The JianZheng Community’s Discursive Evasion of Chinese State Repression

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Xiting Tong, whose interest is in the rhetorical and political community JianZheng in China. She begins with a metaphor of biological community organisms like the Aspen trees in Utah, which are connected by their roots and form one large organism.

JianZheng is similarly a rhetorical community that is bounded together by shared discursive processes (metaphors, analogies, satires) that play an endless process of hide-and-seek with the Chinese state. This is an ongoing process, even though current research on such processes tends to take a very event-based, limited view – there is a long-term community here. The community is also not simply conflict-focussed, even though it is embroiled in conflicts like the ‘little pink’ controversy about Chinese Communist Party online youth activists from time to time.

Xiting has been a long-term participant in this community, and has studied it through a virtual ethnography of participants; the community emerges from this as a sustained undercurrent of the Chinese public sphere, and a space to stimulate and release the enormous reserve of public wit that exists there. It connects online and offline communication, and occasionally spills over into general online discourse – moving as a shortcut from mind to mind. The word ‘run’ trended recently, for instance, representing young Chinese people’s desire to escape the system by moving overseas.

But it serves as an ambiguous and uncertain connection of apolitical and political discourse, which makes it much harder for the state to grapple with and censor. State censorship of certain terms in fact flags them as belonging to the community, and enable it to rhizomatically replicate itself. A rhizome may be broken and shattered at an point, but will start up again along old or new lines, as Deleuze and Guattari have put it. But not all members of this community have an equal chance of participation.