5. Education Attainment of Chinese Internet Users
High school or lower
Bachelor degree
Graduate school
Elementary school or lower
High School
Community college
Bachelor or above
Elementary school or lower
Junior high school
Senior high school
Community college
Bachelor or above
Community college
Bachelor or above
Elementary school or lower
Junior high school
Senior high school
9. “Asteroids 隕石期”
(mid 1990s ~ 2003)
“Bees 蜜蜂期”
(2003 ~ 2009)
“Coliseums 競技場期”
(2009 ~ now)
Three Phases of China’s Network Society
10. COMPARING 3 PHASES OF CHINA’S NETWORK SOCIETY
A B C
Political parallelism L M H
Opinion pluralism M H L
Globality H M L
Efficacy M H L
Civil society development M M.-H. M.-L.
17. 1800: the British Empire (1 million slaves):
2.5 billion hours
(R. Blackburn)
2014: Foxconn (1.4 million employees in China):
4.8 billion hours
In Facebook, worldwide, in 2014 (1.04 billion daily active users):
652.9 billion hours
(261 British Empires
or 137 Foxconns)
30. 3 triangular exchange models:
Slavery & antislavery
Europe
West
Africa
The
Americas
$$, sugar
slaves
$, rum
Apple
Foxconn
Manufactured
iSlaves
$$, UGC
$, R&D
gadgets
Network
Labor
Working-Class
ICTs
Working-Class
Public Spheres
DNA
WGC
cultural
capital
social
innovation
Editor's Notes
Thanks for organizing this conference..
Ten years ago I started to write my first single-authored book, which came out in 2009 entitled Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China工人阶级的网络社会：中国城市的传播科技与信息中下阶层. . The book extends Manuel Castells's theory of the network society into Chinese contexts, where massive processes of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization re-defined not only China itself but also the world at large.
Are the basic ideas of working-class network society still relevant today? How has China, and the world, changed over the past decade? Does new social reality require theoretical revisions and new concepts?
Before answering these questions, let me first recap the main ideas of working-class network society. Here you see three books: on the left -- the 2009 volume; in the middle -- the Chinese version of working-class network society published in 2013; on the right -- my new book that just came out this year, which is quite different from and much more radical than my earlier work, but it nevertheless contains these basic ideas:
First, digital media are no longer an exclusive domain for middle- and upper-class people. The working class has entered the domain as the bulk of the market, in China as in most parts of the world. These working-class users found new means of information and communication; they are therefore no longer the have-nots. But they are not the so-called "have's", either. Instead, they have developed distinct modes of usage, social innovation, cultural capital, and/or political subjectivities, so much so that it makes sense to construe a new sociological category of the information have-less and a new technological category of working-class ICTs.
The information have-less include workers and their families, migrant labor, poor students, retirees. These are low-income groups with limited budget and low socioeconomic status, often exploited and disenfranchised. Yet, it is erroneous to see them as nothing but culturally unconscious and politically subdued. They are called have-less because they also have less commitment to the status quo. They are therefore also the social basis for new class politics extending from the shop floor and working-class communities into cyberspace, into digitally-connected networks, beyond the confinement of conventional unions and political parties.
Most definitively, have-less groups use working-class ICTs to meet their existential needs: find jobs, housing, healthcare, childcare. This differs from middle-class users hopping from one social media platform to another, in order to look cool, get entertained, and become a better consumer.
Several years ago, I wrote that the information have-less had only begun to move from a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself. But in my new book Goodbye iSlave, I contend that this process of class formation has excelerated -- because the scale and intensity of class confrontation have become so acute that a new slave regime is now looming large, in the electronics manufacture industry -- Foxconn, for example. Super exploitation and increasing oppression take place under conditions of digital media saturation. The result is more rapid rise of network labor, the class-for-itself in China's network society, and globally.
The idea of the working-class network society is, without doubt, an attempt to build on Castells's theory of network society -- as fleshed out in his Information Age trilogy -- and extend it to account for structural transformations in industrializing developing countries such as China.
Social class was, of course, THE key concept for Castells's earlier theoretical work in the 1960s and 1970s. Although he distanced himself from Marxian class analysis since the 80s, the theory of network society, as fully expressed in his trilogy, is still full of concerns about social inequality and class antagonism. For example he discussed the informational city as "dual city"; he specified that the labor force in network society consists of self-programmable labor on the one hand such as Silicon Valley designers or Wall Street traders, and generic labor on the other hand, such as blue-collar workers.
In Castells's theorization, the network society has two pillars: network enterprise and the network state. My contention is that, in the Chinese context and in similarly industrializing regions of the Global South, we ignore issues of class and labor at our peril. Indeed, a third pillar is emerging that I call "network labor", which stands on par with network enterprise and network state to constitute a more humane and more sustainable social system.
In the Chinese contexts, Castells has written extensively about networks of Chinese entreprenuers, from Southeast Asia to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China mainland. But does that still suffice given China's enhanced position as a leader of world economy; given the recent trend in Beijing to insulate the country increasingly from the outside world; given the decline of network state -- falling apart with neoliberal globalization, as seen in Brexit, in the US presidential election, as much as in China's new-found assertiveness in advocating sovereignty, for instance, on issues of Internet governance?
