Chenyang Song : Political Participation and Popular Cultural Practices in China’s Social Media: A Digital Ethnography of New Generation Chinese Nationalist User Groups (Working Title)

Funding: Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes

First Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christoph Bareither
Second Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Alexandra Schwell (University of Klagenfurt)

In recent years, many countries in the West have been experiencing an apparent rise of populism and nationalism in their political landscape, both offline and online. This rise of populism-nationalism is often associated with digital media-induced emotionalization of political opinion-forming. Here, online popular cultural elements, such as memes, images, quotations from popular cultures, and emojis, also play an essential role. While this phenomenon is frequently occurring and well-known in western countries, it also affects – and this initially seems surprising from a European perspective – one of the fastest-growing nations in the world: China. Since 2015, a new Chinese cyber-nationalism wave, whose activists are labeled as “little Pinks” or “Fandom Girls”, has gained much attention. They are usually described as a group of young online nationalists with strong female-led and (fandom)pop-cultural characteristics and emotional discourse of irony/ridiculing and entertainment. This reveals an area of tension between a nationalist way of forming political opinions on the one hand, and their intertwining with popular culture-influenced communication on the other.

It is precisely this area of tension that this research project is interested in. How can it be that nationalist ideologies on the one hand and progressive, critically reflective popular cultures on the other merge here? What is specific about the identity ascriptions, self-images and national consciousness of the young generation of China's online nationalists? How does this generation understand the "other," what are their positions on territorial conflicts, how do they construct ideas of the Chinese nation? How are these images of self and other, as well as political imaginaries, expressed through concrete Internet practices? And how are they renegotiated through them? Through multi-sited online ethnography and mixed-method data analysis, this research aims to investigate the questions above with a specific focus on the interaction of the popular cultural practices and practices of political opinion-forming in the case of new Chinese online nationalists.

Curriculum Vitae: B.A. (2015) Germanic Language and Literature, Fuzhou University . M.A. (2017) Cultural Anthropology/Folklore, University of Muenster. Master Thesis about Chinese online nationalism on Weibo. Since 2020, PhD scholarship from Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.