Chinese Netizens Research Articles

Who is our friend and who is our enemy? The enregisterment of tribalising digital discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract This study demonstrates how tribalism and nationalism, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have given rise to the enregisterment of a cultural discursive practice – dui (怼) – on Chinese social media. Based on a sample of social media posts collected through a combination of ‘noticing’ and systematic data scanning and archiving over a month, our analysis shows that dui shifted from a discursive practice of friendly teasing, a specific function that underpinned its rise of popularity prior to the onset of the pandemic, to an oppositional discursive practice characterised by wrangling, words of violence and a conversationalised journalistic discourse of refuting. We argue that COVID-19 has heightened Chinese netizens’ sensitivities towards China’s perceived friends and enemies. This politicisation, together with the associated traditional discourses of national pride and humiliation, contributed to the emergence of dui as a tribalising discourse, which in turn has further destabilised and polarised the user community on Chinese social media and beyond. The study illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of the enregisterment of discursive practices and social relationships and the importance of bringing together discourse analytical and socio-cultural perspectives in analytical terms.

“We Chinese just want meat!” An analysis of Chinese netizens’ reactions to vegetarian advocacy

The shift to a vegetarian diet has multiple benefits, including the promotion of public health, sustainability, and animal welfare. Despite these advantages, vegetarian food choices often provoke controversy, particularly on social media platforms. On International Vegetarian Day 2021, renowned Chinese actress Zhang Jingchu endorsed a documentary titled “Vegetarian” on Weibo, igniting widespread discussion among Chinese netizens. Considering China’s deep cultural and practical roots in vegetarianism, the predominantly negative response to the documentary was surprising. This study employs frame analysis to dissect the portrayal of vegetarianism in the documentary, utilizing topic modeling based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation and sentiment analysis to examine over 26,000 related comments. Our findings indicate that the documentary predominantly utilizes health and ethical frames to represent vegetarianism, with a greater emphasis on ethical considerations. Topic modeling of the comments uncovered 14 topics that reflect netizens’ dissatisfaction with various facets of the vegetarian advocacy presented in the documentary. Moreover, the comments reveal three primary strategies netizens use to justify meat consumption and alleviate cognitive dissonance: rationalization of meat eating, skepticism towards vegetarianism, and resistance to the advocacy message of “Vegetarian”. The results imply that for vegetarian advocacy to be more effective, it should align with local everyday concerns, food culture, and the current stage of social development.

Responses to self-praise on Chinese social media

Self-praise is a very common practice on social media and has attracted researchers’ attention in recent years. In contrast, how interlocutors respond to other netizens’ self-praise on social media has rarely been explored. This study investigates internet users’ responses to online self-praise by examining a dataset of 569 netizens’ self-praise responses to 75 self-praising microblogs collected from the Chinese social media platform Weibo. The study examines the strategies of users’ responses to bloggers’ self-praise and whether bloggers’ self-praise strategies influence netizens’ responses. It was found that Chinese netizens responded to self-praising blogs with various strategies, including compliment, congratulation, inquiry/remark, evasion, and challenging. The findings showed that netizens’ self-praise responses varied with the categories of self-praise strategies. Possible factors motivating the various strategies involved in netizens’ self-praise responses are also discussed. The study contributes to the literature on self-praise interaction and speech act responses.

Extreme Weather and Complaints: Evidence from Chinese Netizens

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relationship between extreme temperature and online complaints to local government officials. We show that the number of complaints significantly increases by 11.1% on extremely hot days relative to the benchmark temperature. Such effect is most pronounced on the day of extreme weather conditions and muted immediately after the extreme weather day. Among all the complaint areas, we find that 28.6% of the increase in complaints on hot days is related to public service, 42.8% to urban construction, 21.4% to noise, and 7.2% to safety. Moreover, we reveal that the primary motivators of increased complaints on hot days are not likely to be psychological factors; instead, the complaints are more likely to be associated with inadequate provision of public facilities to cope with extreme weather and inadequate management of other environmental disamenities caused by extreme temperature.

"No man is an island": How Chinese netizens use deliberate metaphors to provide "depression sufferers" with social support.

