Talking, Linking, Clicking: The Politics of AIDS and SARS in Urban China Haiqing Yu

The spring of 2003 has been vividly described as the spring of masks in China.1 Soon after the nation staged the largest ever AIDS campaign on World AIDS Day (December 1, 2002), the unknown white anxiety of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) took the place of the known red threat of HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).2 Enveloped in a SARS panic, the whole nation was decorated by a variety of masks that smelled of disinfectant. The successive red threat and white anxiety have brought about a quiet cultural revolution in Chinese society. Unlike the Maoist one, this revolution is not one of ideology led by the state; rather, it is a revolution of information vectors. It is part of what has been called the silent revolution that is leading to the resubjectification of post-Mao citizens.3 Upon closer look,

positions 15:1 doi 10.1215/10679847-2006-023 Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press

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though, these post-Mao citizens are not silent: they talk, link, and click. By talking on radio and television, linking with others through real and virtual networking, and clicking the keyboard of the mobile phone and/or computer, these citizens, especially those from the urban middle classes, are able to appropriate and expand the circulatory matrix of narrative, subjectivity, and citizenship. New media have become the venues and means for postMao citizens to re-form subjectivities and exercise citizenship, which in turn exposes the politics of AIDS and SARS in urban China. AIDS and SARS, as potential global epidemics that have affected millions of lives in China alone, are sites of signification and knowledge in contemporary biopolitics. Since they represent social and cultural crises, as well as biomedical ones, both syndromes have provided opportunities for the state and society to reconstitute and resituate their subjective positions in relation to each other. AIDS and SARS have also opened up space to reexamine the information revolution that is changing Chinas popular media topology. Faced with a morality-loaded virus (AIDS) and a highly contagious virus (SARS), people have readjusted their strategies of expression and interaction through the use of new media, which offer them channels of (relative) freedom and convenience at low cost. As a result, communication has increasingly taken the form of written rather than oral transmissions. If the viruses have opened up space for the reconstitution of public discourses on subjectivity and citizenship, the use of new media has facilitated the formation and circulation of such discourses and provided new venues for subject formation. The term new media in this article refers mainly to the Internet and mobile phones, the use of which spread first among the urban elites and then proliferated among the middle class and the vast social strata of urban centers. China has the largest mobile communication market in the world and the second highest Internet usage after the United States; in 2003, the numbers of Chinas Internet and mobile phone users hit 80 million and 250 million respectively. Both BBS (bulletin board system) and SMS (short message service, or text messaging) are particularly popular among Chinese new media users: about one-fifth of Internet users regularly make use of BBS, and 95 percent of urban youth prefer SMS to communication by any other means.4 During the SARS outbreak, for example, the Internet and

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mobile phone were called into play for nearly every aspect of interaction and communication among SARS-confined urbanites. In this way, new media constitute the everyday reality of urban China, as well as the politics of AIDS and SARS. This article examines the practices of talking, linking, and clicking as they intersect with the politics of both syndromes and the concomitant resubjectification of urban citizens in contemporary China. I view the practices of talking, linking, and clicking as part of the revolution in media ideology, as well as a societal revolution. The use of new media is transfiguring the private and the public, as well as transforming and dislocating networks of communicative practices.5 In the process, the subjectivities of those who participate in such networks are refigured. By examining the use of new media by Chinese urbanites to circulate and discuss topics related to the viruses between 2002 and 2003, I look at the ways that talking, linking, and clicking have become technologies of resubjectification, whereby people reimagine and reconstitute themselves as subjects that are visible to the state, though without being subjected to its logic of interpellation, and as subjects that are invisible to the state, without undermining their reflexive subjectivity. While one becomes a visible subject when one is made to talk by the state, one becomes an invisible subject when one talks in response to calls of ones intimate self and fellow citizens via new media. By enabling the reformation of political subjectivities, talking, linking, and clicking have become important means of exercising citizenship for late-socialist subjects of the Chinese polity.
Talking

In this section, I focus on AIDS talk as a site of the emergence of invisible subjectivity in China. Talking is used here in a broad sense to refer to spoken as well as written forms of communications via contemporary electronic platforms, and AIDS talk refers specifically to talks on AIDS given by people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). Spoken forms of talking, which are usually carried out through traditional broadcast media, render the talking subjects physically visible to their audiences. Written forms of talking, which are normally carried out in the forms of BBS (the Internet) and SMS (mobile

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phones), render the talking subjects physically invisible to their audiences. The act of talking, as I argue in the following, is the very technology of resubjectification, whether the talking subjects are recognized as audiences, mobizens, or netizens.6 Talking (such as AIDS talk) allows the talkers to reconstitute themselves as subjects whether visible or invisible in relation to the state. From 1985, when China recognized its first HIV/AIDS case, to mid2003, an estimated 0.6 million to 1.3 million people were infected with HIV/ AIDS, with an annual increase rate of 30 percent and a male to female ratio of 4:1.7 It is estimated that by 2010 China will have ten million PLWHA if the epidemic is not brought under effective control.8 Despite such an astonishing growth rate, AIDS talk remained a sensitive and prohibited zone in Chinese public discourses until the turn of the twenty-first century, when representations of HIV/AIDS shifted from official discourse on statistics and policies to individual discourse consisting of personal confessions and revelations. In a face-saving society like China, AIDS talk, especially talk related to sexuality, can be as radical as the gay rights movement in the West, because coming out and losing face (and social security) are one and the same.9 On the fifteenth World AIDS Day in 2002, the News Probe (Xinwen diaocha) a renowned news investigation program on China Central Television (CCTV) introduced Li Jiaming in the feature story as the most mysterious PLWHA in China.10 This televised AIDS talk presented Jiaming as a dark silhouette sitting opposite his fully lit interviewer, Dong Qian, in a studio setting. Running through the forty-minute program were fast flows of information between interviewer and interviewee, accompanied by constant shifts and contrasts between the dark and bright televisual frames of the two figures. Jiaming was not the first public PLWHA, but he was the first to perform AIDS talk with sexual implications on Chinese national television. Jiaming stands out from other PLWHA covered in the national media for three reasons. First, he is portrayed as a moral person suffering from the consequence of an immoral activity (prostitution); second, he comes out as both a victim of and warrior against the disease of modernity not, as other PLWHA choose to do, in the name of saving the nation, but in the name of

