DEFENDING CANTONESEWEIBO AND GEO-IDENTITY

POLITICS IN GUANGZHOU, CHINA

Impact of War on Modern Chinese Society Conference, UQ 2013

Wilfred Yang Wang (QUT)Wilfred.wang@student.qut.edu.au

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

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)

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

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)

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.

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)

QUESTIONS

How are information communicated and transmitted with the presence of state-repression (censorship), and the absence of protest leader-follower structure?

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

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

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.

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.

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

VISUALISE IDENTITY

GEO-IDENTITY TO MOVEMENT IDENTITY

袁崇焕 (YUAN CHONGHUAN)

VISUALISE DISSENTS

MAINSTREAM MEDIA

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

GZ-HK CULTURAL IDENTITY• Woai Feisinai (18:48, 25/07/2013): ‘pro-Cantonese

is a common course for Guangzhouers and Hong Kongers!’.

ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL SPHERE

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

EYE WITNESSING

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!’

AFTER-MATCH • The proposal was not even submitted for

consideration

• Proliferation of local, Cantonese communities on Weibo

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’

THANK YOU!

QUESTIONS?