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MIA0010.1177/1329878X19876362Media International AustraliaKeane and Su

Original Article

Media International Australia

When push comes to nudge: 1­–14

© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1329878X19876362
https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X19876362
in-the-making journals.sagepub.com/home/mia

Michael Keane
Guanhua Su
Curtin University, Australia

Abstract
China’s emergence as a technological power is now unquestioned. Since the early 2000s, the
Chinese government has invested heavily in information and communication technology. Rather
than seeing the internet as a challenge to its hegemony, the government has allowed leading
communications companies to offer new digital services, many of which enhance peoples’
lifestyles, while others allow people to express their loyalty to the nation. The Party-state has
in the process found a new solution to asserting control. This article investigates the concept
of a ‘digital civilisation’, in particular how civilisational discourses associated with the Party-state
since the beginning of the economic reforms have found new applications in online technologies.
It draws on the ancient metaphor of flood control to show how behaviour is redirected, or
nudged, towards digital lifestyle choices. Examples discussed include the multiplicity of QR codes,
mobile payments, the social credit system, the Strong Nation (xuexi qiangguo) app and the Huawei
Harmony operating system (OS).

Keywords
algorithms, apps, China, digital civilisation, digital lifestyle, social order

A king is a boat, and the people are the water. The water that bears the boat is the same that swallows
it: Xunzi The Regal System (284 BC).

Introduction
In 2018, Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese-born venture capitalist, published a provocatively entitled book:
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order (Lee, 2018). An advocate of the

Corresponding author:
Michael Keane, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University, Perth, WA 6845, Australia.
Email: m.keane@curtin.edu.au
2 Media International Australia 00(0)

digital technology ‘start-up culture’ milieu, Lee’s book fits neatly in the genre of airport lounge
best-sellers, the kind that attracts the gaze of business travellers. Lee claims that technological
innovations developed in the United States have assisted the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in
its quest to become a technological superpower. Unlike critics of digital, or ‘platform capitalism’
(Schiller, 2014; Srnicek, 2017; Van Dijck et al., 2018; Zuboff, 2019), Lee sees no intrinsic ethical
problem in ‘big tech’ companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent
mining data. In fact, Chinese tech companies’ access to over a billion people’s data, including
overseas Chinese, – that is, their ability to know what the masses buy, watch, say and share online
– has allowed Chinese entrepreneurs to become more globally competitive. China Inc. is directly
pitted against Silicon Valley.
Lee’s ‘new world order’ should be noted with some caveats. The sudden withdrawal of US
companies from China in 2019, and the political disruptions taking place in Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region (SAR) have muddied his vision of the future. A key theme of the book is
that ‘human civilisation’, not Chinese, or Soviet, or Western, is at a critical juncture. This civilisa-
tional ‘crisis’ is artificial intelligence (AI)-induced, and in the near future it will impact upon
regions where economies have been built on low-cost labour, including much of Asia. For Lee, the
world order is changing, not in a geo-political sense, but in a post-human one. ‘Human civiliza-
tion’, he says, has absorbed technology-driven shocks in the past with farmers becoming factory
workers, but can it absorb new shocks as machines displace humans? Similar sentiments of pro-
found transformation are expressed in Silicon Valley literature, including Eric Schmidt and Jared
Cohen’s (2013) primer for policy makers and corporates, The New Digital Age (whose inside cover
features glowing endorsements from the CEOs of transnational corporations and leaders of national
intelligence agencies). According to Schmidt and Cohen, while technology brings new challenges,
tech companies and good arm’s length regulatory policy can be trusted to resolve these. Six years
after its publication, The New Digital Age, is less gilded, tarnished by data security issues, hackers,
fake news and outbreaks of hate speech.
The aims of this article are twofold: first, to show how discourses of civilisation are embedded
in Chinese statecraft, and second, to illustrate how the Chinese government is using communica-
tions technology to realise its vision of a civilised, that is, ‘harmonious’ society. While western
civilisation’s purported values of free speech are increasingly buffeted by online incivility, the
Chinese government is using algorithmic solutions to mould civilised behaviour, while at the same
time identifying those that are out of step with social harmony, as defined by the government.
Access to what people say and share online is available to the Chinese Communist Party, its secu-
rity apparatus, as well as its technology corporations; that is, China’s ‘big tech’ has to comply with
requests for information from government. Such access is rationalised as preserving social stabil-
ity, a theme deeply rooted in the Chinese consciousness.
China’s digital civilisation blends nationalism (Schneider, 2018), participatory production of
cultural content (Zhao, 2019), and access to downloadable lifestyle affordances, together with the
acceptance of surveillance (Strittmatter, 2019). In the PRC, people live in a crowded society where
many choices of lifestyle are determined by the progress of economic reforms, which are inscribed
in Beijing’s Five-Year Plan. Life is better than it was a decade ago because people have more
choices. In this context, the freedom to choose is liberating. In behavioural economics, the term
‘nudge’ refers to techniques by which people are steered to make choices. Digital nudges use text
messages, email, push notifications and gamification to ‘encourage people to take desirable actions’
(Dhar et al., 2017). Digital nudges feed off group or collective behaviour. Machine learning and AI
contribute to promoting group consensus. Meanwhile, China’s state-owned media play a leading
role in this behavioural zeitgeist, extolling the nation’s technological pre-eminence, for instance,
the so-called ‘four great new inventions’: high-speed trains, e-commerce, mobile payment services
Keane and Su 3

