Towards Democratisation?: Understanding university students’ Internet use in mainland China
University intranet and online forums
Download 3.43 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- 4.5.2 Online forums
4.5 University intranet and online forums4.5.1 University IntranetMost characteristics of university intranets are just like their Western counterparts. There is one characteristic that attracts great attention from scholars (e.g. Yang, 2003; MacKinnon, 2007; Li, 2010). University intranets in mainland China provide online forum services, or so-called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) which are considered by Li (2010) as ‘a major type of online public space in China’ (p.63). The history of university BBS in China can be traced back to the era of telnet-based BBS from 1997 to 1998. Earlier university BBSs were established and operated by students utilising university resources and became popular as liberal BBS not only among students but also people from the general public. University BBSs are not only used for the spread of breaking news the authorities want to hold back and public discussion, but also for online protests, and organising offline protests (Yang, 2003b). Despite enjoying a certain degree of freedom, university BBSs are in the control of the university and are censored (Yang, 2003b). 2004 and 2005 marks a turning point for the development of university BBSs in China. Before that there had not been any registration requirement for their users so that any person could post on university BBSs while remaining anonymous. Besides, ‘the Chinese universities and research institutions’ network is not under the direct rule of local government’ (Li, 2010, p.72). As a virtual public sphere for political debates and discussions, therefore, university and commercial BBSs enjoyed greater popularity across China than blogs even in 2005 (Guo, et al., 2005; Li, 2010). Due to the anonymity and numerous permeable holes of both technical and human censoring, sensitive content was posted and survived for hours and sometime days before it was discovered and filtered. It is long enough for any news to spread wide online and make much difference. Sometimes it becomes too late to block or suppress the spread of such news for enough people have already read it and begun their protest. It is for this reason that in 2004 the Chinese government launched a crackdown on the BBS which deepened throughout 2005 (MacKinnon, 2007, p.36). In 2005, the Ministry of Education ordered that external IPs should be banned from university BBSs. Starting from a popular BBS known as “SMTH,” hosted at Tsinghua University (China’s equivalent of MIT), a real name registration and a current-student-only policy have been enforced on university BBSs across China (Soong, 2005). Consequently, posting of sensitive content and public discussion has been moved to the newly born, but later rapidly rising, blogs whose potential as a public sphere and to be used by dissidents had not been realised by the government yet. Li (2010) argued that ‘university forums were reduced from a public place to an internal place for students’ social use’ as a result of the tightened control. Table 44. University Intranet: participants as audience
Most of the participants reported their use of university intranet as audience. There are three categories of message the participants sought on the university intranet: information about and around the university, study, and entertainment. University BBS was a major platform for the participants to learn information about their universities. P01 explicitly mentioned that he did not read national news on university intranet. It seems that the university intranet has been reduced to an internal place as Li (2010) argued, but not only for social use. Chinese university intranets provide three unique services: BBS, Bitdownload, and ideology education service. Bitdownload is a peer-to-peer platform for registered users to share resources. The majority of what is shared is just movies, videos, and study resources that are ‘politically safe’. The advantage is that it is fast and free. Politically sensitive content is also shared on this platform. For example, the researcher once downloaded a banned documentary from Bitdownload. The ‘politically and intellectually challenging’ documentary (Zhao, 2008, p.86) named River Elegy (Heshang,《河殇》in Chinese), was aired by China Central Television (CCTV), a vice-ministerial level government institution, in 1988. The documentary harshly criticises the Chinese civilisation and suggests that China should learn from Western civilisation. The documentary as an enlightenment was believed by some critics to play an essential part in bringing about the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989. The Party and their ideological educators in university know well the power of the Internet and how to use it and to conduct ideological education has been a major topic of Internet research and practice in China (Qiu & Bu, 2013). The three universities studied all provided ideological education services on their intranet. However, the ideological education services were not reported to be used by the participants. Their motivations to use the university intranet are classified into four categories: surveillance, study, convenience, and time-killing. The most important motivation found is surveillance including to know the university and to be aware of what is going on around them. It has been