Online social support provides a way to positively influence depression sufferers. In the present study, we aim to analyze how social support in Chinese online depression communities is communicated through the lens of deliberate metaphor theory (DMT) to deepen the understanding of the under-researched complicated, emotionally laden, and culture-related concepts of this experience. We collected data (n = 3546 comments) from the Warm Supporting section of the Depression Super Topic, a major Chinese online depression community on Weibo. The data were analyzed using a metaphorical analysis with the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit and a thematic analysis. Our findings identify two themes: deliberate metaphors (DMs) of depression and DMs of social environment for depression sufferers. The former conceptualizes future expectations without depression (as rosy images; victorious battles; the beaten black dog); disorder (as subtle objects; subjective initiative events); depression sufferers (as valuable objects; important roles); and present life with depression (as optional events; spiritual practices; fragile objects). The latter conceptualizes social connection (as solid objects; nonessentials); individuals in the social environment (as energetic objects; vicious roles); and prejudice (as colored objects). The findings suggest that DMs as important online social support resources, helping to express empathy and normalize depression with more common-sense, and non-judgmental concepts. Additionally, in DMs, Chinese netizens navigate the intricate intersection of medical and moral perspectives on depression and its recovery, leveraging both aspects to offer comprehensive social support. "Confucian-based" elements are embedded in culture-related social support expressions in DMs. In practice, our findings contribute to tailored and appropriate health interventions for depression.

“It’s All About US vs THEM!”: Comparing Chinese Populist Discourses on Weibo and Twitter

The recent resurgence of populism has led to renewed interest in the phenomenon, but it remains unclear how this phenomenon has manifested itself in non-Western settings like China. This article analyses Chinese populism and provides a systematic categorization of online discourses related to this phenomenon, including ideas about “the people,” “corrupt elites,” and “enemies.” The article is based on a collection of more than 100,000 Chinese online posts, collected from both Weibo and Twitter, that were classified as populist or not using natural language processing (NLP) models. We show how populism has manifested itself in Chinese online venues, and how populist discourses on Weibo and Twitter differ in topics, semantic content, and in who posts (agenda setters) and shares posts (audiences). The comparison demonstrates that different Chinese netizens take competing approaches to define the place of a rising China, and this also puts populism into the context of the peculiar Chinese way of rallying “the people” on behalf of the nation. Findings from this study contribute new insights into understanding populism in Chinese cyberspaces and provide a cross-platform perspective for understanding populist discourses in national and transnational contexts. The study also adds to computational methods in empirical research of populism in a comparative perspective.

模因论下网络暴力语言生成机制及特征研究

As an emerging language variant, researchers have made many efforts from different perspectives to address online violence language. Dawkins believes that human society is full of memes, and everything people learn is memes. Memetics, as a new theory, aims to explain the relationship between language and culture. Undoubtedly, memetics provides a new perspective for linguistics, and many scholars have been studying this theory for a long time. At the same time, we also noticed that previous research has left a lot of research space for this typical theory. Otherwise, language is constantly changing. Therefore, the variation and development of human language directly affect its evolution. Memetics provides a new perspective for analyzing online language. On the other hand, from the perspective of research on language memes, there is insufficient attention paid to the dynamic generation of language memes and a lack of a systematic and comprehensive conceptual framework for meme language. Network language is a product of the information age background and a typical language variant. Therefore, analyzing its complex generation and evolution process is of great significance for the development of language. This article is based on meme theory and focuses on language variants of online violence. Mainly studying the language variants of online violence used by young Chinese netizens. Based on the definition of online violence language, in order to better analyze the variants of online violence language, the author screened some typical online violence events from 2011 to 2021. Based on the fact that there are a large number of language variants of online violence and popular internet slang, the author has built a corpus to better analyze this language variant. All texts are collected from some influential websites, such as Weibo, QQ, WeChat, Tiktok, etc. In addition, some data is collected from real-world communication. The collected language variants of online violence are representative and widely disseminated.

Exploring disclaimers on Chinese social networking sites from a metapragmatic perspective

This study explores the employment of disclaimers as metapragmatic devices in online interpersonal interaction on a Chinese social networking site, Weibo. Previous studies discussed meta-negation disclaimers and meta-prohibition disclaimers. This study establishes a new type of disclaimer: meta-condition disclaimers. It examines the forms and functions of the three types of disclaimers. Prior studies explained disclaimers as either prospective moves or retrospective moves. This study further introduces disclaimers as conjunctive moves, which bridge the speaker’s ongoing communicative behaviour. Also, it investigates the communicative purposes of using disclaimers, revealing that disclaimers are mainly employed by Chinese netizens to convey criticism. Furthermore, this research probes into the underlying cultural factors of employing disclaimers. It uncovers certain values ingrained in Chinese culture, such as ren (kindheartedness), yi (righteousness) and li (politeness). The study contributes to a global understanding of disclaimers and could provide some insights into online rapport management.

Pro-liberalism vs. Nationalism: how critical opinion leaders challenge the persuasive effect of propaganda in China

In Chinese cyberspace, mass media and opinion leaders struggle over socio-political discourses. While the former propagates positive views on national policies, the latter often expresses dissenting opinions that challenge authoritarian rule. In the context of China–US competition, do citizens still perceive non-state sources as more credible? Taking the Belt and Road Initiative as the issue, this experimental study investigates how Chinese netizens process conflicting information from a government-owned news agency and two opinion leaders with varying levels of source credibility. Our findings reveal that high-credibility propagandistic news is effective, whereas low-credibility propaganda is not. Furthermore, an opinion leader perceived as independent surpasses government propaganda in influence, regardless of information credibility. However, when an opinion leader is perceived as backed by a rival nation, the former’s influence is counterproductive unless their message credibility exceeds that of propaganda. This study sheds light on the prevalence of nationalistic sentiment in China, which has raised concerns about the manipulation of Chinese netizens by hostile forces.