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declaring a personal war on HIV/AIDS; and third, Jiaming was persuaded by News Probe to talk about his experience as a PLWHA after he shook the Internet community by posting his personal confessions online.11 His coming out is rendered both visual (hence visible) and masked (hence invisible) in new ways that mark him as different from other cases. The inclusion of Jiaming in mainstream media signifies a decisive event in the national discourses on HIV/AIDS, in which the care of natural life rather than national face takes center stage. The inclusion of natural life in political life, or the entry of zoe into polis in Giorgio Agambens terms, is characterized by political techniques through which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center.12 In Jiamings case, the technique is the Althusserian subjectivization through voice. By subjecting himself to the gaze of state power, Jiaming becomes a talking subject whose subjectivity is solicited, or interpellated.13 He becomes a subject visible to the disciplinary technologies or the biopolitical logic of the late-socialist state. Seen from this perspective, Jiamings AIDS talk on CCTV is a reincarnation of speaking bitterness (suku), the logic of confession in Chinese political culture. In Chinese communist history, all walks of people, from peasants and workers to intellectuals, have been called upon by the state to perform the rhetoric of socialist revolution in a speech form known as speaking bitterness. Speaking bitterness is a public narration of past hardship and spectacularized accusation against enemies of the people, usually performed by ordinary citizens. It is a highly effective performance, a narrative form and representational means that transforms social consciousness and defines and constitutes the subaltern position of socialist subjects. As Ann Anagnost points out, speaking bitterness is a technology for inscribing onto the social body the power structure of the disciplinary state. In speaking bitterness, I was a mute body made to speak.14 Its allegorical force has continued to haunt the nation in such forms as class struggle sessions during the Cultural Revolution, scar literature in the 1980s, and the lamentations of female silk workers in the 1990s as documented by Lisa Rofel.15 Speaking bitterness has been institutionalized to such an extent that it continues to subject late-socialist subalterns (women, peasants, and other subgroups) to the states claims about natural life, producing what Anagnost has called a locally

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specific politic of perception and experience that constituted local identities as well as national subjects.16 Even television talk shows, in the form of highly controlled interview and audience participation sessions, can be viewed as a new form of confession that testifies to state strategies about human improvement and social control to achieve what Borge Bakken calls the exemplary society in China.17 Jiaming is made into an exemplary talking subject in the official HIV/ AIDS discourse when he is persuaded (or mobilized) to speak to the public as his targeted audience and the state as his implied audience. In the speaking bitterness tradition, women were usually made into visible subjects to articulate the patriarchal order of discourse dictated by the state.18 In AIDS talk, however, the male body is made visible against the invisible female body. As Jiaming puts it, on the day he found out that he was infected with HIV/AIDS, he went back to the brothel where his healthy body was infected through physical intimacy with a female sex worker. He could not find the woman who infected him; all he could hear was wicked female laughter. He rushed out into the sunlight with the realization that he would never go back again to that place, and he urges other males to follow his example. It is at this point in the narration that he is transformed from an infected heterosexual male body into an exemplary body of morality. His is not the healthy, high-quality, and cultured body that the state and elite intellectuals have trained and cultivated, but a body of morality required of late-socialist subjects to realize a perfect social order;19 while he is transformed, the supposedly degendered narratives in the televised AIDS talk point to the invisibility of female bodies and narratives within male-dominated public discourse.20 Jiaming becomes a sign that circulates throughout the social body as a reincarnation of the politicized body and politicized subject.21 The reincarnation renders Jiaming visible to the state as he performs AIDS talk under its gaze. The gaze, however, does not subject him to its logic of verbality. Unlike the speaking-bitterness subjects who talked in the language of the state, Jiaming talks in his own language. Called upon to confess, he speaks about himself as an individual person rather than a representative of the masses of PLWHA; he reveals his own secret and intimate fears, pains, and hopes, rather than the fears, hopes, and policies of the state. The privatized AIDS talk and the ability to confess intimate personal mat-

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ter is a sign of power and control on the part of the confessor, to use Jane Shattucs words.22 Talking for Jiaming is not a simple reincarnation of speaking bitterness, but a reversal of speaking bitterness from being a technology of the state to a technology of resubjectification. It becomes a self-molding process that binds the talking subject to his intimate consciousness and subjectivity. In performing AIDS talk on television, he becomes a self-recovering subject, rather than a revolutionary subject or a victim speaking bitterness. Jiamings AIDS talk thus represents not only a process of subjectification to the state power, but also of resubjectification of an intimate self. Such resubjectification poses a threat to the performative display of power in speaking bitterness, as talking now occupies a private space of dreams and fantasies rather than simply a public display of ones subalternity. The talking subject is not a mute body made to speak, but a recovering interlocutor estranged from the state interpellation. Whereas, in speaking bitterness, the body of the talking subject was rendered visible and that of the stateinterlocutor invisible, in Jiamings AIDS talk, the body of the journalistinterlocutor was rendered visible and that of the talking subject invisible a reversal of body politics in Chinese political culture. Jiaming does not talk through the body language and oral vehemence of speaking bitterness, but through his fingers. In his televised AIDS talk, the focus is on the lit fingers his body is shaded in darkness, except for his hands, and his voice blurred through technical means. The visual framing shows his fingers transmitting his thoughts and revelations. Outside the television studio, it is also his fingers that tell of his desires and fears through his writings on the Internet. Indeed, fingers seem to have become the embodiment of Jiaming and his AIDS talk. But his fingers are at the same time engulfed by his spectral image on television and spectral presence in the virtual world of the Internet. Talking has gone beyond physicality and transcended the corporeal: the talking subject has been rendered physically invisible, yet his words are highly visible. It is through the transcendent form of talking that Jiaming and his fellow netizens refigure an intimate and recovering subjectivity for themselves and become subjects invisible to state power. As an invisible subject, Jiaming has become a sign of reflexivity that cir-

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culates freely on the Internet in a manner unthinkably speedy for the speaking bitterness subjects. Jiamings virtual home has attracted a diversity of discourses on HIV/AIDS, ranging from heterosexual and mainstream to homosexual and otherwise subaltern, that are normally excluded from the public sphere. As Jiaming admits, his AIDS talk with other netizens has enriched and enhanced his life, and he has begun to reflect on life/death and fringe topics, such as homosexuality, that he used to shun. As invisible subjects, Jiaming and his fellow netizens have reversed the order of confession in speaking bitterness. Confession of ones subjective positions on self and the external world is not called upon by the state power, but elicits the power of the speaking subjects to register alienation as well as consolidation. Numerous audience responses to Jiamings AIDS talk on the Internet testify that the circulation of an invisible subjectivity can form and consolidate a community of reflexivity across age, class, and ethnic differences.23 Subjectivity is a social category that can be politicized, gendered, classified, and imagined. It is not a single attribute but interlocked with an individuals relations to external forces as well as to ones intimate self. Jiamings case has shown that the subjectivity of a talking subject can be rendered visible as well as invisible. Jiaming is subjected to the disciplinary technologies of the state as its visible subject, but he subverts them as its invisible subject when he assumes a spectral presence to his audiences. As a visible subject, he constitutes a sign that circulates through the social body to make supremely visible the power of the state and its ideological apparatus. As an invisible subject, he is able to refigure his subjectivity by returning to his intimate self and reflexive subjectivity via new media, and hence becomes a sign of self-empowerment and estrangement from the hypervisibility of the state power.24 Subjectivity, reflexivity, and technology have been central themes in social and cultural theories on modernity and postmodernity.25 As Frank Webster writes, Where there is heightened reflexivity there must also be means of making this information available to others, and accordingly there is a central role to be played by media of all sorts in todays world.26 Technical improvement in media and communications makes it possible for the talking subject to form and participate in communicative networks and to facilitate the circulation of invisible subjectivity and reflexivity. Talking via