and bike sharing. China’s digital civilisation, moreover, is predicated on the logistical functions of
critical infrastructure (smart grids, cloud computing, ubiquitous computing and robotics) and ser-
vices (devices, apps, content). The evening China Central Television (CCTV) news bulletins,
which until about 5 years ago reported faithfully on the virtues of manual labour, now extol the
latest developments in industrial robots, facial recognition software and voice recognition. News
reports, meanwhile, alert Chinese citizens to the unfair international treatment of Huawei, China’s
fast-rising telecommunications giant.
The term ‘civilisation’ has a number of implications for social order. In a discussion of how
digital media construct a sense of reality, Couldry and Hepp refer to Norbert Elias’ work on the
‘civilising process’ which describes how the European state in the 15th and 16th centuries began to
order people’s lives through the use of written records (Couldry and Hepp, 2018; Elias, 1994/1939).
They extend this civilising process to consider the era of ‘deep mediatization’, claiming that ‘the
social world is not just mediated but mediatized: that is, changed in its dynamics and structure by
the role that media continuously (indeed recursively) play in its construction’ (Couldry and Hepp,
2018: 15). While civilisations are often the subject of archaeological research, it is equally impera-
tive to view civilisation as a ‘work-in-progress’ (Coker, 2019). Accordingly, the ‘Digital China’
section of this article introduces the concept of ‘digital China’, noting the rise of the PRC as a
technological power. The ‘Civilisation’ section examines the concept of civilisation and its exten-
sion to digital civilisation. The ‘Fierce floods and savage beasts’ section takes up the ideas of ori-
ental despotism and harmony to characterise a benign all-caring government, where internet
sovereignty is a necessary condition for digital citizenship. As exemplars, we look at current mani-
festations of digital civilisation: the QR Kingdom, where life is made easier by affordances (Keane,
2019), and the Harmonious State, where one’s digital life is constantly subject to calculation. The
digital affordances referred to include the Social Credit System, the Study Strong Nation (xuexi
qiangguo) app, and the Harmony Operating System recently developed by Huawei.

Digital China
At the end of the 20th century, Silicon Valley was the powerhouse of the US economy, a symbol of
innovation emulated by aspiring nations. Silicon Valley acted as a magnet for overseas talent,
attracting some of the best minds from India and China. In the southern San Francisco Bay Area of
California, the Valley is home to renowned start-up and global technology companies including
Apple, Facebook and Google. It is the site of technology-focused institutions centred around Palo
Alto’s Stanford University. In 2016, as part of its 13 Five-Year Plan, the Chinese government
announced the development of its own Greater Bay. The region formally known as the Pearl River
Delta encompasses Hong Kong SAR, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Macao, Foshan, Zhuhai, Zhongshan,
Huizhou, Dongguan and Zhaoqing. Of these cities, the leading contender for supremacy is
Shenzhen, home of technology companies including Tencent, Huawei and ZTE. All of these com-
panies are competing in the race to develop 5G network technologies and, in the case of Tencent,
to become the dominant player in internet communications and social media.
The rise of the Shenzhen combines technology and talent in a particularly Chinese way: that is,
massive encouragement and subsidy from both the central and local governments, ‘blending inno-
vation and socialism’ (Ma et al., 2019). With its myriad maker spaces, AI projects and Internet of
Things (IoT) capability and the digital lifestyle enjoyed by its residents, Shenzhen epitomises the
hi-tech utopia of a digital civilisation. In November 2017, Eric Schmidt, the former Executive
Director of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, warned, ‘By 2020, they [Chinese] will have
caught up. By 2025, they will be better than us. By 2030, they will dominate the industries of AI’
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(in Chowdhury, 2018). In February 2018, four of the top 10 companies in the Global Unicorn Club1
were Chinese: Didi Chuxing (2), Xiaomi (3), China Internet Plus Holding (4) and Lu.com (9).
China’s digital revolution is pivotal to its communications-led economic restructuring (Hong,
2017). Its deployment of digital information networks and communication technologies are trans-
forming social interactions, driving productivity and stimulating innovation in Asia (Fung et al.,
2018; Shen, 2018). Its internet communication companies are offering economic solutions as well
as a more connected (digital) lifestyle. Once described as the Bicycle Kingdom (Thomas, 2018),
because of the ubiquity of this form of transport, China has become a ‘QR Kingdom’, as countless
functions are passed over to algorithmic interfaces linked to companies such as Tencent and
Alibaba. In this context we can ask: what kind of civilisation are we entering? The term ‘digital
civilisation’, we believe, captures the great transformations that have been wrought by technology.
These are transformations that have changed peoples’ lives immeasurably. Productivity has
increased, the costs of smartphone have fallen and connectivity means that all people can access
and share Chinese cultural content instantaneously on mobile devices. This cultural connectivity
extends to the Chinese diaspora (see Yu and Sun, this issue). However, at a time of escalating
global tensions and trade wars, the digital technology that offers such a connected lifestyle is
becoming deeply contested, constituting a threat to the stability of the regime. Our aim is to pro-
vide a balanced analysis of these developments in the Chinese context.

