By David Bandurski
THEY HAVE BEEN called the "Fifty Cent Party," the "red vests" and the "red van- guard." But China's grow- ing armies of Web commentators-instigated, trained and fi nanced by party organizations一have just one mission: to safeguard the interests of the Communist Party by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing Chinese Inter- net. They set out to neutralize undesirable public opinion by pushing pro-Party views through chat rooms and Web forums, re porting dangerous content to authorities.
By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as 280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious China's leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More importantly, they offer tangible clues about China's next generation of information con- trols-what President Hu Jintao last month called "a new pattern of public一opinion guidance." It was around 2005 that party leaders started getting more creative about how to influence public opinion on the Internet. The problem was that China's traditional propaganda apparatus was geared toward suppression of news and information. This or that story, Web site or keyword could be banned, blocked or filtered. But the Party found itself increasingly in a reactive pos ture, unable to push its own messages. This problem was compounded by more than a decade of commercial media reforms, which had driven a gap of credibility and influence between commercial Web sites and metropolitan media on the one hand, and old party mouthpieces on the other.
In March 2005, a bold new tactic emerged in the wake of a nationwide purge by the Ministry of Education of college bul letin-board systems. As Nanjing University, one of the country's leading academic insti tutions, readied itself for the launch of a new campus forum after the forced closure of its popular "Little Lily" BBS, school offi cials recruited a team of zealous students to work part time as "Web commentators." The team, which trawled the online forum for undesirable information and actively ar gued issues from a Party standpoint, was financed with university work-stu即funds. In the months that followed, party leaders across Jiangsu Province began recruiting their own teams of Web commentators. Ru- mors traveled quickly across the Internet that these Party-backed monitors received 50 mao, or roughly seven cents, for each positive post they made. The term Fifty Cent Party, or wumaodang, was born.
The push to outsource Web controls to these teams of pro一government stringers went national on Jan. 23, 2007, as President Hu urged party leaders to "assert suprem acy over online public opinion, raise the level and study the art of online guidance, and actively use new technologies to in- crease the strength of positive propagan da." Mr. Hu stressed that the Party needed to "use" the Internet as well as control it.
One aspect of this point was brought home immediately, as a government order forced private Web sites, including several run by Nasdaq-listed firms, to splash news of Mr. Hu's Internet speech on their sites for a week. Soon after that speech, the Gen eral Offices of the cpc and the State Council issued a document calling for the selection of "comrades of good ideological and pouit- ical character, high capability and familiar- ity with the Internet to form teams of Web commentators…who can employ methods and language Web users can accept to ac tively guide online public opinion."
By the middle of 2007, schools and par- ty organizations across the country were reporting promising results from their teams of Web commentators. Shanxi Nor- mal University's 12一member "red van- guard" team made regular reports to local Party officials. One report boasted that team members had managed to neutralize an emerging BBS debate about whether stu dents should receive junior college diplo mas rather than vocational certificates, the former being much more valuable in China's competitive job market. "A question came up among students about what kind of diplomas they would receive upon grad- uation," the university report read. "A num ber of vanguards quickly discovered the postings and worked together to enforce guidance with good results."
China's Culture Ministry now regularly holds training sessions for Web commenta tors, who are required to pass an exam be- fore being issued with job certification. A Chinese investigative report for an influen tial commercial magazine, suppressed by authorities late last year but obtained by this writer, describes in some detail a Sep tember 2007 training session held at the Central Academy of Administration in Beijing, at which talks covered such topics as "Guidance of Public Opinion Problems on the Internet" and "Crisis Management for Web Communications."
In a strong indication of just how large the Internet now looms in the Party's dai ly business, the report quotes Guan Jian wen, the vice president of People's Daily Online, as saying during the training ses sion: "In China, numerous secret internal reports are sent up to the Central Party Committee through the system each year. Of those few hundred given priority and action by top leaders, two-thirds are now from the Internet Office [of the State Council Information Office].，，
The ccp's growing concern about the Internet is based partly on the recognition of the Web's real power. Even with the limitations imposed by traditional and technical systems of censorship-the best example of the latter being the so一called "Great Firewall"-the Internet has given ordinary Chinese a powerful interactive tool that can be used to share viewpoints and information, and even to organize.
But the intensified push to control the Internet, of which China's Web commen tators are a critical part, is also based on a strongly held belief among Party leaders that China, which is to say the cci', is en- gaged in a global war for public opinion. In Gongjian, a book released earlier this year that some regard as President Hu's political blueprint, two influential Party theorists wrote in somewhat alarmist terms of the history of "color revolutions" in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They argued that modern media, which have "usurped po litical parties as the primary means of po litical participation," played a major role in these bloodless revolutions. "The influence of the ruling party faces new challenges," they wrote. "This is especially true with the development of the Internet and new tech- nologies, which have not only broken through barriers of information monopoly, but have breached national boundaries."
In 2004, an article on a major Chinese Web portal alleged that the United States Central Intelligence Agency and the Japa nese government had infiltrated Chinese chat rooms with "Web spies" whose chief purpose was to post anti一China content. The allegations were never substantiated, but they are now a permanent fixture of China's Internet culture, where Web spies, or wangte, are imagined to be facing off against the Fifty Cent Party.
