Social media on the picket line

Abstract

This article provides an overview of Chinese working-class social media, which has been used on the picket line for an entire decade since 2004. A variety of social media tools such as QQ, Weblog, online forum, vlog, Weibo, and WeChat have been added to the toolkit of working-class politics, creating an enlarged media ecology of resistance. Using Raymond Williams’ tripartite framework of the dominant, the residual, and the emergent, I submit that social media on the picket line is not a revolution in itself, but a tactical evolution of the residual and, more crucially, the emergent, within a much longer revolutionary tradition of the Chinese working class. Such a framework can and still needs to be further developed through the examination of labor movements in China as well as developing regions of the Global South, probably using worker-generated content (WGC) as one of its most promising analytical foci.