Civilisation
Julian Baggini (2018) writes that ‘assumptions about the nature of self, ethics, sources of knowl-
edge, the goals of life, are deeply embedded in our cultures and frame our thinking without our
being aware of them’ (p. 1). Growing up in one culture, a person’s values and beliefs tend to
become ‘sedimented’; that is, it is not easy to change the cultural software of our minds. The
average ‘westerner’ living in New York might not know what Aristotle said, or even who he was,
but ideas of freedom and individual liberty are deeply etched in the processes of socialisation. A
Chinese person in Shanghai might not know any of the Confucian Analects by heart, but she will
be well aware of the Confucian importance of harmony. Sometimes, migration and religious
conversion allow people to adopt new beliefs, while ideology and xenophobia reinforce beliefs:
‘My culture is superior to yours’, ‘You are a foreigner’. In reality, civilisational myths, national-
ism and the way people have been socialised, have a lot to do with their acceptance of discourses
of world order. For this reason, populist governments worldwide are falling back on civilisa-
tional myths.
Nowadays, technology, media and communication allow information to be instantaneously dis-
seminated around the globe. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1962) is often held
up as a prophet of the digital age. But McLuhan never foresaw a world unified by peace and har-
mony, nor did he imagine the global village to embody an ideal community. McLuhan correctly
predicted that the advance of communication technology would give rise to discord, division and
disagreement (Gu, 2018). In 1993, the US political scientist and policy advisor to the Democratic
Party, Samuel Huntington, argued that the future of East-West relations should be viewed as a
‘civilizational clash’. The title of Huntingdon’s (1996) book was The Clash of Civilisations and the
Remaking of World Order Huntingdon’s controversial views on the supremacy of western civilisa-
tion were criticised by liberal commentators. Although the civilisational debates died down, the
events of 9/11 in New York allowed the central argument to take deeper roots, and these have been
fed by rhetoric emanating from the US President Donald Trump, including ‘off the record’ com-
ments in January 2018 referring to migrants coming to the United States ‘from shithole countries’
(Watkins and Philip, 2018). In Australia, controversies over visas for controversial far right media
Keane and Su 5

