The semiotic guerrilla: Internet subcultures as political resistance in China

This paper adopts a critical discourse analysis in combination with in-depth interviews of 55 people to examine three representative cases of Internet subcultures created and practiced by Chinese netizens from 2009, in order to define the formats, strategies and tactics of these subcultures in relation to the broader mainstream political culture. The paper finds that the Chinese subculturists employ tactics of homophony and neologism made possible by the highly contextual Chinese language; the participants are aware of the appropriation of traditional Confucian ethics by the Party-state to legitimize its rule and devise targeted strategies of resistance accordingly; but their cynical attitude towards the dominant political culture prevents them from affecting real political change beyond mere defiance at the semiotic level.


INTRODUCTION
The virtual ban in China on "offline" political activities, such as protests, demonstrations and unofficial assemblies, has made the Internet the main tool and scene of the resistance to the authoritarian Party-state by Chinese netizens in a variety of areas, including freedom of speech, gender equality, the one-child policy and autonomy over their own lifestyle (Gong and Yang, 2010;Qiu 2013). In response to this, the state has been tightening its grip on the Internet by shrinking the space of online expression and censoring potentially controversial content. This, however, has provoked further rebellion among Internet users (Cairns and Carlson, 2016;Creemers, 2017). As a result, the Chinese Internet as cultural space is turned into a complex of contradictions characterized by both activist resistance and firm government control (Yang, 2003).
With political expression and criticism of social injustice heavily suppressed, Chinese netizens have come to resort to a particular form of online resistance characterized by culture-and entertainment-based memes with political messages embedded in them. It is a postmodernist approach that re-creates existing content (language, imagery, video, etc.) in a way that is humorous or sarcastic (or egao, to use a popular Chinese slang) enough to stay out of the censors" line of sight but still able to subtly convey dissent (Esarey and Xiao, 2011; *Corresponding author. E-mail: criver@protonmail.ch. Author(s) agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Jacobs, 2012;Mackinnon, 2008;Tang, 2013).
Naturally, it is hard to foresee with certainty what this type of resistance can eventually lead to. Some scholars see the emergence of an important form of grassroots democracy in this postmodernist online culture for its carnivalesque spirit and unconventional attitude towards "mainstream" and "officialdom" that continually press the Party-state to open up more space for expression (Li, 2011;Meng, 2011;Tang and Yang, 2011). Others disagree: this linguistic or semiotic resistance in vogue among people living under a repressive government is essentially "slacktivism" that indulges netizens in online defiance at the expense of meaningful, engaged activism in the real world, which will eventually lead them to inadvertently support both the state and the market (Morozov, 2011;Wallis, 2015). What is certain, though, is that the Internet-based subcultures have expanded room for expression, heightened the visibility of nonmainstream lifestyles and allowed Chinese Internet users to criticize the government in subtle ways (Chen, 2014;King et al., 2013;Yang 2009). Investigation into the evolution of such cultural practices, therefore, becomes key to understanding the politics of contemporary Chinese digital media culture and China"s broader political culture in the Internet age.
This paper applies the post-subcultural theory to the methods of critical discourse analysis and in-depth interviews to examine the online subcultures created and practiced by Chinese netizens in the decade 2009-2018 with three goals in mind: First, map the characteristics of such subcultures in terms of formats, strategies and tactics; second, interrogate their interplay with the dominant political culture in China; and third, building upon the first two goals, attempt to theorize the (sub-)cultural resistance rooted in the Chinese politico-cultural context that goes beyond the cliché of the "freedom versus control" model.

The post-subcultural theory within the Chinese context
Subculture has long been seen as separate from, or rebelling against, mainstream culture in a multitude of aspects, including values, beliefs, symbols and styles. It is often able to achieve a certain level of autonomy with its particular spaces and networks for meanings (Haenfler, 2010;Hodkinson, 2002;Williams, 2011). Best positioned to analyze this culture in the Internet age is post-subcultural theory. Born in the 1990s and coming into powerful force at the turn of the century, it is seen as the critique and correction of the classic subcultural theory championed by the Birmingham School, which emphasizes class as the central dimension of forming subcultures and considers subculture as a representation of class struggles. Influenced by postmodernism, postsubcultural theory rejects the CCCS-derived versions of subcultural theory for their inability to escape the traps of determinism and essentialism due to their over-emphasis on the class, race and gender attributes of cultural identity, which renders them incapable of dealing with the contemporary global subculture (Muggleton, 2000;Sweetman, 2013). To post-subcultural theorists, the cultural identity of youth, molded by new technological and cultural forces, especially globalization and the rise of the Internet, has become increasingly reflexive, fluidy and fragmented. The distinctly political subculture in the traditional sense has evolved into a "style-based youth culture" (Bennett, 2004(Bennett, , 2011. Under such theoretical guidance, scholars developed a number of conceptual frameworks to analyze specific cultural forms to replace the research paradigm of the Birmingham School or even the very concept of subculture. Maffesoli (1996, 98), for instance, uses the term "neo-tribe" to describe contemporary youth culture that is rather "a certain ambience, a state of mind, and is preferably to be expressed through lifestyles that favor appearance and form". Similarly, Chaney (1996) further develops the concept of lifestyle, first proposed by Max Weber, by regarding lifestyle as a type of "creative project" based on acts of consumption. Also influential among post-subcultural scholars is the conceptualization of "scene" by Straw (1991) that renounces the traditional definition of subculture based on the fixity of class and community in favor of highlighting the constant evolution and often transient nature of collective youth activity. These conceptual frameworks, different as they are on the surface, share the same core theory that stresses the individuality and non-fixity of contemporary youth culture and youth collectivity which demand rigorous contextualized, ethnographic research.
