Week 11: Llamas vs The Chinese Government
If someone tried to tell me that China had one of the highest uses of social media in the world, I would have never believed them. Because, in my small mind, and im sure in the minds of many others, China seems like a far away and oppressed country when it comes to social media. I’d heard stories of people going on holiday there and not being able to post about it on social media until they got home. In my head it was strictly monitored and censored in all capacities.
So yes, I was shocked to find out that China has many successful social media platforms, none of which that we use in the Western world. The biggest network is QZone. As of 2014 the platform had. Around 645 million users (!!!). Although that isn’t huge when comparing to networks like Facebook, Facebook is used globally, whereas QZone is almost exclusively used in China. That’s a ridiculously large amount of people from one country.
But that’s because there is no Facebook in China. There’s no Instagram. No Twitter either. I wonder if they know what they’re missing, or if the networks they use are significantly better than ours. I might have to check that out later.
And even if they aren’t called the same names or do exactly the same things, China have an equivalent to each of the networks we have. Sina Weibo and Tencent tend to replace our idea of Twitter, and Facebook has a multitude of copycat versions.
Out of the 58% of Chinese internet users who use social media, a significant 37% are students. Now, it isn’t a completely new concept that youth have always pushed for change across the world throughout history, be it social, technological etc, but there is a massive difference in a country like China, where the government has a lot more power, and those who scream revolution have intense ramifications to answer to.
This is why the students of China have to be more resourceful and effective.
It is difficult for a social media user in China to express negative opinions on their platforms, and so young people have adapted and constructed an entire new language, constituting of symbols, images and sounds. This allows them to communicate with each other about things the government might not like to hear without being punished. Just like in many other countries around the world, the government cannot censor something if they don’t understand the language.
The language rapidly changes, so as soon as the government discover what one symbol may mean, it has been changed to something else. A now iconic meme named the Grass Mud Horse refers to images of llamas. People shared images of llamas as an act of defiance towards the government. Llama is extremely similar to the phrase for ‘fuck your mother,’ and so whenever someone. Wanted to protest against their government they shared an image of a llama.
Although the thought of having to create a whole new dialect to protest against what is happening around me terrifies me, it seems like the youth in China are getting away with it just fine. Even thought they may use social media just us much as we do, the things they are using it to say are significantly more important.
References
DLD Conference 2013, DLD13 - How Social Media is changing China and Asia (Kevin Lee, Duncan Clark, Kitty Lun), 7 February, viewed 28 May 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG3z2ucaR6A>
Kemp, S 2014, Internet users pass 3 billion mark, We Are Social, viewed 28 May 2019, <http://wearesocial.sg/blog/2014/11/internet-users-pass-3-billion/>
Social Networks in China - Statistics & Facts 2013, Satista, viewed 28 May 2019, <http://www.statista.com/topics/1170/social-networks-in-china/>
