On 14^th September 1987, the very first email was sent from China, declaring with high hopes: “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world”.[1] More than 35 years later, however, what is now known as the Great (Fire)Wall of China has created a world unto itself, whereby “those inside the Firewall cannot see outside, and those outside cannot see inside”. Nevertheless, a crucial exception is how the Chinese government itself transcends that Firewall to engage in increasingly sophisticated and pervasive forms of illicit internet activity beyond the national boundaries of the Firewall.

In fact, Fang-long Shih recounts, “while in the 1990s the Chinese government vocally supported the expansion of internet connectivity, it simultaneously took steps to control it as soon as the internet was opened to the general public in 1995. And in 1997, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security issued the Measures for the Security Protection Administration of International Networking of Computer Information Networks, which were approved by the State Council. In the same year, Beijing introduced its first laws criminalising online postings considered to represent a threat to national security, which pragmatically means the security of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)”.

Indeed, as DigiChina specialist Rogier Creemers observed, “As the internet became a publicly accessible information and communication platform, there was no debate about whether it should fall under government supervision, only about how such control would be implemented in practice” (2017: 266-7). Said otherwise, Shih observes that “organisational warfare (zuzhi zhan組織戰) played a significant role in the CCP’s initial consolidation of power. ‘Mobilising one group of people to fight against another (qunzhong dou qunzhong群眾鬥群眾)’ has, since the CCP’s rise, become an iconic tactic in cracking down on enemies and dissidents.” Shih further comments that, since the advent of the digital age, “controlling the internet has always been part and parcel of China’s digital governance, which is central to maintaining the CCP’s hold on power”.

Shih’s presentation is thus not about how the digital world would change China, but how China has changed the digital world. The Great Firewall is a sophisticated system of techniques and methods that the Chinese government uses to balance internet connectivity with tight controls. One of the most pervasive ways in which the Great Firewall is used to censor online content is called ‘sniffing’. This refers to how the CCP deploys intrusion detection technologies to detect and block keywords that are deemed sensitive by the government (examples include terms like ‘Xi Jinping’, ‘Taiwan independence’, ‘democracy’).

The Firewall works in conjunction with behaviour-based methods, whereby censors analyse web traffic and server names to find suspicious websites and block them manually. Certain domains—such as google.com or facebook.com—are blacklisted, meaning Chinese users are unable to access them without bypassing the ever-tighter meshes of the Great Firewall. For example, Shih notes, “In the 1990s, China’s internet forums known as BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) having more than 1,000 views could attract police attention. Later, in the Weibo era, the threshold has halved to 500”. At the same time, websites and apps that wish to operate in China need an Internet Content Provider (ICP) Registration permit issued by the Chinese government.

It is important to notice, however, that such censorship functions are not purely performed by government agencies. Indeed, to control the digital world, the Chinese government often outsources censorship to domestic and international companies—such as the US-based Cisco Systems, which helped the CCP build the Great Firewall. By using market mechanisms and fostering competition within the private sector, the Chinese government ensures that its censorship efforts remain efficient and updated. As Shih further explains, “Domestic private companies often compete for government contracts, striving to be as effective as possible due to small profit margins. If these efforts were carried out solely by government agencies and civil servants, they would likely be less efficient due to a lack of profit motive and market competition”.

China’s digital governance is therefore not characterised by complete control. Rather, as hinted above, the CCP has engaged in a careful and delicate balancing act between connectivity and control, devolving some key parameters of control to the private sector. Thus the CCP’s authoritarian control is not directly administered. Nor is its authoritarian control absolute since, as Shih emphasises, “Chinese netizens and dissidents have found creative ways to elude the filtering and blocking of online content. For instance some netizens are adept at using sarcasm, as in the case of the hashtag #ChinaIsAGreatPlaceToLive, or the many mocking posts shared online during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as ‘We need to refuse the vaccine in the horrible West, because chief Hu Xijin’s (of the Global Times state media) saliva drops are the best vaccines for us’”. Some Chinese dissidents are also able to bypass the Great Firewall altogether, through quasi-legal VPNs[1] but most who use VPNs do so for purposes not seen as threatening by the CCP, and hence implicitly condoned. The point is that the CCP always reserves the potential to clamp down in particular circumstances (such as June 4^th, October 1^st, People’s Congress period) or in relation to the proliferation of certain searches or trigger words. According to one of Shih’s informants, “If I really want to circumvent the extant barrier, it is becoming more and more time-consuming, at timers up to 40 minutes for a single search”. Other informants say that despite the opportunity that exists for many to transcend the Firewall “most Chinese citizens do not bother because they are happy to operate within the Firewall and they deem the information they could access beyond the Firewall ‘not of use’ for them in China”.

