Abstract
In 2016, Little Pink has emerged as the label for a new wave of female-led cyber-nationalism in China. While increasingly popularized in media and online discourses, little is known about the evolution of this label and its significance for our understanding of China’s digital activism. This article takes the first step at unraveling the Little Pink mystery by examining its origins and contestation in China’s online community during the cross-strait memes war of 2016 when mainland nationalists mobilized to challenge Taiwan’s election results. Drawing on multifaceted digital data, this study shows that Little Pink was an invented label and that gender was used by conflicting cyber groups in their attempts at reframing the imagery of nationalism. More broadly, this article demonstrates that cyber-nationalism is a phenomenon contested across different digital groups in China, and it should be analyzed more as a case of ambivalence in digital activism than as a manifestation of state propaganda or growing radical nationalism in contemporary China.
Introduction
“The East is pink,” claims The Economist (2016), referring to a growing group of young nationalists in China who “use the internet as a battleground.” According to The Economist and other major news outlets (e.g. Lin, 2016; Ruan, 2016; Zhang, 2016a), unlike the previous wave of masculine nationalism embodied in “angry youth” throwing rocks at the US Embassy in Beijing (Dumbaugh, 2000) and overturning Japanese cars (Branigan, 2012), the latest wave of nationalistic activism, known as the “Little Pink,” is said to be female-led, opting for soft emotional discourse of seduction and romance.
Originating from the pink-colored discussion forum on boys’ love 1 housed on a popular literature website, Jinjiang (晋江), 2 the term, Little Pink, has suddenly become associated with nationalism in the aftermath of Taiwan’s 2016 pro-independence election. Members of the Little Pink group have allegedly spearheaded the “cross-strait memes war” when thousands of Chinese Internet users flooded social media platforms to protest Taiwan’s political drift from China.
Their weapons were neither rocks nor angry statements, but numerous funny and provocative Internet memes (Phillips, 2015; Shifman, 2014; Wiggins and Bowers, 2014) created by the Internet users who edited, remixed, and added captions on photos of celebrities and rage comics. 3 How a group of young women interested in dissecting male beauty and explaining homosexual love has become associated with sharp nationalistic sentiments, however, has thus far remained largely unexplored. While the members of Little Pink are presented as the new nationalistic crusaders, little is known about the composition of this group, its modes of politicization, as well as how it has been treated by China’s wider cyber community. Is it truly a new form of online activism, as The Economist claims? And what does it tell us about the nature of evolving cyber-nationalism in China—a phenomenon that holds significant domestic and global implications? In domestic arena, cyber-nationalism presents a double-edged sword for the party-state, fueling support for the party, on one hand, while having the power to turn against the state if it fails to meet the radical demands of nationalistic voices. The state’s ambivalence toward cyber-nationalism, as manifested in a mix of endorsement and control (Han, 2017), highlights the official concern toward this growing movement. Given the prime emphasis of Chinese cyber-nationalists on foreign issues, these digital expressions also hold implications for geopolitics through China’s engagement with the world. On a theoretical level, as we explain further in the article, understanding cyber-nationalism presents a window into complex dynamics of digital activism in China—a field that has thus far focused more on liberalizing potential of the Internet than on its nationalistic facets.
In this article, we attempt to unravel the mystery of Little Pink and challenge some of the popular preconceptions about it by closely tracing the cross-strait memes war and its participants, as well as the evolution of the Little Pink label in online discourses. Specifically, we examine how the association between Little Pink and nationalism originated and became popularized, as well as how it got appropriated by different online groups with competing agendas. Through the prism of the evolution of Little Pink, we offer new insights into China’s online nationalism as a contested process that embodies dynamic interactions and negotiations among distinct societal groups and the party-state.
Unlike the widespread notions of Little Pink as a real cyber-movement, our analysis finds that Little Pink is a manufactured, mythologized label that was deployed by other cyber groups to challenge and rebuke nationalistic visions vis-à-vis Taiwan. As we demonstrate in this article, the original labeling of the Facebook war “crusaders” as Little Pink is inaccurate as romantic users on Jinjiang forum had little to do with politics. The term, in fact, was invoked and manufactured by liberal-leaning commentators 4 and further resurrected by official party outlets, but remained largely disconnected from female-led nationalism attached to the label. Rather than being a new vehicle for nationalism, we find that other groups have strategically appropriated gender and femininity to diffuse and contest their political visions in China’s cyberspace. These findings have important implications for our understanding of China’s evolving digital activism, especially the dynamics of cyber-nationalism, as explained in the following section.
Digital activism and cyber-nationalism in China: creating the linkages
In the past decade, the study of digital activism has emerged as one of the dominant sub-fields in research on communication in China, unraveling the intricate dynamics of control and resistance between party regulators (e.g. King et al., 2013; MacKinnon, 2011; Schneider, 2016) and savvy social media users, who negotiate restrictions and engage in subversive and imaginative discourses online (e.g. Esarey and Xiao, 2008; Yang, 2009). Despite or paralleled to the state’s adaptive regulation and control of the cyberspace, the Internet is endowed with a liberalizing potential in China, creating channels for more pluralistic and critical discourses to emerge and spread, occasionally translating into progressive offline initiatives. Although democratic outcomes are not prescribed or always alluded to in these studies, there is an apparent emphasis on contestation, activism, and liberalization trends alongside the persisting authoritarian rule. In the broadest sense, some scholars argue that by creating new spaces for communication, the Internet represents an emerging public sphere in the Chinese context (Yang, 2003). While heavily censored and regulated, the Internet is analyzed as empowering social mobilization on important issues such as environmental protection (Sullivan and Xie, 2009; Yang, 2005), as facilitating the survival and reinvention of investigative journalism (Hassid and Repnikova, 2016; Repnikova, 2017; H Wang, 2016), as allowing for the emergence of Internet sub-cultures that use humor and art to express alternative political views (Yang, 2009), and as inducing ingenious forms of participatory entertainment or fandom publics in China (Zhang, 2016b), among other initiatives. Similar to studies of other contexts, including Western democratic ones (Castells, 2009; Dahlgren, 2009), scholarship on China’s digital activism emphasizes the potentially powerful linkages between civil society and social media in gradually transforming governance practices.
