Digital Media in Urban China: Locating Guangzhou by Wilfred Yang Wang (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Digital Media in Urban China: Locating Guangzhou by Wilfred Yang Wang Lishu Tang Wilfred Yang Wang. Digital Media in Urban China: Locating Guangzhou. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 197p. In an age with advanced technologies and widespread digital networks, the concept of placelessness or globalization has been widely recognized. However, Wilfred Yang Wang opposes such popular discourse and asserts in Digital Media in Urban China that digital media fails to form a global cultural identity or to promote universal values. He argues that “the ideologies and ‘culture’ of digital media are always localised rather than globalised” (22). To prove his argument, Wang chooses [End Page 280] the Chinese city Guangzhou as an example to show how Guangzhou citizens’ applications of digital media technologies contribute to their local cultural subjectivities as well as to the reterritorialization of Guangzhou in a process of urbanization (deterritorialization) initiated by the central Chinese government. Wang’s introduction discusses the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s relentless effort to forge a sense of nationhood and local people’s resistance to the CCP’s ambition and push for deterritorialization. By looking back in Chinese history, Wang points out that the strategy of homogenization is not a recent invention, since it was used by the first emperor Qin shihuangdi, long before the CCP come to power. However, while Qin shihuangdi and the CCP share the same aim of achieving uniformity and standardization within the nation, the latter confronts challenges that are presented in digital forms while dealing with relationships between the center (the official) and the periphery (the local) in the contemporary digital media era. Chapters 1 to 5 concentrate on how residents in Guangzhou take advantage of digital placemaking (reterritorialization) to express and construct a sense of self and place. Wang sees digital placemaking as a form of minjian force; importantly, he believes that conceptualizing the idea of minjian society is a fundamental step to understand digital media in China. The first chapter provides a very detailed interpretation and solid analysis of the term minjian. More than simply giving a definition of min, which means people, and jian, which means space and in-betweenness, the extensive discussion includes associated concepts such as citizenship and guan (officials) that can help readers with different backgrounds understand minjian in the Chinese context. To emphasize the nonexistence of a straightforward connection between minjian society and the CCP-led state, Wang distinguishes min from Chinese citizenship, which he believes is “indeed ‘a state-centric view [that] continued to subject ‘the people’ to [a] metadiscourse of nationalism in China’s nation-building project’ ” (54). Further, to claim that minjian society or minjian force is essentially not interdependent on officialdom or central authorities, Wang elicits the concept of guan and accentuates the paternalistic role that guan has performed towards min. Chapter 2 contextualizes Guangzhou and claims that Guangzhou is structurally organized by the authorities and, at the same time, discursively recreated by ordinary Guangzhou residents’ daily practices. The subsequent three chapters mainly use various case [End Page 281] studies as evidence to show how Guangzhouers’ cultural identity is structured and expressed through digital media. Chapter 3 features the digital placemaking practice––the pro-Cantonese activism that took place on the Chinese social platform Weibo in 2010. By examining the affordability of Weibo, including “portable,” “locative,” and “interactive” (112), Wang concludes that Weibo has played a significant role in igniting Guangzhou grassroots’ passion for preserving Cantonese, which ultimately contributes to their sense of locality and cultural subjectivities. Chapter 4 addresses how geographical knowledge of Guangzhou is formed through digital visualization. The first part of the chapter pays attention to Eat Drink Play Fun in Guangzhou (EDPF), which was one of the most popular Weibo city groups in 2014. By investigating and categorizing the content posted by EDPF, Wang asserts that Guangzhouers’ sense of solidarity, locality, and reterritorialization is established and shaped by visualizations on digital platforms. The second part of the chapter goes beyond geographical boundaries and observes Guangzhou through the western social media platform. By examining the debates on Guangzhou identity and cultural subjectivity posted by the I Love Guangzhou (ILGZ) group on Facebook, Wang demonstrates “the remaking of Guangzhou is an act of transnationality...