National identity construction by Chinese youths in Tiananmen square: political pilgrimaging and geographic microblogging

Abstract

In China, youths actively transfer places of political pilgrimage to images on digital social media to perform their national identity construction. This paper seeks answers to two questions: How does a physical space, such as Tiananmen Square, influence the national identity construction of Chinese youths when they digitalize their experiences using the location-based services (LBS) of social media? What characterizes the interaction between youths as individuals and their institutionalized political pilgrimages? We collected 1,008 image-and-text and 147 video-and-text microblogs produced by Chinese youths in Tiananmen Square in 2019 to analyze their political pilgrimage experiences using multimodal discourse analysis and visual grammar theory. After conducting in-depth interviews with selected microbloggers for further verification, we found that national identity construction consisted of both emotional arousal and emotional repression. The tension between arousal and repression was prevalent during the flag-raising ceremony in Tiananmen Square, and the social outcomes of this tension led to the simultaneous strengthening and destabilization of the national identity. Additionally, the LBS function of social media converted traditional offline spatial practice rituals to digital opportunities through which Chinese youths enjoyed constructing their national identities with online viewers far from the physical location. This finding is significant in theorizing location-based identity construction in social media.