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television and the Internet enables Jiaming and his audiences to refigure their subjectivities as invisible subjects who speak from their intimacy and privacy as well as from their commitment to common causes, rather than merely as visible subjects who are solicited and made to speak by the power of the state. New media have been playing a central role in facilitating the resubjectification of talking subjects and promoting commitment to their rights and obligations as citizens of the nation. As the following sections show, Chinese netizens and mobizens have not only refigured the concept of subjectivity, but also reformulated the concept of citizenship through the practices of linking and clicking.
Linking

Since their first public declaration of power during the Chinese Embassy bombing in 1999, Chinese netizens have staged several shock waves, three of which occurred in 2003.27 One such shock wave the netizens reflections on SARS not only brought about an earthquake in Chinese officialdom, but also evoked a national reflection on Chinese sociopolitical systems.28 The frequencies of a second such shock wave the case of Sun Zhigang emitted from the virtual networks of the Internet and permeated the hard networks of actuality, resulting in national reflection on Chinese legal and social systems. Sun, a twenty-seven-year-old graphic designer from Hunan, was detained by police in the southern city of Guangzhou on March 17, 2003, on his way to an Internet caf, for failing to display his temporary resident card. He was found beaten to death in police custody on March 20, 2003.29 After more than a month of futile efforts by Suns family to get the authorities to investigate his death, the case got to the attention of Chen Feng, an investigative reporter with Southern Metropolitan News (a local Guangzhou newspaper known for its critical and investigative journalism), through Suns classroom network.30 It was published in the newspaper on April 25, under the title The Death of Detainee Sun Zhigang. Immediately after the exposure of Suns case, all major Chinese BBS, personal Weblogs, and e-mail groups were awash with netizens outcries demanding that Guangzhou authorities find justice for the dead man.

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Among the outcries was an article posted on the official Web site of Peoples Daily, written by a netizen called Splendid Article (Jin Xiuwen), which criticized the government for neglecting its duty and denying citizens rights.31 It triggered heated online discussions and eventually led to a strong wave of online protest against state authorities. In the high tide of online protest, a special committee was quickly formed by the Guangzhou government to investigate the case. The result of the investigation, however, was the usual denial of responsibility by the local police, who had hoped to force Suns family into silence and hence make the case disappear from the public sphere.32 But if that strategy had worked before, it did not work this time. The blunt denial of responsibility by the local police enraged Chinese netizens. They reacted immediately by posting more critical comments that criticized the legal procedure in investigating the case.33 A spontaneous online petition quickly spread throughout the virtual networks. Online discussion, protest, and petition formed a strong public opinion base that prompted official rhetoric to align more closely with popular feeling. Mainstream media, including CCTV, readjusted their agenda and started to follow the case at the impetus of the vox populi.34 Even the central government in Beijing became alert to the brewing discontent and unrest in the virtual world and instructed Guangzhou authorities to arrest those responsible for Suns death. Thirteen people were arrested, as reported on May 13, and found guilty in an open trial on June 5. Even before the final trial, critical analyses and reflections on the case had shifted from a call for justice to a reexamination of the Chinese legal system and citizens rights. On May 15, a netizen posted an article titled On the Violation of Legislation Law by the Holding System: The Case of Sun Zhigang at the famous People Net (Renmin wang), which initiated a series of discussions on the accountability of existing antivagrancy regulations.35 A loose network of reformers and citizens rights advocates was formed through this cyber-networking. Two appeals, one on May 16 and one on May 23, were signed by individuals and sent to the National Peoples Congress calling for state prosecutors to reflect on Suns case and amend antivagrancy regulations.36 In the end, national reflection on Suns

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case resulted in the abolition of the decades-old antivagrancy regulations in July 2003. A humanitarian regulation based on assistance rather than detention and forced repatriation was issued in August 2003.37 Although dissatisfaction with and indignation at Chinese legal and police systems had long been brewing in Chinese society, reflections on police and legal reform were limited in scope and coverage in mainstream media. In the case of Sun Zhigang, however, a previously unacknowledged desire for legal and police reform was brought out into the open by the impetus of Internet public opinion. It was one of the first cases of popular opinion overriding and resetting official agendas and the first demonstration of the sociopolitical power of Chinese netizenship. Never before in Chinese history had individuals directly proposed legal reforms to the legislative body in the name of citizenship, and never before in Chinese society had a national reflection on citizenship and human rights, initiated and carried out via the Internet, borne fruit in reality. In the national reflection on the case of Sun Zhigang, the Internet facilitated public expression, social interactions, civic association, popular protest, and more importantly, the circulation of reflexivity among Chinese netizens. As invisible subjects, netizens called forth the power of reflexivity to register alienation (from official discourse) as well as consolidation (among society) in the name of citizenship. The Internet became a nexus of information flow and (trans)national mobilization.38 Furthermore, the interpenetration of popular discourse in the nonmainstream media (the Internet and local newspapers) with official discourse in the highly controlled state media (CCTV and Peoples Daily, the most important mouthpieces of the party) has borne fruit for Chinese political culture. Mobilization is no longer a theatrical display of the states power to summon its subjects to its politics of visibility, but a subterranean flow of popular discourse that binds anonymous netizens to the politics of invisible subjectivity. The politics of invisible subjectivity are closely tied with the politics of visibility (and hypervisibility) represented by Sun, who was associated with the politics of SARS as a sign and symbol of popular citizenship during the epidemic outbreak in the spring of 2003. The exclusion or inclusion of Sun in the national discourse was not solely dependent on the will of the state, but

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negotiated between the state and society (represented by the netizens). The hypervisible body of Sun was used by the invisible and yet reflexive subjects as a symbol to reflect the Chinese legal system and citizens rights and to form an alternative network of circulation still supervised by but disembodied from state control. In other words, the hypervisibility of Sun a dead body, a victim of the system rather than the SARS virus itself constitutes the politics of invisible subjectivity, and the politics of invisible subjectivity constitutes the new body politics in late-socialist China. As a new form of talking, linking together with clicking has become a technology of resubjectification.
Clicking

