Online Encounters
Will this latest episode in popular internet diplomacy share the fate of the first one?
In 2009, I set out to write what I hoped, at the time, would be a book about the online encounter between Chinese and Americans that I’d witnessed beginning in the mid-aughts.
With Beijing building frantically ahead of its first Olympics, China having joined the WTO, and the Chinese economy growing at an unprecedented pace, China was, in the middle years of the century’s first decade, suddenly attracting a lot of American attention that had, after September 11 and the ensuing wars, been focused elsewhere. China’s internet, in those years, was relatively open: very few U.S. news sites or even the proto- or early social media properties were blocked, and Chinese internet user numbers were growing exponentially. By the time of the Beijing Summer Games, there were about 300 million internet users in China, according to CNNIC,1 while there were fewer than a million a decade earlier. Chinese internet users, aware that China was making the covers of magazines, were naturally eager to know what was being said about their country, and a significant portion of them — those early adopters tended, after all, to be educated elites — were of that generation born in the 70s and 80s for whom English classes were de rigueur; they were thus not only keen to but also very much able to read how “the West” was talking about China as its “coming out party” approached.
And so it was that in the comment sections of news websites, the ubiquitous blogs of the day, and the still-nascent YouTube, one could see unfolding in real time what truly was the first large-scale, unintermediated meeting of mainland Chinese and ordinary people in the Anglophone West. Before broadband internet had been available so widely in China’s cities, people-to-people encounters between Americans and Chinese were, as I wrote at the time, typically very much stage-managed and formal, with everyone on their best behavior: sister city delegations, dance troupes and orchestras, that sort of thing. Now, it was something entirely different, and a whole lot less friendly.
It was, as I later came to realize, a harbinger in many ways of what was to come. Increasing familiarity quickly bred increasing contempt. To many Chinese, the Americans seemed so often to be sanctimonious hypocrites, cartoonishly arrogant and lacking in self-awareness, utterly ignorant of history. Conversely, to many Americans, the Chinese struck them as thin-skinned, stridently nationalistic, “brainwashed” and slavishly obedient victims of a repressive regime. A friend of mine described it as “the war of the Rednecks and the Red Guards,” and for a while I took to referring to it that way, too. I gave a couple of talks themed around this first, depressing only encounter that year — a longer one in Lincoln, Nebraska, and an abbreviated version for TEDx in Honolulu. As I said then, Chinese and Americans finally stood nose to virtual nose — but couldn’t for the life of them see eye to eye.2
It all came to a head after the events in Tibet in March of 2008. The chasm widened: the “arrogant American browbeating” and the “reflexive, defensive Chinese nationalism” both seemed, to the other side, to only intensify. The state-to-state relationship, which had in the years bookended by 9-11 and the Great Recession been largely free of any major disruption, began the downward spiral that would accelerate during Trump 1.0 and the Biden administration.
I never got beyond a few chapters of the book; those still languish somewhere on a hard drive I couldn’t find after a cursory search, but it’s just as well. A few days ago, as I watched American “TikTok Refugees” pouring into Xiaohongshu ahead of the January 19th sell-or-be-banned decree from Washington. I naturally braced for another ugly encounter. There has been, to be sure, some horrible behavior from both the refugees and their new Chinese hosts. But on balance, we’ve mainly seen a display of humanity that warms me through in this bitterly cold mid-January: well-intentioned efforts to connect, wholesome, earnest and often painfully dopey curiosity, and a delightful discovery: a shared sense of humor.
What has changed across this time, from 2008 to 2025? Aren’t Sino-American relations at a nadir, and wouldn’t you think that another encounter would only deepen already ample distrust? Or — dare we hope — could this be, again, a harbinger of what is to come, but this time in the other direction? Please let it be so. Please, let’s not fuck this up.
Stay tuned for an episode of Sinica next week that will explore this whole stranger-than-fiction phenomenon!
The China Internet Network Information Center, which back in those days was the authoritative source for that sort of data.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s a reference to a song from one of my favorite musicals, The Music Man, called “Iowa Stubborn” — “And we're so by God stubborn we can stand touchin' noses for a week at a time, and never see eye to eye.”
I share your hopes and wishes, but I fear the blockheads on both sides will kill it off (again). :-(
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7285208839795146754?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28ugcPost%3A7285208839795146754%2C7285668008931262464%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287285668008931262464%2Curn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A7285208839795146754%29
I don’t even recall what event may have happened in 2008 in Tibet, was it earthquake?