Internet Software Piracy in China: A User Analysis of Resistance to Global Software Copyright Enforcement

Abstract

China's entry into the global networked society has raised considerable debate over what is derived from the development and expansion of information and communication technologies (ICTs). One of the hotly debated issues is Internet copyright piracy, which is critical to the credibility and stability of China's membership to the global networked society. This paper examines Chinese users’ online discussion about Internet software piracy as local resistance to global copyright enforcement exercised through globalization processes. The study uses Mittelman and Chin's (2005) framework of Polanyi's (1957) counter-hegemony and Gramsci's (1971) counter-movements as a heuristic device to conceptualize the resistance points to globalization located within the dominant discourse on intellectual property rights, specifically Internet software piracy, by Chinese Internet users. Gee's (2002) discourse analysis framework is applied to produce seven recurring themes within online postings: cost, convenience, software companies, foreign developed countries, China's development, Chinese culture, and moral dilemma. The analysis on these dominant themes illustrates the cultural models held by Chinese users towards the issues of Internet software piracy: Internet as a public domain, socialist market economy, patriotism, and Chinese culture. These cultural models represent different types of resistance in Mittelman and Chin's (2005) framework. Meanwhile, these resistance positions are integrated under the notion of Chinese nationalism to constitute a complete set of counter-discourses to global software copyright enforcement.     

The ‘diaspora advantage’ of Pauline Chan (1956–): from multicultural filmmaker to cultural broker

ABSTRACT

This is the first academic paper to critically introduce and document the 30-year screen career of Pauline Chan, Australia’s highest profile Chinese film director, television actress and media producer. Sydney-based, Vietnam-born, Hong Kong-educated and US-trained, Chan has directed six films, starred in 14 and produced four television series and films. Despite her prolific career, there has been no sustained research on her profile and repertoire. This paper evaluates the evolution of Chan’s career using the diaspora ‘advantage’ as a new approach. Characterised by mobility rather than culturalism, the term refers to the benefits brought by and skills of diaspora groups that have allowed them to flourish as transnational actors able to leverage resources in both their countries of origin and settlement. It begins by elaborating how Chan’s diaspora advantage has allowed her to challenge welfare multiculturalism and extend aesthetic multiculturalism. It further documents her transition from a multicultural filmmaker to a cultural intermediary by leveraging her diasporic advantage across the film sectors in China and Australia, and opening up new industrial routes outside of the confines of policy. Using interdisciplinary methods to screen biography that include interviews with the filmmaker, film archival research, critical cultural policy studies, and studies in Asian Australian cinema and political economy, this paper argues that the new approach of the diaspora advantage turns the deficit associated with the diaspora into a dividend that has the potential to rethink the imaginary between Asia and Australia.     

When Transnational Civil Network Meets Local Context: An Exploratory Hyperlink Network Analysis of Northern/Southern NGOs' Virtual Network in China

Abstract

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are important communicators in the international arena, but few studies have explored the encounter between Northern NGOs (NNGOs) and Southern NGOs. This study examines how NNGOs build relationships with Chinese NGOs (CNGOs) online and how network positions affect the amount of local media coverage NNGOs receive. This study revealed three major findings: NNGOs occupied a disadvantageous network position; a close connection with CNGOs was crucial for NNGOs to attract media coverage; and NNGOs' and CNGOs' virtual networks demonstrated structural patterns similar to those of their offline networks. This study calls for attention to a mutually beneficial virtual communication structure.     

Communicating citizenship in China’s digital society

ABSTRACT

This research explores the (inter-) cultural dimension of communicating citizenship in China’s new media environment. It adopts speech codes theory as a theoretical and methodological framework to examine the historically situated and socially constructed meanings of citizenship and the normative communicative conduct for practicing “good citizenship” in China. Through a systematic analysis of Chinese online discourse surrounding two social events, this study captures one speech code pertaining to communicating citizenship that is premised on a paradox – citizenship is interpreted by the Chinese as a legal entitlement that they deserve, but it is simultaneously treated as an aspirational and unattainable ideal. Additionally, speaking sensibly and morally with a communal orientation is heavily emphasized in this speech code as it is considered a valuable communicative practice for performing “good citizenship.” Finally, participating in online collective actions such as “topping posts” is rendered an acceptable and effective way to communicate and enact citizen rights in China.     