commentators have led ‘free speech’ advocates such as Andrew Bolt and Tony Abbot to champion
‘Western civilisation’. With cash-strapped universities in Australia jockeying for funds to launch
centres of teaching in the great works of Western civilisation, questions are now being asked about
the relations between regional security, national cultural identity and the role of communications
media.
Civilisation is a broad utilitarian construct, used in different ways in various disciplinary fields.
‘Universal’ civilisational discourses, for instance, tend to posit that dominant civilisations exist
(Bergeton, 2019). Typically, talk of Western civilisation goes hand-in-hand with the need to protect
and reserve enlightenment values such as democracy, civil society and individual freedoms. The
root term comes from the Latin civilis, referring to the virtues of civic order and citizenship. This
sense of ‘proper conduct’ was not picked up in English until the 16th century. Uffe Bergeton notes
that early forms of a universal concept of ‘civilisation’ emerged in Europe in response to a shift
from traditional and charismatic authority to bureaucratic modes of power (Weber, 1957).
Subsequently, the use of the term civilisation provided a 19th century rationale for Europeans to
exploit overseas colonies, whose inhabitants were regarded as ‘civilisationally inferior others’
or ‘barbarians’, and who needed guidance to adopt ethnocentrically defined European ideas of
‘civility’ and ‘police’ (Bergeton, 2019: 25). Chinese civilisational discourse has much earlier
roots than this, in the teachings of Confucius and his followers during the Warring States period
(475–221 BCE). The root term wen, essentially meaning patterns, was used to designate both
refinement and learning. As with the Europeans much later, an assumed civilisational superiority
informed how Chinese perceived ‘barbarians’ or outsiders.
By the early 20th century, as China began to recognise its changing place in the world, the word
wenming was widely used to denote civilisation, notably by reformers such as Liang Qichao and
Hu Shi. Thus, it is fair to say that Chinese civilisation today is founded on centuries of accrued
cultural capital, which has allowed the state to justify many of its social policies on the basis of
raising the quality (suzhi) of the people. In other words, people who lack cultural capital need to be
uplifted, or monitored. The role of the media leading up to the founding of the PRC in 1949 was to
guide and uplift the masses according to the truth of socialism (which still applies, in theory at
least). As Delia Lin (2017) writes, in the post-Mao era four types of civilisation were accorded
prominence in Chinese political discourse: spiritual, material, political and ecological. Of these,
‘spiritual civilisation’ ranks foremost in terms of Chinese Communist Party propaganda strategies.
Essentially, concepts like quality, harmony and, more recently, ‘the Chinese Dream’, are predicated
on instilling notions of civilised behaviour onto people. In the past, this was done through compul-
sory study groups, the extolling of role models, ubiquitous slogans and promises of advancement
through the ranks of cadres. As Lin (2017) says, ‘Civilising projects are focused on conformity to
certain patterns of behaviour, appearance, mind and sentiments that are posited by elites to symbolise
a higher level of civilisation/cultivation’ (p. 60).
Today prominent Party intellectuals like Zhang Weiwei (2014) propagate the idea that China is
a ‘civilizational state’. Zhang is fond of reciting his view that people who migrate to the west,
particularly the United States, become less enchanted with democracy when they encounter the
real living conditions of the west. He opines, ‘Going abroad makes one more patriotic. This is far
more effective than the party’s political education’. (Weiwei, 2014: 2). Of course, Zhang is well-
acquainted with political education Chinese-style. He criticises the Eurocentric notion of ‘oriental
despotism’, referencing Montesquieu and Hegel, who contrast the civilised west (Europe) with the
unfree east (Islam and the Far East). Inherent in the China Model, a description used by Zhang and
others, is respect of Confucian principles that underpin the social structure, particularly harmony.
Moreover, ever since the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), the Chinese state has found ways to
record and track peoples’ movements and behaviour. Under the auspices of a digital civilisation,
6 Media International Australia 00(0)

the state can now justify the use of algorithmic means to track and know the population, while at
the same time extolling the benefits that accrue to the economy, to families and to social stability.
Thus, campaigns to manage the prosperity and conduct of the masses previously orchestrated
through traditional media are now online. One also sees an explicit return to the traditional codes
of Confucian ethics, bundled with catchy slogans and animations. Signs on construction sites,
especially in the second and the third tier cities, exhort people to ‘be civilised’, while the affordances
of digital applications nudge them in the direction of being good consumers.

‘Fierce floods and savage beasts’

Shoshana Zuboff (2019) uses the term ‘information civilisation’, signifying a development that has
displaced the ‘industrial civilisation’ of the past two centuries, and which has wrought significant
damage on the environment. Information civilisation, she says, ‘will thrive at the expense of human
nature’ (p. 252). Zuboff critiques the encroachment of technologies of surveillance into citizens’
lives. This is the theme of her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human
Future at the New Frontier of Power: ‘A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods
and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification’ (Zuboff,
2019: 1). In a section entitled ‘the China syndrome’, Zuboff offers a brief glimpse into the kind of
information civilisation now found in the PRC. One of her observations is that a lack of trust found
within Chinese society, a result of rapid industrial civilisation and modernisation, has fed the
growth of surveillance, which is rationalised by the government as a means to weed out ‘unhealthy
elements’, online scammers, hackers and dissidents that might damage national security. Within
China, moreover, digital civilisation is enfolded into ‘the Chinese Dream’, the government’s future
vision for a rejuvenated China. It entails the promotion of an online lifestyle where information
flows like water. A digital civilisation is therefore effectively equated with a prescribed digital
lifestyle, supplemented by an ever-increasing smorgasbord of apps: for entertainment, productiv-
ity, creativity, dating, as well as connectivity with distant friends and prospective collaborators.
Communications companies like Tencent, ByteDance and iQIYI are complicit, constantly provid-
ing more entertainment choices, not only Chinese in origin.
While entertainment content is increasingly streamed online, obstacles hinder the flow.
Algorithms function as a first line of online border guards. On the second line, are the human look-
outs, China’s state censors, and the so-called ‘five mao army’.2 Because of these sentinels, the
notion of nationally bounded internet has entered the everyday lexicon of communication studies.
Thus, the now commonly used term ‘Chinese internet’ explicitly refers to a restricted internet
underpinned by other metaphors of constraint, such as the Green Dam Youth Escort project, the
Golden Shield and the Great Firewall of China (Griffith, 2019). Meanwhile, the borderless ‘free
world’ internet of the World Wide Web is increasingly populated by myriad communities of inter-
est where ideas are increasingly filtered within ideological confines. As Ethan Zuckerman (2013)
says,

a central paradox of this connected age is that while it’s easier than ever to share information and
perspectives from different parts of the world, we may now often encounter a narrower picture of the world
than in less connected days. (p. 237)