This general association of social media with progressive socio-political agenda, however, has served to largely exclude the study of China’s digital nationalistic expression, or contestation of different meanings of national identity, under the umbrella of digital activism. The reason for the perceived misfit might be that cyber-nationalism is often associated with state propaganda or voices that support the state, and thereby is not well positioned under the rubric of public sphere.
The existing scholarship on Chinese nationalism and especially cyber-nationalism, however, shows that while propaganda may be one part of it, much of nationalistic expression manifests a movement and sentiment as distinct from that of the party and thereby should be incorporated in the wider field of digital activism. As we demonstrate in our article, moreover, the members of the so-called progressive public sphere actively engage with nationalistic voices online, and even resort to the same discourse tools, pointing to the competition as well as the fusion among different groups that shape China’s digital sphere.
The scholarship on Chinese nationalism has long underscored the top-down and the bottom-up dimensions of nationalistic expression. While some works highlight the party’s promotion of “pragmatic nationalism” through patriotic education and media campaigns (Zhao, 2005), as well as the state’s effective incorporation of nationalist demands into foreign policy-making (Reilly, 2012; Weiss, 2014), others emphasize the spontaneous and extreme outbursts of nationalism among the Chinese youth that are unanticipated by the state and potentially threatening political stability and foreign policy formation (Gries, 2004; Shirk, 2007; Yang and Zheng, 2012). Some more recent studies further attempt to disaggregate between nationalism and patriotism (Woods and Dickson, 2017) and between episodic nationalism that is seemingly on the rise and nationalistic sentiments among urban youth that appear to be on the decline (Johnston, 2017), again pointing to the importance of studying nationalistic expression in its own right, rather than as a direct outcome of state initiatives.
In the growing field of cyber-nationalism, while some scholars acknowledge and depict the state-directed nature of nationalistic expression through the study of paid commentators or the 50-cent army (Han, 2015b; Hung, 2010; King et al., 2017) or through analyzing the state’s regulation and subsequent domination of information on sensitive historical issues and conflicts online (Schneider, 2016), most works emphasize the distinctly non-state nature of online nationalism. Hyun and Kim (2015: 768), for instance, define cyber-nationalism as “spontaneous version of nationalism online,” Liu (2006: 144) appropriates it under the broader category of “popular nationalism” that takes up “an autonomous political domain that is independent of the state nationalism,” and Han (2015a) differentiates between the paid commentators and the “voluntary 50-cent army” whose members “sustain a pro-regime discourse” by deploying a range of creative tactics, from “labelling” to “face-slapping” to using scientific arguments. The existing works further demonstrate how discourses of cyber-nationalists can dissent from those advocated by the state, calling for more radical policies (calls that often translate into protests) in the foreign policy realm, such as with regard to Sino-Japan relations (Liu, 2006), as well as in domestic arena when it comes to ethnic policies, with some nationalists openly promoting Han supremacy that contradicts the party’s vision of the multi-ethnic state (Leibold, 2010). Cyber-nationalism, therefore, is understood as a radicalized expression of national identity that is rooted in antagonism toward other nations (deemed as enemies) and ethnic groups and has been treated with caution by the party-state, on one hand, viewing it as an expression of patriotism, but, on the other, concerned about it spilling over into anti-party sentiments (Han, 2015a, 2017). Although undoubtedly in part stemming from top-down patriotic initiatives and propaganda, cyber-nationalism is a movement distinct from and potentially challenging the state, a movement that is itself marred in contradicting forces of globalization, cosmopolitanism and China’s complex history and culture.
While the double-edged depiction of cyber-nationalism reveals the contested expressions and imageries of the nation between radical voices and the party-state, the current studies of this phenomenon have thus far paid less attention to the contestation of nationalism and national meanings among diverse digital communities. Thinking of nations as “imagined communities,” in large part created through communication mediums (Anderson, 1983), how do social media play into the diverse imaginations of the nation in the case of China, and how do they translate into potentially distinct and conflicting expressions of cyber-nationalism in China? Specifically, given the rise of liberal-oriented activism online, well documented in the digital activism literature, how do these voices speak to or clash with the self-proclaimed nationalists who support the political status quo but advocate for an even stronger and uncompromising positioning of the state in domestic and international arena. Speaking to scholars who argue for recognizing and engaging with ambivalence of China’s social media expressions (Yang, 2012), our study analyzes cyber-nationalism as part of the broader field of digital activism, and thereby characterizes it as a process that is interactive, dynamic, and inherently messy—contested across different societal groups, including those oriented in more liberal versus conservative directions vis-à-vis the state, as well as state online commentators. In unpacking contestation, we place a special emphasis on labeling as a discursive tool deployed in digital battles. Echoing other scholars who approach labeling as a linguistic device that holds socio-political and strategic significance (Czarniawska-Joerges and Joerges, 1998), including in the realm of nationalist formations (Heller, 2011), we show how the choice of labels can play into the evolution of China’s cyber-nationalism and how the process of selecting and justifying labels works online. As we demonstrate in this article, the very association of Little Pink with nationalism was a product of creative labeling.
