Abstract
China’s Digital Nationalism is a valuable addition to the growing corpus of research on the political impact of communications technologies in China. Like several other works, it uses the theme of anti-Japanese nationalism as its case study. Framing the issue with an impressive theoretical discussion of nationalism and communication, it draws on the broader political science and communications literature to present nationalism as ‘an emergent property of communication networks’. The nation thus becomes a technology in its own right, used to control citizens, but also to work with them for more effective governance through negotiations, collaborations, and persuasions between various stakeholders.
The book’s most outstanding contribution is its exploration of the way in which technological architecture shapes discourse. This is done using a mixed-methods approach that combines the analysis of website content with the use of digital tools to reveal technological structures and patterns of behaviour. The result is a picture of the ways in which technology shapes the discourse on Sino-Japanese history, the stability of networks, and the main actors and the roles that they play. Graphics are used to show how search engines actively select and rank sources and how hyperlinks form larger networks of websites, allowing largely invisible commercial and political actors to be complicit in the creation of a ‘sovereign’ version of digital China.
Catching up with the latest wave of literature on the Internet in the age of Facebook and Google, the book should also be credited with giving significant weight to the commodification of online behaviour and content. Particularly noteworthy is the exploration of the interplay between the hegemony of the state and the need for content providers to secure advertising sales by scoring high numbers of ‘clicks’ and ‘likes’. The significance of this becomes clear in case study chapters on the anti-Japanese discourse generated by memories of the Nanjing Massacre and the dispute over the Diaoyu Islands. While historical distance allows the former to be presented as a relatively uncontested discourse of humiliation, the immediacy of the latter presents an opportunity to use pornographic images and advertisements for treatment of hair loss and libido to guide users to more commercially lucrative websites. The most ardent nationalists are thus uncovered as members of a ‘lost generation’ of lonely and frustrated men who have fared poorly during China’s rapid economic development and have few prospects to attract a partner. The state, meanwhile, shows little interest in blocking such websites, or the digital casinos and online stores that sell Diaoyu Islands beer and suitcases to such patriots.
The most challenging aspect of any research on communication technology, which is to determine whether often sensationalist online activity has any real impact on political change, is addressed most squarely in a chapter titled ‘The user-generated nation’. This shows how the interactive behaviour facilitated by Web 2.0 allows users to challenge the official nationalist discourse. Chauvinistic anti-Japanese behaviour is thus balanced by the use of microblogs to negotiate what it means to be ‘Chinese’ through a more ‘rational patriotism’. The possibility is thus opened up for an online discourse that can repurpose nationalism towards highlighting domestic injustices, such as forced demolitions.
While such important observations open up rich possibilities for understanding the evolution of complex political strategies, it is not very clear where the author, Florian Schneider, positions himself in a penultimate chapter on cultural governance and in the conclusion. Here he cites Foucault to explain how the ability to align citizens’ interests with those of the party without resorting to coercion is enabled by a system that is akin to a ‘high-tech, capitalist version of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon’, in which private actors discipline themselves and others to reap the fruits of digital communication. Yet elsewhere he also acknowledges Foucault’s view that the construction of a discourse creates opportunities for contestation by acknowledging and, to some extent, empowering the antagonistic position.
The book gives several examples of such oppositional politics, but the argument could be developed further by making more use of such material and tying it more clearly into a theory of change within the Chinese sociopolitical system. This might be done by taking more account of the ways in which well-established strategies of using nationalism to build coalitions and challenge leadership legitimacy are carried over into the information revolution. It might also help to broaden the focus beyond nationalism; as Schneider himself acknowledges, it is not hard to find cases where new social media is used to challenge established political practices over issues such as the environment and government failures. It is to be hoped that he will take up these challenges as he builds on this outstanding model of research and a rich source of data for academics and students alike.