Research on the Impact of Graphic and Video Advertisements on Chinese Netizens in Chinese New Media

Research on the Impact of Graphic and Video Advertisements on Chinese Netizens in Chinese New Media

Portraits of the Most Severely Affected Population in Online Violence

In todays new high-tech era, the phenomenon of cyberviolence, with the proliferation of social media in most peoples lives, has attracted global attention to cyberviolence and its victims. More and more research evidence shows that victims vulnerable to cyber violence share many similar characteristics. So, this paper aims to conduct a scientific study to find out the specific portrait of the vulnerable victim group. This paper collects data from network questionnaires, frequency analysis, validity analysis, reliability analysis, and chi-square test. A total of 437 random Chinese netizens participated in this study; the results of the study show that the people who are vulnerable to network violence, basically in line with the portrait, the experimental results present: the susceptible boys are those who are Gentle and Kind, have a postgraduate education, are underage, and work in the service industry. The susceptible girls are radical, with a high school education or below, aged 10-19, primarily underage, and working as housewives. This paper can provide direction for cybersecurity practitioners to reduce the harm suffered by victims of cyberviolence.

Foreign Movies and TV Dramas as the Source of Political Argot in an Authoritarian Context: Memes and Creative Resistance in Chinese Social Media

ABSTRACT In the Web 2.0 era, memes have emerged as playful and versatile forms of communication in the daily interactions of social media users. In countries that embrace digital authoritarianism, memes have been deployed as a vehicle of political communication under the online surveillance system. Based on long-term observation of Chinese cyberspace, the author adopts a deep China approach and conducts multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of a series of political memes which poach transnational TV series and movie scenarios or characters. The remix of symbols from foreign TV dramas and movies with indigenous Chinese symbols devotes to three fundamental dimensions of meaning-making strategies: direct captures, reproduction of the original scene, and the reworking of specific elements. By producing, deploying, and proliferating ironic political memes, Chinese netizens have the capacity to engage in innovative discursive guerrilla wars under the rapidly evolving landscape of surveillance.

An analysis of how Chinese Netizens, especially men, react to feminismthrough social media

With the advancement of technology in recent years, social media has become an increasingly significant part of people’s everyday lives, while feminism is beginning to be recognized as the flow of information becomes more accessible. However, unlike in the West, different Chinese have varying perspectives and views of feminism; some interpret it as a female advantage, while others see it as a remedy to help Chinese women awaken. By commenting on the work of gender-specific bloggers who share knowledge and content about feminism on Douyin (Chinese “Tiktok”), this study investigates how different types of people, particularly men, respond differently to feminism from three different perspectives. According to the data, the public mainly addresses bloggers through sexualization, ad hominem attacks, and patriarchal dismissiveness. With these three characteristics in mind, different men view bloggers who support feminism differently, resulting in more or less diverse remarks for or against them. This study categorizes comments from various guys under various bloggers’ works presenting feminism in Douyin (China’s “TikTok”) and teaches viewers how to differentiate and recognize their categories.

The Protection of Personal Information under the Civil Code in the Information Age

At present, we are in the information age, personal information has penetrated into all aspects of our lives, and affects our lives. However, with the development of the times, there are many problems in the protection of personal information, and the protection of personal information has increasingly become the focus of people’s attention, and more and more people call for legal protection of personal information to prevent personal information leakage. The newly published Civil Code clearly states the legal protection measures for personal information, which is in line with the concerns of Chinese netizens. However, from the perspective of the new Civil Code, how to comprehensively and effectively protect personal information and thoroughly plan effective ways and means to protect the personal information of netizens still needs to be discussed in theory and practice.

Local Politics in the Age of Automated Decision-Making in China: A Case Study of the Henan Health Code Scandal

ABSTRACT This article uses the case of the Henan health code scandal and Chinese netizens’ response to it to illustrate the local politics in the age of automated decision-making systems in China. It examines how a local stability maintenance endeavour has become a sign of the misuse and abuse of power and technology by an authoritarian Party-state and its ruling elites to safeguard their own interests and power. The performative disciplining of local culprits by the central government demonstrates not only the tension between local and central authorities but also the pitfalls of big-data-driven digital governance and social control systems when such systems are arbitrary and lack provision for human rights protection. Chinese netizens’ response to the scandal demonstrates the possibilities and limits of networked communicative mobility.