Beyond expanding the notion of this contestation of nationalistic formations, we further contribute to the existing studies of digital activism and cyber-nationalism by illuminating the role of gender in fueling online discourse battles. Echoing other works on linkages between gender and nationalistic movements that demonstrate the deployment of women as convenient armor by both state and anti-state groups in pushing for their political agenda (Herr, 2016; Phillips, 2014), our study highlights the dominance of gender (or the Little Pink participants) in discourses of conflicting groups on the issue of Taiwan independence. Like other works that demonstrate the creative efforts of the party-state to co-opt gender or women into its larger project of nation-building (Li, 2011; Wang, 2005), we demonstrate the party’s appropriation of gendered nationalism as patriotic expression in line with the state. More surprisingly, however, we also illuminate the aggressively gendered discourse adopted by the self-proclaimed liberals on the web, whose diminishing and sexist depiction of women parallels that of the state. Like other scholars, we found that creative resistance or digital activism practices can co-exist with gender subordination, whereby satirical texts that aim to critique the state also “position the female body and the feminine as the site of subordination, penetration, and insult” (Wallis, 2015: 224). As such, our study underscores that whereas the very expression of nationalism is contested on the Chinese web, these different discourses converge in their masculine make-up and appeal, whereby the actors supposedly inhabiting opposite ideological spectrums converge when it comes to their vision of women as inherently unequal to men and incapable of expressing a coherent national narrative in Chinese society. Ironically, whereas this article is a product of the mythical emergence of China’s female-led nationalism, it argues that women only engage in nationalistic expression as involuntary actors, or as symbolic ammunition for different parties, rather than as genuine participants. Digital nationalism in China, therefore, thus far, remains a highly masculine affair.
Methodological approach
Our findings derive from an in-depth cyber ethnography, understood as immersion and close observation of selected virtual communities. Online ethnography has evolved into an important approach in studying China’s digital activism and online nationalism, most notable in the scholarship of Yang (2009) and Han (2015a, 2015b) who embark on long-term online immersion and observation to investigate and map out nuanced dynamics of online interactions. Given the complexity and time-sensitive nature of our subject, we most closely align with the method of “guerrilla ethnography,” introduced by Yang (2003), whereby we embraced the selected sites and communities as fluid, and focused on constructing a complex mosaic of Little Pink label, akin to an investigative journalist trying to get at the heart of a story. As part of this tracing, we also selectively engaged in what Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) define as “multi- modal” discourse analysis, whereby we examined key themes, framing strategies and linguistic devices deployed by various actors involved in cross-strait memes war and in the production and dissemination of Little Pink label.
Specifically, our investigation proceeded in three phases: (1) the study of the original Jinjiang forum, (2) the analysis of the cross-strait memes war, and (3) the investigation into the framing of Little Pink as a label after the Taiwan campaign. As for the first phase, we examined relevant threads on Jinjiang forum for politicized discussions that might have emerged in and before early 2016, as described in the popular narrative about Little Pink. We used the search function on Jinjiang (http://bbs.jjwxc.net/search.php) to collect posts containing the words “Little Pink (小粉红),” “Di Ba (帝吧),” or “crusade (圣战)” in title from the launching of the site (2003) to 15 December 2016. We closely read about 1500 threads (Table 1), examining traces of Jinjiang users’ nationalistic dispositions and their possible participation in the cross-strait war.
Data categories.
CNKI: China National Knowledge Infrastructure.
Weibo provides a function called “headline articles” (toutiao wenzhang) for posting long articles instead of 140-character posts.
The second phase of research focused on the actual participants in the cross-strait memes war, comparing the demographics and narratives of Jinjiang users and the “crusaders.” The two authors, with the help of a research assistant, used random sampling in selecting about 800 comments posted on Facebook pages of Tsai Ing-wen, Chou Tzu-yu, Denise Ho, Apple Daily, Liberty Times and Sanlih E-Television by Chinese users during the cross-strait memes war. The randomization process was conducted by using a random number generator and collecting comments corresponding to the numbers generated (following similar approaches in studies such as McMenamin et al., 2012). We did not choose the most liked comments for two reasons. First, randomization removes bias in sampling and provides more representative posts (Lacy et al., 2015: 793). Second, a large part of top comments are repetitive. For example, among the top 100 comments on the most commented post by Tsai, 39 comments featured the same content—“Eight Honors and Eight Disgraces” (Barong bachi) proposed by former President Hu Jintao (also see Han, 2017 for the repetitive nature of the top comments). To get a sense of the demographics, the authors also randomly examined the profiles of 100 users who posted pro-Chinese government content. Because of the strong visual character of the memes war, we also downloaded a compressed ZIP package of 64 memes, which were used by the “crusaders” during the memes war for our analysis. 5 However, due to the scope of this study, the analysis of the visual components is limited. 6 Other than looking at the profiles, we also examined discourse or labeling strategies of participants in the memes war. Specifically, in closely reading nationalistic discourses, we focused on the comments that carried a feminine feature of seduction, and further distinguished among different manifestations of seduction, including that expressed via metaphors, aesthetic connotations and romantic allegories.
The third phase involved investigating how the narrative about Little Pink was formulated outside the Jinjiang site by exploring the emergence and the association of this term with young nationalists. We collected and analyzed postings from different groups observing and commenting on the cross-strait memes war, including liberal commentators and official media sources. We found discussions of Little Pink from January to November 2016 by searching in China Core Newspapers Full-Text Database of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Google News, and Baidu News, selecting articles with keyword “Little Pink (小粉红),” “Di Ba (帝吧),” or “crusade (圣战)” in the full texts. There was limited coverage in traditional media, and more articles appeared in digital-only outlets (Table 1). Since the labeling and framing of Little Pink and their patriotic activism took place primarily online, we also checked posts and major threads about this topic on social media platforms during the same time period using the same search terms. We included major sites such as Weibo, WeChat, Sina blog, Tianya, and Zhihu, a Quora-like Q&A site populated with well-educated city elites. In this final phase of the research, we again combined online immersion and observation with thematic analysis or coding of key themes associated with postings that included the term Little Pink (i.e. Little Pink portrayed as ideologically regressive, ignorant, and emotionally zealous by liberals vs patriotic and naïve by official commentators). Table 1 summarizes the data we collected and analyzed.
