Week 4: Democracy Awakened Under Power

Speaking of the ‘democracy’ in China, the government has officially announced ‘socialised democracy regime’ in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Differ to western system, China is characterised as a dictatorship, runs socialism with Chinese characteristics since its unique history and social conditions. Hence, the freedom of Chinese citizen is still limited in recent years. Banned articles on WeChat, deleted discourse on Douban, taken-downed hot-spot titles on Weibo. The discourse around speech freedom of Chinese citizens has inevitably become a controversial topic in democratic countries.

With the development of information technology, the utilisation rate of social media has been greatly increased, and all kinds of information have flooded people’s lives. However, most of messages on social media is controlled by the ruling class, which means public ideology of democracy is under threat. Yet, the longing of the masses for democracy and freedom in China has given rise to a few special independent media organisations, breakthrough the highly regulated media circumstance. McChesney (2015) addressed the notion of civic and political engagement is shrinking, where non-profit media takes core role on building liberal political thoughts among citizens.

The characteristic non-profit media organisation is ‘In3’, a Beijing underground hip-pop band composed of Chen Haoran, Jia Wei and Meng Guodong, founded in 2007. They use Beijing slang to reveal Chinese reality lives within a joking and flirtatious manner. Unrestrained lyrics and fast-paced rhythm have been widely circulated in the private sphere among citizens. They publish their album on unregulated web pages and cloud disk, where followers can download for free.

The first song named ‘Black’ released in 2018. ‘Betrayal and deception, Women and money; Countless businesses have black conspiracies, repeated in the society, I want to quit in anger’. Those lyrics exposed the dark side of society including corruption, chaotic lives of the upper classes, gap of wealth and artificial social value. The catchy melody facilitates audiences to spread the word of mouth interpersonally, leads audiences to be willing and excited to download and enjoy the experience of verbal ‘tirade’. The number of downloads and followers reached the peak as the band and albums go viral.

Even though ‘In3’ group was fully banned by government in 2015 as they were accused of disrespecting the heads and policies in China, they back with a new name – ‘Purple Soul’, continues their democratised song on western music platform – ‘Spotify’.  There is an increasing number of audiences using VPN (an app allows users to breach the Great Firewall of China) to download songs and listen. The emergence of “In3” led for the first time to a conceptual innovation in the Chinese hip-hop scene and all the 90s to 00s, as well as building a collective consciousness of neoliberal democracy at the same time. McChesney demonstrated that, for absolute democracy, political power needs to be transferred from the minority to the majority. ‘In3’, as a special non-profit media form, gives Chinese masses the opportunity to speak freely, to vent one’s emotions. Furthermore, the lyrics expressing critique of politics and realities generates common reflections among the citizens, influences contemporary political system. Although the movement mostly is operated in the private sphere, but the creation of a collective consciousness was a milestone in democratic innovation. The collective concerns mentioned in their song like bribery, arises the recognition of government. Since 2012, Xi Jinping, the president of China, launched an extensive and harsh anti-corruption campaign in which more than a million officials were purged. To conclude, public power can be possessed by non-regulated media form, even under a hegemonic society, then strengthen the democracy in neo-liberalism era.