Public emotional atmosphere during disasters: understanding emotions in short video comments on the Zhengzhou flood

Short videos are gaining popularity among Chinese netizens who use them to socialize and express themselves online, particularly during disasters. This study examines the characteristics of an emotional atmosphere through short video comments. We developed the Multimodal Social Short Video Crawler V1.0 to analyze 157,747 comments from 343 short videos about the “Zhengzhou flood.” First, we categorized comments into clusters and calculated cluster density using complex network analysis methods. Second, we employed computer-mediated content analysis to derive sentiment values in clusters. To capture the emotional atmosphere in short videos accurately, we developed a trust model to assign weights to both cluster density and sentiment value. Our findings reveal that the emotional atmosphere in short video comments indicates continuity and clustering traits. Furthermore, a correlation was found between cluster size and emotional valence, with the relationship trend varying between macro- and micro-clusters. Regarding theoretical contributions, this study enriches the theory of emotional atmosphere by proposing a mathematical model of emotional atmosphere that combines machine learning and complex network analysis, and introduces cluster density and emotional value calculation methods. Concurrently, this study highlights emotion’s importance in short video comments, which can enhance disaster response efforts in the future.

The Impact of Social Media News Consumption on Online Political Expression in China: The Role of Netizens’ Political Orientation

ABSTRACT Political ideology and political trust are key factors that affect people’s political expression. With the development of the internet, social media is at the forefront of China’s mainstream ideological dissemination, and social media users are becoming the dominant force in various online public opinion and political expression venues. This study examines whether Chinese netizens’ trust in the government and their political ideology impact the relationship between their social media news consumption and their online political expression. By analyzing data from the 2018 Netizens’ Social Consciousness in China Survey (N = 5,415), we found that social media news consumption is positively associated with people’s online political expression, and Chinese netizens’ trust in government mediates this relationship. Additionally, netizens’ political ideology moderates the relationship between social media news consumption and online political expression. This paper explains the effects of social media news consumption on netizens’ online expression through their political orientation.

‘Gangpu is too funny!’: The mediatization of Hong Kong Mandarin as a jocular register

AbstractThis article demonstrates how mediatization facilitates the (re)production of mock language. Through an examination of Chinese netizens’ reactions to a series of viral internet commercials that feature three Hong Kong actors speaking nonstandard Mandarin, it uncovers the processes whereby Gangpu (Hong Kong Mandarin) has become increasingly perceived in China as funny. The vast scale of uptake formulations enabled by mediatization has made it possible for Chinese netizens to engage in a collaborative effort not only in highlighting certain features of Gangpu and certain elements of the commercials but also in presenting them in ways that evoke specific meanings and interpretations. Ultimately, it is through the parodic revoicing of Hong Kong celebrities speaking nonstandard Mandarin that this non-native variety has come to be keyed as humorous. This study shows that we gain a better understanding of how mock practices reinforce and build on each other by tracing their uptake and circulation. (Mediatization, mock language, parody, listening subject, Mandarin Chinese, Hong Kong, China)*

Attacks and remedies in online public opinion reversal events

Abstract Collective attacks related to controversial issues are pervasive in online communication. However, public opinion is often reversed later when earlier reports are revealed to be misinformation, which may lead to remedies offered to the victim by netizens. We call such phenomena online public opinion reversal (POR) events, which reflect group polarization from attack to remedy. This paper explores the pragmatic strategies that netizens employ to launch attacks and offer remedies in such events, examining a dataset including 300 netizen-generated attacking comments and 300 remedial comments collected on Weibo. The study identified two main categories of online attack strategies and seven types of remedial strategies. Chinese netizens prefer to employ on-record strategies when launching attacks. When an earlier report is revealed to be fake, they employ apology as the most frequent remedial strategy. Preferences for different attacking and remedial strategies and potential influencing factors are also discussed.

Reconceptualizing translation and translators in the digital age: YouTube comment translation on China’s Bilibili

ABSTRACT A new participatory ecology of translation facilitated by digital technologies has significant implications for understanding translation and translators. This article examines YouTube comment translation on Bilibili in China to reconceptualize translation and translators by taking the Will Smith-Chris Rock confrontation at the Oscars 2022 and the assassination of Shinzo Abe as two illustrative case studies. It demonstrates that Chinese netizens participate in civic engagement and translate verbal and written YouTube comments into a multimodal text with various technological tools. Based on the emergent properties of YouTube comment translation, we argue that translation can be reconceptualized as an assemblage of multimodal resources that reconstitute and extend the original meanings of the source text. We also propose to expand the concept of translators to encompass both human and non-human translators, challenging the anthropocentric bias in translator studies. Finally, a post-humanist approach is suggested to reconceptualize translation and translators in the digital age.