Suns case shows that, in the practice of linking, people are constituted as subjects whose invisibility and reflexivity are conducive to national reflections on citizenship and legal rights. But the formation of invisible subjectivity is not always imbued with pensive deliberation; it can be simultaneously lighthearted and empowering, as well as have elements of witty merriment. Sending an SMS message via the mobile phone and linking up via new media can be enjoyable: producing, reproducing, and circulating a popular witty SMS message involves pleasure and desire, as well as resistance and compromise. Sending an SMS message can also be viewed as empowering as the cell phone texting in the Philippines that generated a populist movement to dethrone a government, or as radical as the paging in Singapore that enables the extension and maintenance of local lesbian communities.39 Shortly after the Spring Festival of 2003, rumors circulated widely in urban China about a mysterious virus outbreak in Guangzhou and later in Beijing: about its incurable nature, about a scarcity of rice and salt (which caused large-scale panic shopping in Guangzhou and Beijing), about sealing the city of Beijing, and about the imposition of martial law. Until April 20, the day that marked Chinas open campaign on SARS, Chinese mobizens and netizens were the major sources and carriers of information about the epidemic: it was reported that the number of SMS messages in Guangdong province alone reached forty million on January 8, forty-one million on

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January 9, and forty-five million on January 10.40 Families and friends wove an extensive virtual network by clicking. The technology of telecommunication became a supplement to the technology of guanxi (personal networks), wherein clicking and linking were the means to gain and circulate information not accessible from mainstream media. For more than four months, people were confined indoors by the SARS panic, but their words circulated freely and happily in the ether with the sounds of clicking. SMS messaging became the everyday reality for SARS-confined individuals. Besides private SMS messages between family members and friends, there was a huge body of public SMS messages circulating widely throughout Chinese society. No one knew or cared about the authorship of these verses: people simply clicked their mobile phone keyboards, knowing that their fellow mobizens would share a bitter laugh or knowing smile when reading them. The following are a few examples of these numerous short messages sent via mobile phones and the Internet in the spring of masks.41 Example 1: SARS represents the demand of a special virus for development SARS represents the advancement of a culture of terror SARS represents the basic interests of the broad masses of wild animals This first SMS rhyme, called the Three Represents of SARS, is a parody of former Chinese Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemins Three Represents philosophy.42 It is a clear example of appropriation, by which people transplant their own wisdom onto official idioms. The rhyme neatly summarizes both the SARS panic and the developmental crisis in China: the loss of complacency, as in the new definition of development, previously understood as economic development; the feeling of insecurity, as in the appropriation of the term culture of terror, reminiscent of the terrorist attacks and the war on terrorism; and the environmental crisis, as in the call for protection on behalf of wild animals. By replacing productive force in the original verse with special virus (SARS), advanced culture with a culture of terror, and the people with wild animals, the rhyme generates a bizarre and humorous juxtaposition. It hyperlinks official and unofficial ideologies in mockery.

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Example 2: The Party cant stop officials from eating and drinking at public expense, but SARS did! The Party cant stop junketeering officials, but SARS did! The Party cant stop endless futile meetings, but SARS did! The Party cant stop the deception of superiors and the cheating of subordinates, but SARS did! The Party cant stop prostitution, but SARS did! The second SMS rhyme is a sarcastic take on bureaucracy and corruption in the Chinese polity. SARS had negative impacts on the Chinese economy, but it brought about a cleaner China: cleaner not only in terms of improved personal hygiene and public health systems, but also in terms of better state governance. By paralleling the Party with SARS and contrasting the two, the rhyme overthrows the party logic of SARS: it is not the party but SARS that has done something good for Chinese society. This rhyme has been hailed as the most vivid and accurate description of SARSs contributions to China, as people of all ages have taken it up and laughed in appreciation of its witty lines.43 Example 3: Guangdong got SARS then Beijing caught it The government isnt so strict now Media dares to speak up Many people have SARS now The hospitals are full The doctors and nurses are having a tough time The masses are scared out of their wits Wearing masks to cover their faces International organizations have come to take charge SARS will soon be brought under control Take your Chinese medicine boiled in the pot Be sure to get some exercise The third SMS rhyme is the most accurate description of SARS-stricken China during the height of the anti-SARS campaign (April to May 2003). It

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touches upon truths that everybody knew but few would venture to speak in the mainstream media: truths about the SARS cover-up, media censorship, poor medical care, and an inadequate emergency-response system and the subsequent national panic and international intervention. Amid a celebration of SARS-induced changes and SARS heroes, this rhyme reminds people in a lighthearted way of the importance of Chinese cultural traditions (for example, the advice about Chinese medicine and taking exercise), which are often forsaken in the national rush toward modernization and globalization. Like shunkouliu (popular sayings), most of these SMS rhymes are quite melodious (a quality that is lost in translation) and easy to recite, as they resemble verses and rhymes stored in Chinese cultural and political memories.44 China has a long tradition of rewriting such verses in contemporary popular culture. The appropriation of Mao themes in the recent Mao craze, the playful reworking of Red songs in rock music, and the infusion of political icons into political pop art, are akin to the SARS rhymes in their playful use of words, symbols, and themes in a defiant and sometimes subversive manner.45 Such reproduction of rhymes from their use in official ideology is a complex social and cultural phenomenon. It involves deliberate playful misuse and misinterpretation of the dominant ideology and represents the ideology of invisible subjectivity; producing and circulating popular discourse about the virus enable people to produce meanings and pleasures that are, in their own right, a form of social power.46 As the SMS rhymes demonstrate, the semiotic power of the popular is manifested in producing symbolic meanings that compete with those of the state and the power to construct alternatives in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, resisting.47 Producing and circulating SMS rhymes are acts of encoding/decoding by the anonymous netizens.48 They are also demonstrations of a popular tactic known as transmesis, which can mean both translation plus mimesis as well as transgression plus mimesis.49 These SMS rhymes are mimesis and transgression of the official ideology. In fact, they are able to circulate as widely as they do in the public sphere because of their subtle transgressions of permissible boundaries. Like the doorway couplets studied by Patricia Thornton and the rock music interpreted by Rey Chow, the SMS rhymes serve as an

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evocative transcript that masquerades as fun and politically irrelevant in order to circulate throughout the social body.50 Clicking becomes an innovative and efficient means to translate and reinterpret the politics of SARS. Playing with words, however, does not necessarily generate counterdiscourse.51 These SMS rhymes are better read as a tactical expression of the semiotic power of invisible subjects to form a new interpretive framework of their daily realities in parallel with, rather than against, the interpretive framework promulgated by the state. Like subtitling on television and stand-up comedy in Hong Kong, the ambiguity of language and structure used in the SMS rhymes subverts the state system of subjectification by disturbing the facile conferral of subjectivity, even though it cannot alter the law of subjectification itself.52 Implied in the production and circulation of invisible subjectivity are both resistance and compromise. Clicking, together with linking and talking, becomes the technology of resubjectification, wherein the subject becomes visible to the state without being subjected to its logic of interpellation. The resubjectification creates a subjectivity both intimate and invisible among the talking, linking, and clicking subjects. As subjects who are invisible to the state and to one another, they have adopted a reflexive subjectivity via the sphere of new media. Talking, linking, and clicking are both affirmations of the semiotic power of the invisible subjects as individual citizens and affirmations of their membership in a productive and communicative community. These practices have not only informed the politics of AIDS and SARS, but also constituted postmodern technologies of citizenship in late-socialist China.
Media Citizenship

