Digital displacement: The spatialities of contentious politics in China's digital territory

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes digital displacement as both a way through which the digital, dynamic and fragile spatialities of contentious politics can be examined and as a geographic critique of censorship. Digital displacement, understood here as the act of removing users from the digital places and spaces they wish to remain in and use, often through the act of deletion, is conceptualised through the digital displacement of two contentious politica l groups that attempted to contest the forced eviction of migrants from Beijing in 2017; hashtag focused #BeijingSurgery# and instant messaging group using BeijingTogether. Explored through participant observation, interviews and playful digital exploration, this paper examine s the spatialities that made multiple digital displacements possible and the activist spatialit ie s that emerged during and post-displacement. In exploring this I develop a flexible vocabulary around digital place, space, scale, territory and mobility to analyse the practices of digita l displacement, to understand the socio-spatial positionality of activists involved in digita ll y centred contentious politics and to contextualize their territorial positionality within Chinese digital territory and global digital territories. Through the examination of #BeijingSurge r y# and BeijingTogether the article highlights: the importance of digital territorial positionality for both activists and the digital places and spaces used for contentious politics; that within systems of digital spatial governance deletion and displacement can be effective strategies of repressive governance with wide ranging displacement effects; and that while digital displacement is not necessarily the ending point of contentious politics the re-production of activist spatialities is more difficult when the authority being protested against governs the digital territory used for protest.This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as

Seeing Digital Asia Spatially: Vignettes of Digital Sociospatial Relations

“…This opening vignette shows a sophisticated understanding amongst young Chinese urbanites of the spatialities of China's digital landscape and the effects of the Chinese state's 'digital territorialisation project' (Möllers 2021), a process in which digital territory is produced. In this case, a Chinese digital territory is created in order to develop state sovereignty over digital relations (Davis 2020;Fang 2018;Morris 2022a). As Elden (2013Elden ( , 2017 and Li (2022) show, these developments highlight that territory is not a universal constant but, rather, something produced in specific contexts in ways that reflect the position of the institutions, humans, and non-humans involved in its production.…”

“…Therefore, in 2021 countries with over a third of the world's population were either permanently or regularly restricting the ways in which their citizens could access information and services hosted elsewhere in the world, creating both national and regional digital borders. Because of the emergence Morris Asiascape: Digital Asia 10 (2023) 30-41 of these new borders, during attempts to gain control over which spaces and information citizens can view, ideas related to 'digital territory' (Möllers 2021;Morris 2022a) and 'digital sovereignty' (Creemers 2020;Fang 2018;Pohle & Thiel 2020) will be central in ongoing research on Asia's digital relations, processes that do not only involve national borders (Chen & Yang 2022).…”

Care for Transactions

“…A third area for further engagement relates to digital geographies. These include concern for how the digital is remapping human and non‐human relations as well as digital maps themselves, with a growing interest in digital natures, digital ecologies, digital cities, digital geopolitics and even digital territory (Datta, 2018; Morris, 2022; Prebble et al, 2021; Searle et al, 2023; Smith et al, 2020; Woods, 2021; Zook & Graham, 2018). While smart urbanism and associated forms of platform capitalism continue to highlight the interdependencies of code/space, scholarship on digital geographies is also documenting spatial inequities within these interdependencies at multiple scales and in particular places, ranging from the platforms of online education and debt relations to the embodied experience of tech‐enabled home care (House‐Peters et al, 2019; Reid, 2022; Roos‐Breines et al, 2019: Sparke, 2017; Tan, 2022).…”

Spatial Governance in Beijing: Informality, Illegality and the Displacement of the “Low-end Population”

“…More recent examples include 3 Li, Song and Zhang 2018;Rudolph 2017. 4 Estimated figures calculated by late-2017 grassroots eviction-mapping projects involved in contentious politics, as discussed in Morris (2022). 5 Morris 2021.…”

“…4Estimated figures calculated by late-2017 grassroots eviction-mapping projects involved in contentious politics, as discussed in Morris (2022). …”