China's Digital Nationalism

Abstract

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...

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