By the end of 2018, Chinese social media platform, Sina Weibo, has attracted over 462 million monthly active users and continues to be one of the most influential platforms in China and the world. The political potential of Sina Weibo, especially its role in mobilizing online activism (Gleiss, 2015) and the emergence of public spheres (cf. Rauchfleisch & Schäfer, 2015 and Bolsover, 2018) has always been the academic focus in understanding the social impacts of social media in the Chinese context. However, with a six-month online ethnography, this study investigates that Chinese younger generations’ political participation on Sina Weibo has been simultaneously transformed by the rising nationalist sentiments as well as their engagements in the fandom culture. On the one hand, the platform is both shaping and shaped by the dynamic online participation of fandom culture, significant in its efforts in “manipulating the data” and the users' autonomy in organizing and structuring fandom groups. That is to say, the fandom communities on Sina Weibo are no longer connected by weak ties or casual participation but evolve into hierarchical structures where members’ positions are directly determined by their digital abilities and devoted economic, cultural, and social capital. At the same time, these fandom practices originally aiming at producing the fan-based idols or increasing the social impacts of specific celebrities have also been incorporated into the young netizens’ political participation, especially in expressing their national pride during news events from responding to the Hong Kong protest to resisting the US National Basketball Association. In disentangling the network of the use of social media, nationalism, and fandom communities, this on-going study hopes to contribute to understanding how one specific element of popular culture, the fandom culture, transforms the political participation and its own online mediation in contemporary China. The authors hope to present their analysis in a video format, in which personal stories from interviews, news reports, snapshots and clips of online discussions will be integrated with academic analysis.
Reference
Bolsover, G. (2018). Slacktivist USA and Authoritarian China? Comparing Two Political Public Spheres with a Random Sample of Social Media Users. Policy & Internet, 10(4), 454–482. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.186
Gleiss, M. S. (2015). Speaking up for the suffering (br)other: Weibo activism, discursive struggles, and minimal politics in China. Media, Culture & Society, 37(4), 513–529. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443714566897
Rauchfleisch, A., & Schäfer, M. S. (2015). Multiple public spheres of Weibo: A typology of forms and potentials of online public spheres in China. Information, Communication & Society, 18(2), 139–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.940364