Post-subcultural theory has been attacked from many angles since its conception, but the opponents have always stayed within the usual criticism of the various post-theories. Nevertheless, this paper believes in the value of post-subcultural theory in investigating China"s online subcultures, for two main reasons. Firstly, postsubcultural theory contextualizes subculture, or engages in what Jensen (2018) describes as a multidimensional, culture understanding of identities in cultural studies. China"s cultural traditions and political reality, vastly different from those in Western societies, make the country inhospitable to the essentialist framework of the Birmingham School. The clear lack of class factors in China"s cultural resistance is a telling example. Secondly, the stringent censorship of explicit political speech and radical expression in China has driven netizens to indirect forms of resistance, including jokes, wordplay, picture/ video reediting, meme creation, etc. (Tsui, 2003), making this subculture highly stylized or aestheticized. In other words, the common language of the subcultural resistance is not straightforward political discourse, but politicized consumption activities built around symbols or images. Therefore, post-subcultural theory, with its emphasis on the constant evolving and often transient nature of symbols and its interpretations of the multiethnic and cross-class forms of affiliation (Mitchell 1996), can serve as a particularly effective tool in the effort to investigate the uniqueness of subcultural practices of Chinese netizens.
Firstly, post-subcultural theory contextualizes subculture, or engages in what Jensen (2018) describes as a multidimensional, culture understanding of identities in cultural studies. China"s cultural traditions and political reality, vastly different from those in Western societies, make the country inhospitable to the essentialist framework of the Birmingham School. The clear lack of class factors in China"s cultural resistance is a telling example. The loose virtual community of subcultures is made up of disparate people with specific issues and causes, as opposed to a tight group solidified by lasting class interests. Furthermore, members of this community do not share the same cultural identity. This requires researchers to immerse themselves in specific temporalspatial contexts to examine this group as insiders. Given that most of the studies on China that use CCCS frameworks have failed to reach insightful conclusions (Liu and Xie, 2017;Zhang et al., 2017), it is imperative that a new framework be developed that is informed by post-subcultural theory and rooted in Chinese conditions. Secondly, the stringent censorship of explicit political speech and radical expression in China has driven netizens to indirect forms of resistance, including jokes, wordplay, picture/video reediting, meme creation, etc. (Tsui, 2003), making this subculture highly stylized or aestheticized. In other words, the common language of the subcultural resistance is not straightforward political discourse, but politicized consumption activities built around symbols or images. In some cases, the act of resistance by creating and consuming symbols bears more significance than the issue at hand (e.g. freedom of expression) and evolves into a universal online lifestyle, which may provide an opening for scholars to examine "the rest of life," or, in the words of Hodkinson (2016, 638), "[h]ow participation in any particular cultural grouping connects to the range of other spaces, networks and affiliations of importance to participants." Therefore, post-subcultural theory, with its emphasis on the constant evolving and often transient nature of symbols and its interpretations of the multi-ethnic and cross-class forms of affiliation (Bennett, 2000;Mitchell, 1996), can serve as a particularly effective tool in the effort to investigate the uniqueness of subcultural practices of Chinese netizens.
The existing literature has laid a firm foundation for this paper. The gender-based analysis by Wallis (2015) of three illustrative cases of gender-based production of subculture exposes the discursive collusion between the Internet subculture in China and patriarchy and misogyny, warns against the academic tendency to happily glorify any form of resistance and finally demonstrates the need to confront the flaws of online resistance within the framework of China"s post-socialist gender politics. Chen (2014) surveys the popularity of the North American rage comics among young Chinese on the Internet by mapping the ways in which the riotous humor has been able to cross cultural boundaries in China"s cyber space, and recognizes the political significance of this subculture for having created room for emotional and political catharsis despite the unlikelihood that it will ever lead to political reform. Research by Qiu (2013) on the feizhuliu culture questions how articulations of female gender and sexuality relate to broader cultural politics in contemporary China and sheds light on the tensions between the so-called Chinese modernities and the different modernities reflected in certain forms of online subcultures and the gendered identities they construct. As illuminating as they are, the papers have mainly focused on individual cases without attempting to define the changing patterns of online resistant culture of Chinese netizens, youth or from other age groups, and have not taken the trouble to develop a native Chinese theory. Which is why this paper, building on the existing literature, sets out to answer three questions: One, are there general patterns to how the Internet subculture is formed? Second, how is this subculture politicized or depoliticized in its interaction with political structures, especially government censorship? Third, as the most important form of resistance in today"s China, what potential influence will the Internet subculture have on the country"s political culture?

