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China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
This research examines how the Chinese government facilitated a political parade in both domestic social media, Sina Weibo, and an international social media, Facebook, to promote the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideology. In September 2017, posters about "Hong Kong Independence" were spread on the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, giving rise to heated debates between Hong Kong and mainland China students. Following reports of this event by the government’s social media accounts and comments by a cluster of officially entitled opinion leaders, a notable group of young protesters volunteered to defend the CCP and its core values on Facebook, which was ironically blocked by China’s Great Firewall. These protesters trolled the key figures’ social media accounts with a hybrid discourse that combined pop-culture genre and diplomatic rhetoric. In this research, I analyze the discourses used by the government’s Weibo accounts and those used by the nationalist protesters on Weibo and Facebook. I use crawling software to scrape posts from both platforms. Then, I analyze these posts by computer-assisted text analysis and aim to understand the discourses and the connection between official and unofficial social media users. I argue that this seemingly grassroots movement reflects the achievement of the CCP’s ideological work and online governance. By developing a complete set of official discourses of democracy and freedom, establish a well-connected cluster of official opinion leaders, and actively engage with the online sub-culture youth groups, the Chinese government successfully mobilized an ideological war cross borders through social media.
Muyang Li
University at Albany, State University of New York