The Discursive Construction of Chinese Nationalism in Online Communities

• In Event: Innovations and Applications in Qualitative Content Analysis

Abstract

Chinese nationalism has been widely explored by scholars for good reason. With the advent of the information age, people gradually gave up taking up the street and begun to occupy the social media to realize their political goals. Internet became the main battlefield of Chinese nationalism shortly. Yet little is known about those “cybernationalists” and their expressive forms in different social situations. This study therefore shifts the gaze from the inquiry about “what Chinese nationalism is” to the exploration that social characters or figures (e.g., cybernationalists) and their qualities are enregistered in forms of talk and how netizens rejected or accepted the personae predefined for them. By examining the uptakes of “Little Pink” (xiao fenhong) [小粉紅] and narratives of the Kimchi incident on Douban, a social media website of China, I contribute to the scholarly discussion a case which suggests that today’s Chinese nationalism is more recounted as continuous interactions among those engaging each other on the digital sites than a unidimensional relationship between Chinese people and the Party.

Author

• Wenmiao Wu