RESEARCH DESIGN
The methodology of this paper takes a two-pronged approach. Firstly, a critical discourse analysis is applied to three representative cases of Internet-based resistance from 2009 to 2019: the "grass mud horse" phenomenon that started in 2009, the "toad worship" in 2014, and the Peppa Pig culture in 2017. These are chosen for several reasons. Firstly, these three have had a widespread influence on contemporary Chinese society and culture where the writers of the paper have had intensive, firsthand experience of these subcultures as regular users of the Chinese Internet during the past 10 years, and a review of existing literature shows that these three are more typical than other subcultures and have all been hot topics for global media coverage. For example, The New York Times have covered all these three cases with in-depth reporting and commentaries, attracting wide attention of Chinese politics observers to Chinese netizens" creativities. Although naturally becoming the target of nationwide government crackdowns as of their inceptions, these three cultures have shown incredible staying power in the digital world. Their army of followers "hide" in different digital spaces, abiding their time to launch a quick "ambush" of subcultural signifying practices, before going in hiding again, leaving no trace to the censors. The "toad worship" subculture has even migrated to Facebook (blocked in China) as its new home with a large and growing fanbase. One Facebook fan group for "toad worshippers" where we recruit interviewees has over 7,000 active members, most of whom are Chinese nationals according to their names. Secondly, all three have taken a form of resistance to the mainstream political culture in China characterized by suppression of individual expression in the name of maintaining social stability, solidification of cultural stratification and order, blurring of lines between the Party, the state and society, and exaltation of an ascetic, puritanical lifestyle (Hua and Nathan, 2015). In other words, on the symbolic, narrative and expressive levels, all three subcultures have set out to flaunt freedom of speech, break down cultural stratification, uncouple discursively the Party-state and society, and revel in secular (and sometimes vulgar) joy, albeit in ways that are mostly playful and sarcastic. Lastly, the three subcultures, however, different from each other form a historical continuum. The "grass mud horse" is a forthright strategy of confrontation that graphically denounces Internet censorship in an almost obscene language, incurring therefore the harshest crackdowns; in contrast, the "toad worship" has developed a sophisticated system of symbols that employ subtle and clever wordplay in nuanced stories spread across a wide range of mediums (such as T-shirts, mugs and illicit fan art and publications), which can be seen as a sign of maturity of Chinese online subcultures but also blunts their political edginess; the Peppa Pig culture, finally, is more fully commercial, given its roots in pop culture (a British cartoon) and viral franchise (stickers, T-shirts, etc.) whose customers have almost given up direct political expression and chosen instead to dissolve political authority with linguistic and cultural pastiche. They represent the stages in the evolution of Chinese Internet subcultures: from the "grass mud horse" to the "toad worship" to then Peppa Pig, a clear line can be drawn towards post-subculture. This will be explained in detail.
This paper does not give an end date to these cultures because even though their posts were deleted en masse by state authorities soon after they appeared, they have not only survived in various forms but managed to spread far and wide, even entering the vocabulary of ordinary people. Documentary data mainly comes from news reports, Weibo and WeChat posts, image and video memes created by social media users, popular video-streaming sites (e.g. bilibili.com). Unfortunately, government censors or platform host companies have deleted most of the content, which is why some data is also supplied by the 55 interviewees of this paper in addition to the content downloaded and saved by the writers of the paper over the past decade. In total, 220 pieces of documentary data (including text, imagery, video, etc.) are used in this research. By analyzing these typical cases, this paper tries to define the general patterns of the online resistant culture by Chinese netizens in order to build a conceptual framework with which to investigate the broader Internet-based cultural resistance in China.
Secondly, complementing the critical discourse analysis are indepth interviews conducted with 55 people who have been heavy producers and active practitioners of the three cultures. This aims at charting the ways these netizens grapple with the censorship regime and negotiate with the mainstream political culture, with a focus on what these cultures, in particular structures and contexts, can bring about. The interviewees were selected as follows: The researchers, in their data collection stage, identified the uploaders of content in various Internet platforms, then sent out private messages to a number of them requesting an interview. Those who accepted were then asked to recommend other people for interview. In the end, 55 said yes. It needs to be pointed out that uploaders are not necessarily original creators. The anonymous and decentralized nature of online content production makes it difficult to trace back to the first creator of a certain text or narrative. In addition, since all three subcultures have been subjected to government purges, the initial versions of much content on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo may have "disappeared" soon after they appeared; and much of the content still visible on Facebook and Twitter has been "smuggled" out of the country by netizens. This is why we have sought uploaders instead of only creators for the interviews. Nevertheless, even though they were chosen as uploaders, all interviewees told us that they used to or were still actively producing and creating online material related to the three subcultures. It is, therefore, our belief that they fit the criteria for "active subculturists." Because they lived in different parts of the world (8 outside China), not all interviews were conducted face-to-face. Specifically, 22 people, who live in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, London or New York, were interviewed in person during the period from September 2017 to December 2019, at 90-120 minutes per interview. The remaining 33 agreed to WeChat video calls at 60-90 minutes per interview. All of them are native Chinese speakers. All interviewees outside China used to be or currently are Chinese students overseas, who claim to become fans when they were in China as young adults, and have kept the affection ever since. 46 were under the age of 35. 40 were male; efforts were made to interview more women but failed, and this may confirm what Evans (2008) terms the "limits of gender in China." All interviews were conducted in a semi-structured fashion where we encouraged the interviewees to tell us their motivations in becoming part of this resistance, their ways of defying and negotiating with the censorship regime, and if and how this type of participatory cultural practice had changed their political and cultural views.

The Grass Mud Horse: A Profanity Revolution
The grass mud horse is an Internet phenomenon born in 2009, when a blogger created an entry on Baidu Baike called "The Ten Holy Beasts of the Internet," and gave the ten imaginary animals their accompanying information, including their appearance, behavior and background story. Of the ten beasts, the horse quickly became viral. It directly resembles the alpaca. It lives in malegebi (literally Ma-le Gobi Desert), eats wocao (fertile grass), and has a natural enemy-the hexie (river crab). A number of songs dedicated to the animal soon appeared, the most famous one using the opening theme of the Chinese version of The Smurfs set to new lyrics that recount the heroic story of the GMH defeating the river crab and took its home back. Music videos produced by Chinese fans were uploaded to streaming sites in and outside China, and many versions can still be found on YouTube.
