wilfred yang wang: remaking guangzhou: political engagement and place-making on sina weibo
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Presentation at CeDEM Asia 2014TRANSCRIPT
Remaking GuangzhouPolitical Engagement and Place-making on Sina Weibo
Wilfred Yang WangCreative Industries Faculty, QUT
Prepared for the CeDEM Asia 20144-6 December, Hong Kong
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The central question•A study about geographic (physical) places on the Internet
•Ask:
How the Weibo group (EDPF) construct and negotiate the Guangzhou identity on a daily basis?
- How do we learn about a place (nature and humanity) from digital information and data
- How we understand new media practices through the lens of human/cultural geography
Politics?• How and where about do politics come in?
• Politics: the realisation of citizenry rights and responsibilities
• non-institutionalised, and non-party politics;
• no obvious confrontations or conflitual incidents/issues
• The ongoing, and evenrydayness
What is a place?• Not just a graphical representation on a map
• A place is a ‘complex construction of social histories, personal and interpersonal experience, and selective memory’ (Kahn 167).
• Given by natural landscape but constantly (re)-make by cultural practices and rituals (indigenous people’s dance, music and art works)
• A place defines people’s value, believes, behaviours, and daily routines (Mitchell 120)
• A place provides a sense of community and collectivities (a sense of belonging)
What have happened?Literature background and common assumption
-Cities and urban spaces are ‘invisible’ in the age of electronic media (S. Graham 16)
-There is a ‘lost of physicality’ and ‘locality (Crang and S. Graham 190)
-The Internet is ‘borderless’ that it disrupts geographic boundaries (Allagui and Breslow 174)
-An issue of identity: no longer managed by the nation state, but ‘freed from the bonds of the boundaries of the state’ (174).
-The ‘death’ of distance (e.g. Bill Gates)
-The Cyberspace: an immaterial realm … entirely separated from the material, corporeal world of the body and the city (in Graham)
BUT …• Digital media reinforce a sense of ‘locality’
more than a sense of being ‘cosmopolitan’: without geographic boundaries and constraint (Zukerman)
• People continue to associate with the closed network (e.g. Facebook friends and online communities)
• Internet: immediate, local environment (e.g. Open Rice in HK)
• Online information are more localised than globalised …. Social networks are ‘closed’ rather then ‘open’
Why is it so?• ‘The overwhelming majority of people … live
in places, and so they perceive their space as place-based … (a place) is a locale whose form, function, and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical continuity’. (Castells 453)
• Eric Prieto (18):
‘No matter what the starting point … and no matter how much of a tendency we have to forget this basic fact, human identity … is inextricably bound up with the places in which we find ourselves and through which we move.’
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The case of Guangzhou, china
12/5/2014
Guangzhou (Canton)• Capital city of the Guangdong Province
• Population: 14 million (2014) … Australia (22.68 million)
• Social changes: rapid population growth rate since 2000s; 1/3 is floating population … a rapid shifting sense of cultural identity
• Dialect: Cantonese
• Climate: humid subtropical (68% humidity)
• Economy: first to reform; hospitality and trade-driven: ‘China’s southern gate’. One of the wealthiest regions in China (GDP)
• Geographic: close to HK and Macau
• Recent Histories: Opium Wars; Taiping Revolution; the Nationalist Revolution and the Communist Revolution
• Some issues: social inequalities, cheap labor, unemployment, inflation (if not hyper-inflation)
• High ICTs penetration rate and numbers
A different Twitter … Weibo• Weibo (micro blogs), entry up to 140 Chinese
characters;
• Launched in 2009, by Sina.com;
• 5-6 different versions of weibo, a very competitive market.
