EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 19 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 213 Food safety scandals that threaten the health and wellbeing of Chinese consumers have been discussed intensively in the past few years, such as milk powder scandal that caused the death of kids or the recycled oil from garbage used in the restaurants. Food issues are therefore getting a growing attention from Chinese media, which represent the main channel to spread and construct a new collective national identity. This preliminary study analyses, over a period of 2 months following the food scandal, a corpus of media contents related to the so-called “zombie meat” incident, a recent food scandal that took place in mainland China during June 2015. In particular, two different Chinese-language websites will be object of analysis, namely: a government-owned website (leading key news website source people.com.cn) and an enterprise-owned media (UGC source sina.com.cn), based on the hypothesis that the two of them should produce different types of textual genres and language register in the report of the same single event. Knight Adam (University of Oxford) Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Content Control on the Chinese Internet Key words: Internet, censorship, self-regulation, Sina Weibo, microblogging The development and spread of information communication technologies has challenged the Chinese state’s monopoly over content creation and dissemination. Hitherto faced with the control of a handful of easily identified, controlled, and compliant, if not always docile, licensed media mouthpieces — houshe 喉舌 — the internet has transferred the ability to produce content into the hands of hundreds of millions of users — the rise of a ‘microphone era’ — maikefeng shidai 麦克风时代 — in which the mass-circulation of public content is no longer the exclusive right of the state. This breakdown of the state’s monopoly over content production has resulted in the massive proliferation of largely non-political online material, i. e. the kind of inane gossip, trolling, and petty debate prevalent across the internet world. This has required a significant shift from a highly centralised model of content control, to one focussed primarily on the periphery of content creation— that is to say, the users themselves. My research has attempted to provide a case study of one such mechanism, theWeibo Community Management System (CMS), as a way of exploring alternate methods of content regulation. Previous studies of content control have focussed pre- dominantly on vertical conceptions of censorship, precluding emerging horizontal forms of control. The CMS was chosen as it presents a distinctive and supplementary censorship model to previous studies’ dichotomous focus on vertical ‘state-on-citizen’ regulation. Through the use of documentary analysis, official data, case studies, and role-holder interviews, I have sought to position the CMS’s method of handling non-political con- tent —an approach unique to SinaWeibo and not seen onWestern platforms such as Facebook or Twitter —as the emergence of a non-state horizontal control structure, something I term as ‘peer-to-peer’ (P2P) censorship. Liu Jun (University of Copenhagen) Digital Media, Cycle of Contention, and Sustainability of Environmental Activism— The Case of anti-PX Protests in China Key words: digital media, political activism, cycles of contention, environmental activism, China Although scholars have studied issues arising from digital activism, most have failed to scrutinize the possible interconnections that might be found within digitally mediated political contention. To advance such an understanding, this study employs the concept of “cycles of contention” to investigate recurrent mechanisms of protest in contemporary society. This study takes as its case seven anti-petrochemical (anti- PX) protests in China from 2007 to 2014, during which 54 in-depth interviews are conducted. Whereas traditional media coverage legitimizes and modularizes anti-PX protests, facilitates the adoption of digital media as part of the repertoire of contention, and sustains political contention in a long run, the use of digi- tal media enables protestors to diffuse contention widely and quickly, and allows them to learn from the experiences of the past. This study concludes that the sustainability of digitally mediated environmental activism is shaped by the specific communication ecology in China.