Neither content nor speech flows freely in China. It never did. But, like water, some of it finds
its way around the official dams, dykes and aqueducts that have been built to stop ideas deemed
harmful to morality and national security. In the sense that the water metaphor can be applied to
information control, we need to look back in history. First, a recent event, well known to scholars
Keane and Su 7

of China’s broadcast media, and then, an event of historical scale, less known by foreign scholars.
To begin with, River Elegy (Heshang: literally ‘the river dies young’) was a six-episode documen-
tary screened on CCTV in 1988 (Keane, 2015). The programme was produced under the supervi-
sion of Chen Hanyuan, vice-director of CCTV. It presented viewers with an unprecedented criticism
of Chinese civilisation, challenging the legacy of state authoritarianism (i.e. oriental despotism),
the slave mentality of its people and China’s ossified social structure. The writers asserted that
China should cast off the baggage of its cultural traditions and emulate the more modern outward-
seeking culture of Western nations. River Elegy attracted an estimated viewing audience of 200
million. The series drew attention to the land-locked mentality of China and the habit of creating
dams to control flooding. It recalled the heroic efforts of Yu the Great, the legendary founder of the
Xia Dynasty, who is renowned for solving the problem of flooding in the Chinese plains (the region
of the Yellow River). Yu devised a plan to channel water into irrigation channels, which according
to legend, allowed Chinese culture and civilisation to flourish. The transformation of nature was
justified as a social benefit to the people, just as the massive Three Gorges Dam is today.
The Chinese idiom ‘fierce floods and savage beasts’ (hongshui mengshou) refers to the potential
for great disaster. In 2017, 31 years after the production of Heshang, Jin Yinan, a professor in the
National Defence University of the People’s Liberation Army, reactivated the concept of oriental
despotism in a speech at Hong Kong Open University, saying that it was necessary to understand
the ‘nation, national interests, and national security’ (Jin, 2017). As noted previously, the notion of
oriental despotism has its origins in European thought, originally used by Montesquieu, and much
later in the 20th century by the German political thinker Karl August Wittfogel (1896–1988).
Montesquieu’s account placed an emphasis on fear: oriental despotism

determines not only relations with the ruler but also those between his subjects, who see each other as
potential informants and close themselves off in mutual suspicion. This prevents the emergence of nonstate
solidarities or a bourgeois public sphere. (Cited in Osterhammel, 2018: 343)

Wittfogel, however, called attention to an Asiatic mode of production, in which he developed the
idea of the economic necessity of supporting irrigation systems as the foundation of a model of
society and government. The main characteristic of government was the absolute power of a cen-
tral bureaucracy. Management of large-scale projects was essential to the prosperity of the popula-
tion. Certainly, this latter theme is well understood by China’s military elite and its cadres, as
represented by Professor Jin, reinforcing the idea that Chinese civilisation is the only one that has
survived intact throughout history.
To understand the metaphorical connection between flood management and digital civilisation,
we can return to the theories of the ‘information society’ where hydraulic metaphors also abound
(see Castells ‘flows’ and ‘pipes’ of the ‘Global Network Society’) (Castells, 1996). When it comes
to ‘free flow’, the World Wide Web was conceived as a utopian vision: ‘information wants to be
free’. Such free flow requires formal recognition of civil society, something that goes against the
nature of Chinese-style democracy. Indeed, Zhang Weiwei (2014), the self-anointed spokesperson
for the civilisational state, provocatively suggests that ‘Western-style democracy as practised in
today’s world may well be a short episode in the long course of human history’ (p. 51). The concept
of a ‘managed internet’, with ‘managed flows’, thus accommodates what Zhang calls the ‘Chinese
model’. Chinese-style internet sovereignty now looks increasingly attractive to states in Asia that
face the growing concerns of ensuring national security. Underpinning the securitisation of a sov-
ereign internet within China is a large army of apparatchiks. The main state apparatus is called
China’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CNCERT). Its 2018 report claimed to have man-
aged more than 100,000 cybersecurity incidents, most of which were related to fake websites,
8 Media International Australia 00(0)

security leaks, malicious programmes, websites being tampered with, website backdoors and dis-
tributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks (CNCERT, 2018).

