MCLC: cyberpolitics in China (3)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <anne at chinadigitaltimes.net>
Subject: cyberpolitics in China (3)
***********************************************************

Thanks to the MCLC member who sent the Cenci essay around last week. We've
now posted a full translation at China Digital Times.

Anne

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Source: China Digital Times (7/23/14):
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/07/eulogy-cenci-journalism-project/

A Eulogy for the Cenci Journalism Project

Since 2011, the Cenci Journalism Project has been “reporting another
dimension of the world,” allowing Chinese-speakers to access diverse
global coverage of marginalized topics through translation. Earlier this
month, the Cenci Project’s website became blocked by the Great Firewall.
In a lengthy (and now inaccessible) WeChat post immediately following the
website’s blocking, project founder Kang Xia described his experience
building up the nonprofit, his pain in watching its harmonization, and his
thanks to the countless volunteers that helped him realize his goal
[Chinese]:

From now on, there is no Cenci Journalism Project.

At 20:00 on July 14, I was chatting idly with friends, with my “battery
killer” of an iPhone charging on the side. Sharp pain from my freshly
removed teeth made me grimace as I talked. It couldn’t be any worse, I
thought.

YES, IT COULD.

When my phone was fully charged, I turned it on. I had 400 unread messages
in WeChat, as usual. Holding my swollen cheek with one hand, I deleted all
the unread group messages with the other. Huh? Someone asked me why they
could no longer visit the Weibo page of the Cenci Project.

Probably it had been shut down, damn it. I then asked my Weibo friends
what was happening and how long the shutdown would last. “No big deal,” I
typed in the Cenci Project’s WeChat, hoping to first calm everyone down,
and then see what solutions we had.

Before I could finish sending the message, I received a phone call from
Yang Chu and Zhuo Xing, “Where are you? Are you safe? What happened? Why
was your phone switched off?!”

Half an hour later, I rushed back to my home in Shuangjing by taxi. Feng
Xiao, Yang Chu and Zhuo Xing were all there. In the hour my phone was
switched off charging, Cenci Project’s Weibo had been shut down, as had
its WeChat and Douban accounts. Even our many QQ groups for internal
communication had vanished without trace.

Perhaps these friends of mine thought that I’d also vanished altogether.

I made several phone calls trying to negotiate a fix to the situation, got
some WeChat messages, and then I learned the reason [for the shutdown]. I
slumped onto the couch, realizing that the Cenci Project was finished.

On July 15, the domain name of Cenci Project (www.icenci.com
<http://www.icenci.com/>) was blocked by the Great Firewall—people could
no longer visit the site without without breaching the Wall. My personal
Weibo was also shut down, @康夏Eric and his more than 2000 posts also
vanished. All volunteers with a “Cenci Project” suffix had their Weibo
usernames turned into random numbers.

A friend sent me an email marked “read and delete,” an order to delete
some reposted article. Then, Cenci Project’s app and its search results on
Baidu, as well as every single interview of mine, would vanish from the
world without a trace, like they’d never existed.

My teeth were killing me. With my back bent, I replied to every WeChat
stream telling people to keep calm. I squeezed the fingers of my right
hand with all the strength of my left—I do this every time I have a dental
surgery or have to give a speech. It felt like all my friends had died. I
wanted to write 1000 obituaries, but I knew that obituaries wouldn’t bring
them back.

When you are a little sad, you binge eat; when you are sadder, you cry;
when you can’t endure the hopelessness, you scream, smash bowls and
furniture; then the level of hopelessness deepens more, and more…

I didn’t want to eat or cry. I didn’t wish to talk. I walked around the
room, again and again. I turned on my computer. The Weibo page could not
be visited. What used to be my homepage, icenci.com <http://icenci.com/>,
had become “this page cannot be displayed.” I refreshed the page, again
and again. It went on like this for an hour.

Friends, elders, teachers, readers, and some people I barely even knew
were asking me on WeChat, “what happened to the Cenci Project?” I didn’t
want to reply, fearing that while a bloated answer would disappoint
others, a real answer would only embarrass me. So I just pretended not to
see the question.

When you have devoted so much to one thing, it becomes your very core.
From 2011 until now, I graduated from college, studied abroad, returned
China to look for a job, interned, worked, quit, and then re-applied to
school. In these many years, I had tried to get up at 7 am everyday, go
for a jog, read for an hour in the evening, look over one page of The
Encyclopaedia Britannica before bed, contact a long-lost friend every
midday—not a single one of these things had I managed to carry on. Most of
them I abandoned halfway, but the Cenci Project was the only one I’d ever
stuck to.

In August 2011, as I was preparing the Cenci Project, I was about to
graduate. But my GPA was at stake, and I needed good grades for my study
abroad application. Time was running out. In December 2011, Cenci Project
was losing members, and internal conflict was fierce. No one wanted to do
trivial tasks like manage Weibo posts. We also barely had any followers,
which was disappointing.

A June 2012 report in Beijing Weekly introduced Cenci Project to a wider
audience. More and more people thought that Cenci’s translations were
pretty much the same as content in Reference News. In October 2012, while
I was in Britain, the organizational structure of Cenci volunteers broke
at the upper-middle level, and our content frequency became unstable.
Often times there were only one or two new articles each week.