Citizenship is an elusive concept. It has been constructed in different ways in different societies and at different historical stages. As a multitiered construct, citizenship may apply to peoples membership in communities according to political and cultural differences at local, national, and transnational levels, or according to subcultural and subpolitical differences in gender, sexual, ethnic, biological, and technocultural agendas.53 The typology of citizenship is also witnessed in Chinese citizenship studies. For example, Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, coedited by Merle Gold-

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man and Elizabeth J. Perry, captures the dynamic and elusive features of citizenship in the Chinese context.54 As the book shows, various historical actors have imposed quite different conceptions of citizenship upon the population of twentieth-century China: the Manchus, warlords, foreign imperialists, Nationalists, Communists, modern intellectuals, and ordinary people (women, workers, peasants, students) have all played important roles in defining citizenship. Awakening or being awakened to the (Western) Enlightenment concept has dominated various discourses on nation, state, and self since the onset of Chinese modernity in the early twentieth century.55 Despite various awakening discourses, a state-centric view of citizenship has prevailed in Chinese intellectual and political thinking and continued to subject the people to various metadiscourses of nationalism in Chinas nation-building project. This view has been successfully established through mobilization of the masses (qunzhong) in political and economic activities selected and defined by the party-state. As Goldman and Perry summarize, The exclusion or inclusion of various social categories whether based upon political consciousness, economic class, ethnicity, gender, or other criteria by the authoritarian state has been a notable feature of Chinese citizenship over the past century.56 The state-centric view of citizenship has never been unchallenged in modern Chinese history. Despite the lingering effects of communist traditions such as speaking bitterness, the rise of popular discourse on citizenship that centers on self and selfhood, rights and self-identity, is further complicating citizenship in post-Mao China. As such, street politics have occupied post-Mao citizenship studies. Taking to the street and public squares has become characteristic of popular contestations of citizenship, whether it is in the form of intellectuals and students prodemocracy movements, workers protests, peasants riots, or grumbles of the floating population in the city.57 An emphasis on the institutional basis of citizenship public protests, civic associations, a bourgeoning press, and an electoral process still characterizes studies on citizenship and the public sphere/civil society in China, despite various third-way approaches to harmonize the oppositions between the state and society.58 Some have noted the effects of modern journalism and

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the press in fostering a new audience for opinion, information, and mobilization; molding a national identity; and building a modern nation-state.59 But few have noted the subtle change in citizenship caused by the impact of new media. As this article has demonstrated, a new subjectivity and citizenship has emerged in the practices of talking, linking, and clicking. New media not only contribute to the emergence of invisible subjects and the formation of reflexive subjectivity, but also constitute a new citizenship based on spontaneous and individualized deliberation on matters of public importance, through textual flows of written words rather than direct oral and/or physical engagements. New media have become an important venue in which to exercise citizenship to express, protest, and mock. This approach falls within a postmodern conceptual framework of the relations between media, citizenship, and the public sphere in Western media/ cultural studies. Postmodernists see new media (the Internet, mobile phones, video, the Walkman) as new venues to form publicness based on nonlocalized, noncorporeal, nondialogic, and nonreciprocal forms of communication across national and cultural boundaries, and to open new possibilities for voices that have previously been excluded from public cultures. Hence a postmodern framework encompasses such categories as intimate citizenship, terminal citizenship, DIY (Do It Yourself) citizenship, and cosmopolitan/ global citizenship.60 John Urrys notion of citizenship of flows captures the postmodern condition of citizenship in our techno-media cultures. For Urry, a citizenship of stasis is linked to membership in certain nation-states, while a citizenship of flows describes flows or movements of people, together with things, images, and concepts, across nation-state boundaries.61 Media citizenship is also a citizenship of flows. But it is less about transnational flows of people and rights than mediated flows of words and subjectivity across spatial, temporal, and social boundaries. Once a message is posted on a BBS or sent out via an SMS message, it is impossible to track its origin and destination without highly sophisticated technologies and expertise. As the case studies in this article have demonstrated, the flows of words and subjectivity not only break down national, social, and political boundaries, but also overcome barriers among SARS-confined individuals and people who are living with and/or care about HIV/AIDS. These flows can generate networks of public

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opinion strong enough to influence the agendas of mainstream media and state policies. In the mediated interactions between nation and state, the subjects who facilitate the flows are transformed into media citizens, for whom meaningful and constructive engagement with (new) media is equivalent to exercising citizenship. As a citizenship of flows, media citizenship heightens reflexive subjectivity among the talking, linking, and clicking subjects. Peter Golding once commented, Communicative competence and action, and the resources required to exercise them, are requisites for citizenship.62 This article has shown that communicative means and freedom are prerequisites for the exercise of media citizenship in late-socialist China. If citizenship can be imagined spatially, it is not just a contestation over the right to urban spaces, streets, and squares, but also a contestation over the right to communicative means and space.63 From the Internets role in Li Jiamings AIDS talk and the case of Sun Zhigang, to the use of mobile phones in disseminating SARS-related SMS rhymes, new media have become privatized public space to exercise citizenship in urban China. Like the new individualism in post-Mao China, which, as Lucian W. Pye has noted, represents for the individual a half-way point between the tradition of being a passive, parochial participant in face-to-face group structures and being an autonomous citizen capable of political relationship with the Chinese state, media citizenship represents a halfway point between informed citizenship capable of direct political engagement with the state and active consumership and audienceship that celebrates individuality and pleasure.64 Sending an SMS message or posting a message/article on a BBS is the very technology of media citizenship, through which people can turn themselves from consumers of media into citizens of media. As media citizens, people may approve, applaud, petition, and debate issues of personal, national, and international significance, even though they may not even have a vote in reality. In other words, as netizens and mobizens people are invisible subjects in response to the call of their fellow citizens and intimate selves, rather than visible subjects in response to the interpellation of the state. But when offline and not SMS messaging, or when targeted by cyber-police, they may become visible subjects again to the disciplinary technologies of the state. Such is the paradox of citizenship in authoritarian/ totalitarian states.