There is no doubt that the rise of network society has continued -- in terms of smartphone diffusion for example -- while the power of identity has also become more visible and more substantive, as can be seen in the rise of ISIS or nationalist sentiments around the world. But the end of millenuium is more than a social condition around year 2000. It is still happening now, as we witness the return of class politics -- in a renewed form, of course -- to the US election of 2016.
The white working class has been an essential part for Trump's America. What would the Chinese working class do in the future? Will they also surprise us? The answer is a resounding YES -- if we do not try harder to understand the working people, their informational needs, how they use digital media and be abused in that process, during their routine work and life, and at critical moments of key events.
Studying Chinese workers is not easy
Like their counterpart in the US, they are often silient or more precisely -- silienced by the pressure to make ends meet, by the management, the middle class, the media -- all of whom cannot care less about the working population.
But the Chinese situation is also very different. “China has got out jobs”, people like Trump would say. But they are wrong. The jobs created in China over the past decade or so are not the same as those jobs lost in the West. The pay is much lower, the exploitation much more severe. There is much less job security, much less institutional room for solidarity.
This is how China's digital and industrial revolutions happened in the past 15 years, when China became home to the world's workshop of electronic gadgets. Most smartphones and laptop computers are now made in China. Many layers of labor are necessary to have such a digital industrial revolution -- not only the migrant labor to work on the assembly line but also construction workers to build the infrastructure of factories and roads.
Between 2011 and 2013, China used more cement in three years than the US did in the entire 20th century. The scale of industrial development is massive and unprecedented as China industrializes, urbanizes, and globalizes herself.
The materialization of this digital industrial revolution, however, takes place in the context of a large developing country, which differs fundamentally from the social structure of the Global North.
Over the years, we see that the bulk of China's network society -- measured by Chinese Internet user population, for example -- has become working-class or info have-less users, as can be observed in this diagram...
Does the increasing proportion of working-class Internet users mean China's digital landscape is becoming more egalitarian?
No -- here is a snapshot regarding the geographical distribution of Internet resources...
This was however not a “natural” political economy of network society. If we take a longer view, China’s network society can be divided into three phases
...2003 and 2009 were turning points... ... A and B still co-exist with C today, but all attention is paid to the bloody entertainment going on in the politico-economy structure of social media now
The overall trajectory partially corresponds to the growth of civil society until 2009. Since then, “informational politics” has characterized China’s network society as media spectacles become increasingly overwhelming, under the combined influence of state-led communitarianism and finance- and technology-driven capitalism.
“one step forward” from phases A to B, then “two steps back” into phase C
despite its peculiarities, China is probably not alone in its non-linear trajectory of devolution; nor is today’s social media technology, often carrying promises of cosmopolitanism and emancipation, but actually turning out to be manipulative and parochial, conservative and instrumentalized
If we zoom in from China's network society at large to working-class social media more specifically, we see many parallel developments.
The three phases of working-class social media in China are also marked by two turning points: 2004 and 2009...
The third phase of China's working-class network society began with Foxconn suicides ...
Appconn 苹果糠 –a new world system, not just one company or two, not just one country of two
-- Chongqing
workers, like all citizens, are now put in digital shackles, when our data become the sources of advertising revenue, when Big Data analysis dictate our lives.
This is not only good for the corporations and their stock shareholders but also for the police state, who can now retrieve more information, with higher precision, about labor movement, social networking among activists, for instance. Whenever a new bloody show is planned in the coliseum, they can easily pull out whoever they want, complete with his or her past histories, including sandals for the media, and digital evidence for court hearing.
Is this complete domination? Will alternatives be possible?
My take is that there is also ample sources of hope -- if we understand the digital worlds of Chinese workers
As Castells has noted in his trilogy: a hallmark of network society is that it is "globally connected and locally disconnected":
globally connected -- Appconn, news about Trump
locally disconnected -- what's going on in the factory zone? (plenty of workers's voices and actions for us to see hope)
Also the beginning of the third phase
The world's largest shoe factory, 48,000 workers on strike
Wooha, a high-class e-commerce site subject to employee subotage similarly in Ctrip 携程
the first worker-initiated "cyberwar" ambush (via Search Engine Optimization)
the global trend of working people becoming content creators -- Worker-generated content, digital picket-line, new literacies
Another line of exciting development during phase 3:
There is enough slack in digital capitalism and in statist control system for diverse forms of WGC to take place, survive over time, and have sustained impact
Coops合作社
Many possibilities of WGC, beyond the confinement of UGC (middle-class, individualistic, and consumerist)
To conclude, the landscape of China’s network society has become more varigated, some parts more bleak, some parts more hopeful. While China has become a more integral component of the capitalist world system, this does not mean its working class would simply succumb and accept exploitation along the assembly line and in the data mine.
To conclude, the landscape of China’s network society has become more varigated, some parts more bleak, some parts more hopeful. While China has become a more integral component of the capitalist world system, this does not mean its working class would simply succumb and accept exploitation along the assembly line and in the data mine.
