Among prominent currents of ideologies and practices in contemporary China, nationalism has been a perennial topic in both popular and scholarly discourses. As one of the latest additions to the existing body of literature, China's digital nationalism makes the effort to examine the subject in its most technologically advanced context-the Chinese Internet, examined in a variety of different forms in the book, ranging from search engines, hyperlinks, online encyclopedias, websites, and social media. The book casts the empirical boundary of Chinese nationalism, an often unrulily broad concept, in one of the most important yet tumultuous bilateral relationships China has with its neighboring country, Japan. And in this setting, the book further zeros in on two important historical events-the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and the recent territorial dispute over the Diaoyu Islands-to demonstrate how different forms of network communication influence nationalist discourse.With the goal clearly specified in its introduction chapter, the book spends the next eight chapters explicating digital discourse surrounding these two cases, first theoretically then empirically in different technological settings. Chapter 2 reviews the existing research on nationalism in contemporary Chinese studies. It proposes to understand the nation as "imagined" largely through communication practices. That is, the nation is defined by a diverse range of actors in the networks of national communities formed through discursive practices. Nationalism, then, becomes an emergent property of these networked activities.In the following chapters, the book goes on to provide a nuanced picture of how discourse on national history in relation to Japan is mediated in different forms of digital communication. Chapter 3 focuses on the search engines, the most common access to the online knowledge repertoire. It demonstrates that China's search engines, as those in other countries, reproduce many of the biases, not least through commercial imperatives and algorithmic operations. This leads to biased knowledge about Japan, therefore negatively affecting the construction of the Chinese nation. Chapter 4 examines networks made of websites connected by hyperlinks. The chapter concludes that the websites that deal with the Nanjing Massacre and the Diaoyu Islands dispute make only limited use of the web's interactive features. Consequently, the national online space built by the main players, including large corporations, state agencies, and Party institutions, primarily reflects the situation offline. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 turn the attention to the content of the digital discourses themselves. Chapters 5 and 6 cover discourse generated by online encyclopedias and other websites on the two cases respectively. Chapter 7 examines user-generated content in social media.Then Chapter 8 returns to conceptual discussion, which problematizes the popular framework of "authoritarian informationalism" in the study of digital politics in China. The author argues that these framewo...

On China's web, networked actors ranging from state agencies to private internet users engage in highly active online discourse. Yet as diverse as this discourse may be, political content remains highly regulated, particularly on issues that affect the legitimacy of the ruling Party. A prominent issue in this regard has been modern Chinese history, particularly the 'national humiliation' that Japan inflicted on China's populace during events like the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. This article asks how the discourse on this particular event is structured on China's web, and what such practices of digital 'remembering' can tell us about nationalism in the information age. Combining content analysis and digital tools, the article shows how the mass-media model that the Chinese authorities and various commercial actors apply to the web ultimately reproduces the very logic of 'imagined communities' that makes reconciliation of historical disputes in East Asia so protracted.

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In digital China, networked actors ranging from state agencies to private Internet users engage in highly active online discourse. Yet as diverse as this discourse may be, political content on China’s web remains highly regulated, particularly on issues affecting the legitimacy of the ruling party. A prominent issue in this regard has been the conflict-laden relationship with Japan. This article asks how Chinese websites shape online discourse on two Japan issues (the Nanjing Massacre and the East China Sea conflict), and what these sites can tell us about the leadership’s strategy for managing digital communication. Combining content analysis and digital tools, the article shows how the authorities apply a Leninist mass-communication logic to the web, treating websites not as spaces for networked social interaction but as authoritative information sources that broadcast approved content to a mass audience, which effectively brings digital media into the fold of China’s ‘traditional’ mass-media system.

This article explores how competing actors established, spread, and challenged visual representations of the Chinese nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. It asks: how do official gatekeepers of meaning in China imbue their visual construction of a crisis-hit nation with pathos?; and what happens when their critics utilize the resulting repertoire of visual cues for their own ends? To answer these questions, the article first examines the visual libraries of nationalism and national crisis from which Chinese propaganda drew during the COVID-19 outbreak. It then analyses the struggles that ensued over such representations, specifically the use of national flags and the sentiments they elicit. The analysis traces representations of the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from an initial satirical portrayal in a Danish broadsheet to the angry Chinese backlashes that followed on social media, and it shows how the tensions over such portrayals became part of a meme war over the sovereignty of Hong Kong. The analysis shows how representations of the nation can become a matter of existential anxieties during a time of crisis, especially in highly networked communication environments where authoritative official actors and their supporters are no longer in control of the symbols they established as part of their ‘emotional governance’.