downstair please explain it

Awesome comment and definitely a good reminder for those visiting chinaSMACK and thinking it represents everything about China’s internet or all the Chinese netizens. I seriously doubt Fauna and her band of merry men/women could cover everything, but they do a good job translating some of the more interesting stuff that crops up. Much easier than trying to wade through the Chinese forums yourself without being really proficient in Chinese.

@ SPP:

Yeah, Mao said that at one point, but then he didn’t like what he heard/saw, changed his mind, labeled them all as counter-revolutionaries, and had them all cleansed. So much for that.

and yes retaliation by the offended mass is not a chinese invention, it does happen in other places at times but whats happens here tends to spin out of control and gets very extreme and irrational.

And then you have McCain campaign volunteer Ashely Todd carving a B backwards into her own face and then blaming an imagine black guy who also mugged her and told her that she’s going to be an Obama supporter. LoL.

But yes, extreme and irrational shit gets reported a lot with the Chinese.

I believe HFS (human flesh searches) get a lot of attention because it is one of the few ways the Chinese populace have relatively recently found to be an effective way to express themselves and/or exert a new measure of control over what they historically perceive as a difficult to control environment.

Not only do certain aspects of their culture socialize them to “accept” certain things in life as things they cannot change and ought not bother trying to change (”mei ban fa”), there indeed has been a historical precedent that many things cannot be changed or helped. Yet, with the advent of the internet, they’re discovering a medium and tool through which they can express, disseminate, discuss, expand, promote, organize, and execute their will.

I’m too lazy to enumerate the actual points I was making in my previous comments so I’ll just respond to you based upon your numbered list:

Re: 1. perception

I’m a little confused by what you’re trying to say or what you think you’re responding to with this one. One of my points was indeed that people will interpret the HFS in different lights based upon their backgrounds as well as what they themselves want to see. That’s why I mentioned “projecting” and “attaching values.” I’m further saying how their different interpretations affects their interest in HFS and its significance.

Now, I granted earlier that I was probably bringing up only a minority “Westerner” perspective that I run into repeatedly in Western media or from Western observers of China, particularly through English blogs about China. I granted that the vast majority of Westerners don’t know two shits about China or the ramifications of HFS beyond seeing it as a bunch of Chinese lynch mobs, frightening but otherwise not more important than the next round of American idol.

My basic point which I hope I can strike home with you is to understand the qualitative differences in the “significance” attached to HFS by the average Chinese and the average Westerner that is familiar with HFS. I see a trend in the Westerner to extrapolate from HFS phenomenon a hope for Chinese revolution, amongst other ideological and political consequences. That’s understandable and surely there are Chinese people who see extrapolate the same things. However, I’m just cautioning that most of the Chinese may only have shallowly begun recognizing that the internet can be harnessed to voice grievances to keep the government accountable, and have not once considered HFS being something of a first step or symptom on the road towards overthrowing the Chinese central government.

Do you understand? I am, in a way, just trying to caution overenthusiastic Westerners.

Now, the above pertains to perceptions relevant to “good” HFS that targets corruption or scandal, etc. But what about the “bad” HFS?

With “bad” HFS, Westerners bemoan the invasion of privacy, the intolerance of dissenting views, the violation of other individual rights, etc. Many Chinese feel likewise, but many Westerners will still return to some conception that the group always overrides the individual in China whereas the individual is rightfully supreme in the West. That perception is not wrong or unreasonable to have but I do think it becomes unfair when Westerners start thinking phenomenon similar to HFS doesn’t or couldn’t possibly happen from where they’re from because their people, unlike the Chinese, respect privacy, rights, and dissenting views.

The examples I gave were merely to remind Westerners not to fall into that superiority complex, the trap of self-righteousness or exception. Again, the reasons why HFS exist and the appeal of HFS is common to all people everywhere. Everyone wants to expose, share, discuss, argue, or right what they perceive to be wrong. People fight for the right of investigative journalism and a free press, or the right to assembly and protest precisely for these reasons. Hell, that PETA group on Facebook regularly sends visitors to chinaSMACK to check out these gruesome Chinese animal abusers, and those visitors occasionally leave some bigoted, angry comment. Some even think this website promotes animal abuse and one said they were going to report chinaSMACK to the police! There’s little difference between what that PETA group is and what an ad hoc human flesh search engine is.

