As the internet becomes an increasingly potent force in China, the government has responded both 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. Examples include Huang Qi (arrested in 2001 and sentenced to five years imprisonment for posting human rights material on his web-site), Luo Yongzhong and Huang Qunwei in 2003 (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 5 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, however, is that not only was he imprisoned for instigating an on-line protest attended by more than 10,000, but furthermore his own identity is entirely an on-line creation. This is because the prisoner, is actually the on-line avatar of a long-time 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 of these transgressions, he was locked in the game’s “Great Tang Permanent Incarceration Prison” (大唐永禁监 ) (see screen capture above).
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 day or two more than 10,000 avatars had allegedly gathered to protest the painting (see screen capture below).
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 line of argument, however, ignores the fact that everything within the “Fantasy of the Journey West” virtual space is an imperfect imitation of its ostensible real-world referents (among other reasons, on account of the fact that the computer graphics are rather rudimentary compared to other popular games).
Indeed, as Edward Wesp and Haun Saussy argue in a recent pair of posts at Printculture on the flag burning 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 symbol, however, 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?
Applied to the Journey West controversy, we might ask how to differentiate between a digital representation of a flag (which is a itself a symbol of an abstract ideal), an intentional parody of the same flag (e.g., dollar-signs-for-stars…), and a visually similar image which actually bears no relationship to the flag at all.
This question of the power of simulacra and the limits of representation, in turn, has implications not only for the Japanese flag controversy itself, but also relates very directly to the virtual protests which followed. Like the digital flag, the on-line protests are virtual simulacra of real-life political protests, which themselves function (like flags) to evoke abstract political ideals. The question, then, becomes one of whether the on-line protests can be regarded as protean political actions (insofar as they constitute, at heart, symbolic engagements with power), or are they more fruitfully regarded as some parodic bastardization of “genuine” protests (the same way that, for instance, a representation of a protest within a movie does not constitute an actual protest).
In considering these questions, it is useful to note that the Journey West protest was not an isolated incident, but rather was part of a growing phenomenon in on-line gaming in general. Significant precedents include the famous late 2003 Everquest mass march to protest an issue concerning the relative strength of the warrior class (the game designers darkened the sky over the protest as a gesture of implicit solidarity), which was preceded by in-game candle-light vigils following the 9/11 attacks. Similarly, a January 2005 World of Warcraft demonstration (consisting of thousands of naked gnomes) to protest problems associated with the warrior class (the game was only two months old at the time) was followed a year later by another protest over War of Warcraft’s owner Blizzard Entertainment’s refusal to allow Sara Andrews host a GLBT group within the game. In early 2003, meanwhile, performance artist Tony Walsh organized a protest to call attention to Electronic Arts’ decision to insert a McDonalds kiosk into Sims On-line, and a year later philosophy professor Peter Ludlow was permanently banned from the game for running the on-line newspaper Alphaville Herald, in which he reported on illicit activities (such as virtual prostitution and organized crime) taking place within the virtual space of the Sims game.
As these examples illustrate, there is a fluid continuum within MMORPG protests ranging from dissatisfaction with issues internal to the game itself (e.g., the relative power of the warrior class) to issues which are situated almost entirely outside of the virtual space of the game (e.g., the 9/11 vigils), to protests which straddle the boundaries between the two (e.g., whether or not game groups can be identified based on sexual orientation, and whether it is appropriate for games to incorporate corporate branding into the fabric of the game itself).
In an interesting discussion about a year and a half ago, Edward Castronova argued that the virtual space of these sorts of on-line games is itself inherently political, and consequently
the nature of these political events [virtual protests within MMORPG’s] and their replication under different circumstances in different worlds suggests that they reveal something fundamental. Running a virtual world is a service, as we are often reminded, but it is more than running a BBS or a shopping mall or an amusement. There's a nascent politics. There's policy. There's speech and assembly. There's terror and reaction. If destroying the world and banishing people are not terror and reaction, respectively, I don't know what would be.
The question that is posed here, therefore, concerns the position of the these protests vis-à-vis the “community” which the game designers themselves attempt to create and maintain (occasionally resorting to such extreme tactics as banishment and “world destruction”), on the one hand, and the “community” which the players create within the virtual space of the game itself (occasionally in conflict with the wishes of the game owners).
Jean-Luc Nancy addresses very similar issues in his influential 1982 book The Inoperative Community, where he argues that communities can not be dictated from above by outside authority, nor can they be grounded on a sense of “immanence and intimacy of communion,” nor are they a “project of fusion, or in some general way a productive or operative project.” Rather than being grounded on any concrete ideal of immanence or communion, Nancy argues instead that it is precisely the necessary loss or absence of these ideals which becomes “constitutive of ‘community’ itself”:
Community therefore occupies a singular place: it assumes the impossibility of its own immanence, the impossibility of a communitarian being in the form of a subject. In a certain sense community acknowledges and inscribes—this is its peculiar gesture—the impossibility of community. A community is not a project of fusion, or in some general way a productive or operative project—nor is it a project at all....
What has disappeared from the sacred--and this means finally all of the sacred, engulfed in the "immense failure"--reveals rather that community itself now occupies the place of the sacred. Community is the sacred, if you willl: the but sacred stripped of the sacred. For the sacred--the separated, the set apart--no longer proves to be the haunting idea of an unattainable communion, but is rather made up of nothing other than the sharing of community.
In other words, a community does not consist of a real-world association of individuals which can be mapped directly onto pre-existing communitarian ideal, but rather it is a process, a struggle to establish connections in the face of the very impossibility of this mapping.
Therefore, the tensions between the “Journey West” painting, the Japanese flag which it might signify,
and the ideals which are embodied by the latter symbol; together with the tensions between the on-line flag-related protests and the real-world political protests which they resemble, are not in and of themselves arguments against the social-political relevance of the game-space activity. Instead, one might argue that, like the flag and the protests, community itself does not, and cannot, map neatly onto some immanent ideal, but rather is constituted precisely through a constant struggle against that which it might be.
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