Digital Asia and Activism

The Media and the Internet: Tools or Weapons Against Resistance?

While Li does not go into what exactly the Chinese internet is, her emphasis on video and piracy culture within Chinese internet culture appears to be critical to discussing resistance against internet censorship because while Chinese government censors certain words, images and video can circumvent the "Great Firewall." Anti explores this unprecedented but limited power Chinese internet users hold, as well as the idea of selective censorship. Chinese copycat social media sites and their creation of a distinctly Chinese public sphere has revolutionized Chinese people. Censorship has resulted in the formation of new languages, as microbloggers have developed a vocabulary specifically for discussing politics that is with terms like "grass mud horse" and other memes found in the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon. However, as the page for 35th of May mentions, even the number 35 became censored on Weibo. How do Chinese Netizens continue to navigate censorship as the central government starts catching onto their tactics? This and the way activism is limited to local governments are obstacles to resistance as the state continues to enforce policies marginalizing minority groups in the mainland.

How does the media's role in shaping perception of the state and social movements play out in Hong Kong, a SAR without a Great Firewall? Wong argues that although media has contributed greatly to successes for pro-democracy organizers, it also has detrimental long-term impacts as they use it as a crutch instead of focusing on long-term organizing and elections. We see this criticism exemplified in Scholarism, a student activist group led by Joshua Wong that sustained itself on media attention and massive street protests. It disbanded following the long, unsuccessful 2014 Occupy Hong Kong protests. The group's members have since redirected their activism to their new political party, Demosisto, and the political institutionalization that Wong emphasized but is currently unimaginable in the mainland, as Netizens there stick to low-key political resistance online. We see that the media and the internet helped create this image of Joshua as an iconic figure and protests that ultimately failed to bring palpable change. I am also left wondering, how has pro-democracy activism developed in Taiwan in comparison?

-Michelle

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