So if people from everywhere engage in similar behavior, why do Westerners seem to think HFS are a bigger deal in China?

Because the intolerance of dissent, invasion of privacy, violation of individual rights, etc. all play beautifully into the Western narrative of China, China’s government, and Chinese society. Westerners are socialized from young to view “communism” and “communist countries” as antagonists, as entities that stood in opposition to Western values and ideals. All these aspects of HFS play into a specific backdrop embedded into Westerners, appealing to certain conditioned emotional responses and ideological convictions. HFS is a big deal because it seems to corroborate their preconceived socialized notions of China, nevermind that its really not that black and white, but a matter of shades of grey.

My point about perception is to differentiate between what actually is and what only seems that way, either due to context or due to your own subjective socialization.

Re: 2. Chinese coming to terms with their powers

Your disagreement with what you refer as my second argument (I’m too lazy to enumerate the various points of my previous comments here, so I’ll just respond to what I’m reading from you) is wrong in my opinion.

1. I don’t know why you think the current generation is “more or less completely free.”

2. How are you defining your generations? It isn’t as if all of the netizens are post 90s or whatever, and there are plenty of 30-40 something netizens who remember what happened in the last year of the 80s.

3. Free from what? Government control? Government propaganda? Social and cultural norms and mores? Confucian social hierarchy? Traditions?

It is reasonable to say Chinese living today have experienced increasing freedoms over time but I do not think it is remotely accurate to say there is no “reaction to oppression” much less that they are “more or less completely free.”

Moreover, my point here was two-fold. It is coming to terms with a new technology (the internet) that did not exist in the past, AND coming to terms with how this new technology enables them to do things they could not do prior to this technology existing and through other channels in present life (ineffective petition system, state-controlled media, physical demonstration, etc.)

3. concentration of netizens in a few hotspots

Right, and I’m also saying you have to consider “massive” in absolute terms or in relative terms. China’s population alone will make anything massive in absolute terms, but there’s a reason why things like GDP per capita.

4. less tolerance regarding dissenting views

Right, but I think dogs and cats have been kept as pets in China for ages as well. They’ve kept a lot of other cool animals and insects as pets for ages as well. ;)

Um, I think a Western equivalent to a HFS would easily happen in the West where I presume you’re from. Are you telling me that students at a university wouldn’t make a big fuss about finding the prick who blew up their beloved and adopted university cat? I think they would, but sure, they’re probably going to get farther with the school administration, the police, or at least they’ll likely get better lip service. The resort to HFS is because upset people were ignored by the authorities they ought to turn to or they think they will be ignored. The Chinese students did plenty of normal things. They posted fliers and posters looking for the suspect. Do Western university students not do that? I remember tons of fliers about just about anything back in my college days. It also really isn’t that odd for students to post, discuss, and express emotions about the incident on a school or public internet forum. I really don’t see this being alien or foreign to Western society.

Also, I don’t think the cat-bombing HFS got really big either compared to other more notable HFS. Also keep in mind that a call for HFS has become something of an internet meme on China’s internet. It doesn’t mean every person who utters “human flesh search him/her/them” is actually going to do it or participate in it. It has largely become something akin to “go get that/those fuckers!”

5. distrust in the legal system

Cool.

Re: Summary

Cool. Cheers.

Haha, yeah, but government officials misusing public funds is something of a scam too, right?

@ No Links:

Just finished reading your earlier comment where you sign off on how you haven’t slept. No worries, I understood your comment and although I went off on a tangent stressing a distinction between nature and nurture, I know you weren’t actually trying to imply that Chinese are born less tolerant to dissenting views. I just wanted to respond and make that clear should anyone be stupid enough to interpret you that way. Though you repeatedly emphasized “nature” I now note that you wrote “conditioned” as well, which is synonymous to my use of “socialization.”

Your argument of East and West both having the same sentiments and both having flesh searches is valid, but I also think that the interesting part of the discussion is why they are not the same.
What is it in the socializing process of the Chinese that makes specifically vigilante HFS so popular? Of course this question has been answered quite sufficiently above. I’m just saying that nobody disputes that they exist both in the west and the east.