Entering the QR code Kingdom

The infrastructure of digital civilisation in China is turbo-charged by the massive number of people
online. The number in 2019 was 829 million. A total of 98.6% of these use the Mobile Internet (Fu,
2019). In the 1980s and 1990s, China was widely known as The Kingdom of Bicycles, a name
given by foreign visitors who were stunned by the number of bikes in Chinese cities (Thomas,
2018). But now visitors are more likely to be amazed by the ubiquity of QR codes, appearing eve-
rywhere from street markets to high streets, from beggars and buskers on the streets to monks in a
temple (Wang, 2019a). The major application for QR codes is mobile payments and China is a
fastest adopter in Asia (see Athique and Baulch, 2019). In fact, the pervasive use of QR codes in
China is often surprising for visitors from developed countries where paper money and point-of-
sale cards are still more widely used for transactions. Under the mindset of technological opti-
mism, that is part of the government media messaging, these new transactional affordances are
seen as very positive developments. QR codes in flea markets have empowered vendors who can-
not afford a POS machine for Credit card payments. In Metro stations, QR code payment has
increased the efficiency of travel. Access to online services provides quick access to services that
were previously difficult to obtain, including taxis, train and airline tickets.
Recent data show that the users of kids’ smart watches have reached 46 million in China in 2019
(Jiguang Ltd., 2019). In contrast to most smart watches for adults, these watches are designed to
allow parents to track the child’s location in order to monitor location and behaviour, and to avoid
child abduction, which is a high-risk crime in low-tier cities and remote areas of China. E-commerce
platforms such as Taobao and Jindong facilitate productivity as well as promote village entrepre-
neurship, via so-called Taobao Villages (Keane and Wu, 2019). Labour-saving and healthy wear-
able devices are assisting the handicapped and elderly, while WeChat instant messaging service
allows connectivity with distant friends and relatives. For aged care services, smart blood pressure
monitors can update elderly patients’ condition with their doctor and children via WeChat. In cities,
the advent of electric cars, along with the widely used bike-sharing schemes, promise a cleaner
environment and greater energy security. In the cultural sector, which is so important to China, the
digitalisation of cultural resources and accessibility to valuable heritage culture is figured as
enhancing the potency of Chinese civilisation.
Nonetheless, the changes that come with this digital lifestyle have their downside as well. The
QR mentality can be excessive and lead to the absurd, such as needing to scan a QR code in a
bathroom to obtain a piece of toilet paper, or having to scan a weighing machine to know the result.
In temples, QR codes are used to solicit donations. Through this process of scanning, people must
agree to sacrifice their data and privacy for a tiny treat. As well as insidious surveillance by busi-
ness and government, and the risk of one’s bank account being hacked, there are monopoly effects,
such as being locked into the Tencent ecosystem. Tencent provides its users with everything from
public transport tickets to financial advice. However, the simple fact of not choosing to be on
WeChat not only makes one an outsider, it might raise a red flag within the surveillance regime.
For many, everyday addiction to devices is offset by the social benefits of seeming to be more
connected.
An obsession with digital photography has been driven to epidemic proportions by Chinese
tourists. Anthropologist Xinyuan Wang (2019b) notes the relationship between smartphone use
and ‘sense of ritual’ (yi shi gan). For elderly Chinese citizens, taking portrait photos implies a
‘sense of ritual’ because of the high cost, and thus restricted symbolic use, of professional
Keane and Su 9

photography before the age of smartphones. In the digital age, new rituals are created. For instance,
taking images of food before dinner and posting them on WeChat Moments is considered essential
for social media savvy Chinese. New ways of living are replacing old habits, rituals and even social
relations (guanxi). The red envelope, a pervasive and long-lasting monetary gifting ritual in China
and other East Asian and Southeast Asian countries, has been through a process of ‘WeChat-
ization’ into the digital red envelope, one of countless functions in the mega app WeChat. The old
days of politely exchanging business cards have passed, effectively replaced by a scan of one’s
WeChat. Regular visitors to China, foreign expatriates and visitors from Hong Kong SAR all need
to install WeChat to connect with Chinese colleagues, friends and business partners. Similarly,
since 2017, more than 90 licences and certificates have been digitalised, including digital ID,
driver licence, business licence and social security cards (Fang, 2019). Starting in August 2019,
people from five provinces (Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Chongqing, Fujian) can collect their digital
marriage certificate from Alipay, a mobile payment app developed by Alibaba.
Other aspects of digital culture are negatively correlated with civilisation, such as unsocial
online behaviour. China is not immune from online trolls and forum wars, especially when it comes
to nationalist sentiment, as Gabriele de Seta argues in his ethnographic study of online incivility in
China (De Seta, 2018). For many national minorities (shaoshu minzu), such as Tibetans and
Uyghurs, the advantages of being connected by WeChat to their friends and relatives outside are
traded off against the risks of being subject to surveillance (Dalha, 2019). For most visitors to
China, the Great Firewall, China’s internet filtering system, immediately cuts off contact with
international connections and news (Maurer, 2017). Even having a Virtual Private network (VPN)
does not guarantee connectivity because Chinese cyber police are active in blocking these espe-
cially at times of unrest or political significance.

