Abstracts

From Archives to Algorithms: A Historian's Approach to China's Digital Transformation

Christian Henriot, Aix-Marseille University, France

In this presentation, I invite you on a journey through the captivating intersection of history, technology, and sources. Drawing from my own scholarly path through successive methodological turns, I will illuminate the pivotal moments and technological milestones that have influenced my intellectual quest. Central to this exploration is the remarkable impact of computational methodologies on historical research, especially in the context of China. We find ourselves in a world increasingly shaped by digital forces, which will undeniably shape how we access, interpret, and preserve the past for future generations. With a forward-looking perspective, I will engage in speculation about the future of digital scholarship and historical research. I will emphasize the crucial role of interdisciplinary collaborations in these endeavors, pointing towards the emergence of innovative approaches that combine historical expertise with cutting-edge technologies. China's history is interwoven with its digital transformation, yet scholars now encounter new challenges in maintaining the momentum of collaborative endeavors and continuing the dialogue on what it means to be digital in China's ever-evolving landscape.

China’s Digital Nationalism: Narratives, Technological Affordance, Practice

Florian Schneider, Leiden University, Netherlands

Abstract: Crisis moments like the 2019 Hong Kong protests or the COVID-19 pandemic have shone a spotlight on how divided political opinions are across the Chinese-speaking world, often along fault lines created by tribalist and nationalist attitudes. These attitudes are shaped by official propaganda, but they also interact in complicated ways with the widespread adoption of internet technologies, and especially of mobile and interactive ‘web 2.0’ technologies since the start of the 21st century. Advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have augmented and accelerated human interactions, included group sentiments, ideologies, and political programmes. Community attachment is today adopted, filtered, transformed, enhanced, and accelerated through digital networks, whether in seemingly banal cases such as fandom practices or in more overtly political contexts such as nationalist agitation. As such processes unfold, the state’s techno-nationalist politics, the commercial rationale of platform providers, and the technical affordances of specific digital designs all conspire to drive viral interactions on China’s internet, be it on social media apps like Sina Weibo or video-sharing platforms like Bilibili. Based on observations about recent developments in the Chinese speaking world, Florian Schneider relates his earlier analyses of Chinese online nationalism vis-à-vis Japan to the post-pandemic era, asking: what happens to nationalism when it goes digital?

Tracing China’s Mask Diplomacy through Digital Sources

Lauri Paltemaa, University of Turku, Finland

Global China has become increasingly popular topic in academic China research. Currently, China’s international activities leave a growing digital footprint, which helps researchers to track and analyze different aspects of Chinese foreign policy even if the country is otherwise becoming more difficult environment for research. This presentation introduces a case of tracking and analyzing China’s humanitarian aid during the Covid19-pandemic, particularly the mask diplomacy phase of 2020 based on various digital sources available in the internet.

China after the Digital: An Ethnographic Reflection

Gabriele de Seta, University of Bergen, Norway

The “digital” has been one of the most consistent buzzwords, adjectives and prefixes over more than two decades of discussions about the People’s Republic of China. From the “digital revolution” sweeping through the country to the digitization of governance, from the success stories of digital media platforms to the massive development of digital infrastructure, the digital has undeniably become one of the main lenses through which to look at countless aspects of Chinese culture, society, economy, politics, and everyday life. While seemingly straightforward to define, the term digital comes with several challenges: first, it carries along a heavy media theoretical baggage that clashes against its underdetermined, everyday use as a buzzword; secondly, it is extremely layered, encompassing corporate interests, government policy, material effects and everyday practices; third, it is entangled with different temporal imaginaries, ranging from catching up with Western modernity to achieving a unique futurity. This presentation draws on ten years of digital ethnographic research on various aspects of digital China and reflects on these challenges through the increasingly popular term “postdigital” in the context of the country and its technological ecosystems. 

Contested Terrain: Mapping Political Agenda in Chinese Social Media with the VAR approach

Shouhui Zhou (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Nian Liu (Capital University of Economics and Business), and Jun Liu (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

How do public discussions unfold online? Who are shaping political agenda in the Chinese social media, with what effect? We study these questions by examining the connections between different agendas/themes across four types of Weibo users in the Red-Yellow-Blue kindergarten child abuse scandal: organizational users, celebrities, micro-celebrities (influencers), and common users. Specifically, we develop a computational approach with 1) supervised machine learning classifiers to label Weibo posts, 2) topic modelling to identify frame and agenda, so to pinpoint the salience of most relevant issues, 3) a vector autoregression (VAR) approach to explore the relationship between the frames and agendas. Our methodological proposal could shed light on how to better map out the complexity of public discussion in the Chinese social media.

