Trigger mechanism centralized but discursive frame fragmented: China as a case for studying populism at the grassroots level in the social media age

Abstract

ABSTRACT While most research focuses on top-down populism practiced by political actors in democratic countries, we paid attention to populist phenomena at the grassroots level in an authoritarian context. Specifically, we proposed a perspective of investigating populist discourse embedded in public opinion and adopted a fine-grained discursive frame approach to study Chinese online populism. Using large-scale social media data around trending events and employing cutting-edge computational semantic analysis methods, we discovered that economic anxiety is central to the trigger mechanism of Chinese online populism, and the specific populist discourse is fragmented in terms of ideological resources, cultural toolboxes, and semantic structure. This study not only provides a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary Chinese populism phenomena, but it also contributes to global populism research by providing valuable empirical evidence in authoritarian contexts and broadening the theoretical perspective of studying populism at the grassroots level.