• Reached 331 million users by June 2013
• Nearly 70% used it through smart-phone
Eat, drink, play, fun in Guangzhou (EDPF)(http://weibo.com/gzlifes)
Method • Systematic sampling
• Sampling period: 1 July 2012 - 30 July 2013
• N=7,625 (38 posts in the first five days are all included and 232 posts in September 2012 are all excluded)
• N=7,355(systematic sample with 95% confidence interval, +/- 3% marginal error ) –every 8th post was selected
• n= 930+38 = 968
CategoriesCategory/label Count
Food 202City Experience 71Events, leisure, tourism 127Cantonese (language) 24Social issues (exclude DG) 58
Disadvantaged groups 39Popular culture/celebrity 51
Human interests 141Funny/jokes 42Expression 35Life advices 178Animal welfare: 27Missing person: 17
Social position• Young, low-end middle class (new graduates, high
school/university students); GZ-born
• Bargain food, clothing, travel, and other lifestyle-related products ($ saving);
• Advices about healthy lifestyle, exam strategies, employment and job hunting skills;
• Gender relations;
• Expressions as an urban youth: the struggle, happiness, hopeful wishes, romance and family.
Setting the tone
Northern people
The China map that is according to Guangdong people
Appreciation - Food
• In 202 posts about food, only 5 has mentioned a waisheng (non-Cantonese regions in China) cuisine; (14/7,355 in total); Majority are Cantonese cuisine;
• Not a single post has mentioned fine dining or premium venues
• ‘The owner is a local’: homemade; simple; nice and polite, ordinary and humble, hard-working;
• The food are delicious but cheap • The food culture is a way of survival that
address issues of inflation, unemployment and social inequalities.
Appreciation -Entertainment/leisure• Recommended travel destination:
1. Guangdong 2. HK, 3. Others , 4. inland cities
(close by, easy and cheap to travel … same as food)
• HK and TW’s celebrities and media products;
• Japanese and Korean, and global celebrity and productions (e.g. David Beckham; LeBron James; Despicable Me 2; One Piece; Backstreet Boys);
• ‘Who’s concert do you want to go to?’
124 out of184 comments chose non-mainland singer; more than half of the 124 chose Cantonese pop stars
- Who is your favour TVB actress? (338/142)
- TVB characterises a nice and memorable GZ childhood
Rubber Duck in HK
GZ - A translocal identityHK as satellite modernity – a window to
modernity since 1980s (Fung and Ma, 2002; Ma, 2012)
- Cultural/media products- Events- Food and entertainments- Policies/news (milk powder, border, passports)
Media preferenceLost in Thailand (2 mentions)
Triumph in the skies II (391/107)
Presenting others (waisheng)More ‘negative’ representations through news
The inland ‘others’Negative News Positive NewsMurder 4 Romance 2Sexual assault 3 Friendship 1Stupidity 4 Food 2Physical assault/violence 1 Animal welfare 1Corruption/injustice 6 Charity works 1Accidents 6 Social support 1Children (abandon/trafficking) 5 Police 1
Violence (children) 3
Animal Cruelty 3Crimes (non‐manslaughter/.murder) 2
Poor behaviors 2
Unusual stories 1
Other Social issues 3
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Framing Waisheng• Under developed
• Devastated
• Crimes/unrests/insecure
• Conservative and even barbaric (inhumane)
• Lack of discipline and knowledge
• Stupid/ignorant
Not discrimination but
We are better and it is our responsibility to help them
the vulnerableVulnerable and disadvantage groups are often mentioned
-Disadvantaged groups
-Animals
Framing a caring and loving GZ identity 【爱心广州】 (A Loving GZ)
Scale jumping the local identity
Norms and valuesGreater Cantonese Cultural identity vs. A Chinese
national identity
【爱广州的60个理由】每一条都很经典:1、离香港近!2、离北京远!3、有大胆敢言的媒体!
‘60 Reasons to love GZ’ : 1. Close to HK; 2. Far away from Beijing; 3. Local media are outspoken
Culture (food, language, heritage, ideologies) = right and entitlement
Duty to protect the city’s liberal social culture and news independency
Responsibilities to protect the social vulnerable/disadvantaged groups
To summarise …
• A striking sense of local-GZ identity is observed
• Weibo’s technical support of visual and audio images ‘re-creates’ the cultural, social, and geographic aspects of Guangzhou;
• Identity becomes visible and tangible, rather than ‘imaginary’;
• EDPF takes over the duty to manage Gzers’ sense of belonging, and provides the guides and rules of being a Gzer;
• Identification enacts political participation and communications;
• Political participation is through the daily online consumption of news and information about leisure and entertainment, and through engaging the ‘mundane’ media practices and preferences.