Relationships based on circles of friends or of strangers, mediated by social media, have featured prominently throughout this volume. Up to now, they have largely been treated as being in opposition to each other.
Indeed this is how they have been viewed in important anthropological accounts to date (as discussed in Chapter 4), and also sometimes how people in the town speak about strangers in comparison to ‘normal’ rela-tionships with their friends and families. However, taking these two sets of relations and considering what they mean as a whole, I argue, reveals that social relations in contemporary rural China are becoming more individualistic in nature as people seek to construct their own personal and selective spheres of relationships. In the following section I will show how relations with both circles of friends and strangers are forms of these more individualistic relations.
This finding partially corresponds with the work of Yan Yunxiang, who has argued that increasing individualisation in China combines with cultural democracy and the lack of a welfare state to create a diminished notion of individualism that is far more utilitarian and self-ish in nature than that seen in other modernising societies.1 This, he argues, accounts for the absence of trust and the competitive nature of Chinese society. While I think specific online relationships in Anshan Town are indicative of the increasing importance of individualism as people are able to personally structure their online relationships, I am less convinced that this can be attributed to individualism understood as extreme selfishness, resulting in ‘egotistic’ and ‘uncivil’ individuals.
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The evidence suggests not only a willingness to trust both friends and strangers, but also strong ideals surrounding the morality of social media use.2 As mentioned in Chapter 1, it is not that individuals have necessarily ‘lost’ their morals, it is simply that these morals have under-gone a change.3 In part this was shown by the way individuals attempted to balance the relationships between circles of friends and strangers within the same online space. I argue that although both sets of relation-ships are insular to varying degrees, it is through juxtaposing them that Anshan Town’s social media users can explore and navigate the mean-ing of moral change.
In the case of relations within circles of friends, many of the con-nections already possessed an inward- facing quality, as these non- kin friendships are based on familiarity. Chapter 2 outlined the importance of specific regimes of visibility afforded by social media platforms, which provide favourable conditions for sociality among circles of friends, rather than the wider internet. Chapter 3 examined the highly family- oriented and moralistic postings that indicate moral worth to one’s peers, confirming the significance of social media as a platform for interaction with a known circle of acquaintances. The clearest example came from Chapter 4, which demonstrated that friendship relations sus-tained on social media are based on the principle of commonality (tong) which has traditionally formed the basis for non- kin guanxi relations drawn from common class, home- town or work acquaintances.4 Taken as a whole, social media has allowed for a continuity of these relation-ships, which already represented somewhat closed and intimate groups.
However, in many ways social media has strengthened these groups and relations and led them to become more insular than before.
Examples can be seen in the classmate groups on QQ, which enabled groups to continue beyond the school walls, facilitating reunions after graduation (Chapter 4). Although the frequent use of avatars and aliases appeared to add a layer of invisibility, it actually increased intimacy by presuming familiarity among people already known to each other.
Chapter 5 showed how the practice of level accumulation on social media introduced elements of competition and hierarchy into these cir-cles of friends. The evidence presented suggests that relationships are in fact becoming intensified, but are also more individualistic as a result of social media.
On initial inspection, relations with strangers through social media seem to be the opposite of these familiar relationships, allowing people to connect with individuals located completely outside the bounds of traditional familiar relations. Chapter 4 showed how elementary and
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middle schoolchildren found it relatively easy to connect to and interact with strangers through the process of ‘messily adding’. Older university students from the town took this a stage further, using location- aware features on social media for the purposes of dating. On the one hand, these behaviours seem to be the antithesis of ‘traditional’ relations, for example by threatening the supposedly inviolable nature of monoga-mous marriage. Stranger relations thus represented a challenge to pop-ular discourse about the types of relationships felt to be permissible in social life, but also to foundational theories of social relations in China that have understood strangers as being the antithesis to relations based on kinship or familiarity.5
However, although relations with strangers may seem to be a rad-ical alternative form of sociality, which sees individuals break through the boundaries of traditional familiar relationships, they can be viewed as a move towards a more individualistic- oriented network, as individ-uals seek to exert greater control over their own social worlds. Many of the interactions that individuals pursue with strangers appeal precisely because they are free of mutual connections, providing relief from the constraints of familiar relationships that are governed by moral obli-gation and concern for reputation. Chapter 4 also described how indi-viduals may use encounters with strangers for anything from seeking romantic relations to talking about one’s problems, or sometimes simply relieving boredom. Therefore, although the numerous encounters with strangers that individuals undertake online are a form of exploration and a source of novelty, they are voluntary, reflecting an individual’s choice of who to befriend. In comparison, networks of obligation are determined by circumstance – epitomised by kinship or familiar non- kin relations.
As people turn inwards in their relationships, family relations in particular have been shown to sit uneasily within the environment of social media. Family connections are not completely absent from social media, but they certainly do not occupy a central position in the sociality on these platforms in the same way as familiar non- kin relations, such as classmates or work colleagues. Indeed, there are far fewer interactions between generations, and within marriage such use is discouraged. Instead, as Chapter 3 demonstrated, idealistic notions of family are strongly expressed in the form of baby photos, romantic memes focused on marriage and messages of adoration towards one’s parents – all of which are unlikely to actually be viewed by family mem-bers. Concern around social media use and its effect on the family is not entirely without basis. The turn towards sets of relationships dictated
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by individuals’ personal desires can represent a departure from, or even a threat to, relationships within the family, which assume each person occupies a fixed and indisputable position in a social hierarchy by vir-tue of their birth and gender.
Anshan Town users can juxtapose relations with friends against relations with strangers and this may be where the appeal of social media lies. I have demonstrated how both sets of relationships point towards an inward turn among Chinese social users, in which individ-uals are seeking to focus upon that set of social relations which increas-ingly derive from personal choice. However, this inward turn does not necessarily mean that individuals are becoming ‘less social’ or are losing the ability to communicate, as espoused by some scholars critical of the influence of social media.6 Instead it must be acknowledged that social media users are intentionally crafting an online environment where they seek intense forms of sociality, which also involves being able to contrast and move between the different experiences found in different forms of relations. Anshan Town’s social media users are intentionally using the shielded world of social media as a space where they can crea-tively bring these oppositions together, explore their contradictions and create their own intimate sphere of relations. In relation to individual-ism, this supports the idea of a more individual focus as they are choos-ing their own relationships and not just acceptchoos-ing the dictates of kinship, but, on the other hand, it is not making people more individualistic in the sense that they are becoming less social.
This inward turn in relations has important implications for how we understand the experience of everyday life in rural China. People are willing to think of themselves as part of an ‘imagined community’, as shown by the patriotic posts, and they use this as a basis of familiarity upon which they build relations with strangers. One of the key questions of this inward turn in relations is how it affects the way in which indi-viduals understand and come to moral decisions about the world they live in.