Whatever the case, there is a very real conviction among party leaders that China is defending itself against hostile "external forces" and that the domestic Internet is a critical battleground. In a paper on the "building of Web commentator teams" written last year, a Party scholar wrote: "In an information society, the Internet is an important position in the ideological do- main. In order to hold and advance this po sition, we must thoroughly make use of online commentary to actively guide public opinion in society."
Mr. Hu's policy of both controlling and using the Internet, which the authors of Gongjian emphasize as the path forward, is the Party's war plan. Chinese Web sites are already feeling intensified pressure on both counts. "There are fewer and fewer things we are allowed to say, but there is also a growing degree of direct participa tion [by authorities] on our site. There are now a huge number of Fifty Cent Party members spreading messages on our site," says an insider at one mainland Web site.
According to this source, Web commen tators were a decisive factor in creating a major incident over remarks by CNN'S Jack Cafferty, who said during an April program that Chinese were "goons and thugs." "Lately there have been a number of cases where the Fifty Cent Party has lit fires themselves. One of the most obvious was over CNN'S Jack Cafferty. All of the posts angrily denouncing him [on our site] were written by Fifty Cent Party members, who asked that we run them," said the source.
"Priority" Web sites in China are under an order from the Information Office re quiring that they have their own in-house teams of government-trained Web com mentators. That means that many members of the Fifty Cent Party are now working from the inside, trained and backed by the Information Office with funding from com mercial sites. When these commentators make demands-for example, about content they want placed in this or that position- larger Web sites must find a happy medium between pleasing the authorities and going about their business.
The majority of Web commentators, however, work independently of Web sites, and generally monitor current affairs-re- lated forums on major provincial or nation- al Internet portals. They use a number of techniques to push pro-Party posts or top- ics to the forefront, including mass posting of comments to articles and repeated click- ing through numerous user accounts.
"The goal of the government is to crank up the 'noise' and drown out progressive and diverse voices on China's Internet," says Isaac Mao, a Chinese Web entrepre neur and expert on social media. "This can be seen as another kind of censorship sys tern, in which the Fifty Cent Party can be used both to rnonitor public speech and to upset the influence of other voices in the online space."
Sorne analysts, however, say the erner gence of China's Web cornrnentators sug gest a weakening of the Party's ideological controls. "If you look at it frorn another per- spective, the Fifty Cent Party rnay not be so terrifying," says Li Yonggang, assistant di- rector of the Universities Service Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "Historically speaking, the greatest strength of the ccr has been in car- rying out ideological work arnong the peo ple. Now, however, the notion of 'doing ideological work' has lost its luster. The fact that authorities rnust enlist people and de vote extra resources in order to expand their influence in the rnarket of opinion is not so rnuch a signal of intensified control as a sign of weakening control."
Whatever the net results for the Party, the rapid national deployment of the Fifty Cent Party signals a shift in the way party leaders approach information controls in China. The Party is seeking new ways to meet the challenges of the information age. And this is ultimately about more than just the Internet. President Hu's June 20 speech, the first since he came to office in 2002 to lay out comprehensively his views on the news media, offered a bold new vision of China's propaganda regime. Mr. Hu reiter ated former President Jiang Zemin's con- cept of "guidance of public opinion," the idea, emerging in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre, that the Party can maintain order by controlling news cover- age. But he also talked about ushering in a "new pattern of public-opinion guidance."
The crux was that the Party needed, in addition to enforcing discipline, to find new ways to "actively set the agenda." Mr. Hu spoke of the Internet and China's new gen eration of commercial newspapers as resources yet to be exploited. "With the Party [media] in the lead," he said, "we must integrate the metropolitan media, Internet media and other propaganda resources."
Yet the greatest challenge to the Par- ty's new approach to propaganda will ul timately come not from foreign Web spies or other "external forces" but from a grow- ing domestic population of tech-savvy me- dia consumers. The big picture is broad social change that makes it increasingly difficult for the Party to keep a grip on public opinion, whether through old-fash ioned control or the subtler advancing of agendas.
This point became clear on June 20, as President Hu visited the official People's Daily to make his speech on media controls and sat down for what Chinese and West- emn media alike called an "unprecedented" online dialogue with ordinary Web users. The first question he answered came from a Web user identified as "Picturesque Landscape of Our Country": "Do you usually browse the Internet?" he asked. "I am too busy to browse the Web ever川ay, but I do try to spend abit of time there. I espe cially enjoy People's Daily Online's Strong China Forum, which I often visit," the president answered.
On the sidelines, the search engines were leaping into action. Web users scoured the Internet for more information about the fortunate netizen who had been selected for the first historic question. Be- fore long the Web was riddled with posts reporting the results. They claimed that Mr. Hu's exchange was a "confirmed case" of Fifty Cent Party meddling. As it turned out, "Picturesque Landscape of Our Coun try" had been selected on three previous occasions to interact with party leaders in the same People's Daily Online forum.
For many Chinese Internet users, these revelations could mean only one thing- Party leaders were talking to themselves after all.
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