#technosocial

The Chinese Jasmine Revolution (or CJR) has been going on for a few months now, having started in late February. A simple post at the social media produsage platform (SMPP) <Boxun.com> proposed a ‘Chinese Jasmine Revolution’ together with about a dozen protest sites throughout China and a slogan-chanting strategy that was to be put into action at these sites every Sunday. That same day, Boxun was effectively disabled via denial-of-service ‘cyber attacks’ (DoS attacks) and Chinese President Hu Jintao announced a need for “improved management of the ‘virtual society’ and a better guidance of public opinions on the Internet”. (The latter has no clear connection to the Boxun post, but does help contextualize it and also the DoS attacks.) At least until March 13, Boxun continued to be consistently subjected to DoS attacks that were almost certainly enacted by the government.

    The proposed Sunday protests have been perceived by much of the transnational and non-China-based mass media as unfulfilled possibilities: there have only been a handful of individuals who have marked themselves as protesters by chanting or through some other acts, so it is difficult to distinguish those who are there to protest from everybody else in the site areas. Yet although the proposed protests did not take the same form as was initially proposed and did not resemble the kind of protests that had recently taken place in Tunisia and Egypt (among other places in Western Asia and Northern Africa), they were still events with clear effects (and perhaps other effects that are not clear as of yet). After all, in addition to the DoS attacks on Boxun, the Chinese police has made a sustained, massive effort to discourage any potential protesters and to violently discipline any who are perceived to be protesters. For instance, the police have regularly swarmed the protest sites each Sunday with the dual intention of standing guard in case any attempt to protest and attempting to incite those people who are thinking of protesting to regulate themselves- that is, to exercise ‘self-control’ (in the sense of ‘controlling the self’) by acting like a ‘normal’ person traveling through a given protest site so as to avoid police discipline.

    The Chinese government-police has also been ‘disappearing’ and generally harassing those people deemed ‘prominent political dissidents’. People such as Ai Weiwei have been dragged away by police without clear explanation; in his specific case, he was picked up at an airport moments before boarding a flight with his friend (again without any concrete reason). In late May, almost two months after Ai’s arrest, he was accused of tax evasion by the police, though the length of time between this claim and Ai’s arrest indicates that this charge is simply an excuse to detain him for additional time. (In any case, it is clear that Ai was initially arrested because of his political resistance, not because of his taxes.) This is not the only tactic that has been used by the Chinese government-police, though- Ai himself was previously put under house arrest for his political work, and the police broke into a hotel room Ai had been staying at and proceeded to beat him, presumably to discourage Ai from testifying in defense of another perceived ‘political dissident’ at a trial taking place the next day.

Altogether, these various police actions effectively serve to discipline those who voice their issues with China’s governance and are part of a concerted effort to incite self-control and political docility among individual Chinese people. Of course, the government-police are not alone in this; every person in China who acts in ways that promote this kind of self-control participates in this production of power that governs and is enacted by virtually everyone. Even the threat of discipline for disobeying the command to self-control is decentralized: for example, mass media and Internet companies are compelled to develop strategies of self-control to ensure that all finalized work is free of ‘politically sensitive content’ under the threat of government shut-down. This is not to say that mass media and Internet companies never resist the Chinese government-police and their production of ‘politically sensitive content’ as part of a broader strategy of media control, but rather that any such resistance should be understood as constricted by this context. Moreover, although the imperative of 'self-control' and political docility are enacted by nearly everyone- for instance, through acts of 'self-censorship'- it is important to remember that their existence is mainly dependent on the disciplinary acts of the Chinese government; that is to say, the government and police institutions (and the people constituting them) bear the bulk of the responsibility for producing and sustaining these power mechanisms, and must change their practices if these repressive mechanisms are to be eliminated.