found that university intranet, especially its BBS, became an important platform for some participants to learn about a university and for students, administrative staff and teachers to communicate with each other. According to P02, BBS has become not only a platform for current students, especially the newcomers, to learn about their environment, but also a source of information for the would-be students to ‘know about the university before registration’ because he believed that ‘complaints on BBS truthfully reflected the bad sides of the university’. It means that university BBS has the potential to influence people’s choice of which university to go to for higher education and the communicators who make the difference are university staff and mainly the current students. In such a sense, university BBS empowers the current students and the staff. In addition, P03 believed that ‘online public deliberation influenced the discussion-making process in a university’. Although he did not really know what happened after, he believed that some posts had positive influence. What has been found about the frequency of usage demonstrates an evident difference between male and female participants in university usage. P04 never used her university intranet. Both P05 and P08 reported utilising their university intranet mainly for movies, occasionally or sometimes for study. P05 seldom used it for surveillance while P08 did not mention any such usage. Three male participants reported usage of university intranet for surveillance. But only P01 still used it very frequently then. P02 and P03 only used it for surveillance frequently as would-be students or fresh students and they only used it occasionally after they knew better the environment and their intent to surveil weakened. Table 45. University Intranet: participants as communicators
The usage as communicators was neither common nor frequent. 4.5.2 Online forumsBBSs and online forums or communities are interchangeable terms in China. Online forums have never been on the list of the most popular Internet services in China (CNNIC, 1997-2013). Their best time was in 2006 when it ranked 4th in the list of Internet users’ most frequently used Internet services next to news reading, search engines, and emails. 43.2% of Internet users reported using online forums most frequently. Usually, it ranked from 7th to 9th in the list of the most frequently used Internet services in the early 2000s. Since 2009, it began to fall out of the top ten in terms of penetration rate. The latest report of CNNIC in 2013 demonstrates that it is now the last of 17 Internet services with a penetration rate of 19.5%. Moreover, online forums are subject to government control. BBSs are required to ‘record user information for at least 60 days to facilitate police work’ (Qiu, 2003, p.11). Like most sites operating in China, BBSs and online forums or communities police themselves to stay out of trouble (Abbott, 2001). Therefore, scholars like Harwit and Clark (2001) suggested that online forums were contributing little to the development of Chinese civil society. Despite limited popularity and government control, however, online forums had been a central topic in the heated debate about the democratic potential or the political implications of the Internet in China before blogs took their place in the late 2000s (MacKinnon, 2007). And its users believe that the forum and the Internet in general is a freer space for public discussion of national affairs, and expression of their opinions, concerns and complaints (Yang, 2003a). Featured by publicity and long-lasting content, online forums are distinct from other Internet services like QQ, microblog, etc. Guo (2005) believed that online forums had ‘the most influence’ thanks to their long-lasting content, despite their relatively low popularity. Online forums serve as a public sphere for Internet users to express and exchange their political ideas, for wide-ranging political discussions with unlike thinkers, for articulation of social problems, and for supervising the government and public affairs, and as virtual communities for the development of civil society (Yang, 2003a; Yang, 2003b; Soong, 2005). According to Yang (2003b), there exist thousands of active online forums in China. He argued that the degree of control and censorship varied from forum to forum and discussion on a wide range of topics was lively on popular forums due to both the hosts’ intent to gain popularity and the users’ counter-control strategies to circumvent key-word filtering. Ironically, even the Strong State Forum of the People’s Daily, one of the leading official newspapers of the Chinese government, is utilised by Internet users for political debates (Qiu, 2003). Thanks to the ‘sheer volume of postings on large sites’ and the post-manner of manual censoring, politically sensitive information and opinion could often survive on online forums ‘for hours and sometimes even days before it is discovered and taken down’ (MacKinnon, 2007, p.36). Moreover, Yang (2003b), asserted that ‘online publics have proliferated along with online forums’ (p.461). In addition, online forums are utilised by groups like Huaxia Zhiqing (the Chinese Educated Youth) to create virtual communities for social interaction, personal expression, mutual help, political debate, artistic expression, online publishing, organising online and offline activities, and more (Yang, 2003a). Zhiqing (the Educated Youth) is a special term in China. It