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Conclusion

The flow of words is always imbricated with power. Actions such as talking, linking, and clicking, as well as marches, parades, and sit-ins are political, since they aim at changing peoples lives and perceptions; they are also inseparable from the inherent power of the society. They do not necessarily oppose the power from above, but rather foster and spread the communicative networks of reflexive subjectivity, which is eventually conducive to the exercise of citizenship. The space of the Internet can be controlled and mobile phone text messages can be regulated,65 but as long as the words continue to flow, there is the potential for invisible subjects to assert the power of their reflexivity anytime and anywhere. Clicking and linking are gaining a prominence similar to reading (for example, a newspaper) and watching (for example, a television) as new technologies of citizenship in urban China, especially among younger generations.66 The consumption of new media forms the basis of a new audienceship and citizenship that has roots in the traditional concept of being informed through reading, browsing, and discussing. The cases of Li Jiaming, Sun Zhigang, and SARS SMS messages suggest that the (relative) freedom and equality offered by the electronic platforms are empowering individuals to use semiotic power to (re)construct subjectivities and exercise citizenship, especially in times of crisis. Writing and sending short messages via the Internet and mobile phones are simultaneously acts of nobody, because their authors are anonymous, and everybody, owing to their wide circulation. New media are portable and privatizing technologies that not only dislocate domesticity but also disjoin subjectivity from its state inscription. Circulation via new media expands discursive spaces and encourages interactions among those who talk, link, and click, and those who hear, read, and continue to talk, link, and click. New media have been regarded as the site of a quiet social test of democracy in China.67 In this revolution, the invisible subjects be they audiences, mobizens, or netizens are becoming coauthors of social texts, who script their own stories and/or creatively read and rewrite plots provided by existing institutions. In talking, clicking, and linking, people have become, to borrow from W. R. Fisher, full participants in the making of messages,

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whether they are agents (authors) or audience members (co-authors).68 In moving their words, they are moving the(ir) world.
Notes

1 2

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions for revisions on earlier drafts of this article. My gratitude also goes to Dr. Audrey Yue at the University of Melbourne for her help and encouragement during my drafting and revising of the article. The spring of masks (dai kouzhao de chuntian) is a popular term in Chinese to describe the spring of 2003 when people had to wear masks for fear of contracting the SARS virus. Here I use red threat to refer to the HIV/AIDS crisis, for its association with blood, and white anxiety to refer to the SARS crisis, for the unknown nature of the virus and the extensive media coverage of medical workers dressing up in white. I owe the term silent revolution to Li Fan, Jing qiao qiao de geming: zhongguo dangdai shimin shehui (Silent Revolution: Becoming Civil Society in China) (Hong Kong: Mirror Books, 1998). Li Fan uses this term to denote the emergence and development of civil society in post-Mao China. Xiao Qiang, The Rising Tide of Internet Opinion in China, Nieman Reports, Summer 2004, www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/04 2NRSummer/103 104V58N2.pdf; Cellphones Ring in Sparkle of Good Spirit, Peoples Daily, May 16, 2004, english.peopledaily.com .cn/200405/16/20040516_143418.html. There is a huge body of literature on the transformation of private and public spaces in the age of new media. They all agree that new media have privatized the public and publicized the private and therefore the boundary between the private and the public is called into question. For example, see Mimi Sheller and John Urry, Mobile Transformations of Public and Private Life, Theory, Culture, and Society 20 (2003): 107 25. Mobizens refers to active participants in mobile communications. They are active mobile phone users who become active citizens through engaging in public discussions and expressions of citizenship. The term is coined in reference to netizens, the term for active participants in the online community of the Internet. State Council AIDS Working Committee Office and UN Theme Group on HIV/AIDS in China, A Joint Assessment of HIV/AIDS Prevention, Treatment and Care in China, UNAIDS-China, December 1, 2003, www.unchina.org/unaids. Zhao Fei and Zhang Jingping, Miandui guonan: Aizi jiang rang zhongguo sunshi 700 yi (Facing National Disaster: AIDS Will Cause China to Lose RMB 70 Billion), in Zhongguo zhi tong (Pain of China), ed. Liu Ning and Tian Huiming (Beijing: Wenhua Yishu Chubanshe, 2001), 158 77.

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10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19

For a study of face culture in China, see Andrew Kipnis, Face: An Adaptable Discourse of Social Surfaces, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 3 (1995), 119 48. See also Song Mei Lee-Wong, Politeness and Face in Chinese Culture (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2000). News Probe (Xinwen diaocha), The Last Warning (Zuihou de jingshi), China Central Television, December 7, 2002. The majority of media representations of HIV/AIDS are related to blood (for example, blood transfusion or blood contamination). HIV/AIDS cases related to sexuality are often loaded with moral judgment in China. Jiaming contacted the virus through sexual transmission from a prostitute. After a few months struggle, he started an online forum called Li Jiaming de jia (Li Jiamings home) at Rongshuxia, a popular literary Web site, in July 2001: www.rongshuxia.com/channels/zl/lijiaming/index.htm. Though denounced, questioned, and condemned by many people as a sinner and hypocrite, Jiaming has not stopped writing on the Internet about his fight with the virus in order to warn other people, especially young people like him, of the dangers of imprudent and irresponsible behaviors. He has hence been acclaimed by the majority of his audiences as a moral person who deserves sympathy, understanding, and support. His online publications quickly attracted a publisher who saw the value of his confessional stories. The publication of his book, Zuihou de xuanzhan (The Last Declaration of War) (Tianjin: Tianjin Peoples Press, 2002), made Jiaming the most mysterious and famous PLWHA in China. Jiamings BBS was subsequently set up at: my.clubhi.com/bbs/660777/. It is under such circumstances that News Probe chose Jiaming to perform AIDS talk to commemorate World AIDS Day in 2002. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174. Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 39. Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 137 49. Ann Anagnost, Who is Speaking Here? Discursive Boundaries and Representation in Post-Mao China, in Boundaries in China, ed. John Hay (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 260. Borge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Anne E. McLaren, The Grievance Rhetoric of Chinese Women: From Lamentation to Revolution, Intersections 4 (2000), www.sshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue4/mclaren .html. Body politics has always been central to Chinas nation-building and nation-strengthening projects. To train and cultivate the desired bodies of its citizens is an integral part of its

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20

21

22 23

24

25

26 27

mission to maintain social order for national (economic) development. See Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the Peoples Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Also see Ann Anagnost, The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi), Public Culture 16 (2004): 189 208. Female discourses on and representatives of HIV/AIDS are overshadowed by the dominant masculine discourses in the mainstream media in China. When they do appear in the media, women are represented either as devoted partners to the male PLWHA or fallen angels who deserve both despite and sympathy. In the latter case, the uncivilized, immoral, and invisible female body is often implicated through the focus on the civilized, moral, and visible male body. In both cases, females are made mute: they are represented by their male counterparts. For politicized body, see Ann Anagnost, The Politicized Body, in Body, Subject and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 131 56. In the article, Anagnost explores post-Mao body politics in relation to the issue of subjectivity through close reading of a realist text. She argues that the body (both individual and collective) is politicized by the party-state to ensure its social and ideological domination over the people and to create and consolidate its own self-identity as the way and the history. Jane M. Shattuc, The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997), 136. Jiamings home at Rongshuxia attracted more than four million visits by May 2002 when his writings were formally published as Zuihou de xuanzhan, with a daily visit rate of thirty thousand on some days. After his talk on CCTV, Jiaming received even more audience responses through News Probe and most of all at his Rongshuxia forum. See Jiaming, Zuihou de xuanzhan, 3, 249. I owe the point on hypervisibility of the state power to Ann Anagnost. In The Politicized Body, Anagnost explores how the operations of power in the Chinese socialist context can produce a hypervisible body of the party while at the same time making its subjects visible. The body of literature on subjectivity, reflexivity, and technology is too big to cite here, and it is not the task of this article to engage in literature review on the subject. Some classic studies on the subject would be: Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991) and Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (London: Routledge, 2002), 206. The proliferation of online protests against the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by America-led NATO forces in May 1999 is regarded as the first showcase of netizens power in affecting public opinion. See Tang Dayong and Shi Jie, Xuni shequn yi