The biggest factor behind the horse"s viral fame on the Internet is its name. The three characters for "grass mud horse" in Mandarin Chinese sound very much like "fuck your mother." Apart from this vile obscenity, malegebi (where it lives) and wocao (which it eats) also resemble nasty curses. Its nemesis the hexie sounds quite like "harmony/harmonious." Given that the Party-state was propagandizing aggressively the concept of "harmonious society" borrowed from traditional Confucian ethics, and as a result relentlessly cracks down on speech deemed subversive to online "harmony," the struggle between the GMH and the river crab serves as a metaphor for Internet users flouting China"s censorship regime. The other nine beasts are named in similar fashion, such as the fa ke you (fa ke squid, sounding like "fuck you" in English), and the ya mie die (ya mie butterfly, resembling the Japanese phrase "yamete," meaning "please stop," that is often heard in Japanese pornography). What sets the GMH apart is that the other 9 animals are pure exercises in vulgarity, but the horse is assigned a political narrative of defiance and resistance. These animals lasted on the watch of the censors as long as they could because the word-filtering technology at the time was not as sophisticated as today when almost every online platform hires thousands of human "examiners" to make sure there"s no bad word at large (Zhu et al., 2013;Li, 2019), and the unique strength of the Chinese language rich in homonyms allows the creators almost unlimited ways to circumvent the censors.
The birth of the GMH and its viral spread on the Chinese Internet were a direct response to the so-called Campaign to Clean Up the Internet by the national authorities since January 2009. In this round of crackdown that officially targeted "obscene, pornographic and vulgar content," 1,575 websites were shut down, many of which, however, were closed because of their political dissent. This angered many young Chinese (Tang and Yang, 2011). Indeed, the "holy beasts" were also systematically purged soon after they appeared, but it was too late for the GMH. Mainstream Western media outlets, led by The New York Times, devoted ample column space to this horse (Wines, 2009). And the participants of this culture continued to create new forms of wordplay to help the GMH defeat word filters and enjoy a long life. Moreover, it has succeeded in infiltrating the upper echelons of culture producers as a symbol of resistance enveloped in political seriousness. Ai Weiwei, the leading contemporary Chinese artist, created a series of performance art the same year. In one work, he goes fully naked and covers only his private parts with a stuffed GMH (alpaca) toy. In Mandarin, "grass mud horse covering the middle" sounds almost the same as "fuck your mother, Party Central Committee." This is proof that the creation of the GMH culture inspires serious critical art. Indeed, for an extended period afterwards, Ai, the most prominent dissident artist in China, continued to use the GMH as a subject of his works (Fisher, 2012).
Using homophony and curse words in cultural resistance is nothing new, especially in rock and rap music (DeChaine, 1997;Martinez, 1997), but it has been rare in the Chinese context. And this is an important reason that the GMH has achieved unprecedented popularity as a protest culture. The written word has always occupied a noble place in Chinese history. Dignified and euphemistic, it adheres to the principles that one does not speak of the shortcomings and mistakes of those one respects, and that one should speak not what is contrary to propriety. Confucian traditions hold the purity of language and writing in sanctity, and have always regarded it as a political issue (Gaur, 2000). The government"s suppression of online speech in the name of protecting language purity is only the latest attempt in a long line of cultural regulation dating back centuries. Therefore, the GMH subculture may seem to challenge the censors on the surface, but is in fact subverting the underlying Confucian institutions that have long been used to justify the censorship regime.
The strategy to appropriate core Confucian values, such as harmony and self-discipline, to legitimize state censorship began after the 1989 Tian"anmen crackdown to ply the Party leadership with an alternative to the bankrupt Communist ideology as a tool to control speech and thought; as a result, Confucianism has been playing a semi-religious role in the Party"s state governance ever since (Billioud and Thoraval, 2008). Indeed, the current supreme leader Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed the importance of "personal cultivation" (meaning the individual"s obedience to order) in social harmony, exhorting Chinese citizens to follow the Confucian path of "first personal cultivation, then governing the world" (Chang and Ren, 2018). Against this backdrop, linguistic recreation that rips up classic language rules is often regarded as a sure sign of a debased character and an attempt at transgression, not to be protected as personal freedom of creation. This is what lies behind the regular campaigns by Internet authorities to "regulate" online language, attempting to curb and even stamp out the newest coinages. In July 2019, the Cyberspace Administration of China (the country"s main censoring body) reposted on its official website a politically charged op-ed that calls for stronger regulation of "Internet language as mass communication," including Chinese-English hybrids and words containing images and symbols, on the grounds that "Internet language may bear such negative implications for security issues concerning language, culture and ideology that high vigilance is needed." Thus, wordplay in the hands of the producers of the GMH subculture not only serves as an instrument to resist the censorship regime, but also constitutes an important source of politicized pleasure. Going beyond merely seeking political expression by getting around the filtering system with wordplay, the creators of the GMH are essentially trying to dismantle the sacred Chinese traditions of language and writing and to build a new discourse of resistance in their place. This invests in the GMH as a cultural ritual an impact and symbolic meaning that cannot be found in the "resistance by swearing" in the Western context. This is captured in one of the interviews: "The great power of the grass mud horse comes from the fact that it openly savages our cultural taboos. We have been taught since we were kids that you should never say the bad words no matter what kind of shit fucks with you. But in real life, when they fuck with you, you need to fuck back. The grass mud horse is the first shot fired. It tore away the fig leaf. It made us realize that this is war." Ironically, China"s Internet filtering system was designed to suppress "impropriety" (Benney 2014;Tang 2014), but it came to serve as the catalyst for a revolution in online language led by the grass mud horse. One interviewee who translated the creature and its narratives into French proclaimed, "We"re angry that we"re not allowed to say certain things, and we are resentful that some words, like harmony, are given new meanings by the censors we disagree with … We are deprived of our birthright to use our mother tongue. Eventually this forced us to set our own rules of language." Since 2009, homonyms and swear words have become characteristics of the Chinese resistance, where Internet users have created one GMHlike symbol after another in a guerrilla war with the censors. The rules and tactics of engagement have become increasingly sophisticated and have culminated in the "toad worship" culture we are about to discuss in the next section.