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

Haiqing Yu, RMIT, Australia, and Jesper Willaing Zeuthen, Aalborg University

This paper 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.

“Rural Guardians” – Rural place-making between politics, nostalgia, and commerce

Antonie Angerer and Elena Meyer-Clement

An ever-growing part of life takes place on social media platforms, and this is certainly true for the largest part of China’s population. Not only individual users and commercial firms compete over views and likes in these spaces, but increasingly also government actors who are aware of the excessive viewing practices of China’s netizens. However, it is difficult to grasp the political impact on social media platforms beyond the obvious censorship regulations.

In this paper, we analyze a Douyin program on rural development, the “Rural Guardians”, which is part of the larger “New Villager Plans” that Douyin runs since 2020. Embedding the qualitative content analysis of videos in a wider discussion of the interests and strategies of major actors involved, we investigate how the linkages and entanglements between political and commercial actors shape the production of rural digital space. By means of inclusion in the program, the well-known and widely liked rural nostalgia videos are framed as part of the ongoing rural development campaign promoting a new appreciation of the countryside and rural traditions, and the moving of young, educated urbanites into the villages. In this “platformization of politics”, commercial platforms and government actors seem to work hand in hand in steering rural video production and dissemination towards both commercially and politically exploitable representations of the countryside. Rural producers, however, become marginalized.

Worldbuilding and surveillance in Liu Cixin's Three-body trilogy 

Bo Ærenlund Sørensen, University of Copenhagen

Literary works of science fiction often revolve around investigating the estranging effects of radical technological developments upon individuals and societies; that at least is Suvin’s seminal claim. This paper takes a related yet still markedly different route by examining the ways in which the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s world-building occurs through the working out of a limited number of productive ambivalences: These include the injunction to remember against the desire to forget; the delights of ocular examination against the paralyzing effects of surveillance; and the longing for sincerity against the fear of betrayal. The paper claims that Liu Cixin's famous Three-Body trilogy can be considered a world created by transposing these social anxieties, characteristic of contemporary China, onto both plot elements and specific imaginary technologies present in the work.

Data Activism in China: Mapping Infrastructures, Actors and Tactics  

Yu Sun, University of Glasgow, UK 

Drawing on previous studies about the role of data in activism and social movements and relevant reflections, this study seeks to map the infrastructures, actors and tactics that constitute data activism research in China. First, it will review the current findings of previous research, shedding light on the diversity, nuances and richness of data activism practices that point out the specific entanglement of the material, temporal and spatial power relations in the Chinese context. Then, it rethinks the challenges we face in formulating more grounded conceptual and theoretical lenses. Such contextually rooted frameworks are essential for better grasping and interpreting the local socio-political context that shapes the practices and dynamics of data activism in China. The study further reflects on the limitations of adopting theories originating from the Global North in understanding the emergence of diverse patterns of data practices in the Global south. Ultimately, it concludes by proposing future directions and areas of study in need of further scrutiny.  

Platform economies in China: what can we learn by “following the money”?

Lianrui Jia, Sheffield University, UK

This talk examines the growth of digital platforms in China and the important political economic question it poses: how does private sector manage to thrive within a restrictive political and communicative environment? Drawing on my previous research, this talk discusses the method of “following the money” in analysing the political economy and movements of capital, profit, and investment in and between digital platform companies in China. Through “following the money”, we can also see how state, market actors, and foreign capital together shape the regulatory and institutional conditions underpin the rise of digital platforms. Overall, this talk argues that in addition to their cultural and political significance, platform companies and foreign capital are important actors in exploring and harnessing legal and institutional affordances for capital accumulation in an increasingly digitized Chinese society.

The developmental Party and the regulatory state in China’s Internet governance

Yi Ma, University of Copenhagen

Despite President Xi Jinping's centralized approach to Internet governance in China, the landscape remains highly fragmented. Existing research on China's Internet governance has focused on fragmentation among different bodies, paying less attention to the internal dynamics within a single institution. Furthermore, the division of labor between the Chinese Communist Party (the Party) and the state in China's Internet governance remains unclear. This study addresses these two gaps by examining the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the most important organ in China's current Internet governance, functioning as a merged Party-state agency with a dual status. Using a unique dataset of official CAC documents, this study investigates the distinct identities (Party or state) exhibited by CAC. The findings reveal that CAC predominantly issues documents on Internet development under the Party's name, while regulatory policies concerning the Internet industries are primarily issued under the state's name. However, CAC frequently employs its Party nameplate to issue social regulations pertaining to the Internet sector. These findings offer nuanced insights into the division of labor between the Party and the state in China's Internet governance. Importantly, the study emphasizes the need to differentiate between the Party and the state when examining China's Internet governance, despite the Party's increasingly tight control over the state.