“Loitering” with Unconcerned Clicks: Class Nature and Social Exclusion of Sina Weibo Users in Representing Chinese Migrant Workers

Abstract

Sina Weibo has a long history as an event-oriented social media platform that promotes public discussion on significant social affairs and gives voice to the bottom-class Chinese people who are usually ignored in mainstream media. However, such democratic potential of Sina Weibo has also inherited huge limitations and resulted in new conflicts and controversies with the rapid evolution of social media ecology and transformation in social structure and power relations during the past two decades in China. Taking what I propose as the "U.A.D.&S. Mutual Shaping" approach, and centering on a "Class as Root" concept, the dissertation examines user's deployment of the single platform Chinese Sina Weibo and the specific factors and conditions that affect Sina Weibo activism in representing the voice of the lower-income working class Chinese people, based on the exclusive and (or) inclusive nature of Sina Weibo and the class limitations of major and the lower-income working class Sina Weibo users. Through discourse analysis of Sina Weibo controversies following two latest Chinese migrant worker related incidents, as well as interviews with 12 migrant worker Sina Weibo posters, the dissertation demonstrates that the democratic effectiveness of Sina Weibo activism in representing the Chinese migrant workers is highly dependent on the class nature and limitations of major Weibo users, the migrant worker Weibo users, as well as various Weibo publics, communities, and spaces. Such class nature and class limitation are based on users' socio-economic status and identity consciousness that shape their online discourse and behavior, as well as the commercial companies' and users' deployment of the increasingly unbalanced commercial and entertaining incentives and affordances applied to Sina Weibo features. The exclusionary class nature of Sina Weibo users and the increasingly profit-driven and pro-capitalist nature of various Sina Weibo spheres are among the most significant challenges for the lower-income working class to gain traction in discourse that represents their interests, which may hinder Sina Weibo's democratic effectiveness in this aspect.