Talking, Linking, Clicking: The Politics of AIDS and SARS in Urban China
The spring of 2003 has been vividly described as the "spring of masks" in China.1 Soon after the nation staged the largest ever AIDS campaign on World AIDS Day (December 1, 2002), the unknown "white" anxiety of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) took the place of the known "red" threat of HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).2 Enveloped in a SARS panic, the whole nation was decorated by a variety of masks that smelled of disinfectant.
The successive red threat and white anxiety have brought about a quiet cultural revolution in Chinese society. Unlike the Maoist one, this revolution is not one of ideology led by the state; rather, it is a revolution of information vectors. It is part of what has been called the "silent revolution" that is leading to the resubjectification of post-Mao citizens.3 Upon closer look, [End Page 35] though, these post-Mao citizens are not silent: they talk, link, and click. By talking on radio and television, linking with others through real and virtual networking, and clicking the keyboard of the mobile phone and/or computer, these citizens, especially those from the urban middle classes, are able to appropriate and expand the circulatory matrix of narrative, subjectivity, and citizenship. New media have become the venues and means for post-Mao citizens to re-form subjectivities and exercise citizenship, which in turn exposes the politics of AIDS and SARS in urban China.
AIDS and SARS, as potential global epidemics that have affected millions of lives in China alone, are sites of signification and knowledge in contemporary biopolitics. Since they represent social and cultural crises, as well as biomedical ones, both syndromes have provided opportunities for the state and society to reconstitute and resituate their subjective positions in relation to each other. AIDS and SARS have also opened up space to reexamine the information revolution that is changing China's popular media topology. Faced with a morality-loaded virus (AIDS) and a highly contagious virus (SARS), people have readjusted their strategies of expression and interaction through the use of new media, which offer them channels of (relative) freedom and convenience at low cost. As a result, communication has increasingly taken the form of written rather than oral transmissions. If the viruses have opened up space for the reconstitution of public discourses on subjectivity and citizenship, the use of new media has facilitated the formation and circulation of such discourses and provided new venues for subject formation.
The term new media in this article refers mainly to the Internet and mobile phones, the use of which spread first among the urban elites and then proliferated among the middle class and the vast social strata of urban centers. China has the largest mobile communication market in the world and the second highest Internet usage after the United States; in 2003, the numbers of China's Internet and mobile phone users hit 80 million and 250 million respectively. Both BBS (bulletin board system) and SMS (short message service, or text messaging) are particularly popular among Chinese new media users: about one-fifth of Internet users regularly make use of BBS, and 95 percent of urban youth prefer SMS to communication by any other means.4 During the SARS outbreak, for example, the Internet and [End Page 36] mobile phone were called into play for nearly every aspect of interaction and communication among SARS-confined urbanites. In this way, new media constitute the everyday reality of urban China, as well as the politics of AIDS and SARS.
This article examines the practices of talking, linking, and clicking as they intersect with the politics of both syndromes and the concomitant resubjectification of urban citizens in contemporary China. I view the practices of talking, linking, and clicking as part of the revolution in media ideology, as well as a societal revolution. The use...