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28

29

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31

32

33

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huo gonggong lingyu yi qiangguo luntan zhuang ji shijian de taolun wei li (Virtual Community or Public Sphere The Case of Strong Nation Forum on Spy Plane Crash), in Wangluo chuanbo yu xinwen meiti (Internet Communication and News Media), ed. Deng Xinxin and Li Xingguo (Beijing: Beijing Guangbo Xueyuan Chubanshe, 2001), 396. The three shock waves refer to the case of Sun Zhigang, reflections on SARS, and the reversal of the verdict in the case of Liu Yong by the Liaoning Supreme Court. All are available online from major Chinese language portals. The earthquake in Chinese officialdom refers to the dismissal of Zhang Wenkang as minister of public health and Meng Xuenong as mayor of Beijing in April 2003. Jiang Xin and Yu Ren, Wu zanzhuzheng bei shourong, sanri hou siwang, daxuesheng ming sang Guangzhou (Arrested for Not Carrying Temporary Resident Card, Died Three Days Later A College Graduate Lost His Life in Guangzhou), Beijing Youth (Beijing qingnian bao), April 26, 2003, www.people.com.cn/GB/shehui/20030426/980262. html. Dai Hongbing, Nanwang de 84 ge riri yeye Sun Zhigang jiaren zai Guangzhou de rizi (Unforgettable 84 Days and Nights Sun Zhigangs Family in Guangzhou), June 14, 2003, news.tom.com/Archive/1002/2003/14-47995.html. Jin Xiuwen, Sun zhigang an: shi shui zai zhuang long zuo ya? (The Case of Sun Zhigang: Who Is Pretending to Be Deaf and Mute?), Renmin wang (People Net), May 4, 2003, www.people.com.cn/GB/guandian/30/20030504/984197.html. Jiang Xin and Yu Ren, Daxuesheng ming sang shourongsuo, jingfang song 2000 yuan jiashou wei jieshou (College Graduate Died in Police Custody; Relatives Refused 2000 Yuan from Police), Beijing Youth (Beijing qingnian bao), May 1, 2003, www.people.com.cn/ GB/kejiao/40/20030501/983210.html. Xiao Shan, Ping Sun Zhigang an: ziwo diaocha weibei chengxu zhengyi (Comments on the Case of Sun Zhigang: Self-Investigation Is a Breach of Procedural Justice), Renmin wang (People Net), June 5, 2003, www.people.com.cn/GB/shehui/46/20030605/1009157 .html. Mainstream media were drawn into the case of Sun Zhigang in May, less than a month after Guangzhou local newspapers exposed the case that caused an uprising among Chinese netizens. CCTV followed the case, including the trial (June 5, 2003) and follow-ups, making the case of Sun a national media event. Zou Yunxiang, Cong Sun Zhigang an kan youguan shourong de fagui weifan lifa fa (On the Violation of Legislation Law by the Holding System: The Case of Sun Zhigang), Renmin wang (People Net), May 15, 2003, www.people.com.cn/GB/guandian/ 30/20030515/992427.html. Hao Hong, Sun Zhigang an hai neng zou duo yuan? (How Much Further Can the Case of Sun Zhigang Proceed?), Renmin ribao (Peoples Daily), May 30, 2003, www.people.com .cn/GB/shehui/43/20030517/994550.html.

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37 The new vagrancy law stipulates that police cannot hold (arrest) people without identification cards or imprison them as vagrants. Instead, police have the duty to inform beggars and vagrants that they can ask for shelters. See Chinas New Vagrancy Regulation Comes into Effect, China Central Television, August 1, 2003, www.cctv.com/english/news/ TVNews/MorningNews/20030801/100118.html. 38 Online Chinese-language forums, whether based inside or outside China, form a Chinese cultural sphere that is transnational by nature, as the forums are accessible from any networked computer in the world. Overseas forums can spill over into mainland forums and mainland forums can feed overseas forums. As Guobin Yang has noted, these online cultural spaces have the potential to mobilize transnational activism and facilitate worldwide protests. They can also impinge on civil society development in China. See Guobin Yang, The Internet and the Rise of a Transnational Chinese Cultural Sphere, Media, Culture, and Society 25 (2003): 469 90. The case of Sun Zhigang, among other Internet waves and the cases discussed in this article, has also had a transnational input and impact. Overseas Chinese-language forums such as Current Affair Review (Shishi pingshu) at wenxuecity. com based in North America and United Morning Post Forum (Zaobao luntan) at zaobao.com based in Singapore featured extensive discussions on SARS and Suns case. Chinese who are based overseas (such as the author of this article) also contribute to the more domestic online discussions in such forums as Strong Nation Forum (Qiangguo luntan) at people.com.cn. It is not the focus of this article, however, to address the topics related to transnational outreach and significance of these online spaces. 39 Vicente L. Rafael, The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in Contemporary Philippines, Public Culture 15 (2003): 399 425; Audrey Yue, Paging New Asia: Sambal Is a Feedback Loop, Coconut Is a Code, Rise Is a System, in Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, ed. Chris Berry, Fran Martin, and Audrey Yue (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 245 66. 40 Qiu Jie-jun, Cong sasi baodao kan gonggong zhiqingquan de manzu (An Enquiry into the Publics Right to Know from SARS Reportage), Zijin Wang, November 8, 2003, www .zijin.net/gb/content/2003 11/08/content_4341.htm. 41 I collected the short messages from friends in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, and Jinan during my field trip to China in August 2003. Many of the SMS rhymes are also widely circulated and accessible via the Internet, such as Xu Xinghan, Tebie cehua: feidian shiqi de feidianxing youmo (Special feature: A-typical Humor During SARS), Renmin wang (People Net), June 12, 2003, www.people.com.cn/GB/news/9719/9720/20030509/987752.html. 42 Example 1, in the original Chinese (in comparison with Jiang Zemins Three Represents theory): SARS SARS SARS ( ( ( ) ) )

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Jiang Zemins Three Represents philosophy CCP represents the demands of advanced productive force; CCP represents the advancement of advanced culture; CCP represents the basic interests of the broad masses of the people is an effort to redefine the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), originally defined as an avant-garde party of proletarians, in order to expand the social strata of its members. 43 Example 2, in the original Chinese:
, , , , ,

