Abstract
This is Part I of a special issue on digital formations in China. The five articles in this part study, respectively, the digital working class, social media propaganda, “grassroots” Internet finance, online swearing, and online political communication in a Hong Kong Chief Executive election.
Introducing their volume on Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm, Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen (2005) outline a new agenda for studying novel social forms and formations which are largely constituted in and through digital spaces and networks. They list examples such as global electronic markets, Internet-based large-scale conversations, knowledge spaces arising out of networks of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and early conflict warning systems.
When their book was published in 2005, important new digital forms and formations were already appearing in China. Over a decade has now passed. It is no exaggeration to say that practices associated with Chinese digital networks have created numerous cultural, social, political, and commercial forms and formations. Some examples are online communities, WeChat groups, Internet memes, cyber-nationalism, Internet literature, Internet rumors, virtual wallets, WeChat rewards, the Alibaba commercial empire, and many more.
Although a large proportion of the Chinese population is still left behind in the digital era, these digital forms and formations have become more and more pervasive in contemporary society, accompanied by new vocabularies, practices, habits, and disruptions to everyday life and existing institutional arrangements. They are often appropriated for different purposes by different social actors. Emojis may be weaponized by cyber-nationalists as well as used by advertising agencies. Rumors may be circulated in the forms of gripping narratives to mobilize public protest or to serve as clickbait. State propaganda agencies may use short videos to spread political messages packaged as entertainment.
This Special Issue, published in two parts, features 10 articles about different varieties of digital formations in China. Five articles are carried in this issue as Part I; the other five will appear in the next issue as Part II. The five articles in Part I study how the development and expansion of new digital technologies in China, with their affordances for public communication, have shaped working class identities, government propaganda, financial institutions, news flows, as well as civic discourse.
Jack Linchuan Qiu argues that among the most important digital formations that have appeared in China is a digital working class. Through a case study of a social media account run by the Communist Youth League of China, Shaohua Guo shows how official media have appropriated digital media forms and styles to foster an alliance between the nation and its citizens. Jing Wang’s research on “grassroots” Internet finance such as crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, and third-party payment finds that China’s fintech businesses have further concentrated wealth and resources through these processes, despite their rhetoric of inclusion and financial decentralization. Yunya Song and Yi Wu study online swearing behavior on China’s social media platform Sina Weibo and find that negative emotions and the use of third-person pronouns (not first-person or second-person pronouns) appear to enhance the virality of swearing language. Through a study of three incidents in the 2017 Hong Kong Chief Executive election, Francis Lee provides support to the theory of political information cycle but at the same time shows that online political communication cannot be understood solely in terms of the relationship between conventional media outlets and the dispersed mass of Internet users. Lee highlights the emergence of new types of institutional actors in the online arena and their roles in the political information cycles.
Some of the ten papers in this Special Issue were first presented at a symposium organized by the three editors and held at the Penn Wharton China Center in Beijing on 12–13 June 2017. Although not all the speakers at the Beijing symposium were represented in this Special Issue, we remain indebted to their participation in the intellectual dialogues which helped to improve the qualities of the papers. They are Jia Dai, Fangzhou Ding, Jinying Li, Adel-Jing Wang, Yizhou Xu, Elaine Yuan, and Kui Zhou. Funding for the symposium was made possible by a Penn China Research and Engagement Fund from the Penn Global Office. Additional financial and administrative support was provided by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, for which we thank Dean Michael Delli Carpini. Last but not least, the editing and timely publication of the papers in this Special Issue would not have been possible without the able and professional assistance of Rosemary Clark-Parsons.