Virtual Chinese literature: A comparative case study of online poetry communities

China Quarterly

Volumn , Issue 183, 2005, Pages 670-691

  Hockx, Michel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ART; COMMUNITY RESPONSE; CULTURE; INTERNET; LITERATURE REVIEW;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST;

EID: 30944463992     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S030574100500041X     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Quoted from an article entitled "Wangluo wenxue" ("Web literature"), originally published (possibly under a different title) in Zhonghua dushu bao (China Reading Journal), 10 October 2001, reproduced online, URL: http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/RS/65142.htm. The reproduction does not mention the name of the article's author. "wwwmm" is the screen name of one of the participants in the 2001 debate about web literature, discussed below.
2. Information provided on the CNNIC website, URL: http://www.cnnic.net.cn/ download/2005/2005012701.pdf. Most general sources on the Chinese internet referred to in this article were traced using the resources available to members of the Chinese Internet Research Group.
3. For more information about this group, see URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/chineseinternetresearch/.
4. For an ongoing analysis of web content filtering in China and other countries see Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, "Empirical analysis of internet filtering in China," URL: http:// cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/.
5. For examples of this approach, see for instance Jeroen de Kloet, "Digitisation and its Asian discontents: The internet, politics and hacking in China and Indonesia," First Monday, Vol. 7, No. 9 (2002), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_9/kloet/index.html and
6. Lokman Tsui, "Big Mama is watching you: Internet control and the Chinese government" (Leiden: Unpublished MA thesis, 2001; downloadable from URL: http://www.lokman.nu/thesis/).
7. This list is available to members of the Chinese Internet Research Group mentioned above. My comments here are based on a visit to the (continuously expanding) list in September 2004.
8. URL: http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/dachs/leiden/poetry/index.html.
9. The URL of the announcement, being the page that would appear regardless which personal web page one was trying to access, was (and perhaps still is) http://ads.533.net/gonggao/.
10. It might be mentioned in passing that the techniques used by the Chinese government here are not new. Similar policies, based on mutual interest of government and ISPs, were arrived at in Western countries in order to suppress illegal content such as child pornography or terrorist manuals. The difference is of course that the Chinese government's definition of what constitutes "inappropriate content" is much wider.
11. Here the formulation of my argument is indebted to Jeroen de Kloet's research cited above.
12. In Western cyber-circles, the term "BBS" (bulletin board system) is considered somewhat outdated, referring as it does to the text-only interactive systems of the 1980s and 1990s. In East Asia, however, the acronym is still popular and used to refer to both text-only and multimedia online forums. Cf. the article "Bulletin board systems" on Wikipedia, URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system.
13. For a partial content analysis of this website, see Michel Hockx, "Links with the past: Mainland China's online literary communities and their antecedents," Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, No. 38 (2004), pp. 105-127.
14. Chen Cun's status as an important contemporary author is confirmed by the inclusion of one of his stories in Howard Goldblatt (ed.), Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused (New York: Grove Press, 1995).
15. Quoted from the article entitled "Web literature," see n. 1.
16. This is true, for instance, of the "happening" avant-garde website called "Shi jianghu" ("Poetry vagabonds"), which consists entirely of poems that adhere to the print culture format, despite their often highly unconventional content. (Indeed, the group also publishes a normal printed journal.) In September 2004, the site was no longer accessible at the old URL (http://www.wenxue2000.com - this instead linked, ironically, to the text of a poem by Li Bai). Alternative URLs were available, leading to a collection of old work (http://sh.netsh.com/ bbs/3307/) and to a new discussion forum (http://my.clubhi.com/bbs/ 661502/). In December 2004 the old site was accessible again. At the time of writing (March 2005), it has once more disappeared, but the other two URLs mentioned above remain valid. The translation "poetry vagabonds" for shi jianghu was suggested to me by Maghiel van Crevel.
17. Howard S. Becker, "H new art form: Hypertext fiction," URL: http:// www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/hbecker/lisbon.html.
18. For an overview of related articles see "2001: Qingsuan wangluo wenxue" ("2001: LiquidatHng web literature"), URL: http://www.booker.com.cn/gb/paper253/1/.
