Crisis moments like the 2019 Hong Kong protests or the COVID-19 pandemic have shone a spotlight on how divided political opinions are across the Chinese-speaking world, often along fault lines created by tribalist and nationalist attitudes. These attitudes are shaped by official propaganda, but they also interact in complicated ways with the widespread adoption of internet technologies, and especially of mobile and interactive ‘web 2.0’ technologies since the start of the 21st century. Advances in ICT have augmented and accelerated human interactions, included group sentiments, ideologies, and political programmes. Community attachment is today adopted, filtered, transformed, enhanced, and accelerated through digital networks, whether in seemingly banal cases such as fandom practices or in more overtly political contexts such as nationalist agitation. As such processes unfold, the state’s techno-nationalist politics, the commercial rationale of platform providers, and the technical affordances of specific digital designs all conspire to drive viral interactions on China’s internet, be it on social media apps like Sina Weibo or video-sharing platforms like Bilibili. Based on observations about recent developments in the Chinese-speaking world, Florian Schneider relates his earlier analyses of Chinese online nationalism vis-à-vis Japan to the post-pandemic era, asking: what happens to nationalism when it goes digital?
The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.
Event Speakers
Florian Schneider
Florian Schneider is Chair Professor of Modern China at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He is managing editor of 'Asiascape: Digital Asia', director of the Leiden Asia Centre, and the author of Staging China: the Politics of Mass Spectacle (LUP, 2019). His research interests include questions of governance and political communication in China.