The cross-strait memes war and the emergence of Little Pink label
The beginnings of the “crusade” and the emergence of Little Pink
According to multiple sources (Buckley and Ramzy, 2016; Leng, 2016; Ruan, 2016), the cross-strait memes war on Facebook was initially triggered by a controversial political act of a Taiwanese teenage pop star, Chou Tzu-yu. In November 2015, when participating in a Korean TV show, Chou waved the flag of the Republic of China (ROC) and has later introduced her nationality online as “Taiwanese.” Mainland Internet users took it as a symbol of support for Taiwan’s independence and attacked the singer. In early January 2016, Beijing-based Taiwanese pop singer, Michael Huang, posted the photo of Chou holding the flag and openly criticized her on Weibo. Shortly after, China’s Anhui TV canceled Chou’s contract to perform in its Spring Festival Gala. In response, JYP Entertainment issued a videotaped apology of Chou claiming, “There is only one China … The two sides of the strait are one, and I have always felt proud to be Chinese” (Buckley and Ramzy, 2016). The video was released just 1 day prior to the Taiwan Presidential election and angered voters who supported the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). While the actual impact of the incident on the election result is difficult to estimate, DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen ended up winning the election, which in turn further incited patriotic feelings in Mainland Chinese.
On 20 January, thousands of Chinese Internet users launched a campaign to flood Facebook pages of Tsai, Chou, and Taiwan’s pro-independence media outlets. They posted slogans and memes declaring that Taiwan is a part of China, proudly depicting China’s greatness with photos of beautiful scenery and delicious food. Some went as far as to call Tsai a “provincial governor” of China. 7 The “crusade” was organized by Di Ba (http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kw=%C0%EE%D2%E3), the most popular discussion group hosted on the keyword-based online forum, Baidu Tieba. 8 The organizers issued a call to arms on social media platforms, asking for help in producing memes, liking comments, and translating simplified Chinese characters into traditional ones used in Taiwan (Leng, 2016). Since Facebook was blocked in China, the organizers provided virtual private network (VPN) services to participants based in the mainland. The Facebook war lasted for about 2 days and became a trending topic on both sides of the strait. Soon after the “crusade” began, criticisms from liberal-minded opinion leaders emerged, and the term Little Pink was put forward to describe these young nationalists. The story of “romance-obsessed young girls turned political” went viral.
Our analysis, however, found an eclectic group of commentators, and no evidence indicating that original Jinjiang users have either organized or actively participated in the memes war. There were only a few discussions about the “crusade” on the Danmei forum of Jinjiang, and most discussions proceeded on the usual theme of boys’ romance and entertainment idols rather than on politics during the “war period.” Our analysis of participants in the meme’s war, moreover, found a male-dominated gender distribution and no stark traces of Jinjiang users on these nationalistic sites. We randomly checked the Facebook profiles of 100 participants who revealed their gender and found that 64% of them were actually male, in stark contrast to the popularized Little Pink narrative. Among the participants observed, whose Facebook profile pages contained information about their identity, about half were located in countries other than China—the majority were overseas students.
Given that the Little Pink users did not appear to directly feature in the meme’s war, what explains the emergence and the dominance of this label? To answer this question, we trace back the political discussions on Jinjiang to uncover possible signs of the past nationalistic expression and examine the actual content strategies of nationalistic cross-strait memes war participants to see whether there is something distinctly feminine about pro-reunification posts.
The mistaken invention of Little Pink
Our investigation of Jinjiang political discussions from 2008 to 2016 found that whereas Jinjiang itself did not carry nationalistic content, the sudden popularization of Little Pink was likely sparked by a conflict between a popular liberal blogger and members of a former nationalistic section of Jinjiang. In addition, our analysis of content strategies deployed during the cross-strait memes war revealed that nationalistic discourses did feature an element of soft seduction, which may have been interpreted as “feminine.”
As for the past conflict between Jinjiang descendants and liberal bloggers, we found that the initial confrontation took place in 2015 when members of Fengyi (凤 仪) site, which separated from Jinjiang 4 years earlier, attacked Daguguguji (@大咕咕咕鸡), a liberal public opinion leader with more than 2 million followers on Weibo, for his invention and use of the phrase “ 你 国 ” (your country), which signaled distancing from the party-state and its popular phrase “我国” (our country). Fengyi users described him as “chicken shit” who posted “bullshit” to attract attention and called his followers “a group of losers” and “f**king idiots who suck Daguguguji.” 9 In retaliation, Daguguguji posted some of their photos (which he collected from their Weibo timelines, Figure 1) and humiliated them by calling them ugly and referring to them a “Little Pink,” having learned from the comment section that they were originally from Pink Jinjiang. Even though Fengyi users quit Jinjiang forum back in 2011 in response to the derogatory comments made by the liberal-leaning owner of Jinjiang, @iceheart, who changed the serial number of the nationalistic sub-forum on Jinjiang to 250 (in Chinese, the number means “stupid person”), this factual information did not feature in commentary section, and the distinctions between Jinjiang and Fengyi were too obscure to be understood by outsiders. The label Little Pink has stuck with Daguguguji’s fans in reference to nationalistic young girls since mid-2015.
