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DEFENDING CANTONESEWEIBO AND GEO-IDENTITY
POLITICS IN GUANGZHOU, CHINA
Impact of War on Modern Chinese Society Conference, UQ 2013
Wilfred Yang Wang (QUT)[email protected]
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PRESENTATION OUTLINE1. Collective action in digital age
- The changing (movement) network structure
- Weibo: interfaces and relevant functions
2. Data collection and analysis
3. Findings and discussions
- Perform Cantonese
- An image war
- Translocal network structure
- Direct confrontation
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DIGITAL COLLECTIVE ACTION• Personalised network
• Horizontal and flat network
• Private and semi-private network and communication
• Spatially and geographically flexible
• Portability, Mobility - technical convergence between platforms and services (Facebook and Twitter apps)
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A DIFFERENT TWITTER … WEIBO• Weibo (micro blogs), entry up to 140 Chinese
characters;
• Launched in 2009, by Sina.com;
• 5-6 different versions of weibo, a very competitive market.
• Reached 331 million users by June 2013
• Nearly 50% used it through smart-phone
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DATATIFICATIONInformation now become:
• More actively approaching users
• Visualised
• Encourage users’ participation (reports, LIKE, promote, and comments)
• Instantaneousness (news feed and chat)
• Emotional (visual and audio materials) and personal (cover picture and profile photo)
• Networking (connectivity), not dissemination (order)
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PRO-CANTONESE PROTEST IN 2010• Guangzhou (Canton) is a major southern city in China
• Home of Cantonese (language); close to HK and Macau
• A proposal to abolish Cantonese broadcasting at local TV station’s news and current affairs programs in July 2010; change to Mandarin
• Public uproar and anger
• A street protest on 25 July, with more than thousands participants; another protest on 1 August at HK.
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HOW IT UNFOLDED ON WEIBO…• A group of activists used Weibo to organised
the protest, recruit members and publish news and updates for the protest;
• Guangzhou authorities disapproved the protest application
• Organisers were dismantled; called off the protest through weibo
• News media were prohibited to report
• Online censorship (date, location, slogan)
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QUESTIONS
How are information communicated and transmitted with the presence of state-repression (censorship), and the absence of protest leader-follower structure?
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METHODS• Collected 1,648 Weibo entries through keyword
search ‘support Cantonese’ (撑粤语) between 23 – 27 July 2010.
• Location: Guangzhou
• Further filter by excluding all reposts, data down to 393, for framing analysis
• Approached with framing analysis
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CATEGORIESLabel/Code Counts
InformationProtest Information 149
Personal plan on protest day 55
Future actions (second protest in HK) 7
Information about censorship 16
RationaleCultural and historical uniqueness of Cantonese
38
Linguistic and identity right 22
Seeking external supports 19
Alternative actions 21
Slogan 66
N=393
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FRAMING ANALYSISGuiding questions:
• Solidarity frame:
1. How Guangzhouers frame their culture and language?
2. How do they perceive outsiders?
• Participation frame (what makes people walk on the street or protest online?):
1. The sense of severity and urgency (the gravity of the crisis and the needs to take action);
2. The assurance to minimize personal risks of participation;
3. The legitimacy to take action.
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FINDINGS• Typing Cantonese;
• Visualise local culture and language;
• Citing mainstream media as moral supports;
• Citing Hong Kong supports to create a cross-border cultural identity (against CCP’s effort of national identity);
• Screenshots and live updates (texts);
• Directly confronting the censorship.
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A LINGUISTIC WARType in Cantonese instead of Mandarin
For example: 蚊 = mosquito (Mandarin) = Dollar (Cantonese)
You first go (Mandarin) 你先走You go first (Cantonese) 你行先
政府 (government) = zf, 天朝 (the heaven Dynasty)/ 正虎 (square tiger)
公安部 (police department) = gong an bu / gung on bou
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VISUALISE IDENTITY
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GEO-IDENTITY TO MOVEMENT IDENTITY
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袁崇焕 (YUAN CHONGHUAN)
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VISUALISE DISSENTS
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MAINSTREAM MEDIA
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AN IMAGE WARInternet contention is radical communicative action conducted in words and images … the most obvious feature of internet contention is its symbolic and discursive form (Guobin Yang, 2008)
Mobilisation and framing:
Geo-solidarity
Needs to participate
Citing external supports
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GZ-HK CULTURAL IDENTITY• Woai Feisinai (18:48, 25/07/2013): ‘pro-Cantonese
is a common course for Guangzhouers and Hong Kongers!’.
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ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL SPHERE
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SCREEN CAPTURE• A practice to evade online censorship
• Information visualised (not textualised)
• .jpg File can get around the ‘sensitive word detection’ ( 敏感词 ) system
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EYE WITNESSING
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ONLINE PROTEST• Many complains their posts are removed
• Accuse the service being disgraceful and weibo took away their legal rights :
‘let’s see how many posts can they (SNSs and the government) delete!?’
‘look, the government starts removing posts (relating to pro-Cantonese movement), do they really think that will shattered our determination to support Cantonese?’
‘zf has censored the term ‘Jiangnanxi’ (protest location) on search engineers!’
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AFTER-MATCH • The proposal was not even submitted for
consideration
• Proliferation of local, Cantonese communities on Weibo
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CONCLUDING…• The nature of collective action is changing
in the digital age … in terms of the communicative structures;
• Collective action becomes part of the everyday practice rather than an exceptional historical moment;
• Self-participation and engagement not systematic coordination
• ‘Who we are’ not ‘what we want’
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THANK YOU!
QUESTIONS?