In July 2013, I started my first job. The work was abundant and trivial.
As a journalist, the amount of energy I spent on an article depended
entirely on my self-discipline. I scheduled over eight hours for work
everyday, and the rest of my time I gave to the Cenci Project. I was in
HR, a designer, in public relations, an event planner, an editor, a
journalist, and a copywriter. It was common for me to stay up as late as 3
or 4 a.m.; Red Bull became my life elixir. In April 2014, two headhunters
talked to me individually about investing in the Cenci Project.
Commercializing would change the original spirit of volunteerism and our
ambitions to provide alternative reporting, and that spirit and focus on
marginalized groups were at the core of the Cenci Project. However, at the
time everyone around me was talking about entrepreneurship. Attracting
investment sounded right, since glory and superiority also had to be
achieved.

In June 2011, after being “invited to tea” countless times over the Cenci
Project, I was fed up. I thought the whole “reporting another dimension of
the world” thing had turned me into the idealist book publisher in Too
Loud a Solitude, who was building a house with his unrealistic fantasies.
The house had candy, cheese, crackers, jelly—all these things. However, in
reality, he had nothing but a bottle of spoiled milk.

Despite this, all through August 2011, December 2011, June 2012, October
2012, July 2013, May 2014, and June 2014, I had never once thought to back
off, to give up, to change or to stop. Not even once.

This year in early July, Cenci volunteers in Beijing had a big offline
party. The first since the revision of the website, and, unexpectedly, the
last. There were over 30 volunteers, and we had vodka, tequila, and beer.
Seeing each other face-to-face for the first time was a little
embarrassing. I drank myself  into a total, record-setting blackout. After
I came to the next day, I heard I’d acted crazy, holding other people
firmly and not letting them leave, laughing and crying at the same time.

I don’t like alcohol. I don’t like dinner parties, chitchat, or workplace
gossip. But I like who I was on that day, even though I had a headache for
two days from the hangover, sent lots of embarrassing WeChats to my
elders, and my intoxication was caught on videotape by the volunteers.

That day, all I wanted to do was say “thank you.” But, I thought “thank
you” seemed too easy, and I couldn’t think of any alternative. So I drank
till I passed out. The “thank you” was for those who devoted far more time
than expected from a volunteer, and did all sorts of work for the Cenci
Project: Chen Nan, Katara, Fang Yuan, Wang Fan, Wang Dengfeng, Alyssa, Yu
Benyi, my classmate Qin, Yang Zhenjing, Yu Yichun, Zhong Ping, Liu
Mingzhu, Zhao Yating, Hao Zhongya, Wang Mei, Lai Wei, Feng Shuai, Zhou
Weile, Wu Weichen, Jin Xianan, Li Xiaoyuan, He Yining, Jennifer, Zhou Hao,
Gao Honghao, Lou Qiqin, Hong Tao, Han Guimeng, Hong Tu, Liu Zhuoya, Jiang
Wan, Mo Pianxiao, Wang Shijing, Yue Xiaoya, Lin Rong, Ma Suping, Chunyu
Bingzhai, Zhou Nanjun, He Yaqing, Zheng Yao, Zhou Zidong, Guan Fanfu;
those journalists who reported and promoted the Cenci Project: Xu Bei,
Wang Mengying, Zhou Xinyuan; those readers who spent RMB to buy our poorly
printed postcards, just to give us their warmhearted support; and those
seniors and friends from the Pulitzer Center, the U.S.-China Dialogue,
WCS, Century Weekly, Phoenix Weekly, ThePaper.cn, Asian Business Leaders,
etc, who pushed for cooperation with the Cenci Project. You all made the
Cenci Project shine when it was alive.

After the revision of Cenci’s website this year, I wrote the article
“Together, We Report Another Dimension of the World.” In it, I said “my
biggest ambition is that Cenci Project can last forever.” At the time, I
thought I was quite pessimistic.

In Life of Caesar by Plutarch, Caesar finally decides to meet with the
entire Roman Senate. With emotion, Plutarch remarks, “Fate, however, seems
to be not so much unexpected as unavoidable.”

See, even Caesar is no exception—everything is doomed. Just like us—we met
each other, and did this one thing together with simple and candid hearts,
regardless of the cost or other people’s judgement. We didn’t earn a penny
in this. We didn’t change the world. We didn’t even change ourselves. And
shortly afterward, people will forget all about it.

I do not have complaints or resentment about his. The Cenci Project will
not return. There won’t be another Cenci Project either. That’s it.

The language preparation for the [study abroad] application is over. Now I
need to choose my major. I asked my friend Steph, “What if I go study
accounting or finance?” She giggled for a second, then she raised her
eyebrows when she realized I was actually serious. She looked at me
incredulously and shook her head: “Kang Xia, that is so not you.”

I quoted Wilde on my blog: “A Map of the world that does not include
Utopia is not worth looking at.” On the cover of the book she [Steph] gave
to me, she quoted one of my favorite lines from Dead Poets Society:
“Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and
necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are
what we stay alive for.”

When you reach a dead end, dressed in tatters, wandering alone on an empty
street, you will suddenly realize that if Fabre didn’t accomplish
Souvenirs Entomologiques, if Van Gogh didn’t paint sunflowers, if Gu Cheng
didn’t publish his poetry, and if Charles Strickland didn’t appear as the
protagonist in The Moon and Sixpence, they would have all turned into a
piece of transparent wallpaper.

The wallpaper can’t speak out. No one knows of it’s pain, filth,
shabbiness, or fading but the wallpaper itself. [Chinese source]

Translation by Mengyu Dong.