Social credit, study Xi Jinping and Huawei Harmony

Nothing is more important to the Chinese government than ensuring social stability among its 1.4
billion people. The continuing ethnic unrest in China’s western region of Xinjiang, and the break-
out of political protests in the southern Special Administrative Zone of Hong Kong, illustrate the
potential for spiralling disruption. As Carl Minzer (2018) writes, the number of incidents of discon-
tent with local officials has risen dramatically throughout the nation in the past 10 years. Crackdowns
on online speech, for instance, an April 2019 repression of a gay hashtag #les #super topic, caused
an explosion of memes. The last thing the Party wants to confront is a flood of online discontent.
Part of the solution is seen to lie in the very same technology that provides personal liberation and
consumer gratification. The Social Credit System (shehui xinyong tixi), now used in several pro-
jects throughout the PRC, deploys data gleaned from digital lifestyle apps including WeChat and
Alipay, as well as other biometrics, to build a trustworthiness profile of the user. A version
currently in use in Shanghai is called Honest Shanghai. According to one account, ‘the app can cur-
rently access 5198 separate pieces of information per citizen from a total of 97 public authorities’
(Strittmatter, 2019: 2696). Digital data collected by tech companies allow them to construct unique
profiles for each individual on different apps and platforms. Instances of ‘uncivilised’ behaviour
found in such profiles can limit access to certain forms of information, to services, entry to certain
places and along the refusal of social and economic opportunities (Galič et al., 2017; Wong and
Dobson, 2019).
Initially announced by the State Council in 2014, the Chinese Social Credit System is not
entirely dissimilar to credit systems operating in liberal democracies (Griffith, 2019; Wong and
Dobson, 2019). This is a state-led form of Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism in play, bolstered by the
obligation of China tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba to pass on information to security
10 Media International Australia 00(0)

services. The Chinese government is harnessing digital technologies not only as means of policing
unrest but also for the purpose of correcting instances of abuse by state officials, and thereby cul-
tivating trust in government. It says it is ‘policing “dishonesty”’, widely understood as the common
factor across high-level corruption, commercial fraud, food safety crimes and the production and
selling of counterfeit goods (Wong and Dobson, 2019). As such, the Social Credit System is nudg-
ing people to be more honest. By mid-2019, it was being trialled at more than three dozen sites.
One of these is the small city of Rongcheng in Shangdong Province. Similar to other pilot projects,
the scheme provides participants with a starting quota of 1000 points. Based on a user’s honesty or
dishonesty, points will either increase or decrease. If a user falls below 599 points they will be
issued with a D demerit blacklist, signifying dishonesty (Strittmatter, 2019). Arguably, this is more
than ‘nudging’ people to be good citizens, it is effectively enforcing ‘civilised behaviour’.
More explicitly in keeping with the meta-theme of Chinese digital civilisation is the Study
Strong Nation (xuexi qiangguo) app, released in 2019. Wanning Sun (2019) writes that this latest
digital affordance, sometimes just called xuexi, ‘puts patriotism to the test’. Users can accumulate
‘positive energy’ (zheng nengliang), a buzz word circulating in the political domain, by correctly
answering questions about Xi Jinping and his ‘thought’, which is now enshrined on the same level
as the ‘thought’ of previous great leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Such an innovation
articulates the ideological platform for China’s attempts to shape its emerging digital civilisation.
Most western criticisms (and indeed many criticisms from within China), are focused upon propa-
ganda elements, for instance, ideological control and a cult of personality. Many reports say that it
is compulsory to download xuexi in state-owned enterprises and government departments. In fact,
the compulsion is not officially mandated but typically comes from local level officials or is
requested by owners of companies or leaders of departments as a manifestation of loyalty. Such
practices are, of course, consistent with the longstanding expectations placed upon citizens by the
Communist Party in China.
The affordances of the digital platform are nonetheless novel. The app has different layers of
political ‘indoctritainment’ (Sun, 2019). Study Strong Nation has multiple features: messaging, TV
live streaming, MOOCs, short videos, news, movies, music, quiz and audio/video chat. All the
contents are in Chinese, which makes it more difficult for foreigners to ‘study’. It is inclusive and
exclusive at the same time. As an officially issued app, xuexi has a built-in authoritarian functional-
ity. Coupled with its red-themed colour, its politically correct content, and the name’s multiple
meanings (both study Xi and learn from Xi), the app’s technical arrangement and design imposes
a form of order. It acts as a threshold to stop the non-believers. Content is ‘harmonised’, cleansed
of distracting advertisements and free from eye-catching headlines about celebrity gossip. The
focus, unsurprisingly, is on important domestic and international issues. Compared with similar
media apps, xuexi’s sophisticated user experience is smooth and user-friendly, unsurprisingly given
it was developed by a special project team at Alibaba. The intention behind its development is to
promote an official digital channel, an alternative to Toutiao and Tencent News. As noted above, it
is not compulsory, but with its inherent political symbolism, it has become a tool for local officials
to express their loyalty to Beijing, by forcing their employees to download and study.
Our final example is perhaps the most ground-breaking development with regard to Lee’s puta-
tive new world order, as discussed in the introduction of this article. On 9 August 2019, the Chinese
telecom company Huawei launched its Harmony operating system (OS) in the city of Dongguan in
southern Guangdong Province. Harmony OS is a cross-platform system that can be used on digital
devices, from smartphones, PCs, smartwatches and IoT appliances to smart cars. This inclusive-
ness is different from global tech heavyweights such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. For instance,
Apple has separate systems for different platforms, such as iOS, Mac OS, WatchOS, TVOS and
Carplay. Since Apple’s launch of the Macintosh in the 1980s, the US company established a
Keane and Su 11

