#michael dutton

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Yikarai

Art for Monster Manual II 3E

Art by Michael Dutton

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“Contrary to most Western accounts of Chinese censorship as crude and unsuccessful attempts to ban dissent, their [Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts] studies show that the Chinese censors are less concerned about dissent than about blogs leading to potential collective street-level action. Blogs and sites that attract large numbers of hits and are deemed to have a potential for collective social action are subject to censorship and this is irrespective of whether such blogs foster or fight with the Communist Party.

Chinese government censors, they note, redact pro-government posts and anti-government posts, for their aim is not to stifle criticism but to halt internet viral bursts that could lead to collective political action. To this end, the pro-government “50 cent army” (wumaodang 五毛党) bloggers are dispatched not to bombard viral sites with pro-government propaganda and thereby raise the degree of political intensity by heightening the friend-enemy antagonism, but rather to lure traffic away from such sites towards ones with less collective political action potential. In other words, the Chinese censorship strategy is built around halting the eruption of political intensities and not stamping out all criticism. Achieving this end involves, once again, channelling and harnessing affective flows, but unlike the Cultural Revolution, this time the focus is on de-intensification.”

-Michael Dutton, ‘Cultural Revolution as Method’