Chinese Postgraduate Students in the UK: A Two-Way Reciprocal Adaptation

Abstract

Chinese students who come to study in the UK and their UK teachers have to adapt to cultural differences in their experience of and expectations about teaching and learning traditions and practices. Qualitative and quantitative data were obtained for Chinese postgraduate students and the staff teaching them in two Scottish universities to investigate the extent of their shared perceptions and their reciprocal adaptations. Students, especially those coming in groups, tended to deal with problems among themselves, which resulted in their teachers having limited awareness of their students’ difficulties. Several themes that emerged in relation to reciprocal adaptation are discussed.     

Moving On? Excurses on Cultural Studies,Phenomenology, Bildung and Kultur

Abstract

This paper takes a meta‐perspective on the theoretical grounding of cultural studies since the late 1970s. It suggests a realisation of the possibilities of both classic phenomenological thought for the field and cultural studies’ continued connections to traditional cultural concepts such as Bildung and Kultur. Of particular importance are relations among cultural studies’ semiotic‐political and economic engagement with culture, phenomenological concepts of Umwelt and historical conceptions of Bildung and Kultur. While arguing that thinking through these relations provides an intellectual route forward for cultural studies, the paper recognises that such intellectual configurations also resonate with earlier models of cultural studies from the 1950s and ’60s.     

Between business and morality: cultural politics in independent bookshops in China

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how cultural businesses may facilitate contentious political activity in authoritarian contexts. Existing research in Western liberal democracies has shown the widespread political activism of actors in the cultural and creative industries. Whether such activism exists in authoritarian society, how it may differ in character and form, and what implications this will have for our understanding of relations between business, politics, and culture in authoritarian countries remain to be addressed. Drawing on data collected from 55 ‘independent bookshops’ in China, I illustrate how these organisations perform ‘cultural politics,’ a type of political participation in which actors employ mainly symbolic means to express social and political concerns. The organisations’ economic relations and conditions facilitate their efforts to create spaces in which contentious questions can be raised, sensitive topics explored, and alternative ideas expressed, despite the Chinese state’s political regulation of the cultural sphere. The finding of the economic embeddedness of cultural politics sheds new light on our understanding of the political economy of cultural businesses in contemporary China.     

Interculturality as an interactional achievement: Doubting others’ nationality and accounting for the doubt

ABSTRACT

This article examines the notion of interculturality in face-to-face, multilingual, ordinary interactions. The focus is on how participants perform constituent actions by reference to members’ normative expectations to a specific membership category. Employing ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this article elucidates interculturality is an interactional achievement in interaction. More specifically, I describe interactional practices for doubting others’ nationality and accounting for doubts accomplished by particular interactional practices in a specific interactional position. Analyzing these interactional contingencies produced by participants demonstrates that members’ practices to make interculturality relevant in a temporal unfolding of the activity and shows how they reflexively use interculturality as a resource for constituent actions. This study contributes to the existing literature on the interactional construction of international and intercultural communication, and on the situated, sequential, and embodied organization of interculturality.     

Language Convergence and Meaning Divergence: A Theory of Intercultural Communication

Abstract

Meaning lies at the core of intercultural communication. The ways in which meanings are made and the differences in meanings form a core problematic for intercultural communication. Yet intercultural communication theorists have yet to systematically explore the processes by which language and meanings converge and diverge within and across particular cultural milieus. The goal of the present analytical essay is to move the theory of language convergence/meaning divergence (LC/MD) into the intercultural communication realm. LC/MD processes discussed in the analysis include language convergence, meaning divergence through meaning clusters and meaning fragments, and the illusion of shared meanings. To illustrate ways in which LC/MD can be utilized by intercultural communication scholars, cults and morality as foreign policy are analyzed.     

Algorithms,advertising and the intimacy of surveillance

ABSTRACT

This article develops the notion of the intimacy of surveillance, a characteristic of contemporary corporate marketing and dataveillance fueled by the accumulation of consumers’ economically valuable digital traces. By focusing on emotional reactions to targeted advertisements, we demonstrate how consumers want contradictory things: they oppose intrusive and creepy advertising based on tracking their activities, yet expect more relevant real-time analysis and probabilistic predictions anticipating their needs, desires, and plans. The tension between the two opposing aspects of corporate surveillance is crucial in terms of the intimacy of surveillance: it explains how corporate surveillance that is felt as disturbing can co-exist with pleasurable moments of being ‘seen’ by the market. The study suggests that the current situation where social media users are trying to comprehend, typically alone with their devices, what is going on in terms of continuously changing algorithmic systems, is undermining public culture. This calls for collective responses to the shared pleasures and pains while living alongside algorithms. The everyday distress and paranoia to which users of social media are exposed is an indicator of failed social arrangements in need of urgent repair.     