reputation for uber-cool, its graphics-based OS becoming a choice for the contemporary urban
hipster counter-culture. But when Apple launched its Closed Source iPhone OS in 2007 it retained
complete control over app development.
By contrast, Harmony is not only easy for users to adapt to but it also benefits developers who
can develop apps and flexibly deploy these across a range of different devices. The company has
set itself up as a symbol of China’s emergence as a technological power, disruptive but accommo-
dating. The CEO of Huawei consumer business group Yu Chengdong said, ‘We want to bring
harmony to the world (Zhang, 2019)!’ As tensions continue to rise between the United States and
China in the current trade war, the development and launch of Huawei OS represents a re-balanc-
ing of technological order in the world system. The name Harmony explicitly reflects the Chinese
vision of statecraft and globalisation: a harmonised society becoming a force in the shared future
of all mankind. The Harmony OS thus reflects the Chinese government’s slogan ‘a community of
shared future’, and the expansion of its self-styled ‘open’ Belt and Road Initiative into Eurasia (He,
2019). The problem that both Huawei and China now face, however, is not technology and capital,
but whether the rest of the world chooses to recognise and participate in this vision.

Conclusion
In her recent work Shoshana Zuboff (2019) questions if our emerging information civilisation will
be ‘a place that we can call home’. The answer she provides is far from positive: ‘surveillance capi-
talism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and threaten
to cost us our humanity’ (p. 257). The more we use digital technologies the more our lives, loves
and likes are turned into data. The upside is that we have more friends to connect with, greater
access to shared information, more opportunities to consume online and more social media chan-
nels to voice our opinions. With our online behaviour monitored, we receive recommendations to
read new books, to try new restaurants, to take new holidays. Fit Bits track our wellness, prompting
us to raise the bar. Dating sites connect lonely people. With every app we download we give per-
mission; if we don’t, we cannot proceed. Meanwhile our home appliances can speak to us. And
they can also listen in.
As we have shown above, the Chinese state has tracked people’s movements since the early Han
dynasty, a time when the discourse of civilisation became closely associated with exemplary behav-
iour. Normally the disciplinary province of historians, anthropologists and archaeologists, civilisa-
tion has found its way into the lexicon of modern statecraft. China, which increasingly self-identifies
as a civilisational state, has used various civilising processes to manage its population during the
reform era, hence, we have noted the terminologies: spiritual, material, political and ecological.
Whereas spiritual civilisation has allowed the state to raise the ‘quality’ of the population, in concert
with political civilisation, and has justified the use of technologies of surveillance, material civilisa-
tion has been about raising productivity. It is the equivalent of Zuboff’s industrial civilisation. As
reflected in Zuboff’s critique, industrial civilisation has polluted the countryside, and threated the
future of humanity. While better living standards have undoubtedly been a benefit for Chinese peo-
ple, industrial civilisation has ramifications for the future physical health of the nation.
The ‘cleaner’ internet age is currently viewed by many reformers within China as a panacea, a
remedy and an opportunity. Accordingly, the Chinese government has accepted, rather than resisted
the challenges of technology, and in the process has found new ways to modify peoples’ behaviour.
In many instances it uses overt surveillance; however, this kind of intrusive bio-monitoring is com-
plemented by practices that offer the user a chance to opt in, to choose from a buffet of regulated
lifestyle choices, and to partake in a ‘digital civilisation in the making’.
12 Media International Australia 00(0)

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following funding for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article: Research for this article was funded through the Australian Research Council Discovery-Projects
DP170102176 Digital China: From Cultural Presence to Innovative Nation.

ORCID iD
Michael Keane https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8155-0140

Notes
1. The term Unicorn refers to a start-up company with a value over US dollars 1 billion.
2. The ‘five mao army’ refers to people who clean up undesirable online content and in most cases replace
with nationalistic sentiment. The five mao refers to a payment for this service, approximately 50 cents.

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