ASP News

With the advent of Internet access throughout the Chinese diaspora, a distinct Chinese Internet culture has evolved. It is somewhat exclusive and unique to the Chinese, yet also takes strong cues from stronger and more established Internet cultures – in particular the Japanese and the Anglo-Saxon presence on the Internet.

Speakers of Chinese have evolved their own online language, their own Internet memes, and occupy their very own corner of cyberspace in large Chinese online communities.

The language of Martians

The Chinese are quite unique when it comes to emoticons (or smileys as they’re also known). Whereas in the West we have to use our alphabet and mathematical symbols to make little illustrations, the Chinese can just use single characters from their vast library of rarely used Chinese characters.

囧

By daytime: an obsolete character.

It’s alter ego: a highly amused smiley!

凸

This actually means “convex” (bending outwards).

On the Internet it represents giving the finger.

They also construct emoticons from the Latin alphabet. A popular emoticon in China (originally from Japan) and scarcely used in the West is the compound “Orz” which is supposed to depict a person kneeling to the left, the characters repreenting the head, arms, and legs. This is often accompanied by the compound 3Q. In Mandarin, 3 is pronounced sān and the Q is pronounced like in English, so 3Q ends up sounding like “thank you” which is – of course – the intent!

But it doesn’t stop there. Huǒxīngwén 火星文 – Martian Language – is in a way the Chinese equivalent of the abbreviated language used by young Western people in SMS and in chat, although quite often it doesn’t actually help shorten anything; some would say the same is true for the Western counterpart. It’s similar in the way that it decorates the written language and sets young people apart from the elders.

Latin letters and arabic numbers are often used in place of common Chinese characters with similar pronunciation or meaning. For example:

爱  becomes I
“love” (pronounced ài)

没有 becomes 0
“without” (i.e. zero, nothing)

你 becomes U
“you” (taken from English)

爱他／她 becomes @
“love him/her” (the Mandarin pronunciation of @ resembles ài tā)

Apart from that, users of Martian Language engage in a complicated deconstruction of Chinese characters, where characters are either broken into the individual characters that form them or hidden inside other characters. There are no formal rules of the Martian language, which makes understanding it all the more difficult for people who don’t actively participate in underlying culture behind it.

Memes and milk formula

The Chinese also have their own Internet memes. An Internet meme can be a catch phrase, a viral video, an amusing or shocking website – just about anything really. They’re typically spread in emails, on bulletin boards, and in chat. The Chinese participate a little in Western memes, but also have their own memes. When the baby formula scandal hit China in the summer of 2008 (a high content of toxic melamine was found in Chinese milk formula), it started several memes related to the Sanlu formula brand:

Young people start snorting milk formula instead of cocaine.
(a modified picture from a story about Chinese decadent youth)

“New product!
Melamine Milk
Nourishment is more exciting!
10% milk, 90% melamine
Ten people use, ten people get kidney stones”

Liu Xiang: “Coach, I drank Sanlu, I cannot urinate.”
(Melamine damages the bladder and Liu Xiang tragically failed to live up to expectations at the Beijing Olympics)

The human flesh search engine

Bulletin Boards (BBS) are very popular in China. Blogs have not caught on as much as in the West, but online communities are very big in the entire Chinese diaspora. The perceived anonymity of the Internet combined with a forum for expressing opinions and discussing various topics have proved successful, although more controversial topics are often removed within a short time by the Internet police of China. Still, Chinese BBS have uncovered several scandals in China that have since been addressed by politicians directly influenced by the BBS posts. This shows how powerful anonymity can be in a country lacking real free speech.

One example is the presence of slaves in Shanxi Province. This was brought to the public mind in a topic in 20007 on the popular Chinese language Internet community: 天涯社区 The Tianya Community. After being discussed on Tianya, it spread to the entire country and from there on evolved into a news item worthy of International attention. It was subsequently brought to an end by the highest authority in China, the Politburo.

Another – perhaps more dangerous – feature of the Chinese online presence is what has been dubbed 人肉搜索  Human Flesh Searching. When the Human Flesh Search Engine is in operation, the Chinese online communities will use their great numbers to try to find a person based on a photo or traces of information left by the “victim” in cyberspace. This can sometimes be positive, as was the case when Chinese netizens tried to find a “long-legged beauty” captured on a news photo documenting recent hard flooding in Nanchang.

Someone eventually found her after a few weeks and this of course spawned a great discussion on whether she lived up to the high expectations or not:

But usually the human flesh searches are of a more vengeful nature and resemble a modern lynching. People who have been deemed bad or evil by the collective mind of the Chinese Internet community risk being hunted down. Such was the case when a 21-year-old Chinese girl posted a video of her criticising how the TV-schedule had been altered after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Netizens disclosed her personal information on the Internet and she was then detained by local policemen who were sympathetic to the netizens, although she had committed no crime.

Another example is a Chinese exchange student in America who was photographed writing “Free Tibet” on her classmate’s t-shirt. Loyal Chinese netizens assembled and found out who she was. She was then a victim of tens of thousans of hate mails telling her she would risk being killed when she returned to China because of her “treacherous behaviour”.

The Chinese online presence both helps get out information ignored by the traditional media, but is also a tool that can be used to mobilise people in a less fortunate way.