Connecting Community Voices: Using a Latino/a Critical Race Theory Lens on Environmental Justice Advocacy

Abstract

This study examines the contested space of environmental inequity and demonstrates how engaged intercultural communication research can be used to put forth seldom heard cultural environmental meaning systems. In an attempt to bridge ecojustice–environmentalist divides, we use Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) to understand and promote practices of Hispanic communities enacting environmental justice and cultural activism. We also exemplify the value of an explicit focus on the role of race in environmental issues for communication scholarship.     

Best of both worlds or refusal to comply? The rich kids of Tehran on Instagram

ABSTRACT

This article offers a textual analysis and semiotic reading of the Rich Kids of Tehran's (RKOT’s) Instagram page. Contributing to scholarship on Iranian youth media practices, this article interrogates how the RKOT navigate urban and rural space to engage in everyday processes of resistance against global and local systemic oppression. Grounding their visual representations on Instagram in historical and cultural context, the author questions how and when quotidian actions are transformed into political transgressions when posted on social media. This article emphasizes the RKOT's agency in shaping their brand by analyzing representations of gender performance, intertextuality, and national identity on Instagram.     

Cultural Similarities and Differences in Seeking Social Support as a Means of Coping: A Comparison of European Americans and Chinese and an Evaluation of the Mediating Effects of Self-Construal

Abstract

Two studies examined similarities and differences in how European Americans and Chinese view seeking social support as a strategy for coping with an upset. Participants (407 European Americans and 595 Chinese) completed instruments assessing the appropriateness of seeking social support and several self-reliant coping strategies (problem-solving, emotion management, avoidance) when confronting upsets. Both studies detected cultural and sex differences in support seeking. However, there were also substantial similarities in coping responses. Americans viewed seeking support as a more appropriate coping strategy than did Chinese. However, both Americans and Chinese viewed seeking support as more appropriate than the solitary coping strategies of avoidance and emotion management. Culture moderated sex differences in support seeking; American women viewed seeking social and emotional support as more appropriate than American men, whereas few sex differences were evident among the Chinese samples. Individual differences in interdependent and independent self-construals partially mediated cultural and sex differences in support seeking in Study 2; in addition, culture moderated the mediating effects of self-construal, with self-construal mediating sex differences among Americans but not among Chinese. The cultural and sex differences in self-construals, however, did not conform to theoretical expectations. Moreover, cultural and sex differences in self-construals were quite small in magnitude.     

‘Stars’ and places: exploring the spatial organization of media and entertainment industries in China

ABSTRACT

Drawing on an innovative ‘big data’ method, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the geography of media and entertainment industries (MEIs) in China, by examining the specific activities that are performed by celebrities, the key actors in these industries. Compared to previous research on cultural and creative industries, which primarily rely on more traditional statistical data, our study demonstrates a new approach to systemically investigate the spatial organization of the dynamic production process in MEIs. The outcomes reveal that activities focusing on the different value segments of MEIs display rather diverse geographical patterns. Depending on the availability and combination of specific local assets, different locations perform varying functions in the production networks of MEIs. Therefore, the agglomeration of MEIs only partially overlaps with the existing urban hierarchy. In addition, celebrities catering to different media and entertainment markets also exhibit distinct activity patterns, indicating a close and reciprocal relationship between the popularity of celebrities, the activities they perform, the platforms that are chosen, and the commercial value that can be generated as a result. This study contributes to our understanding of the complex development patterns and consequences of MEIs in emerging economies.     

Postcolonial remembering in Taiwan: 228 and transitional justice as “The end of fear”

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the contested dynamics of postcolonial remembering in Taiwan. Focusing on the long-suppressed 228 massacre in particular and the White Terror period in general, we bring Taiwan’s postcolonial remembering into international and intercultural communication studies by analyzing two contemporary sites: Taipei’s 228 Memorial Museum and the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park. As our case studies demonstrate, Taiwan’s postcolonial remembering offers unique indications of how public memory work can help move a culture toward a sense of reconciliation, thus promoting what one of our collaborators called “the end of fear.”     

