avoid getting into trouble, and can also save the screen shot for later use,” wrote Li.

Even these posts are disappearing too, but the hide-and-seek game between the netizens and the authority has just started. Netizen 摄影爱好兔 collected a long list of posts from witnesses of the flood, all of which had already been deleted, made it into a long image and posted it on Sina Weibo (see partial below). The post was reposted for more thousands of times before it was finally deleted by the administrator. However, new posts are still popping up, one at a time, keeping the little secretaries busy.

Two posts in a collection of deleted posts of images and witness accounts about Beijing’s flood in late July

The flood has passed, leaving rubles of buildings, damaged cars, and grieving families in Beijing. However, the flood of speech hasn’t been muzzled, despite the government’s effort to. On the contrary, people’s enthusiasm in participating in the public discourse has been going ever stronger. Maybe it is time for those in power to reconsider the ancient Chinese wisdom. For thousands of years, Chinese have seen too many times the demise of dynasties, and perhaps the authority should learn something from history after all.

Foxconn, a Taiwanese company in South China, Apple’s largest supplier, is perhaps one of the most notorious companies in recent news. Employing 1.2 million Chinese workers and producing an estimate of 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, the super company is also known for its most inhuman “super exploitation” of workers. Foxconn workers’ harsh working and living conditions have been reported extensively in mainstream media since earlier this year. These media’s reporting on Foxconn mostly focus on the company’s abuse and exploitation of its workers and those who have been crushed in this system, but we haven’t seen much reporting on the effects of the system on those who have survived or even excelled.

In a recent episode of a Chinese reality show Only You (非你莫属), where job seekers compete for jobs through live job interviews, Chinese TV viewers had a glimpse of Foxconn’s “military-style management” and what it could do to the employees through the first-person account of a mid-level manager working for the company. The 30-year old interviewee, named Zhang Fei, started working for Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen as an entry-level employee after he finished technical high school, making 330 yuan ($52) a month. After twelve years working for the company, he is now an IT manager in charge of a team of fifty employees who are responsible for the entire network, communication facilities and security system for the factory.

Zhang Fei, an Foxconn employee, defends his company after his account of an incident of physical penalty that lead to his blacking out (click image for video in Chinese)

On the show, Zhang revealed that he once fell unconscious in the Foxconn compound. He told the audience what happened:

It was arranged that we were going to be “loaned” to another company that day. Usually, we were supposed to get up at six in the morning for a morning drill. This time, we didn’t know whether we were still supposed to participate in the drill, so we stood at the opening of the staircase, wondering what to do. Then the training officer saw us and pointed out that we didn’t participate in the drill as we were supposed to. [I thought] I had a good reason, so I tried to explain to him, but at this point, he said that [he must] penalize me and asked me to go running up and down the stairs. [I think] the military-style management doesn’t allow any excuse. Whatever the boss asks you to do, you must do it. … [I went] up the staircase on this side and came down on the other side. There were six floors all together. I ran for more than an hour, almost two hours, waiting for an order, that is, the order to stop, but it didn’t come. So I was thinking, as long as I didn’t have the order to stop, I must keep running. It turned out that the training officer might have carelessly forgotten about me. When finally somebody told me to stop, I suddenly passed out on the stairs. At that moment, I felt numb all over. It felt like that your face, your eyes, your brain, and every part of your entire body were numb.

What’s even more shocking is, Zhang did not see this treatment as abuse. Instead, he kept defending the company. Before he told his story, he already were saying that “it wasn’t the company’s fault… [but] maybe because I did something wrong.” When the host said after hearing his story, “I don’t think you were at fault,” Zhang responded, with a strong conviction:

This is the military-style management. From the team’s perspective, [if] you don’t perform as you are instructed to, if you don’t operated as you are instructed to, it surely is your fault. As an employee, you must [see this situation] from the team’s perspective rather than the individual’s perspective, because these are two different view points. When you stand on your ground as an individual, you will think that you’re always right, but when you look at it from the team’s perspective, you’ll realize that this may be your problem.

Zhang wants to leave Foxconn and become a career trainer, helping young people who have just joined the workforce become a competitive employee and plan their future. Here’s what he said to his “trainee” in a mock training session on the show:

Every new employee coming into a company must first form a spirit of teamwork that fits yourself. First of all, you must learn to listen [to your supervisor] and know how to behave properly. This is the most basic requirement. I’m not entitled to say “no” to the boss, so I can only obey. So obeying orders is the foremost requirement.

A “boss” on the show pointed out that Zhang’s management style and expectations from employees would work well in manufacturing industry. He said that with Zhang’s experience, he was in demand and would easily find a company that’d hire him. That’s true. The fact is, in reality, military-style management that controls almost every minute of a worker’s life so as to eliminate every trait of individuality has been adopted by many factories in China, not just Foxconn. This dehumanizing rigid control of workers, unfortunately, is where productivity comes from. It is what has brought astronomic profits to companies like Foxconn and put it ahead of other companies on the international market (read about Apple’s example in NYT).