Blessed be the Toad: The politics of counteridolization
The second case is about the moha culture beginning in 2014. This newly coined Internet slang literally means "worshiping the toad," referring to Jiang Zemin who was the President of China 1993-2003 and the central figure of the so-called third generation of the Communist Party leadership. It is difficult to clearly state exactly when moha was born, but it is generally believed to have originated from the WeChat subscription account Seminar on the Selected Essays of Jiang launched in 2014 (later shut down by the government). Before it was taken down, the blog had published a great number of anecdotes, quotes and audio-visual clips of Jiang. This material, along with commentary, was presented in a mock academic or news style in order to avoid attracting the attention of the censors, and its stated mission was to praise Jiang"s abilities and accomplishments as a statesman.
Moha adopts the strategy of idolization in the form of praise, adulation and well-wishing for Jiang, which is an indirect way to vent dissatisfaction with his successors (especially Xi Jinping who came to power in 2012). But at the same time, this idolization is riddled with sarcasm and mockery. For instance, because Jiang in his big glasses is believed by many to look like a toad (hama), the supporters of this culture use ha as a codename for him. Because it"s pronounced almost the same as the ha in "ha ha," which is a different character, many choose to use the former (of toad) to verbalize their online laughter as a way to announce their moha membership and seek fellow "worshippers." Therefore, moha is also a form of counteridolization that enables the participants to use fake praise of Jiang to lampoon the puritanical political culture on which the Communist Party has always prided itself. The worshippers call themselves hasi (toad fans, who prefer the English spelling hath). One interviewee said, "Toad fans have their own system of expression with its internal logic … Simply put, moha is this dismissive attitude towards orthodoxy that believes all things orthodox are the results of manipulation." A trove of online material has been developed by toad fans, mainly in the form of buzzwords and memes. The former are mostly taken from viral videos of Jiang, the most famous of which shows one heated exchange he had with a female Hong Kong reporter in 2000. The reporter asks in the video if his support of Hong Kong"s leader Tung Chee-hwa seeking a second term means "the Communist Party has handpicked Tung," sending Jiang into a rage. He scolds the woman to her face, and says that Hong Kong reporters "always want to make big news" and "run [over to events] faster than Western reporters" but their questions are always (in English) "too simple, sometimes naïve." He also compares them with the respected American journalist Mike Wallace who is "way better than" Hong Kong reporters and with whom he "talked and laughed." He then softens and says he only wants to teach the reporters some life experience as an "elder" and exhorts them to "raise their journalistic standards." Jiang"s outburst in the video is unbefitting of his status as a head of state, but his idiosyncratic mix of languages spoken with a southern Chinese accent is a welcome breath of fresh air for the haths who are tired of the rigid Chinese political discourse laden with inscrutable platitudes. These quotes and more, especially his eccentric expressions (e.g. "too simple, sometimes naïve") that deviate from China"s political convention, have all gained immense popularity. And the word "elder" has become another codename for Jiang besides ha. The memes, on the other hand, are mostly based on his unscripted behavior in publicly available news reports, such as combing his hair in the presence of the King of Spain, and picking his nose in public, etc. They are mostly circulated on WeChat, and the semi-private nature of the platform has allowed them to be spared systematic purges by the government so far. A woman said in her interview that she loved making Jiang memes, because "there"s just so much material to choose from. And it"s fun and funny. More importantly, it has political meaning. And it gives both parties of the conversation a sense of joy hard to describe in words." Some observers attribute moha"s sudden viral status in 2014 directly to the Chinese netizens" disappointment in and resentment of Xi Jinping. Xi had been hailed as a moderate reformer, but his crackdowns on speech, tightening grip on power and creation of a cult of personality since he came to power have plunged China into political oppression (Peng, 2018;Qin, 2015). In sharp contrast, during Jiang"s rule at the center of the third generation of Communist leadership, China was more liberal in many ways than it is now, and his public image was much more colorful than the other political leaders. While his two successors graduated from Tsinghua University under tight control by the Communist Party, Jiang received Western-style education before 1949. He speaks a number of foreign languages, including English, Russian and Spanish, and appears to get along with Western values and ideas. In the video analyzed above, he proudly asks, "Which Western country haven"t I visited?" As mayor of Shanghai during the 1986 student protest movement, he met with the student leaders and amazed them by reciting the Gettysburg Address in English in front of them, which worked to considerably diffuse the tension between the two sides. This episode made him a favorite of Deng Xiaoping and later served as a key factor in his being chosen as the supreme figure of the third generation of the Communist Party leadership (Zhao, 2010). The well-read, flamboyant Jiang seems human compared with all the other Communist leaders of China before and after him.
