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• 1 2018-06-04T14:54:10-07:00 Chinese Piracy Culture: Emerging User Driven Distribution / China's Cat 20 plain 2018-11-25T09:51:38-08:00

   

  Sandria TranChinese Piracy Culture: Emerging User Driven Distribution
   Luzhour Nina Li’s “Rethinking the Chinese Internet: Social History, Cultural Forms, and Industrial Formation" identifies, at the center of Chinese Internet how cultural piracy served as a foundation for the development of distributing pirated content uploaded for and by the users. The Chinese Internet and Early Online Video Industry both play interconnected roles in early centralized development within the piracy-driven model that is based on the technologies and cultural influences that disrupt unintentional, unexpected environment for piracy to foster interconnection and eventually a community for the “piracy-informed vernacular culture” (Li 4). Through the momentum of peer-to-peer filter-sharing networks, the popularity of these streaming services served as a method and model for users to participate in downloading and distributing content—whether video spoofing, amateur content making, or fansubbing—as a result of the sociocultural, common practices involved with content generated by users. The Chinese cyberspace served as a creative space with palpable opportunities that could exist for the emerging users who were provided the affordance to take on creative initiatives to express themselves. For instance, online forums, especially during the 1990s when amateur video practices were rising, as part of the emerging cultural expression in Chinese cyberspace, served as an open space for expression. These independent, emerging distributions and circulation of piracy-driven content led to commercial platforms such as Tudou, a video-sharing website to capitalize on the social interests for video-sharing. Interestingly enough, while piracy served as a place for expression, it also served a role in distribution foreign content not facilitated by the Chinese state—all part of the history of piracy rooted in p2p sharing networks and volunteer online users dedicated to translating and distributing these foreign television programs and films. These emerging p2p file-sharing practices reflected the Chinese’s laissez-faire capitalism policies, user-driven content distribution, and piracy as it is own sector under the informal economy. In fact, the rise of these practices led to the development of forum culture and p2p fail-sharing culture to go hand-in-hand in the late 1990s and early 200s. Overall, the users articulated through their content practices, let the niche video-sharing sites to become more pervasive and prevalent during the mid-2000s, and eventually near the end of 2000s, distributive pirate content became more commonplace, even on commercialized websites like Tudou, where the paradigm of video content unintentionally shifted from user-driven p2p networks to commercial sites for pirated content. The inadvertent development of these piracy practices was essential in cultural content development and creativity for the online video industry and crucial to shaping the influences of Chinese society through the enthusiasm, maintenance, and distribution of piracy-based vernacular video culture. 

   

  China's Cat 
  To understand the Internet is to understand the Chinese Internet as a separate entity from its western equivalent. Chinese Internet is unique in a sense because it departures from "The Internet", particularly the Western Internet, simply in many ways: as the reformation of its own national identity post-colonialism, as a different geo-political-economic method to understand contemporary world and world history as a case study, and finally a supplement to understanding China’s own knowledge and cultural influences and productions in its own online sphere. 
  
  
  Although there are huge implications for mass surveillance and censorship controlled by the state, China internet survives as mean to challenge the framework that any non-western concept must be backward or deviant, which are exactly the points Kuan-Hsing Chen emphasize in “Asia as method” when Chen describes the varied factors that Asia exists as part of a “manifestation of a number of local historical currents” and not merely “an artifact” of “global capitalism” that challenges ideas and reimagines Asia as an emerging space outside the realm of the Euro-America hegemony (Chen 214). Thus, China is one of those historical parts that make the whole of Asia, and it is evident in how China circulates its own emerging technologies and Chinese Internet, which resists westernization and, perhaps arguably on accident, the old colonization framework that separates Chinese Internet profoundly as different yet independent from the rest of the Internet. 
  Take for example the current applications that exist in the Western Internet: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon. Here are their Chinese equivalents: Ren Ren, Sina Weibo, Baidu, and Alibaba. Again, reaffirming the message Chen tries to describe in “Asia as method”, which is the phenomena of the West being compared and contrasted to Asia. However, it would be provincial and ignorant to reduce Chinese Internet applications to be exact copies of its Western counterparts. At least on the Internet, there is freedom to express. What can be said about freedom of expression In the Chinanet? 
  
  China’s own unique influences on its own online ecosystem beg the question: how does the Chinese Internet foster despite its censorship and restrictions? This can be answered through Michael Anti (also known as Jing Zhao)’s “Behind the Great Firewall of China” where he explains the misconception people have around Chinanet (the other Internet). He reframes Chinanet as not a “dead land, wasteland” but instead of a carefully orchestrated and controlled online ecosystem, or precisely a political tool, utilized by the Chinese government, which he explains through the simplified metaphor of the Chinese government as the “Cat” and its netizen as the “mice” through cat-and-mouse game that exists within the insulated Chinese social media system. Chinanet is thrilling with 500 million Internet users through what Michael Anti explains the microblogging and social media culture that still allows Chinese to come together to discuss and talk online. However, it is still limiting—the freedom of course—how these social media platforms engage in social movements and preparations for utilizing the internet as a public sphere for discourse without entirely changing the Chinese political system. 
  
  Michael Anti makes great points about the Chinanet, with the government’s ability to manipulate this ecosystem to implant and orchestrate its power onto the public citizens to exercise perceived concepts such as freedom of speech— not imported as a foreign western right— as if it is part of upbringing through social media. Thus, understanding how these online platforms work, Chinese develop its own national identity. Despite its censorships and restrictions, there are aspects of where targeted non-censorship gives microbloggers some voice for political activism to criticize local government even if they can’t criticize the central government. In comparison to the Internet, Chinese Internet produces its own culture and language even in its censorship ecosystem, such as the grass-mud horse lexicon, which is a collection of puns to criticize the government within the Chinanet’s limitations. Most of all, the modernity of the Chinanet is its own online space that resists the West Internet and rejects the Internet by insulating their own version of the Internet and building it upon it to condition, control, and foster the booming Chinanet of 500 million Internet users. Chinanet is anything but backward. In fact, it might even more sophisticated than the Internet in this cat-and-mouse game they orchestrate. 

   

  Works Cited

  Li, Luzhou Nina. “Rethinking the Chinese Internet: Social History, Cultural Forms, and Industrial Formation.” Television & New Media, vol. 18, no. 5, 2017, pp. 393–409.

  TED, “Michael Anti: Behind the Great Firewall of China.” (2012)

  Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Asia as Method: Overcoming the Present Conditions of Knowledge Production” in Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, pp. 211-255. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.