No abstract

China, like the United States, has no defined concept of privacy in its Constitution and Chinese citizens have to work out how to negotiate their presence online, just as others elsewhere do. Online privacy in China has not received strong legislative protection compared with the U.S. and European countries as privacy has never written as an individual right in China’s Constitution, nor in the Civil Law. Chinese privacy perceptions and everyday privacy practices in social media have not been fully examined. This article presents an original, ethnographic study of how 26 Chinese youth, men and women, and 25 older rural women from Changsha, south-central China are negotiating what counts as privacy online in their everyday practices. It finds out that youth group in Changsha has a stronger understanding of the technical level of deployment of the social media technologies, enacting both positive and protective self-presentation instantiated by “human flesh search,” “public online privacy,” and “improved firewall.” However, the notion of shameful secrets touches on the protection of the reputation of those concerned, and social relationships play an important role in privacy boundary negotiation, common to both groups. This demonstrates that sociocultural contexts need to be taken into consideration and should be more nuancedly examined when studying online privacy and working out privacy protection methods.

This article provides a discursive analysis of content published in the Berwick Leader, a local newspaper in Melbourne, Victoria, on a proposed and approved mosque in the suburb of Doveton. The mosque development was instigated by the Afghan Mosque Project Committee in 2012 and approved by Casey Council in 2013. Catch the Fire Ministries, led by politician Daniel Nalliah from the Rise Up Australia Party led opposition to the mosque project, appealing to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT). The opposition centred on the mosque’s physical location next to Catch the Fire Ministries’ proposed church, however the formal appeal was dropped when the church purchased land elsewhere. Database research returned 23 published items from the Berwick Leader relating to the mosque in Green Street, Doveton. Part of the discourse analysis reveals inclusive publishing decisions in terms of community input, with thirteen letters to the editor about the controversial project being selected for publication. Significantly though, the voices identified as being excluded from news reports are those of the Afghan Mosque Project Committee, the representative body for the local Muslim community. It may be argued this form of social exclusion, embedded in journalistic practice, reflects discourses of Orientalism, whereby the Muslim community is relegated to an inferior, strange and threatening ‘other’ in local media reporting. By being denied a voice and right of reply in the reporting on the proposed mosque, the authors posit that the Berwick Leader denied the Muslim community of Doveton recognition and validation as social subjects.