The Politics of Naming: The Online Carnival in China

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the carnival aspects of Chinese Internet culture, but it goes further by suggesting that the productiveness of the online carnival leads to the politics of naming in China’s specific context. This article illustrates the questions of how Chinese Internet users name themselves diaosi (“losers”) to separate and distance themselves from the governing power, how they identify the Zhao (“elites”) to form an internal antagonistic frontier in the “us vs. them” context, and how the diaosi are “floating” and appropriated as xiaofenhong (“little pinkos”) to identify the external enemy rather than the rulers inside. This kind of online carnival is not merely a cultural issue, but is also a political and governing theme that has its roots and routes in contemporary China’s governing rationality. KEYWORDS: Bakhtin, carnival, diaosi, Internet, naming.