19. When I visited the sites in May 2004, over 15,000 members were claimed to subscribe to the forums on the Chinese site; over 18,000 members were claimed to subscribe to the main foram (the "Poetry free for all") of the US site. When I visited both sites again on 20 September 2004 both were claiming a membership of over 19,000. At the time of writing (March 2005) the American site has "over 21,000 members." The Chinese site boasts 23,267 subscribers. It has, however, temporarily stopped accepting new subscriptions. Although no reason for this is given, the appearance of a two-line slogan under the announcement ("Let us jointly establish a healthy, civilized, law-abiding poetry community. Actively suppress and eliminate bad information and lend your strength to the cleaning up of the web enviromnent") suggests that in this case, too, state intervention has brought about stricter self-regulation.
20. I borrow my usage of this term from C.J. van Rees's model for the description of literary communities. See for instance C.J. van Rees and Jeroen Vermunt, "Event history analysis of authors' reputation: Effects of critics' attention on debutantes' careers," Poetics, Vol. 23, No. 5 (1996), pp. 317-333.
21. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982).
22. To mention just one fairly unexpected example, the website of the All China Lawyers Association (ACLA) runs a lively literary forum where lawyers can publish and discuss their own literary writing. URL: http://www.acla.org.cn/forum/postlist.php?Cat = & Board = 2.
23. For a more detailed discussion of the various control mechanisms of online discussion forums in China, see Wenzhao Tao, "Censorship and protest: The regulation of BBS in China people daily," First Monday, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2001), URL: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_1/tao/ index.html.
24. It is likely that especially the Chinese site also screens submissions with automatic filters to remove posts containing certain words or terms that are deemed unacceptable. It has recently been suggested that all Chinese messenger services, chatrooms and message boards are forced to operate filters based on a single list of "forbidden" words put together by the authorities. This list was retrieved by Chinese hackers and reproduced in full on various websites. (See Xiao Qiang, "The words you never see in Chinese cyberspace," China Digital News, 30 August 2004, URL: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/chinadn/en/archives/002885.html.) However, I have certainly seen some of the "forbidden" words on message boards; following the publication of the list, others have reported successfully using them in Chinese cyberspace. It is more likely that the list (with entries ranging from "democracy" to "masturbation") only applies to the messaging software (QQ) in which it was found, or that the report was a hoax.
25. Information based on my April 2004 visit to the US site. During a visit in December 2004, I failed to detect references to such anthologies. During that visit the US site did have special boards in which some of its best contributions were preserved. Members were not allowed to add work to those boards, but were allowed to submit comments as usual.
26. Recent issues of the site's web journals (starting from the August 2004 issue) are accessible through links on the page listing the discussion forums: http://www.chinapoet.net/cgi-bin/leobbs.cgi. I have been unable to find an index page of all issues published so far. It is possible that publication did not start until August 2004.
27. During my last visit to the PRC site, in March 2005, a notice had appeared informing users that no more than three posts per member per day would be allowed. There was however no encouragement for users to post more responses to other poems.
28. As I was making revisions for the final version of this article (in Mrch 2005), there was an uproar among China's "netizens" about the restrictions imposed on popular discussion forums at Qinghua, Fudan and Nanjing Universities. In this case, the restrictions (suspending off-campus access and making full registration of members compulsary) appeared to have been imposed directly by the authorities, rather than being the result of self-regulation.
29. David Gauntlett (ed.), Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age (London: Arnold, 2000). (A revised edition, edited by Gauntlett and Ross Horsley, came out with the same publisher in 2004.)
30. David Gauntlett, "Internet studies: What went wrong?" originally published in Times Higher Education Supplement in 2000, URL: http:// www.newmediastudies.com/thes.htm.
31. For instance, the authoritative website for humanities research "Voice of the shuttle" (URL: http://vos.ucsb.edu/) does not have an entry for cyber literature, neither under "cyber culture" nor under "literary theory." Both categories do have entries about hypertext.
32. Ananda Mitra and Elisia Cohen, "Analyzing the Web: Directions and challenges," in Steve Jones (ed.), Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net (Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), p. 193.