Wei Lanfen, a retired doctor living in Qingdao, Shandong Province, commented to the author with a big smile upon reading the short message: How right it is. SARS is not all bad. We should now view the virus in a dialectic way according to Marxism. Such popular appreciation of the sarcastic SMS rhymes explains their wide circulation in Chinese society. 44 For a study of shunkouliu and its role in Chinese popular culture, see Perry Link and Kate Zhou, Shunkouliu: Popular Sayings and Popular Thought, in Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, ed. Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 89 110. 45 Example 3, in the original Chinese:

For a study of the Mao craze, see Dai Jinhua, Tuwei biaoyan (Performance of Breakthroughs), Zhongshan 6 (1994): 97 104; and Dai Jinhua, Jiudu yu xiaofei (Salvation and Consumption), Zhongshan 2 (1995): 194 200. For studies of Chinese rock music and political pop art, see Claire Huot, Chinas New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), chaps. 5 and 6. 46 John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), 314. 47 Ibid. 48 These SMS messages are products of collective wisdom. They go through constant rewriting and refining in the process of circulation. Circulation is therefore also reproduction, which in turn is a process of encoding and decoding. For theorizations on encoding/decod-

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49

50

51

52

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ing, see Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1999), 507 17. Transmesis is a term proposed by Thomas Beebee, who deploys it to penetrate the black box of translation in postcolonial writings. He argues that the black box contains the impure reason of postcolonial subjects, whose desire to portray a state of pure language betrays the Kantian pure reason through the diversified phenomenon of transmesis, that is, translation plus mimesis. See Thomas Beebee, Inside the Black Box: Transmesis and Postcolonial Reason (paper presented at the International Conference on Critical Inquiry: End of Theory, Beijing, June 1115, 2004). Here I expand Beebees original concept by adding a second meaning to it: transgression plus mimesis. Patricia Thornton, Framing Dissent in Contemporary China: Irony, Ambiguity and Metonymy, The China Quarterly, no. 171 (2002): 666 72; Rey Chow, Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question about Revolution, in During, Cultural Studies Reader, 462 76. For evocative transcript, see Carol Humphrey, Remembering an Enemy: the Bogd Khaan in Twentieth-Century Mongolia, in Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, ed. Rubie S. Watson (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994), 23. Humphrey uses the term to refer to texts that are ambiguous by design and intended to elicit or evoke a particular interpretation beyond the surface meaning. Many scholars have warned of overly romanticizing the semiotic power of the popular as resistance. For example, Nick Stevenson criticizes John Fiske for romanticizing popular resistance; Michael Dutton advises people not to overly romanticize playing with words in the Chinese context. See Nick Stevenson, Understanding Media Cultures: Social Theory and Mass Communication (London: Sage, 2002), 89 101; and Michael Dutton, Streetlife China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 278. For studies of subtitling and stand-up comedy in Hong Kong, see Kwai-Cheung Lo, Look Whos Talking: The Politics of Orality in Transitional Hong Kong Mass Culture, in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, ed. Rey Chow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 181 98. Citizenship has been problematized quite heavily since T. H. Marshalls classic studies of citizenship in Western Europe. See T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950) and Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (New York: Doubleday, 1964). A barrage of categories has been used to describe citizenship. Besides Marshalls famous triplet of civil citizenship, political citizenship, and social citizenship, we have cultural citizenship, racial citizenship, sexual/gender citizenship, economic citizenship, biological citizenship, ecological citizenship, global/world citizenship, diasporic citizenship, flexible citizenship, cyber-citizenship, and the like. The body of literature on the subject is too huge to cite. Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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55 See John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 56 Goldman and Perry, Changing Meanings of Citizenship, 7. 57 See Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); and Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 58 Philip Huang was one of the first to propose a third-way approach to situate collaboration rather than opposition between state and society in modern China. See Philip Huang, Public Sphere/ Civil Society in China: The Third Realm between State and Society, Modern China 19 (1993): 216 40. 59 See Joan Judge, Publicists and Populists: Including the Common People in the Late Qing New Citizen Ideal, in Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890 1920, ed. Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow (Armond, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 165 82; and David Strand, Citizens in the Audience and at the Podium, in Goldman and Perry, Changing Meanings of Citizenship, 44 69. 60 For debates on the relationship between media, citizenship, and public sphere, and some of the terms mentioned, see David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995); J. B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); K. Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change, and Social Worlds (London: Routledge, 1995); Douglas Kellner, Intellectuals and New Technologies, Media, Culture, and Society 17 (1995): 427 48; and John Hartley, The Uses of Television (London: Routledge, 1999). 61 John Urry, Global Flows and Global Citizenship, in Democracy, Citizenship, and the Global City, ed. E. F. Isin (London: Routledge, 2000), 62 78. 62 Peter Golding, Political Communication and Citizenship: The Media and Democracy in an Inegalitarian Social Order, in Public Communication: The New Imperatives: Future Directions for Media Research, ed. Marjorie Ferguson (London: Sage, 1990), 99. 63 For a spatial conceptualization of citizenship in China, see Li Zhang, Spatiality and Urban Citizenship in Late Socialist China, Public Culture 14 (2002): 311 34. 64 Lucian W. Pye, The State and the Individual: An Overview Interpretation, in The Individual and the State in China, ed. Brian Hook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 38. 65 There is a huge body of literature in both journalistic and academic writings on the control of the Internet in China. See, for example, Eric Harwit and Duncan Clark, Shaping the Internet in China: Evolution of Political Control over Network Infrastructure and Content, Asian Survey 41 (2001): 377 408; Amnesty International, State Control of the Internet in China, Amnesty International, November 2002, web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/Index/ASA1700720 02?OpenDocument&of=COUNTRIESCHINA; and Open Net Initiative, Internet Filtering in China in 2004 2005: A Country Studies, April 14, 2005, www.opennetinitiative.net/ studies/china. For mobile phone text message censorship, see Joseph Kahn, China Is Filter-

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ing Phone Text Messages to Regulate Criticism, New York Times, July 3, 2004, www.nytimes .com/2004/07/03/international/asia/03chin.html. 66 A survey on the use of the Internet in urban China conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that 25 percent of the urban population and 63.3 percent of urban youths are frequent Internet users who use the Internet for communication, study, and entertainment. See Leng Xia, Zhongguo 12 chengshi hulianwang shiyong zhuangkuang ji yingxiang diaocha baogao fabu (The Release of Report on the Survey of Internet Usage and Influence of Twelve Cities in China), Renmin Wang (People Net), September 17, 2003, www.people.com.cn/GB/it/1067/2094103.html. 67 The term social test of democracy was first proposed by a netizen called Shao Daosheng in an online article to celebrate the contribution of netizens to the democratization of Chinese society. See Shao Daosheng, Huanying hulianwang shi de minzhu de shehui shiyan (Welcome the Social Test of Internet Democracy), Renmin wang (People Net), September 24, 2003, www.people.com.cn/GB/guandian/1036/2104649.html. 68 W. R. Fisher, The Narrative Paradigm: In the Beginning, Journal of Communication, no. 35 (1985): 86.