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Guobin Yang is a professor of sociology and communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Yangyang Cheng is a physicist and Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School specializing in U.S.-China relations.Ellen Judd is a professor emeritus of anthropology, University of Manitoba with a long specialization studying rural China. They discuss the policy changes that have occurred throughout the pandemic, including the long period when westerners in lockdown envied their Chinese colleagues, who were allowed to travel freely. But the later lockdown there was extreme, not so much because of the national policy but because local authorities did not use half-measures in enforcement. For the video, audio podcast, transcript and public comments: https://tosavetheworld.ca/episode-548-china-and-covid.
Three years ago, as people across China welcomed the Year of the Rat, a new virus was taking hold in Wuhan. In London, the conversation at my family's New Year dinner was dominated by the latest updates, how many masks and hand sanitisers we'd ordered. Mercifully, Covid didn't come up at all as we welcomed the Year of the Rabbit this weekend, though my family in China are still recovering from their recent infections. The zero Covid phase of the pandemic is well and truly over. So what better time to reflect on the rollercoaster of the last three years? In exchange for controlling the virus, China's borders were shut for most of that time, while the economy has tanked and a general of children had their schooling disrupted. Yet after some remarkable protests last November, the country has opened up at a breakneck pace. The government is now keen to move on, focusing now on this year's economic recovery. But can a country of 1.4 billion people move on quite so quickly? The exceptional nature of the pandemic and the collective trauma of the last three years need to be processed, and yet I wouldn't say that the Chinese Communist Party is usually good at allowing people to come to terms with historical suffering, especially when it's the Party at fault… So on this episode we'll be looking at the social legacy of the pandemic on China, and the collective memory of this exceptional time. Joining me are the Financial Times's Yuan Yang, who was the paper's deputy Beijing bureau chief during the first two years of the pandemic, and Guobin Yang, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Wuhan Lockdown, a book looking at how the Wuhan people documented the world's first brush with Covid-19. On the episode I also mentioned the Chinese Whispers episode on the civil backlash against facial recognition. Listen here.
Three years ago, as people across China welcomed the Year of the Rat, a new virus was taking hold in Wuhan. In London, the conversation at my family's New Year dinner was dominated by the latest updates, how many masks and hand sanitisers we'd ordered. Mercifully, Covid didn't come up at all as we welcomed the Year of the Rabbit this weekend, though my family in China are still recovering from their recent infections. The zero Covid phase of the pandemic is well and truly over. So what better time to reflect on the rollercoaster of the last three years? In exchange for controlling the virus, China's borders were shut for most of that time, while the economy has tanked and a general of children had their schooling disrupted. Yet after some remarkable protests last November, the country has opened up at a breakneck pace. The government is now keen to move on, focusing now on this year's economic recovery. But can a country of 1.4 billion people move on quite so quickly? The exceptional nature of the pandemic and the collective trauma of the last three years need to be processed, and yet I wouldn't say that the Chinese Communist Party is usually good at allowing people to come to terms with historical suffering, especially when it's the Party at fault… So on this episode we'll be looking at the social legacy of the pandemic on China, and the collective memory of this exceptional time. Joining me are the Financial Times's Yuan Yang, who was the paper's deputy Beijing bureau chief during the first two years of the pandemic, and Guobin Yang, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Wuhan Lockdown, a book looking at how the Wuhan people documented the world's first brush with Covid-19. On the episode I also mentioned the Chinese Whispers episode on the civil backlash against facial recognition. Listen here.
In China today, the party-state increasingly penetrates commercial social media while aspiring to turn its own media agencies into platforms. Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, Engaging Social Media in China, edited by my guest Guobin Yang and Wei WAng, shows the complexity behind the central role the party-state plays in shaping social media platforms. State-sponsored platformization, however, does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party’s desired outcomes. Citizens continue to appropriate social media for creative public engagement at the same time as more people are managing their online settings to reduce or refuse connection, inducing new forms of crafted resistance to hyper-social media connectivity. The wide-ranging essays presented in this volume explore the mobile radio service Ximalaya.FM, Alibaba’s evolution into a multi-platform ecosystem, livestreaming platforms, the role of Twitter in Trump’s North Korea diplomacy, user-generated content in the news media, social media art projects, and the reluctance to engage with WeChat, among other concerns. Ultimately, readers will find that the ten chapters in this volume contribute significant new research and insights to the fast-growing scholarship on social media in China at a time when online communication is increasingly constrained by international struggles over political control and privacy issues. Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. There he directs the Center on Digital Culture and Society and serves as deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016) and the award-winning book The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009). He is also the editor or coeditor of four other books, including Media Activism in the Digital Age (2017) and China's Contested Internet (2015).Engaging Social Media in China: Platforms, Publics, and Production is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Goubin is on Twitter @yangguobin. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.
Current headlines about how authoritarian regimes have come to harness and even weaponize the internet may obscure how this technology, at one time, was more typically understood to be a democratizing force, across a range of different contexts. In the early days of Chinese cyberspace, for example, popular expression on various internet forums seemed to herald a new stage in political activism, that was pressing the boundaries of traditional state control. In this episode, University of Pennsylvania Professor Guobin Yang, the preeminent scholar of the sociology of the internet in China, discusses with Neysun Mahboubi the evolution of social media platforms on the Chinese internet, over the past 20 years, and their changing political implications. The episode was recorded on March 1, 2018. Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology, at the University of Pennsylvania. His research generally covers social movements, cultural sociology, political sociology, digital media, global communication, and modern China. His prolific scholarship includes the classic "The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online" (2009) and, more recently, "The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China" (2016). He is the editor or co-editor of four additional books which explore similar themes. He is also active on social media, and tweets at @Yangguobin. Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com Special thanks to Nick Marziani and Alex Schein
From 1966 to 1968, youth in urban China were embroiled in factional battles in what many of them believed to be a revolution of a lifetime. Guobin Yang explores how this factional violence was the result of the enactment of China's earlier revolutionary tradition, and how echoes of this tradition persist in online forums. Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Sociology and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Yang’s research bridges the Cultural Revolution, critical social theory, social movements, activism, and media and politics in China. His recent books include, "The Power of the Internet in China" (2009), and "The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China" (2017), both from Columbia University Press. The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Popular opinion in Chinese cyberspace—the postings of China’s “netizens”—are often ardently nationalist. Are nationalist voices online representative of broader public opinion in China? How much does such popular nationalism, in cyberspace or on the streets, influential in China’s foreign policy—which is itself widely seen as become more assertively nationalistic? What are the foci and triggers of nationalism in Chinese social media such as weibo (a Twitter-like platform) and weixin (WeChat)? What other politically significant issues draw the attention, and ire, of Chinese netizens? How much does online activism reflect patterns that predate widespread use of the Internet? And what are the prospects for political expression and activism in China’s still highly-restricted cyberspace?In this FPRI Asia Program podcast. Guobin Yang, Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Power of the Internet in China and The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, and Jackson Woods, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of a forthcoming study, Netizens and Nationalism in China join FPRI Asia Program Director Jacques deLisle to discuss these issues.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of "The Googlization of Everything" and Guobin Yang, author of "The Power of the Internet in China" look at the search engine giant's policy in the PRC. Plus: TV and the Internet get hitched.