Daguguguji humiliating girls from Fengyi (and calling them “Little Pink”) in 2015.
About half a year later when the memes war broke out, more liberals appeared to have noticed Daguguguji’s creation—the label Little Pink—and attached it to nationalists in an attempt to grasp and explain the unprecedented large-scale, savvy, trans-border use of social media by seemingly young Chinese Internet users to advocate for a political cause. At that point, the boundaries between Fengyi and Jinjiang were completely blurred in China’s cyber sphere.
Other than the convenience of the label and the ambivalent distinctions between Jinjiang and the Fengyi forums, the Little Pink invocation may have been reinforced by the new nationalistic discourses that featured in the cross-strait memes war. Namely, whereas as noted earlier, we found no evidence of the actual, direct participation of Jinjiang users, we did uncover the prominence of seduction strategy in nationalistic content creation—a softer, emotion-invoking discursive approach that may have become incorrectly associated with female participants.
Seduction was communicated via family metaphors, esthetic connotations, as well as romantic allegories. As for family references, many posts described Taiwan and Mainland as a torn-apart family, meant to be reunited. As a participant in Shanghai commented in one of the posts, “We are all yellow skin, black eyes, speak Chinese, flowing with the blood of the dragon, who branded the Chinese printing. We belong to the Chinese nation, we are Chinese.” 10 The participants also frequently framed the reunification as a naughty or a lost child coming back to the parent and shared patriotic poems and lyrics to attract their neighbor back into family nest. Taiwanese poet Yu Guangzhong’s famous piece “Nostalgia” (xiangchou), for instance, was translated into various languages and posted by participants all over the world. 11 Lyrics of songs, such as Ode to the Motherland 12 and You and Me, 13 were also repeatedly posted by the nationalistic camp.
Others have attempted to “seduce” Taiwan via aesthetic offerings by underscoring that China has great food and many beautiful places to visit. Many participants posted long lists of Chinese dishes, which they promised to offer to Taiwanese visitors if they decide to “return to the motherland.” 14 Many others welcomed Tsai Ing-wen and other Taiwanese to discover tourist attractions in their hometowns. “Hello, Ms. Tsai! I am from Jining, Shandong. Please allow me to introduce Jining,” read a post, “It’s a city with a history of 7,000 years. It’s one of the birthplaces of the Chinese civilization, and many important historical figures either lived or visited here …” 15
Others yet treated the campaign as a romantic affair, personifying Taiwan as a tender lover. A notable example was a romantic story written by one of the participants and reposted by many others: We first met in the year of 230 A.D. Your smile was so warm. You stared at me in curiosity, walked around me for a while, and then reached your tender hands out to me: “Hello, I don’t have a name. And I don’t have anyone to rely on.” “Hello, I am Huaxia. You can follow me. From now on, let me call you Yizhou, OK?” You gave me a bright smile.
16
The story was based on early Chinese official records about the first large-scale mainland exploration mission to Taiwan. It was claimed that in year 230, King Sun Quan of the Kingdom of Wu sent 10,000 troops to Taiwan, which at that time was called Yizhou, or a “Barbarian Island” (De Crespigny, 1990). While the actual story about troops and barbarians was far from that of a romance, the author made it sound like the beginning of a love story.
Not all postings featured the seduction element. Some still carried the usual features of anger and rational manipulation, examined in other studies introduced earlier. Angry confidence featured in comments, such as “we always want to knock down the wall in your minds.” 17 Others alluded to Taiwan as being “brainwashed by the DPP,” 18 attacking Taiwanese media as “highly biased” 19 while trusting information from state propaganda channels. Some called Taiwanese “frogs at the bottom of a well (jingdi zhi wa).” 20 A user from Fujian province asked, “Is there anything in Taiwan truly yours? Isn’t your so-called Taiwanese actually from the south of Fujian? Is your food culture also from our great China?” 21 The sense of superiority was also demonstrated in some details in the posts. A popular narrative among the participants is that “we are coming to your countryside (xiaxiang) to spread words,” 22 with the “countryside” signifying Taiwan. Many people used traditional Chinese in their posts because they believed that people in Taiwan “can’t read simplified Chinese.” 23 There were also a few isolated posts that contained more violent threats to “bomb Taiwan,” 24 but these did not get a significant following.
Overall, however, whereas anger and superiority expression was not surprising, the seductive, affectionate nationalistic discourse was distinct from prior forms of nationalistic expression on Chinese web and may have drawn liberals to conflate it with femininity and female users of Jinjiang. As we explain in the following section, the (mistaken) female label served as an effective instrument for attacking nationalists.
Little Pink label takes on a life of its own: the liberals attack
The large-scale and unprecedented nature of nationalistic expression in the cross-strait memes war shocked observers, especially the liberal-minded intellectuals, who have consistently shown distaste for nationalism (Lee, 2003). In adopting the label “Little Pink” and applying it to crusaders, liberals framed them as inferior. Specifically, they described female nationalists as ideologically regressive, ignorant, and emotionally zealous.
Liberal commentators used the term Little Pink with an ideological connotation (Xi, 2016)—the Communist Party is red, and the young “crusaders” are in lighter red, or pink, which makes them the agents of the party. Nan Qiao (2016), a prolific commentator, explicitly connected Little Pink with Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. He argued that like Red Guards who revered the leader with patriotic slogans, such as “The reddest, reddest red sun in our hearts Chairman Mao,” Little Pink used similarly naïve language in reference to their unity with the Chinese party-state. The difference, according to Nan Qiao, was that Red Guards were much braver than the young Little Pink, who only “dared to fight with their keyboards.”