However, most interviewees did not draw a line from liking Jiang to hating on Xi but insisted that they liked the former mainly because of his "charisma." One man professed his heartfelt fondness of Jiang, who to him was like "an old man who"s kind of smart, kind of funny, but who needs to be humored from time to time" as opposed to a national leader commanding respect from his subjects. Others, meanwhile, saw a deeper reason for their moha in its struggle for freedom of sarcastic speech in an oppressive country. In the words of one interviewee, "Moha makes me happiest when it creates this entire set of discourse that allows us to invent so many subtle and clever wordplays and expressions that bypass the filtering tools of censorship. After all, the authorities will never ban the character ha. This alone can ensure this culture a very long life among us haths." It needs to be stressed here that the image of Jiang painted by the moha culture is not historically accurate. There is no evidence that he was ever more liberal as a political leader than Deng, Hu Jintao or Xi. In certain periods, Jiang is even remembered to have taken a hardline conservative position. This, however, has given the "worshippers" an opportunity to indulge in a special, powerful kind of pleasure by "retelling history." Mainstream Confucians have long regarded history writing as one of their top priorities, taking great care to compile the so-called "official history" to lend legitimacy to the ruler. History, then, has always been political in China. The Communist Party is awfully attentive to how its own history gets written. Indeed, the field of Party Histography, a distinctly Chinese branch of history research, is vital to the ideological work of the Party (Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, 1987). Its political significance comes from its official profiles of principal Party figures. Therefore, by artificially elevating the historical import of Jiang in both achievement and popularity over other leaders, the current supreme leader Xi in particular, moha essentially attempts to deconstruct the legitimacy and authority of the official Party history. Precisely for this reason, the Internet users have bestowed on Jiang as a (anti-)idol a persona the exact opposite of the stereotypical image of the stiff, austere CPC leader. Of course, subcultures that seek political expression by creating (anti)idols are nothing new, but the collective subconsciousness of moha can be truly understood only in the context of China"s cultural obsession with writing "official history." A self-styled "crazy toad fan" put it this way, "What"s important is what people choose to believe. Is it the stuff printed in textbooks and newspapers that brooks no dissent, or our own conclusions through critical thinking … Toad fans are not stupid. Many people do it because they think it"s fun. But most of us really believe that Jiang is a different kind of leader. And this matters because we truly think so. It"s not forced on us."

Peppa Pig: My Body is My Weapon
The third case centers on the viral Peppa Pig phenomenon among Chinese Internet users. It is still evolving, so we name it the Peppa Pig culture as a working term.
Peppa Pig is a British animated television series for preschool children which originally aired on May 31, 2004 on Channel 5 in 5-minute episodes. The show revolves around Peppa, a girl pig, and her family and friends. Its Chinese version began broadcasting on the Children"s Channel of China Central Television in 2015, and was later available on iQiyi and other major video-streaming sites. It soon became the most popular foreign cartoon among urban Chinese children, and many young parents who watched the show with their children became Peppa Pig"s first adult fans.
Chinese viewers liked the show due initially to its high production value compared with the shoddy quality that plagues most domestic cartoons. Then, in November 2017, a Peppa Pig video created by a fan and dubbed in the Chongqing dialect was uploaded to Bilibili, a major Chinese video-streaming site for fans of anime, comics and video games. It quickly went viral and garnered one million views in no time. The Peppa Pig subculture of resistance was thus born. Within a few short months, a large number of clips of the show dubbed to different Chinese languages and dialects appeared on Bilibili. The striking incongruities of a typical English middle-class family speaking richly local Chinese dialects were highly amusing to people online who continued to create even more works based on the show.