The scariest thing about this dehumanizing culture of the manufacturing industry in China is that it doesn’t only exploits workers, it also changes them, like Zhang, who, working his way up from a lowest-ranking worker to a mid-level manager, has been completely molded into the system, with heart and soul. Having contributed to Foxconn’s big boss Terry Gou’s $5.5 billion, Zhang is now willing, actually, eager to promote Foxconn’s ideology that legitimizes dehumanizing exploitation and its huge human cost in pursuit for profits. Perhaps after all, that’s what capitalism requires in order to grow–the capital must not only control the workers’ bodies, but also their minds. And that’s what’s behind Foxconn’s, and Apples’, success.

“I found this company you work for is indeed very powerful. You worked there for twelve years, and now you’re brainwashed completely,” the host of the show said to Zhang, half-jokingly, after Zhang defended Foxconn. He was right, and that situation is unlikely to change any time soon.

Finally, China became the newest item on Anonymous’ list of targets. Yesterday, several Chinese government websites and more than four hundred websites were hacked by international hacktivists, announced by a new handle @AnonymousChina on twitter. Many of these websites have been restored, but a few are still down, showing error messages and a couple of them show a message from Anon calling for action against the Chinese government. These attacks were to protest against the Chinese government’s control of the Internet and its suppression of its citizens’ freedom of speech.

Anonymous's message on the defaced websites

Over the years of its “operation,” if anything, Anon is known to be good at creating excitement in our psyche. And they did it again. The news of its attack on the Chinese government, one of the most notorious censors in the world, surely has excited many freedom lovers, Chinese or not, especially as this happened just a few days after the government’s crack down on websites and the blockage of weibo comments in China. Does this mean that Anon has officially declared war on the Chinese government? How much will their hacktivism impact the Internet in China? Will this become the beginning of a larger social movement?

Don’t get to excited. At this point, I do not see that Anon will have major impact on loosening the Chinese government’s grip on the Internet, nor will it effectively mobilize the Chinese public. And here are my reasons:

On the list that Anon published on pastebin.com, the websites under attack are mostly websites of private businesses. Only a few government websites are on the list, all of them for local governments. The list does not have a single website of a big transnational company (and the group is advocating a “global revolution”) or the central government.

This means, the impact of these attacks is no comparison with that of the attacks on the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, Universal Music, and MPAA in protest against SOPA and PIPA earlier this year. Actually, I doubt the government websites Anon attacked have much traffic to begin with since they’re mostly government websites on the city level.

Perhaps that’s why Anon chose to attack the hundreds of non-governmental websites as well. In fact, in Anon’s webchat on #GlobalREvolution, a participant (unclear if s/he is affiliated with Anon) pointed out that attacking those websites was to “spread the word.” If that was Anon’s intension, it didn’t pick the best targets because most of them seem to be of some obscure IT companies.

More importantly, the “word” Anon is trying to spread really doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t know. There’s no need for anyone to tell Chinese, living in China or overseas, that our freedom of speech is suppressed, because we are living it. In fact, Chinese have been expressing their discontent with the government’s Internet restriction and censoring. Chinese netizens’ reaction to the statement by Hong Lei, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, can well evidence this. Hong said during a press conference yesterday that “the Internet in China is open, and netizens enjoy tremendous freedom… The Chinese government regulates the Internet according to the laws.” Thousands of Chinese commented on various weibo sites, expressing their disgust with the government’s hypocrisy (“Blocking comments, identity verification, we are indeed free”).

So why haven’t Chinese risen up and done something to change? That’s because the Internet is only one place of control. There’s stops and frisks, there’s secret imprisonment, there’s forced eviction, and there’s suppression of unionization of workers… The Chinese government’s control over its citizens is a complex system that reaches various aspects of citizens’ lives on multiple levels and in myriad forms. To mobilize Chinese to take action, if we want to entertain this idea for a second, the Internet is not the only battleground, but it is THE battleground of Anon.

In fact, despite censorship, the Internet the most open space in China and it has been serving as a place for information dissemination, deliberation, and expression that hosts public opinions. However, as the example of Guangzhou’s stops and frisks has shown, in a police state, public opinion hardly has the power that required for change. As Anon and its supporters are raving their victories on Twitter, I’m not sure by taking down a few websites in China, Anon can start a revolution in China as the hashtag #GlobalRevolution suggests.

In the end, Anon’s action has created more of a fantastic image than any actual effects in China. Anon certainly has taken advantage of the sensation-seeking Western media’s obsession with the group and with China’s human rights issues and made a loud noise. I’m not sure, however, how long this sensation can last. Besides, most Chinese governmental websites are so poorly designed and of little use (except for showing off the government’ “good work”) that they do not even need to be hacked to be malfunctioning. As @AnonymousChina tweeted, “cdcbd.gov.cn qnwqdj.gov.cn bbdj.gov.cn redefaced lol your security still suck…” You know what? Maybe that’s because they don’t care about it that much.