While accusing Little Pink of blind ideological submission, liberals also claimed their ignorance was a product of the party-state’s patriotic and nationalistic education, which started in the 1990s (Wang, 2014) and persists to this day. X Zhang (2016), an active critical blogger, abstained from harshly criticizing Little Pink, dismissing them as “victims of the system where free speech was suppressed.” Mo (2016), another influential writer, argued that there is only one origin of Little Pink—a “continuous, one-sided education.” According to him, the “totalitarian education system,” which translates into the party’s dominance in the education arena via textbook censorship and the ban on private schools, among other tactics, accounts for the brainwashing of Little Pink with state-tailored historical narratives and visions of collectivism. Interestingly, he also compared Little Pink to protesters against the 1999 US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, to nationalistic reactionaries to the 2011 collision of a US Navy spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet, as well as to protesters fueling the escalation of the Diaoyu Islands dispute in 2012. He considered these past protesters as “vulgar” and Little Pink as “laughable.” While the protesters were frightening, according to Mo, Little Pink’s “naïve” language and “pale” expressions only invited ridicule. Mo argued that Little Pink resorted to memes due to their inability to articulate opinions. Other liberal commentators shared Mo’s view. A Zhihu user, for instance, commented that Little Pink members “love to use low-quality memes, because their ability to express themselves is low, and they have a bad taste … they don’t even want to learn Photoshop to make better memes.” 25 Ironically, whereas scholarly studies on Internet memes tend to consider them as symbols of cultural capital (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2015), when it comes to Little Pink, liberals interpreted memes as an indicator of low skills and bad taste.
Finally, liberal online commentators framed Little Pink as an overly emotional group, misplacing romantic aspirations in their passionate defense of nationalistic causes and expressing irrational anger in fighting for their agenda. As for soft emotions, a widely circulated narrative is that Pink Jinjiang users are out of touch with politics and tend to personify the state and romanticize relations among states, whereby China is usually depicted as a victim of Western hegemony and is in need of being “protected.” As Jinjiang users actively follow and promote their favorite stories and characters online, and avidly defend their idols, it is not surprising that liberals saw the seductive features of cross-strait nationalism as a transfer of “fandom activism” to a patriotic cause. Beyond simply dismissing them as innocently emotional, however, liberal commentators referred to Little Pink users as being unified in their irrational and violent behavior vis-à-vis other groups online. Specifically, they were described as acting in unified and determined fashion, unwilling to accept dissenting opinions, and hostile to challengers of their views. The “Pink gang,” according to Wang Xiaoneng, an opinion leader on Weibo, was in fact very good at trolling people who tried to question them, and their coordinated actions were far worse than Daguguguji’s humiliating posts (X Wang, 2016). As The Economist (2016) suggested, they were seen “as modern-day Red Guards, the students who exploded in rage and violence at the start of the Cultural Revolution 50 years ago.”
Some commentators went further in attempting to rationalize Little Pink’s emotional response with “scientific” evidence alluding to their inferior nature. Lan (Xi, 2016), a popular tech blogger, claimed that Little Pink members were in the “anal stage” in Sigmund Freud’s trajectory of psychosexual development (the period from age 1 to 3 years when the child begins toilet training), which explains their “unrestrained anger and violence.” A psychologist Tang Yinghong (2015) deployed even more scientific jargons in describing Little Pink. “The cerebral grey matter of their anterior cingulate cortex is smaller than usual and their amygdala of temporal lobe is larger,” and as a result, “it is difficult for them to understand abstract knowledge, while at the same time it’s easy for them to be emotional and loathe something,” he claimed.
Some have further explained the Little Pink phenomenon through the socio-economic prism. Wang Wusi (2016), a popular blogger on WeChat, inferred that “most of the Little Pinks were born in third or fourth tier cities, or they followed their migrant worker parents to big cities, thereby originating in lower societal stratum.” Notably, Wang’s analysis was inconsistent with our observations of the participants. As indicated above, we found that about half of the users who posted pro-China memes were students residing in other countries. Families that could afford to send children overseas were unlikely to belong to the “lower class.”
On the whole, it appears that Little Pink label has presented a convenient shield for liberal intellectuals to take a political stance against radical nationalism, as well as to channel more subtle criticisms of the party-state. In framing Little Pink as naïve patriots, brainwashed girls, and emotional, uncivilized and underdeveloped creatures, some liberals broadened their scope of attack by putting all patriots and nationalists under fire. In doing that, liberals were also explicitly and implicitly criticizing the party-state, especially its education and propaganda systems, as well as state restrictions on free speech. By deploying a ridiculed label of Little Pink, therefore, liberals opened up rare spaces for political critique and took advantage of cross-strait memes war to express their critical stance on what they deem as blind cyber nationalist agenda.
State appropriation of the label
Less than a week after the label has caught on, China’s propaganda officials tried to reframe and expropriate the negative connotations through praise and encouragement of Little Pink’s defense of national interests. One famous response to liberal critics came from the Weibo account of Global Times, the nationalistic tabloid affiliated with the People’s Daily. In the article dated 26 January with the byline, “Xiao Wang Tongzhi (Comrade Wang),” 26 Comrade Wang claimed that Little Pink fought back the “frigid irony and scorching satire” (lengchao refeng) with their brave actions. Comrade Wang’s description of Little Pink nationalists as beautiful, as having “correct worldviews,” and as compassionate citizens stands in exact opposition to liberals’ descriptions of their bad looks, ignorance, and intolerance. Wang deflected the comparison between Little Pink and the Boxer Rebellion or the Red Guard movement, both of which are negatively perceived by the Chinese public, and, instead, compared Little Pink to soldiers in the Battle of Triangle Hill in the Korean War who fought back the “American imperialist invaders,” pointing to the nationalists’ bravery and selflessness.