In December 2017, an article was posted online and was quickly shared by bloggers. Titled "An Exposé on Peppa Pig-Slacking Her Life Away Doing Whatever She Wants Paid for by Her Rich Family of Corporate Executives," the article offers a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the signs and symbols of the cartoon before concluding, "Peppa Pig"s family belongs to the upper class." For example, her grandparents live in a giant mansion with a private garden and own a yacht. Her mom who presumably grew up with all this wealth plays the violin and speaks French, a well-educated lady all around. The dad is probably no average Joe either and most likely the Chief Financial Officer of a big corporation. The family even has a private doctor, too. For a simple rash, within 5 min of a call, the doctor will arrive at their door. This funny piece, still being shared today, apparently struck a chord with China"s netizens. It hit a nerve sensitive to the reality of class and further fueled the online debate over the worsening inequality in China. One man captured the sentiment well: "This one time I needed something for my sore throat. And I waited 4 hours in line at the hospital for the meds … I can"t deny that this article hit home. I know it"s a cartoon. It"s not real. And the article is intended as humor. But I guess it makes everyone realize that the wealth gap is not something we can avoid talking about." As culturally and socially significant this show has come to mean for Chinese people, the most rebellious element of the subculture is nevertheless the appeal of Peppa Pig tattoo stickers. Many people pasted them on their bodies and shared their pictures and videos on such popular short video platforms as Douyin and Kuaishou. It even gave birth to a widespread rhyming catchphrase: Get your Peppa Pig tatt, shout out to your frat (shehuiren). This seemingly innocuous act is one of meaningful resistance because tattoos and piercings are abhorrent to mainstream Chinese culture. No less an authority than The Analects declares that "Our bodies-to every hair and bit of skin-are received by us from our parents, and we must not presume to injure or wound them. This is the beginning of filial piety." Chinese culture deems any act that damages one"s body profoundly disrespectful of one"s parents. Appropriating Confucianism as dominant discourse that justifies its control over public cultures, the government similarly frowns upon tattoos which are associated by most people with gangsters and members of the mafia. Tattoos on entertainers and soccer players are blurred on TV, so that their young fans will not think of doing the same (Quackenbush and Chen, 2018;Rick, 2018). The stickers are thus given multiple meanings: First, they are a symbolic tool to vent public anger at the injection of Confucianist norms by the state discourse into personal lives; second, they provide the opportunity to get a tattoo, have fun, wash it off, and go back to their normal life without any real danger, such as getting caught and disciplined at school; third, using the cute Peppa Pig in a tattoo intended to show defiance makes the mockery even more pronounced. Such a tactic of resistance by using the body as a weapon is clever, because it does not create true, lasting confrontation, but it is a measure of how the subculturists are sick and tired of the performative power of the state discourse over the Chinese body. This is illustrated by one interviewee who had used the sticker: "When you use cute things to express rage, it creates something incredibly powerful. When something as harmless as Peppa Pig becomes a symbol of resistance, it"s not difficult to understand that people have had it up to here with this oppressive society. If there were no Peppa Pig, there would be Peppa Cow, Peppa Sheep." The Peppa Pig culture has become characteristic of the online resistance that uses the body as a medium. Following the stickers, countless Peppa outfits and accessories were made and sold to meet the growing demand from Chinese urbanites. At the same time, however, they have not bothered to form any particular offline groups for real-life political causes. One interviewee argues, "People"s love of Peppa Pig is essentially still an act of consumption." And another told us, "The main reason people like wearing Peppa Pig clothes is that she has a funny shape. She is a pig who looks like a blow dryer." Seen this way, the Peppa Pig culture differs in nature from the other two discussed in this paper-it is more postmodern and more about emotional catharsis, a tool for its practitioners to tease the Party-state with. In other words, despite the Peppa fans" disgruntlement with both the Chinese state and the ubiquitous Confucian creeds intruding on every aspect of their life, they are not interested in overthrowing them. This is because they are the beneficiaries of this society in whose stability they have a stake. The first and foremost reason behind their fondness of Peppa Pig lies in their pursuit of an individualized aesthetic pleasure, while political expression has never been their main aim.
None of this, however, prevented the Chinese government from launching a nationwide crackdown on all re-created Peppa Pig works in May 2018. The staunchly pro-government and nationalistic Chinese newspaper Global Times warns in its report on the purge that the shehuiren label runs counter to mainstream values, a bad influence on the young (Qin, 2018). This confirms what King et al. (2013) describe as the indiscriminate, thus least costly, approach the Chinese censors take in suppressing speech, deleting anything that could lead to activism offline regardless of its content. The arbitrariness of the crackdown also serves as a clear sign that the censorship regime is not cracking up despite the various cultures of resistance challenging it.
The Peppa Pig culture is in many ways the latest variation on the tradition of "limited resistance" by the highly consumerist Chinese megacity dweller in the Internet age. They usually repurpose imported foreign cultural creations by giving them new meanings in the Chinese context, so as to vent their frustration and anger through sarcasm or irony (Chang and Ren, 2016). In a way, this type of "resistance" essentially serves as the safety valve of society. This distinction was sharply drawn by an interviewee: "Peppa Pig cannot be even mentioned next to moha. They are vastly different in meaning, significance and definitely value." This is a clear demonstration of the political resistance of Chinese online subcultures gradually deteriorates under the persistent pressure of state discourse.

DISCUSSION
This paper adopts the critical discourse analysis in combination with in-depth interviews as it examines the three representative cases of online cultural resistance among Chinese netizens starting from 2009-the grass mud horse, moha, and Peppa Pig. These cases can hopefully help us define the characteristics of the online subcultural resistance in relation to the broader mainstream political culture in China.
To Chinese Internet subculturists, first of all, there is a clear "villain": the suppression of speech and censorship perpetrated by the Communist Party. The Internet is first and foremost a tool for the subcultural practitioners to sidestep, taunt and even (partially) wreck the censorship regime. This explains the (inevitable) common tactics among these cultures of using prolific linguistic or semiotic weapons to take on the authorities where the rebels revel in the highly contextual and ideographic nature of the Chinese language by creating a copious amount of homonyms and neologisms that contribute to an ever growing pool of online cultural resources that seem harmless or gibberish to the uninitiated. These features of the Chinese language fundamentally shape the form of Chinese online resistance. Major western languages are inflectional, which rely on sentences formed with strict grammatical rules and on established words made up by letters from a finite alphabet. In contrast, Chinese is analytical, its words and phrases composed of characters that number in the thousands. Each character denotes a range of sometimes wildly different meanings, and can only be "pinned down" when it is used in combination with one or more others. As a result, Chinese is highly dependent on context without which there often can be no definitive interpretation. For example, "Tibet" is an established English word that keeps its meaning no matter what situation it is in, but in Chinese, the word is composed of two characters xi (西) and zang (藏). Xi by itself has a relatively stable meaning as "west/western," while zang is a typical polyphonic and polysemic character that can mean either "conceal/hide" or "treasure/storage." Only when these two characters come together with xi before zang can the word mean Tibet, an ethnic region in China troubled by a separatist movement. But when zang is joined by other characters, different meanings may emerge, such as guan cang (馆 藏, literally "collections at a library"; the character is pronounced cang here). Because of this unique linguistic feature, it is extremely difficult to completely censor a character. The state may want to censor xi zang altogether to prevent people from discussing Tibetan independence, but neither xi nor zang can be scrubbed without wreaking havoc on the language-they are needed to combine with many other characters to function as other words. This creates ample discursive space for the subculturists who have managed to express themselves in a variety of ingenious ways, including abbreviations, hybrids and Latinizations, without raising red flags with the censors. Put in another way, the filters can remove a character or a word but never the contextual meaning behind it. This is why the numerous campaigns to "clean up the Internet" have never succeeded in eradicating "unwelcome" online language which has survived and prospered on abundant homophony in countless local languages and dialects. This ensures the longevity of these cultures, but as they spread wide, more and more "outsiders" join the ranks of cultural producers and consumers. Unlike the original members, these newcomers display weaker political interests and stronger preferences for personal pleasure, which in the long run will unavoidably deradicalize the resistance, turning it into just another generic pleasureseeking culture.
