The 5th Chinese blogger conference took place last weekend in a rural county Lianzhou in northern part of Guangdong province. Despite the inconvenient traffic, there were around 150 participants from China and overseas attended the conference.
This year the slogan of the annual conference is “Micro power and a broader world”. We want to look into various tools and channels of micro information sharing and its implication towards social progress, cooperation and people's life. No matter whether it is a meme, a photo or a postcard, they have the potential in changing our society. Not to mention the fact that the space generated by the tools opens up millions of possibilities open up our horizon.
Every single person has to bear one's responsibility and such sense of responsibility is micro power. The meaning of micro refers to every single Chinese citizen, I have called them “big people” in the previous section. The meaning of power refers to action that brings change to the world.
The word micro can also refer to daily micro politics. We have macro and micro politics. Macro is structural while micro is daily politics. Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrad wrote a book titled as “Antipolitics” in 1982. The book has many ideas that elaborated by others. Ideas such as “politics of anti-politics”, “power of the powerless”, “originality of citizen” are Václav Havel's favorite terms. When the power of authoritarianism is omnipresent, its termination has to come from the realization of people's autonomy and initiation in daily life. When the authoritarian system invades people's living domain, people's daily act can also resist against such control. Cui Weiping, the Chinese translator of Vaclav Havel's writings, pointed out that “the politics of antipolitics” is not to struggle for political power, it is not to produce a set of agenda to replace another set of agenda, and it does not attempt to solve the problem via political means (replacing leaders or power bloc). On the other hand, “antipolitics” operates in the level of daily life. In other words, the self-governance of an individual. That's why, when we address the issue of the development of Internet public sphere, we have to emphasize the “originality of citizen”. Every individual can take initiation where ever they want. This is how I understand micro power.
Why micro power is so important? In the past, whenever a few action oriented people acted with the passive masses, the results were depressing. The passionate activists could not understand why the masses did not show enough concern and enthusiasm while the masses could not understand why the fanatic activists could not just shut up. Today, activists should facilitate action and allow people who are not deeply involved in campaign and movement to participate. Their acts will be very powerful once they are aggregated together. For example, a piece of postcard can turn into a powerful scream when hundreds and thousands of them are mailed to the same destination.
It requires independent thinking for realizing micro power. This society has distorted our value. In this country, the definition of being success is to get as much money as possible and become wealthy. As a result, the society has kept lowering its baseline of social conscience and morality. Too many people are unaware of the need to think independently. Of course, our material well being and education are much better when compared to 60 years ago, but our ability to think independently remains more or less the same. Hence, our responsibility to our society and history in the future 50 or 100 years is to act as an individual and create a trend by practicing our micro power. Here I would like to quote Ai Weiwei's words: “The possibility for this world to change relies on every individual's commitment to undertake their responsibility, or else the world will never be changed.”
The idea of “Micro power and a boarder world” is similar to Isaac Mao's theory.
In the Internet era, people have more opportunities to share whenever they want. “Cloud Intelligence” happens when people continuously share their ideas and opinions that they agree with.
When a person shares an idea with others, other people will pick that up and continue to forward that idea to others, so on and so forth. Such kind of continuous sharing would eventually realize the will of these people. The process is like water drops coming together to form cloud. Isaac Mao compares individual to a drop of water and when individual keeps sharing the ideas that they agree with, these people would come together and turn into a power that can change government policy and social order.
In June this year, netizen Guo Baofeng was detained by Fuzhou police because he spread information regarding Yan Xiaoling's unnatural death. Other netizens took action by sending postcards to the detention center where Guo Baofeng was held. Each postcard was marked with a sentence: “mother is calling you home for dinner”. These postcards were sent from all across the country and eventually Guo was released.
A piece of postcard has eventually led to the release of Guo from the detention center. It is an example of “micro-power” creating a new “world”. It also manifests the power of “cloud intelligence”.
We don't need swords and guns to transform our society. We should not under estimate micro power. The essence of micro power is to call upon citizen's awareness so that they would take up their responsibility and fill up their lives with meaning. Through aggregation of people's will, micro power can bring progress to the society. Although there is a lot of obstacles for the development of civil society in China, when people's will is pointing towards the same direction, neither the power bloc nor powerful individuals could stop the momentum. On the contrary, they have to follow the trend and join us. Micro power is people's power!