The piece by Comrade Wang was more of a personalized opinion post than a traditional propaganda article, pointing to the creativity of official media in using social media to their advantage. Global Times, however, deleted Comrade Wang’s post a few hours later, possibly out of concern of it sparking more provocations online. Indeed, some liberals including the aforementioned Wang Xiaoneng, reposted Comrade Wang’s commentary and used it as an instrument of attack. Namely, Wang Xiaoneng (2016) reposted some users’ comments to the original post, including one suggesting that the fact that Little Pink “don’t care about politics and don’t know about left and right in politics” simply means that they are “stupid” and that “having a natural sense of justice” simply means “loving the country” without careful reasoning.
In addition to Global Times, there were several other official outlets and social media accounts that defended Little Pink. One opinion piece on Qianlong.com, a news website hosted by the Propaganda Department of Beijing Municipality, praised Little Pink for having “big visions” (Ni, 2016). The author portrayed them as “independent” and “diverse,” disputing the idea that they were brainwashed or manipulated. He argued that Little Pink made an independent and correct choice in embarking in patriotic activism. Another piece on the same website highlighted the emotional nature of Little Pink and treated “loving the country by playing cute” as evidence of dealing with politics in a more open and casual manner without the burden of history. The piece argued that by expressing love for the country in romantic stories, the new generation of nationalists was redefining patriotism in a positive way (Yan, 2016). This argument was later picked up by a commercial magazine, China Newsweek (2016), which critiqued the statement by suggesting that “if you Little Pink are so genuine, you should use your rationality and study civic knowledge instead of simply playing cute.” Another Little Pink defender on Cha Wang, a highly conservative nationalistic website, counter-attacked the critics of Little Pink by arguing that liberal intellectuals felt “desperate” with many young people being patriotic and refuting the “evil” ideology that the liberals were eager to sell. He claimed that China’s liberals hoped for young people to start a “color revolution”—an “evil” dream that Little Pink destroyed with their nationalistic inclinations (Long, 2016).
To sum up, once Little Pink had drawn wide public attention, it became an important battleground for liberals, who framed the term negatively and used it to discredit nationalism and state policies, as well as for state propagandists and conservatives, who tried to reframe the term and to use it to encourage patriotism and support for the party-state (Figure 2). The key similarity between the two sides in their treatment of Little Pink, however, is the gendered nature of this label. In engaging with Little Pink, pro–Chinese Communist Party (CCP) commentators and liberals alike portrayed it as a group of clueless and naïve young women, who have mistakenly become involved in politics. While pro-CCP users underplayed their naïveté in favor of their sense of judgment, they still referred to Little Pink in patronizing terms as “our daughters, our younger sisters, girls in the next-door classroom we had crushes on” (see Comrade Wang’s post). Liberal intellectuals, in turn, linked the gendered naïveté to their inherent failure to form reasonable opinions and to behave as rational citizens—a role presumably attributed to men. Interestingly, commentators on both sides are predominantly male. The only exception is Wang Xiaoneng, who expressed her caution against the potential gender discrimination embedded in this label. 27
The creation and appropriation of the “Little Pink” label.
How the real Little Pink reacted
“Little Pink” is the nickname of Jinjiang shared by Jinjiang users since at least 2008. 28 In response to the sudden popularization of Little Pink as female nationalists in China’s online sphere, most users on the original Little Pink forum (i.e. the Jinjiang forum) appeared surprised, confused, and annoyed. The majority of relevant discussions on Pink Jinjiang disapproved of the new meaning attributed to the label, insisting that Little Pink is a forum with mostly danmei posts and very limited nationalistic content, as opposed to being a group of young female nationalists showing affection for the country. On Jinjiang forum, users called anyone who believed in the new label of Little Pink as “airborne” (kongjiang), suggesting that they were coming from the outside world and were not rooted in Jinjiang, as experienced and loyal users. Some went as far as to argue that the label became a “magical detector for idiots” (jian sha shenqi)—those who used the label Little Pink to describe young female nationalists were treated as stupid and ignorant by Jinjiang users.
Some users reposted articles by liberals and official media sources we introduced earlier and invited comments from Jinjiang users themselves. 29 The most frequent commentaries featured confusion (e.g. “I am totally lost”), attacks (e.g. “WTF, they are mentally handicapped”), and ridicule (e.g. “LMAO, I suddenly realize that Little Pink is so powerful and is responsible for such a huge movement!”). Some sarcastically claimed that manufacturing narratives of Little Pink served as a “perfect” strategy to initially stigmatize the group and then use the term to label anyone who expressed support for the country and the party. 30 One user angrily called liberals “bastards” because “they were not brave enough to attack Tiexue users” (Tiexue is a highly masculine, nationalistic forum) and “only dared to focus on Little Pink and imagine about girl students every day.” 31
For many Pink Jinjiang users, the nickname for the forum was unfairly stolen from them. Although they could still use the term in their original way, they were unable to change the new meaning that penetrated the cyber-publics. The meaning behind the term became a battleground between Jinjiang users and the rest of the cyber. Some expressed hope that liberals and official media outlets could “return” the name of Little Pink to them, but others acknowledged that it was hopeless to explain and recapture the original name. 32
The Little Pink label indeed has seemingly slipped away from Jinjiang users. Following the Taiwan Facebook war, the mistakenly invented term continued to be used by major media outlets and by social media users to label nationalists and CCP defenders involved in other incidents. For example, during the Rio Olympics, a group of Chinese Internet users passionately defended the Chinese swimmer, Sun Yang, against the Australian swimmer’s Mack Horton accusations of a “drug cheat.” As they flooded the Instagram account of Horton with derogatory comments, they were quickly called out as the Little Pink (Ruan, 2016). At the end of 2016, The People’s Daily’s Online Public Opinion Monitoring Center (2016) further expanded the meaning of the label to include all young people who “feel proud of the country’s achievements” and “are brave enough to express patriotic feelings in public.” As a result of these developments, Little Pink has become an expansive umbrella term for most forms of cyber-nationalism, akin to “angry youth” introduced in earlier studies (Yang and Zheng, 2012).