Also worth noting is that the disparate strategies of these cultures nevertheless all converge on a deeper level in challenging centuries-old Confucian traditions (beyond merely defying the specific policies and regimes in China today). As mentioned above, after the events of 1989 made the Communist leadership realize that Communism as a "semi-religion" to reaffirm and consolidate the legitimacy of one-party rule no longer worked, they resorted to Confucianism that has a much firmer base historically and culturally among the people and built an entire regime of governance that fuses economic reform and cultural conservatism. Therefore, the anti-Confucian acts and expressions of Chinese subculturists are not only a reaction to their traditional cultural heritage, but also a modern form of political resistance against authoritarianism. The interviewees clearly recognize the state"s manipulation and appropriation of the Confucianist discourse, one of whom said, "I feel there"s a close link between the government crackdown on speech and its aggressive promotion of traditional values…Maybe because freedom of speech is a modern value you can"t openly denounce, so the government must use other means to control it, like admonishing all of us to "follow the rules."" More specifically, the grass mud horse is a deliberate exercise in vulgarity mocking the principles of decorum and order in the Chinese language. Moha fans go beyond their station as powerless subjects to attempt to "rewrite" mainstream history. And Peppa Pig rebels symbolically damage their body to scoff at antiquated Confucian dogma. These strategies clearly demonstrate a collective awareness among Chinese Internet users of the Partystate"s manipulation of Confucian ethics to legitimize its repressive policies. As one interviewee put it, "The most powerful word in the grass mud horse culture is actually hexie [harmony/river crab]. What is harmony? It"s a crab brandishing its claws and walking sideways, also meaning "being a bully" in Chinese. A society that respects the value of each individual does not need harmony, but freedom." Lastly, as untenable as it is to call the three cases "history" in the strict sense, we are able to look back on this past decade and see a gradual decline in online resistance. If, compared with the barbed insolence of the grass mud horse, moha is already tame and covert, then Peppa Pig can at most be charitably described as resistance in name only. This observation deserves a separate paper for a thorough exposition, but it is roughly due to the following reasons. This decade has seen the space of homophony-and neologism-based online resistance increasingly squeezed by the sophisticated filtering technology the Communist Party has developed and the exacting decrees of self-censorship it has issued to Internet companies (Economy 2018). In the meantime, the Chinese government has been actively encouraging the merging of IT corporations, which has resulted in a digital oligarchy that has made it much easier than ten years ago for state-capital collusion, effectively shrinking the virtual space for dissident cultural forms. Broadly speaking, even though China"s online subcultures of resistance are incomparable and fascinating (provided that one speaks Chinese and understands the culture), current conditions make them unable or unwilling to exert meaningful influence on the dominant political culture.
Indeed, the interviews have revealed a lack of clear political ideals among the earnest fans of these cultures who have not shown any interest or motivation to form political entities in the real world. They have never developed a firm, coherent political position, or considered toppling the political establishment. Seeking emotional catharsis in specific contexts, the postsubcultural expressions through sarcasm, mockery or parody are quickly produced and disseminated in the window between the birth of a new technology, such as microblogging, collaborative encyclopedia, short video apps, etc., and the development of new filtering tools by the authorities to tame it, and after the purge, they continue to circulate as symbols and images across platforms and gradually deradicalize down to a generic online culture that is only moderately disobedient.
We have also discovered that there is a cynical attitude towards censorship and the Communist rule that drives these subcultural practitioners. The pleasure they derive from producing and consuming online subcultures is certainly political, yet it is a passive-aggressive, even escapist, kind of politics. This nihilistic inclination has given birth to a semiotic guerrilla that crops up here and there and can never be completely stamped out. "A single spark can start a prairie fire," (in the words of Mao Zedong), but more often the "sub" in China"s Internet subculture is gradually watered down as more people join in. This may hint at a common pathway of evolution of online subcultures in authoritarian countries, if we can expand our research to include more countries with similar political contexts. Therefore, this research may enrich our understanding of subcultures in the digital age by theorizing the technocracies of the authoritarian political system, and the manners in which subcultural practitioners negotiate with the state censorship through highly contextualized, nonconfrontational tactics. But questions remain. Is this "fate" determined by China"s cultural realities? Are there other unknown social factors at play here? This calls for further academic research.