As the Internet becomes an increasingly potent force in China, the Chinese government has responded by restricting access to specific web-spaces; strong-arming Internet sites such as Google and Yahoo to both censor themselves and also, allegedly, hand over to the government information on potential dissidents; as well as by imprisoning numerous prominent cyber-dissidents.
One of the earliest such dissidents was Huang Qi (arrested in 2001 and sentenced to five years imprisonment for posting human rights material on his web-site), but other high-profile cases include Luo Yongzhong and Huang Qunwei (arrested in 2003 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for posting “rumors” about SARS on the web); New York Times researchers Zhao Yan and Zhao Jing; and blogger and documentary filmmaker Hao Wu (who was released this past July 11 after spending five months in prison). Just last week, furthermore, reporter Li Yuanlong was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for disseminating controversial essays via e-mail.
This past July 4 (Independence Day in the US), meanwhile, another Chinese dissident was imprisoned on charges of inappropriate Internet-related political expression and unlawful association. What makes this Independence Day prisoner somewhat unusual is that not only was he imprisoned for instigating an on-line protest, but furthermore his own identity is entirely an on-line creation. This is because the prisoner, is actually the on-line avatar of a player on the Chinese massively-multiplayer on-line role-playing game (MMORPG), 梦幻西游 (The Fantasy of the Journey West) operated by Netease. The un-named player was being punished for refusing to change his alias, 干死4小日本 ["Kill the little Japs"], and also on account of the name, 抗日同盟会 [The Alliance to Resist Japan], of the 700-person guild he had formed (one of the game’s largest). As a result, he was locked in the game’s “Great Tang Permanent Incarceration Prison” (大唐永禁监 ).
As Roland Soong reports in a widely-cited post from a couple of weeks ago, it turns out that around the same time that Mr. “Kill the little Japs” was imprisoned, “someone” noticed that a government office within the on-line game was decorated with a painting of a rising sun that resembled the Japanese Imperial Navy flag adopted in 1889. Word quickly spread, and within a couple of days more than 10,000 fellow avatars had gathered to protest the image.
As Soong notes, however, Netease claims that the rising sun motif has many precedents in Chinese art independent of its use by the Japanese, and furthermore, the image found within the game differs in important respects from the 1889 Japanese flag (e.g., one is a mirror image of the other; one has several more rays than the other, and the rays are of a different color). This argument, however, ignores the fact that everything within the “Fantasy of the Journey West” virtual space is a necessarily imperfect imitation of its ostensible real-world referents.
Indeed, as Edward Wesp and Haun Saussy argue in a recent pair of posts at Printculture on the flag desecration debates in the US, one problem with the way in which the desecration amendment is conceived is that it is not the material flag (which, in the end, is nothing but a piece of cloth, paper, etc) which people feel must be protected, but rather the abstract ideals which it symbolizes. As a signifier, furthermore, the flag has an inherently contingent relationship with its referent, and consequently the precise limits of what counts as an American flag are themselves impossible to specify. As Wesp puts, the debate overlooks the way in which
the materiality of the flag raises a set of specific and potentially absurd questions about the nature of enforcement: such as “how much would something have to look like an American flag to be protected under such an amendment?” There’s the classic 51-star flag hypothetical, but what about a parodic dollar-sign-for-stars switcheroo? A picture of a flag? How about a negative image?
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