The many identities of China are increasingly playing out their dramas first in the digital realm of cyberspace then in the more traditional media channels such as television and print newspapers – if the stories get that far. Some of the dramatis personae that Chinese are trying out include the gallant nationalist, who assassinates any suggestion that China is resuming its role as world leader; the lone rebel, who fights the government censors and the 50-cent bloggers using his blog as his sword and the proxy server as his shield; the Communist Party apparatchik – or technochik, as I prefer to call them – for whom control of perceptions and exercise of complete control over the society is paramount; and the wangbaixing , another term I’ve coined – that is, the average Zhang – or laobaixing, who simply wants to get on with his life and who uses the internet to play games and chat with family, friends and classmates, and – if he’s an average guy – check out the porn sites. (Lao means “old” and is indicative of the Old Hundred Names, which is what Chinese call themselves; wang means “net” and is used to connote the Internet). Indeed, the “Young Digital Mavens” survey published in November 2007 by IAC, an internet brands company, and JWT, an advertising agency, states “More than twice as many Chinese respondents agreed that “I have experimented with how I present myself online” (69 percent vs. 28 percent of Americans). And in fact, more than half the Chinese sample (51 percent) said they have adopted a completely different persona in some of their online interactions, compared with only 17 percent of Americans.”

Quixotic political winds, cultural shearing forces, rapid economic change, and pulverized social mores have made the internet the only safe place for Chinese to explore themselves as individuals. The wangbaixing in particular experiment with online personae – called avatars – the same way a debutante tries on wardrobes before her coming out to meet the public. Avatars, though, socialize, build entire families and homes and neighborhoods into which they can escape from the super-human stresses of keeping it all together in modernizing China. Occassionally, the virtual societies coalesce and rise up as Human Flesh Search Engines against which they define themselves and their value systems. Popular Human Flesh Searches involve corrupt government officials, individuals who run counter to nationalistic mythologies, and concubines of the rich or officious (though concubines seem to suffer a mix of hatred and envy from their tormentors). At every turn these groups and individuals ask the question, “Who am I now?” and wait for the response and the echo of the question. Perhaps because there is no fixed answer, they ask the question repeatedly until the powers that be consider asking too many questions of identity are unhealthy for a society with one party rule.

The most dramatic online performances, of course, are those that reach the threshold of the political, where the technochiks have drawn the boundaries of their own domain of control. Anyone – whether individual or mob – who crosses into that territory with any agenda other than the one technochiks have allowed, risks being filtered out of existence – literally.