Rethinking China’s Internet censorship: The practice of recoding and the politics of visibility

Abstract

This article proposes visibility as a new lens through which to examine the politics of Internet censorship in China. It focuses on the practice of recoding, that is, the use of code words and images to circulate information that is deemed “sensitive” and therefore removed from the web. While commentators in the West have often described censorship-evading practices like this as a form of “resistance” against state domination, little academic attention has been paid to how and why recoding holds political and cultural significance. The prism of visibility, by conceptualizing recoding as a cultural response to censorship, opens up a more critical perspective to comparatively analyze examples drawn from both China and the United States. It therefore invites a careful rethinking of China’s Internet censorship beyond the framework of the nation-state, by calling attention to the social dimension of meaning making and the negotiation of power in a transnational context.

Leveraging Visibility, Gaining Capital? Social Media Use in the Fight Against Child Abusers: The Case of The Judge Beauce

“…Indeed, Facebook can be understood as a "device for online publicity" through which users, and also commercial, policing, activist, and even academic entities, can acquire certain types of capital. Drawing from these observations, this article uses visibility as a "heuristic device" (Yang, 2016) to understand the dynamics of emerging vigilante initiatives and, by doing so, looks at social media and their features as spaces of "constructed visibility" (Bucher, 2012(Bucher, , p. 1170. Although mediated visibility has been the object of an increasing amount of research on social media (Duguay, 2016;McCosker, 2015;Uldam, 2016), its study certainly predates the development of these platforms.…”

Networked Creativity on the Censored Web 2.0: Chinese Users' Twitter-based Activities on the Issue of Internet Censorship

“…On several occasions, collective action and public sentiment have resulted in legislative changes and the downfall of high-ranking government officials (Yang, 2013). The empowering role of the Internet in the country's societal development is made possible by Internet users' creative virtual actions that allow them to bypass censorship (Yang, 2014). Their virtual actions fall under two domains: cultural tactics and technological tactics.…”

“…Their virtual actions fall under two domains: cultural tactics and technological tactics. As to cultural tactics, to get around keyword filtering, Internet users create code words and images to replace sensitive words used in politically sensitive discussions (Yang, 2014). For example, 'Grass Mud Horse', is an invented Chinese word with a shape similar to an alpaca, and its pronunciation is similar to a profane Chinese phrase.…”

“…Nevertheless, online spoofs do convey political criticism and provide emotional bonding for users. Yang (2014) suggests that the use of code words and images to convey sensitive political information is a cultural response to censorship and "resistance" against institutional power. The current study adds to this body of work by providing an integrated framework to examine three elements in users' creative collective actions targeting censorship.…”

Contriving the Future by Tampering with the Past: A Deferral Tactic in Chinese Internet Censorship

“…The Chinese government has established a complex system of institutions and practices of censorship and governance, which create certain myths for scholars to explore (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6). The Chinese government exerts control over the media and other sources of information through a network of departments that monitor and enforce censorship policies.…”