‘I’m Not an Alien. I’m a Digital Ethnographer’: Doing Online Research with China’s Social Media

Abstract

After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital ethnography became an important methodological tool for researchers. In my case, I shifted my research from China to digital China, and I engaged with China’s social media as my research field. But what are the challenges for an ethnographer in conducting research into China’s digital space and networks from afar? And how do China’s social media platforms mediate the formation of relationships with potential participants? Based on two years of online research, integrated with literature on autoethnography, China’s social media platforms, and performativity, this article describes China’s digital domain and explains how social media platforms mediate ethnographic research. Autoethnography facilitated this research on a critical notion of digital China in which institutional regulation contributes to the transformation and production of digital ethnography.

Global China and everyday mediation in the Global South: Selling Chinese fashion in Mozambique via WhatsApp

“…Miller and Wang (2021) agree that as online and offline worlds are closely interwoven nowadays, they have to be looked at together to allow for 'holistic contextualisation', as they call it: 'This creates both depth and breadth, allowing us to interpret the consequences of social media holistically in the context of all that we are learning about people's offline lives'. (Miller & Wang, 2021) Acknowledging the potential of anthropological approaches in media and communication studies (Miller & Wang, 2021), I combined in-person ethnographic fieldwork with online data collection (Kefala, 2023) to better understand the use of WhatsApp as a relational affordance in the context of the Chinese-Mozambican garment trade. The long-term relationships and trust I built up in the course of my fieldwork helped me to navigate and make sense of many different things.…”