Shih concludes that in the information age, the strategy of organisational warfare has become even more intensified. The CCP uses the Firewall to continue mobilising one group of people inside the Firewall (known as Xiaofenhong小粉紅) to fight against another group outside the Firewall. These dynamics inside and outside the Firewall lead to social division within China and between China and the rest of the world. This aligns with Mao Zedong’s saying, “greater chaos in the world, greater benefits [to the CCP] (天下大亂，形勢大好)”, later becoming a guiding principle of the CCP. A supposed threat to social division is portrayed as a threat that the CCP builds up and mobilizes for its own benefit, using it as justification for its surveillance, censorship and crackdown on so-called ‘dissidents’, whether located within or in countries beyond the Firewall. These digital trends allow for increasing ways to stabilise Chinese authoritarian governance and to manipulate rules, norms, and computer codes so that citizens are cajoled into rationally acting out the leadership’s will. The Chinese government’s control has developed a logic of its own, epitomised by the omni-surveillant reach of the social credit system (社會信用體系). The CCP has taken key elements of digital technology in a new authoritarian direction, primarily geared to preventing opposition and dissent. This raises the question as to whether China’s deployment of digital technology should be seen in a comparative and historical perspective as exceptional—as a substantial change—or merely a change in intensity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Creemers, Rogier (2017) “Cyber-Leninism: the political culture of the Chinese internet.” In M. Price & N. Stremlau (eds.), Speech and society in turbulent times: freedom of expression in comparative perspective (pp. 255-273). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The book

Taiwan’s status began to evolve from merely a geographical area into a geopolitical entity in the seventeenth century, when the island came under Dutch colonial control and was thus incorporated into regional and global geopolitics. However, Taiwan’s position has always been marginal: on the periphery of the Chinese and then the Japanese empires, and now on the edges of the USA’s current sphere of influence. This chapter examines the issues around how marginal Taiwan has been represented culturally and symbolically in the twenty-first century’s new geopolitical climate. It explores the twin themes of ‘religion and politics; religion and nationalism’ in the Taiwanisation movement, focusing on how the god Nazha represents the struggle of Taiwanese identity in an attempt to open new political spaces for itself in the international world.

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Taiwan and Hong Kong1 are both primarily defined in relation to the Chinese Mainland, although their histories are also marked by strong associations with colonial empires: in Hong Kong, the British (1841–1941, then 1945–1997) and the Japanese (1941–1945); and in Taiwan, the Spanish (in the north 1626–1646), the Dutch (in the south 1624–1662), the Japanese (1895–1945), and arguably the KMT (1947–1987). In both locations, contemporary politics is consequently marked by struggles over contested histories, identities, languages, and cultures, in which questions of political representation have become increasingly important. In this introduction, we place this current situation of contested identities and politics in historical context. From the perspective of the Chinese Imperial court, Hong Kong and Taiwan were always regarded as peripheral, barren places populated by barbarians, rebellious pirates, and illiterate fishermen. Further, both locations were respectively ceded to and governed by British and Japanese colonial empires, which, in contrast to China, perceived fertile land with economic potential in locations of strategic importance. Hong Kong and Taiwan were thus brought into the world capitalist system by the colonial powers, and underwent rapid transformations from rural modes of life into modern capitalist formations. However, both locations were profoundly affected by the conflict between the Nationalists and the Communists on the Chinese Mainland after World War II: Hong Kong’s population trebled due to the arrival of refugees, while the eventual defeat of the KMT led to the retreat of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. Throughout these histories of migration, resistance, colonialism, and civil wars, the so-called ‘ethnic group’ ( !) has emerged as a new category of historical subject that challenges the very concept of ‘the Chinese’, and the result has been a politics based around competing identities and representations. The crucial question here is whether the politics of identity in Hong Kong can develop in such a way under the ‘one country, two systems’ model that its inhabitants will be allowed to take responsibility for organizing their own lives together, and decide what common rules they will live under. This in turn raises another question, of whether Taiwan will be able to retain its own identity and democracy if it is forced to follow the model of Hong Kong. The outcome will depend on to what extent Hong Kong will develop a representative political system, and whether democratic culture in Taiwan can be enriched and given a firm basis. As such, rather than being a comprehensive comparison of both locations, this introductory essay aims to highlight parallels beyond the most readily-apparent connections, as well as resonances that exist between the two locations despite the lack of direct communication. In particular, we explore centre–periphery dynamics in imperial China, as well as in colonialism and the world capitalist system, as well as democracy as a universal value and the politics of representation after World War II.

