(WARNING: May include racism and other unpleasant contents in the following!)
Under China’s intense speech censorship and online surveillance, there is less and less room for public discourse. In this case, some people will choose overseas platforms and forums as their new’ home’. The sub r/chonglangTV in Reddit is such a place for these dissents. It has become one of the most popular Chinese subs on Reddit. Gathering together under the banner of anti-China and -Chinese Communist Party, most of them are from the Chinese-speaking region, including the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Also holding the criticism of the ignorant attributes ingrained in Chinese culture(they called ‘支性, ‘Shina-ness, an offensive word for Chinese), they share memes, images, stories, jokes, and fun videos in this sub. Some of them could be NSFW (not safe for work) contents. All the things are to fight against the cruelty of the real world.
The name of this sub, chonglang, comes from a famous Japanese painting of The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai. Also, the meaning of the phrase ‘chonglang’ in Chinese is surfing. Therefore, it can refer to both sea surfing and web surfing. Members of the sub have many self-proclaimed code names, such as 鼠人(Ratman), as they think the rats live under the ground, out of sight, which is very similar to the living situation of many of them, they have a sense of empathy with them, 浪人(Ronins), derived from ‘chonglang’ directly, and 神友 (Friend of Kanagawa). Because they were dissatisfied with the status quo in China and the Chinese Communist Party, they naturally showed their desire to emigrate to foreign countries, especially Northern Europe and Japan.
Unlike other Chinese online sites, in this sub, all things could be just for fun, and their post all have a sense of irony and playfulness, based on one standard: try their best to achieve 节目效果 (dramatic effects), which means a kind of black humor to some extent. One funny case of this is the meme-ization of a historical icon——Zhang XianZhong. He was a peasant revolt and rebellion leader in the late Ming Dynasty and carried out a massacre in Sichuan, China. Therefore he becomes synonymous with random indiscriminate killings in China.
The climate in this place has a streak contrast with 品葱 (Pincong), another online forum gathering Chinese dissents using more serious tones to discuss China’s global political and diplomatic affairs. Similarly, chonglang-ers treat the user from r/gendezong, and r/sino with disdain and the same attitudes towards r/China_irl, another big sub for Chinese, as the positions of these people are in line with the CCP and contrary to the chonglang-ers.
I always love to read your blogs, I think it’s great that you offer in-depth perspectives about Chinese digital culture. For me as a Dutch person, all I see and read about China is large scale news about geopolitical state tactics etc. Your blogs often offer a more zoomed-in, personal look on (digital) life in and around China and its politics. In your blog, you write that often humour is used on the reddit page. I have been thinking about meme culture and the reason why it is so ambivalent in largely pessimistic global subcultures. With issues like climate change, growing wealth gaps and polarisation, humour seems to be our main response. This could be from a sensation of true activism having no effects, and so very cynically resorting to the last resort you have to put what’s happening into perspective. Yet, it also actively contests someone’s power and untouchable status, and can thereby also seen as activist. I think this is very interesting and could be material for future research, especially in the context of strict regimes as in China.
In agreement with the comment above, this is a very valuable perspective to share. Looking at the subreddit, I really never would have understood what was going on, but your post is illuminating. From the perspective of our course, Reddit has been a great cultural wealth for anthropological analysis, because we can watch sub-cultures form in real time. This, to me, shows that culture really is a way of life – and that no amount of censorship will stifle people’s desire to embrace their identity through developing representative communities. (Nor will it quell their desire to share memes.)