Commemorative places,political spaces: Virginia Indians,the Jamestown Quadricentennial,and the quest for sovereignty

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the cross-cultural communication strategies deployed by a coalition of indigenous tribes in Virginia to leverage the Quadricentennial commemoration of the founding at Jamestown in support of their sovereignty campaign. The tensions between Jamestown’s mythos as the “birthplace of democracy” and the natives’ historical and contemporary lived experiences, combined with the national and international attention focused on the events, constructed the 400th anniversary “celebrations” as a compelling location for social action. The coalition employed intercultural communicative practices—particularly cross-cultural dialogue and negotiation—as means of mobilizing these tensions to renegotiate their relationship with the federal government, illustrating the intersection of intercultural communication, memory, and identity.     

Acceleration Nation: An Investigation into the Violence of Speed and the Uses of Accidents in Iceland

Abstract

There are two starting points from which this paper is constructed: first, Virilio’s observation that the wealth of societies is founded on their dromocratic condition, that the faster societies accelerate their citizens, commercial goods and communication the more political and economic power they have and, second, the links that he traces between technologies of speed and acceleration and the accident. We suggest that Virilio’s ideas on this invite and deserve a closer ethnographic scrutiny than they have so far received, scrutiny that highlights the varied ways in which speed, acceleration and the accident are articulated in different cultural contexts. To this end we offer an investigation into the dromocratic condition, the violence of speed and the uses of accidents in Iceland.     

Cool governance: Japan’s ubiquitous society,surveillance, and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The rapid reform of the Akihabara district of Tokyo during the first decade of the twenty-first century, in conjunction with the Japanese government’s policy on the global promotion of Cool Japan, has been envisioned under the Japanese government’s new direction of becoming a ‘ubiquitous society’. From the postwar period when Akihabara became the techno-gadgetry hub of Tokyo, into the twenty-first century where it transforms itself into the Mecca of anime and video games, Akihabara has become the embodiment of national hope and technological future. Noticeably, what also implemented alongside this advance of techno-future is a new form of governance and surveillance. After Katō Tomohiro’s murderous rampage in Akihabara in 2008, numerous CCTVs have been installed to secure the neighbourhood from crime and news of this solution became a spectacle in international media. This form of ubiquitous techno-governance integrated as part of everyday life had already been imagined in anime such as Dennō Koiru (Coil A Circle of Children), which broadcast on Japan’s national broadcast station NHK in 2007. In light of the concerted effort of the Japanese government’s promotion of anime to the global consumers seamlessly integrating the urban developmental project of Akihabara, the production of Dennō Koiru at that historical juncture presents a pertinent foreshadowing of Japan’s ‘society of control’. This article will examine the notion of ubiquitous society and surveillance in Dennō Koiru and situate its production against the backdrop of Japan’s growing techno-governance vis-à-vis its creative industries in the twenty-first century.     

Korea's blacklist scandal: governmentality,culture, and creativity

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the relationship between culture and governance, exploring how the practice of government has invoked conflicts and crises in the Korean culture industries. The Park Geun-Hye regime used culture as a central engine to boost Korea's national economy by adopting the new slogan, ‘Creative Korea’, to embody the country's national values within the international community. However, the regime's constant emphasis on creative economies came under attack when it was discovered that the Ministry of Culture and Tourism abused its authority by censuring 9,473 artists who were critical of the regime. Through an analysis of journalistic interviews with artists, critics and cultural practitioners, this paper examines how the relationships of governmentality, culture and creativity have been negotiated in the process of regime change. In addition, this paper explores how the Korean Wave phenomenon – the transnational expansion of Korean popular culture – during the past two decades has reshaped the society's perception of the governor–governed relationship within the cultural sphere.     

Knows no weekend: the psychological contract of cultural work in precarious times

ABSTRACT

This article explores the expanded and transformed nature of the psychological work contract for forms of cultural and artistic labour in precarious conditions. The forms of passionate work found within cultural production are argued to form a new model for governing our subjective involvement in and attachment to work. This more expansive and demanding relationship with work has become generalized beyond the specific area of cultural production into employment relationships more generally. In doing so the expanded psychological contract of work comes to operate as a form of logistical media and infrastructural governance, connecting the micropolitics of governing labour with larger structural conditions of precarity and instability. Thus, while work today is less stable in what it offers, it demands even greater psychological investment despite increased uncertainty.