Jonathan Benney

Rights Defence and the Virtual China

Over the past decade, a striking new term has appeared in the Chinese lexicon: “rights defence” [weiquan]. Rights defence has become a significant aspect of China’s evolving legal consciousness and has spurred the formation of a new public sphere in which individuals can play an active role. Well known in Chinese political and legal circles, it has so far attracted little scholarly study in the West. From the mid-1990s, the notion of rights defence has developed from being used by the state to educate its citizens in the operations of the law to being used by individuals in the active defence of their rights against state and official interests. As argued here, the evolution of the term “rights defence” is inseparable from the exponential growth in the use of the Internet in urban China, and the creation of websites to promote the idea. In this study, I demonstrate the use of the term “rights defence” in Chinese media from the early 1990s to the twenty-first century, and examine some characteristic case studies of rights defence on the Chinese Internet. Rights defence activity has sometimes met with resistance from the Chinese state. I argue here that a new and distinctive form of “virtual nationalism” is emerging that uses notions of rights defence to promote the rights of the individual against the power of the state. Although Western scholars have produced considerable amounts of material on the concept of rights in China, as well as the rise of the Internet, very little material has been produced on the idea of weiquan, or rights defence, itself. In this study, I extend some of O’Brien and Li’s (2006) similar ideas of “rightful resistance” from their primarily rural concentration, to consider them in the urban context in which the term “rights defence” is most often used. Furthermore, my study is informed by a number of scholars who have explored both the growth of the Internet in China and its connection with the growth of civil society. In many ways the basis for this study can be summarised by Zixue Tai’s analysis of the model for the development of civil society in the Chinese context: “[C]ivil society assumes an adversary role to check the power of the state, yet at the same time it also needs to cooperate with the state . . . to put in place a framework in which civil society can enjoy institutional and legal protection” (Tai, 2006, p. 65). The techniques and challenges of rights defence Asian Studies Review December 2007, Vol. 31, pp. 435–446

The Aesthetics of Chinese Microblogging: State and Market Control of Weibo

Microblogs, epitomized by Twitter in the West and Weibo in China, have attracted considerable attention over the past few years. There have been a number of optimistic accounts about their potential to stimulate political activism and social change, juxtaposed with suggestions that their networks are too weak and that they are too easily censored for such change to occur. Yet, in this debate, little attention has been paid to the medium itself; microblogs have too often been treated as mere conduits for information, and the practical and aesthetic experience of microblogging has been marginalized.This article addresses this imbalance in two ways. First, it argues that the microblog is a distinctive medium with special potential for political communication. It applies Ranciere’s ‘politics of aesthetics’ and Baudrillard’s ‘private telematics’ to microblogs, suggesting that the particularly immersive quality of microblogs provides new and distinct opportunities for the promotion of opinions and social movements. Second, it argues that by allowing, re-modelling, monitoring and censoring the Weibo service, the Chinese party-state, acting collaboratively with the key microblog companies and the market as a whole, is consciously manipulating the medium of the microblog to reduce the risk of activism, controversial use, and network formation. Thus, the medium of Weibo differs from other microblogs – of which Twitter is the key example – in several important ways, each of which, the article argues, are intended to maximize the cacophonous spectacle of entertainment and to minimize reasoned discussion and debate. Furthermore, while pure censorship of information can be evaded in many ways, it is more difficult for dissenters to evade state control when it is applied to the medium itself.

Weiwen at the Grassroots: China’s stability maintenance apparatus as a means of conflict resolution

Abstract This article assesses stability maintenance (weiwen) as a means of conflict resolution in China. It argues that the resolution of local disputes in China, particularly outside cities, is now being influenced and facilitated by the discourse and practice of stability maintenance, rather than legal methods and traditional mediation processes. This conclusion adds to the existing academic views of stability maintenance, which have previously emphasized social control to the exclusion of almost all else, and suggests that stability maintenance-focused conflict resolution may have practical benefits to Chinese citizens, given the state’s withdrawal from legal conflict resolution methods and its ambiguous attitude towards mediation.

Selective use of political opportunity:: A case of environmental protest in rural China

Abstract This paper explores the selective and instrumental use of political opportunity in Chinese contentious politics through the study of a rural environmental protest. By considering the transmission of political opportunity through different levels of government, it also analyses the phenomenon of leakage of political opportunity. We argue that political opportunities can be divided into soft and hard types, which are weighted differently by activists. In the protest we examine, the villagers had various political opportunities at their disposal. They used them selectively, preferring the opportunities arising from changes to land policy, which were relatively hard and had a higher level of operability than environmental political opportunities—despite their grievances being largely connected with environmental damage. The hard, land-oriented opportunities, however, went through a process of leakage and then became merely symbolic, due to the local government’s manipulation of policy implementation. However, although they were well aware that the symbolic political opportunities were not genuine, the protesters still acted as if they were real and exploited them instrumentally.

Introduction: Modes of Activism and Engagement in the Chinese Public Sphere

Activism – in the sense of particular groups of citizens attempting to achieve societal change – is driven not merely by “social ferment”, as Lee and Hsing (2010, p. 1) describe it, or the existenc...