(Un)civil Society in Digital China| Demobilizing the Emotions of Online Activism in China: A Civilizing Process

Authors

  • Guobin Yang University of Pennsylvania

Keywords:

censorship, Internet, civility, civilization, China

Abstract

With the declining number of Internet protest events in recent years, online activism in China has suffered a setback. This is due significantly to the implementation of new forms of governing online expression. At the center of these new forms is a set of discourses of wenming, the Chinese characters for which can be translated as both “civilization” and “civility.” As civilization, wenming operates as an ideological discourse of legitimation, whereas as civility, wenming functions as a strategic technology for Internet governance. After tracing the evolution of the ideological discourse of wenming, this article analyzes the technologies of civility used for managing online speech in China. Two case studies illustrate how the technologies of civility are used to demobilize the emotions of online protest.

Author Biography

Guobin Yang, University of Pennsylvania

Associate Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009) and The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (May 2016). He is the editor of China’s Contested Internet (2015), The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China (with Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein, March 2016), and Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (with Ching- Kwan Lee, 2007). Professor Yang is also the author of Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind (2003), a critically-acclaimed English translation of Wenxin Diaolong. With Zhongdang Pan, he co-edits the new SAGE journal Communication and the Public.  Yang serves on the editorial boards of Public Culture, Social Media and Society, The International Journal of Press/Politics, Global Media and China, The China Quarterly, and Chinese Journal of Sociology. Previously he taught as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in English Literature with a specialty in Literary Translation from Beijing Foreign Studies University and a second Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University.

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Published

2018-05-08

Issue

Vol. 12 (2018)

Section

Special Sections

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