refers to the urban youth who were sent or forced to the countryside to become peasants or to build farms from the early 1950s to the end of the Cultural Revolution. However, some scholars argue that online forums, especial those of official websites, have been utilised by the CPC to legitimise its own claim to power or used for diplomatic tactics (Weiss, 2014) with countries like Japan and the United States, by mobilising nationalism. The Strong State Forum of the People’s Daily is a hotbed of nationalist fervour (Hughes, 2002; Kalathil, 2003). In September 1996, Peking University’s Untitled BBS Station coordinated the first web-based grassroots nationalism protest. It was against Japanese occupation of Daioyu Island (Qiu, 2003). Other such protests in which online forums played a part include demonstrations targeting Indonesia (summer 1998), NATO (May 1999), Taiwan (July 1999), Japan (January 2000 and February-March 2001), and the United States (April-May 2001). Online forums acted as a public place for heated discussion and mobilisation when a triggering event happened (Qiu, 2003). However, employment of nationalism is a dangerous game. The party-state runs the risks of looking weak in its diplomacy and looking unpatriotic when suppressing nationalist protests, which undermines its legitimacy (Weiss, 2014). Moreover, Weiss (2014) argues that nationalism mobilisation may lay the foundation of other social mobilisation which the party-state fears most. The organisers and participants of nationalism mobilisation practice the skills and accumulate the experiences needed for social mobilisation. In addition, it gives birth to such autonomous organisers and organisations. Caution is needed when researchers interpret their results of content or discourse analysis of online forum contents. For example, Yang’s (2003a) assertion of users’ belief in the freedom of the online forum came from an analysis of the discourse in the Strong State Forum. It is because that full-time cyber-police and part-time state information security liaison personnel are not only employed to filter out the undesirable content, but also to post content favourable to the Chinese government and to make it look like a free public sphere. On 20th June 2008, President Hu Jintao communicated with the Strong State Forum’s users for several minutes. Such a symbolic communication sent out two messages. Firstly, the Chinese government recognised the political importance of online forums. Secondly, the Chinese government has been strategically utilising the online forum to increase its legitimacy. Thirdly, scholars like Leibold (2011) argue that equipped with a freer space, Chinese forum users employ them mainly for discussing matters of common interest and for sharing life experiences rather than meaningful political debate. In addition, users tend to misuse their online freedom for whispers or ‘verbal violence’ instead of critical or rational discourse (Leibold, 2011). Survey evidence demonstrates that only 11% of surveyed participants considered information on online forums as reliable compared with three-quarters on government websites (Guo, 2007, pp.9-11). Baidu Tieba is one of the most popular online forums or communities in China. It is based on the notion of bringing like-minded people together to communicate with and help each other on a topic of common interest through key word search. Any registered user can search with a key word the topic he or she is interested in. if such a forum, or so-called bar, has not been established and then a forum named by that key word is automatically set up. ‘Once the bar is created, it will become searchable within the Baidu Tieba’ (Yip, 2010, p.38). As a result, on its website (http://tieba.baidu.com/) it claims that it has 8,192,794 topic-based forums when the author is consulting its website on 10th May, 2014. Liyi Bar, one of its most popular bars, has 10,184,593 visits and 421,951,261 posts. Democracy needs not only freedom of speech, but also constant exposure to competing ideas (Sunstein, 2009). Such an interest-based model of communication and interaction is criticised for fragmentising and localising Chinese society as a self-aggregating “hive mind” and “cloistered cocoons of cognitive consonance” (Lanier, 2006; Lawrence, et al., 2010, p.152). Leibold (2011) argued that ‘the ease with which individuals can create their own fragmented speech markets and interest-based communities encourages misinformation, group polarisation, and extremist thoughts and actions’ (p.13). Table 46. Online forum: topic, purpose and participant’s contribution
The online forums that participants used concentrate on two topics: hobbies and study. The purpose of utilising online forums is usually to search for or learn information in a specialised area. Participants did not only visit the forums, but also made contributions by voting to support useful posts, participating in activities, or posting useful content. Participants did not report using online forums for public debate or mobilisation that has been much discussed academically. Their usage was interest-based and leisure-and-study oriented as argued by Leibold (2011). Table 47. Online forum: topic, number, and effect
P01’s understanding of the effect of visiting a bicycling forum adds a perspective to better understand the effect of entertainment and life content online. He believed that reading travel blogs made their readers want to go travelling. Download 3.43 Mb. Share with your friends:
|