A Chinese Pirate Unmasks

Iam_zhcn

A Chinese Pirate Unmasks
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2009/03/a-chinese-pirat.html

Dispatches by Evan Osnos March 5, 2009

One of the more popular items on the Chinese Internet in the last few weeks is an essay entitled “Zhengge Zhongguo Jiushi Yige Shanzhai”—“All of China is a Knock-Off.” It first appeared on Douban, a culture forum, written in Chinese but, curiously, with a Western byline: Steven Zuckerberg. It was scooped up by Chinese news portals, which described it as the translated writings of an American and gave it a headline: “An American Youth Says: All of China is a Knock-Off.” The piece cited a long list of pirated music and Nokia knock-off phones and Nike rip-offs and the like to argue that China is racked by a culture of imitation that stifles genuine creativity. The piece was polarizing, drawing criticism from China’s patriots and praise from liberal Chinese writers who credited a foreign writer with an astute observation.

But the essay is a more subtle piece of work than you might think: A tip from a Chinese friend led me to contact Wang Hongzhe, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student in mass communication at Peking University, who acknowledged that he is the reputed Steven Zuckerberg. (He chose the initials S.Z. as a nod to shanzhai, the Chinese term for “imitation.”) His essay was an experiment: Would China respond differently to criticism from abroad than it would to criticism from home? It’s a long-running question that gets to the heart of China’s erratic appetite for dissent, and the same question that vexed Lu Xun, the famous social critic, who wrote seventy-five years ago: “Throughout the ages Chinese have had only one way of looking at foreigners. We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.”

In his Internet experiment, Wang has added a compelling twist on the nature of Chinese nationalism. He did not simply want to prove that patriots would predictably bristle at the criticism, but that Chinese readers of all stripes would listen to criticism more closely from an outsider, even if they did not agree with it. “Before this little trick, I wrote some sincere essays about the Chinese Internet and pop culture to express my thinking….But Chinese netizens always regarded my essays as bullshit,” Wang told me. “They did not understand them, and, more importantly, they were not willing to understand them, because of my identity as a Chinese guy.”

As Wang sees it, people gave more credence to “Zuckerberg”’s appraisal than to “Wang”’s because China spends too much of its time on the hunt for prejudice, only to “find out what this prejudice is based on and give one’s own response or counterattack.” They “feel some kind of invisible threat—that a foreigner might understand China more deeply than ourselves.” It’s a provocative argument, and I’ll be curious to see how comments change once Chinese Web users know that the author was, by design, a knock-off American.