Conclusion and discussion
In analyzing the emergence and the evolution of Little Pink label, our study contradicts the popularized narratives of the female-led youthful nationalism in China and instead demonstrates that Little Pink was largely an invented phenomenon—a label that then took on a life of its own during and especially in the aftermath of the cross-strait campaign. Initiated by liberals critiquing radical nationalism, Little Pink then got appropriated by party organs and finally transformed from feminine nationalism to a term encompassing young nationalists more broadly. While the mystical transformation of romance-consumers into avid politics participants was an attractive narrative, we found it supported with sparse factual grounding and that, instead, gender served as a weapon of convenience in China’s game of contested cyber-nationalism.
In presenting this fresh perspective on a largely under-studied phenomenon, we have to concede to several limitations of this study. Namely, while we did our best to map out the identities of the participants, the precise demographics were difficult to capture. We encourage future studies to follow-up on our findings by adding relational data to the kind of postings examined here and then using the data to map the networks through which presumably Little Pink arguments proliferated. This may allow for better tracing of who played a role in specific labeling practices and who dominated the debates. Another limitation of our study is that our analysis is limited to digital data. Future researchers are encouraged to do more interview work with meme creators and sharers to unpack their conceptions of femininity, gender norms, and their vision of nationalism.
Despite the limitations, the case study of Little Pink and the cross-strait memes war adds new layers to the understanding of China’s cyber-nationalism. It creates new linkages between the study of cyber-nationalism and digital activism by demonstrating how contestation of national identity takes place across different online groups, including those associated with civil society and democratizing initiatives online. Rather than being solely directed at perceived enemies, therefore, cyber-nationalism is also a domestic affair, creating rare spaces for political friction and debate online. The very adoption and evolution of the Little Pink term during the cross-strait memes war demonstrated the presence of strong resistance to nationalistic claims by China’s liberal online commentators, as they attempted to push back not only on the pro-unification discourses but also on blind allegiance to the party-state. At the same time, the reinvention and appropriation of Little Pink by the party-state have further underscored the adaptive capacity of the party in opportunistically employing the Internet to embrace and enhance nationalistic discourses. The evolution of cyber-nationalism in China, therefore, is best understood as a fierce battleground, marred with uncivil behavior and discourses.
We further demonstrate the surprising role of gender in fueling this contested cyber-nationalism debates online. Our analysis reasserts the existing findings on the masculine nature of China’s nationalistic expression but emphasizes its gendered dimension, with femininity, equated with naiveté and playfulness, being used as a strategic weapon by those trying to dismiss nationalism and bolster its significance. Like other studies forewarning about the masculine nature of China’s liberal activism online (Wallis, 2015), we uncover aggressive deployment of gender for political attack by liberal commentators. Like scholars pointing to state feminism, we illuminate an attempt by the state to use gender to diversify its nationalistic claims.
While arguing that women tend to be passively deployed in nationalistic battles, we also demonstrate the emergence of unique feminine and even feminist characteristics on the Chinese web. The actual grassroots nationalistic discourse in cross-strait memes war carried a possible element of femininity (or at least potentially interpreted as such by other users), as manifested in creative soft seduction discourse applied vis-à-vis Taiwan, in addition to harsh aggressive statements prevalent in other cyber protests. Whereas these statements were not necessarily posted by female users, the presumably feminine attribute in these discourses is still important, as it transforms the dynamics of nationalistic expression online. Although the use of the label, Little Pink, was unwarranted, China’s nationalistic expression has evolved to include softer strategies that can easily fall into the “feminine” category for other Internet users. Ironically, while this article demonstrated a case of largely male-dominated groups contesting a male-dominant topic, in their delegitimation battles, they themselves engage with attributes they consider as female. This nuance adds another layer of messiness and contradiction to our grasp of China’s digital activism.
Moreover, our analysis of the responses of the real Little Pink community to what they deem as an unfair use of their platform for political purposes shows that digital feminism is evolving in China, as female Internet users use social media to express their opinions and defend their positions in China’s messy cyberspace. While conveniently dismissed as naïve and blindly patriotic, the real feminine users manifest awareness and passion to fight for their dignity and to draw a clear line between their fandom activism and politics. More research into female communities online and their engagement with masculine co-optation is welcomed in future studies.
In taking our findings beyond China, our article speaks to the evolving complexity of digital activism and nationalist discourse in the digital age. Far from directly or indirectly empowering the public, or serving the immediate interests of the state, social media has become a channel for constructing and reconstructing the very meaning of the nation across political contexts. Traces of such contestation are evident in other contexts, from the current US politics, to Brexit, to the rise of populist nationalism across Europe, as the lines between cyber-nationalism and digital activism are becoming increasingly blurry. The mistaken yet manufactured emergence of Little Pink brand of nationalism in China shows that discussions of nationhood, belonging, and “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983) can as much empower as disempower different groups and simultaneously serve to expand and narrow our visions of public sphere in the digital era.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Belle Xiaobo Wang for her excellent research assistance, as well as Rongbin Han, Hongmei Li, Calvin Hui, Anne Kaun, and the four anonymous reviewers, for their feedback on this article.
Author’s note
The order of authors’ names was determined by a coin toss.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.