When talking about civic crisis, I was thinking what is the civic crisis in China, or is there a civic crisis in China? In summary, there are three types of civic crisis discussed in this class;

1. People (especially young students) are lack of basic knowledge (arguably) required in public life;
2. People no longer care about politics, and they do not show up in votes.
3. People no longer gather in community meetings such as Bowling Clubs.

The first two problems seemingly do not exist in China: Chinese students are quite fluent in civic knowledge, partly thanks to the “inhumane” education system around examinations. Writing around policies and public affairs is an essential part of Chinese language/literature test (which is a tradition since the era of dynasties), and taking College Entrance Examination is the only way for Chinese students (especially those from rural areas) to enter a college. In a high school in Hebei being heavily criticized as “test-taker factory”, the school “put news stands and kiosks in every floor of their buildings”, in hope of getting their students familiar with public topics that may appear in tests.

The second problem is a bit of tricky. In one side, Chinese people are eager to talk about politics, no matter they are students, office workers or taxi drivers. However, does it mean that if China hold a national election as western countries, people will show up and vote? Unlikely. Looking at other asian places like Taiwan and Japan, general citizen’s engagement in politics are quite unsatisfactory. There seems to be a gap between “showing interest in politics” and “taking civic action”, especially “taking the action as scholars and intellectuals expected”.

This connects to the third “crisis”: how do people gather together, form a public, and take actions? This could be a problem for Chinese people.

China offers a governance system different than most of the countries. Instead of considering Chinese Communist Party as a political party to promote a certain ideology I would like to analogize it to a big corporation. It has a HR sector (Zuzhibu, department of organization), where officials are (often quantitatively) evaluated and promoted all the way towards the president; it has a customer support sector in each level (Xinfangchu, correspondence and visitor department) to respond to complaints of the people; it has a PR sector (Xuanchuanbu, department of propaganda, or advocacy) to promote its ideas and services. It has lots of good and evil traits of a big enterprise: it is stable, well strategized, respond to changes swiftly, while customers seemingly do not have a say on its management at current stage.

So in this sense, is civic still relevant in China? My answer is yes. There are many cases in business world that a company fails its customers, either by producing sub-standard products or ignoring the demand of consumers (which could be a severe problem when there is no competitors). And in the ideal form of Chinese government (if you agree that there MAY be a different political system from the western world), the public should be the board members of the state. A Cafe, or bowling club is still in need. This is where Baidu Tieba come into play.

(image: a screenshot of Baidu Tieba: the Gay forum)

Baidu Tieba (meaning “Posting Cafe” in Chinese) combines search engine with forums. You search for any keyword and it will lead you to a discussion board, either an existing one or a new one to be created (synonyms are automatically redirected, and users can choose to merge two boards into one). Forums are not a new thing, but the key success of Tieba is creating a long tail for forums: everyone can find the forum and its interest group. Tieba soon became the favorite tool for fan communities in comics, animes, popular figures, and TV shows. Till now, it has more than 1.5 billion registered users, 8.2 million forums, 3.5 billion discussion topics, and over 64.6 billion posts.

But what’s powerful in public life is that local governments soon found people are creating forums for their towns, districts, and villages. People start to comment on any affair in their neighborhood, and start to complain about injustices. Tieba was the start of several collective actions (what Chinese call for things like protest) and government start to monitor and respond to what people say in their Tieba, since they can’t just censor it because they do not have the authority to censor a national web platform.

Long tail also benefits marginalized communities. Gays and Lesbians found their groups, and patients of any common or uncommon diseases can easily form a group online and seek for help. After the user formed the habit of using Tieba, they start to search for other things they may be interested in. This further break down discussion silos haunting most of online platforms. Another device to break down silos is the “friend forum” function: a forum can invite other forums as friends. In time of vacation, it is a ritual that forums send “ambassadors” to post on other forums to maintain their “friendship”.

Baidu Tieba is an excellent example that what civic tech can foster something that is not possible before, even though the technology is not designed for civic use at the first place, and the company is still trying to shift its focus to entertainment which is more profitable.