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Abstract

This paper looks at how Taiwan has been imagined or narrated as a national subject from the perspective of different nationalisms, using Ireland in the context of the colonized Other as a comparator. As with Irish nationalist projects, the Chinese nationalism of the KMT and the Taiwanese nationalism of the DPP were and are complex phenomena, with ethnic, cultural, and civic dimensions. However, in the cases of the KMT and of the DPP the civic dimension was either suspended or remained under-developed. This paper takes a critical view, focusing on ethnic and cultural nationalism to explore how the KMT and the DPP narrated their respective national imaginaries. The first framework examined shows how Taiwan was narrated as part of China through a particular form of Chineseness, which was imposed on Taiwan by the KMT. The second framework analyses how Taiwan was re-narrated through Taiwanization discourses as a national subject in its own right; in particular, through a post-modern primordialist turn by which the DPP used Taiwanization to stress ethnicity politics. Critical interpretations here make use of a comparative perspective, re-examining notions of national subjectivity in juxtaposition with Ireland, whose own national imaginaries have, like those of Taiwan, also emphasized ethnicity and culture. The paper concludes by suggesting a third framework, emphasizing the need to pay attention to the cosmopolitan processes of mobilization and globalization. These can help us to reconsider Taiwan and Ireland as network societies that can be narrated in the light of relationships and connections through which they have been constituted as places.

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Abstract

This paper addresses how religion is playing an increasingly important role in empowering anti-nuclear protests at Gongliao in Taiwan. It begins by describing how the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan was originally dependant on the opposition political party, and then examines how growing disaffection with party politics at Gongliao has resulted in a local temple dedicated to the goddess Mazu coming to the forefront of the struggle. This paper frames the dispute as a struggle between three different ways of generating power (and implicitly, of losing power): first, the generation of nuclear power by bureaucrats and scientists working through the industrial sector; second, the generation of political power by opposition politicians and elite campaigners; and third, the generation of religious power by people rooted in local communities, creating an alliance between religious power and secular protest.

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This article interrogates so-called ‘bad death’ rituals and their cultural implications in the Chinese patrilineal society of Taiwan. It begins by outlining the significant features of ‘good death’ rituals through which the discontinuity of biological death is transformed into the social continuity of being an ancestor. Importantly, only those among the dead with male heirs are entitled to become ancestors. The article then looks at ‘bad death’ practices relating to males who die in childhood or who die before they marry, with a focus on the rituals through which they are re-incorporated into their family lines and are granted ancestral status. However, according to ancestral orthopraxy, females who die unmarried have no place in a family line or on an ancestral altar, and thus are excluded from the social practices of remembering that ancestor worship enshrines. This paper in particular analyses the cultural significance of social practices relating to maiden death in two contexts: examining how people deal with dead maidens, firstly, in pre-modern and rural Taiwan in relation to Daoist practices and, secondly, in modern and urban Taiwan in relation to Buddhist practices. It concludes by arguing that the analysis of maiden death requires a contextualisation of those practices within wider processes of societal modernisation.

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Abstract

This chapter examines the issue of injustice in a Confucian society in Northeast Asia. It uses examples from the White Terror in Taiwan, focusing on three levels at which the demand for justice has been articulated, both during and after the period of the terror: firstly, at the level of the state through political calculation and bureaucratic procedures; secondly, at the level of local culture and through the idioms of religion; and finally, at the level of global civil society. These three levels do not constitute a unified demand for justice nor, indeed, do they offer a coherent response to the problem of injustice. Instead, they reveal fractures and discontinuities through which ideas of justice and injustice are refracted. I consider the Luku¹ incident of 1952–53 and the Kaohsiung incident of 1979, which respectively mark the beginning and the end of the Terror. I conducted my field research on Luku, including interviews with surviving victims and their family members, between 2004 and 2005.

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This paper addresses a significant gender issue in the Chinese religious culture of Taiwan. The exclusion of deceased maidens from family and ancestral lineages leaves relations between the living and the dead disordered. People believe that homeless maidens become restless, polluting ghosts after death who will bring misfortune to their family and others in society. The case study examined here is a correction to the exclusion/pollution/homelessness of maiden-spirits through ‘adoption’ in the maiden-temple of Sam-giap. I will analyse how spirit-adoption in the Sam-giap maiden-temple constitutes an attempt to correct that disorder and pollution. I will also argue that one result of the Sam-giap corrective practice is the generation of a new space for maiden-spirits in which a new category that disrupts the opposition of ghosts and ancestors emerges.

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