Revisiting networked China: challenges for the study of digital media and civic engagement

ABSTRACT

In this introductory essay, the editors consider the current challenges in understanding a networked China. We consider how the digital media landscape has changed just since an earlier collection of research in 2015, subtitled ‘global dynamics of digital media and civic engagement.’ We take up this orienting concept of civic engagement to explore emerging mediated spaces for cultural production through global connectivities. Beyond an area studies contribution, we focus on China more broadly as a complex global assemblage: an intersection of technology, norms, and socio-cultural structures. Our contributors were invited to consider ‘what’ and ‘where’ is China, and ‘how do we know China?’ Along with logistical challenges of fieldwork involving constraints of geopolitics and pandemic, we encouraged an epistemic reflexivity around reliance on certain paradigms, concepts and kinds of data. This research is further complicated by sensitivities around by the very vocabulary often involved, including public, civil society, and civic engagement itself. In the search for digital China, contributors consider how to think about China and how to locate a digital China. In exploring digital production and performance of and in China, we include analyses of fandom, idols, and the curation of collective pandemic memories. Together, this collection provides a rich set of deeply researched cases and imaginative new strategies to understand how the contradictions of digital China – between connectivity and control – are playing out, with important implications for the changing nature of public life.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• digital media
• globalization
• civic engagement

Challenges: then and now

Where shall we start in understanding the complex communication landscape of a networked China, predicated on a dense web of digital platforms and mediated connections? We begin here by narrowing that challenge to issues of public life: how new networked forms emerge, how the role of the State has evolved, and what implications that raises for, lacking a better phrase, civic engagement. We use that concept loosely here to describe how people become involved with others to advance the future of their community, in ways not completely determined by the government.¹ Often traditionally applied in a democratic context, invoking the concept for behavioral effects studies in China has meant in some cases stripping out the elements involving electoral participation and expression through protest, leaving a thin form of engagement, restricted to participation in community activities, meetings, and charities (e.g., Guo & Chen, 2022). We don’t want to essentialize it here but leave it open as an orienting concept inviting thick description and additional theorizing.

This special issue revisits the themes of the 2015 edited volume by two of the editors: Networked China: Global dynamics of digital media and civic engagement (Chen & Reese, 2015). Even as our work dealt then with issues of censorship and limitations on various forms of digitally-enabled engagement, it was natural in that period for (particularly Western) communication scholars to find cause for optimism in the greater freedom given grassroots and civil society groups, including for environmental issues (e.g., Liu & Goodnight, 2016) and journalism itself (Pan et al., 2020).

While recognizing the complexity and uncertainties surrounding these phenomena, we reflected that cautious optimism in our intellectual work over the prospects of greater openness and cross-border movements of people and information, something we shared with media and cultural globalization perspectives in their regard for this interconnectedness as an implicit social good (see also Chen, 2014). Even then, however, the political environment was changing. The consolidation of greater power by President Xi, the resilience of the Communist Party, and the crack down on anything threatening to its rule has been well documented. Strategic censorship has become more sophisticated, with the government using all the technological tools available to it (e.g., Tai & Fu, 2020). A deeply rooted rift with the US, exacerbated recently in part by Trump administration policy, has come to the surface and complicated the work of scholarly research. Thus, earlier assessments – which admittedly included some wishful thinking – have had to be re-evaluated in the current Xi era.

In spite of greater political sensitivities and stricter official oversight, we still believe the organizing theme of this issue addresses something meaningful and enduring: asking how the digital platforms that once served to integrate China with the global economy continue to support new forms of engagement, public deliberation and cultural production. This is one of the many contradictions embedded in China’s communication landscape; the very connectivities that enable the State’s need and aspirations to be a global player always threaten to subvert the control it seeks over those same networks. Others have documented how the government has become sophisticated in selectively managing online expression, quickly throttling certain sensitive messages while opening the valves on nationalistic discourse that suits its purpose. But even that strategic sophistication has its limits when confronting issues like air pollution and pandemic management, problems that are objectively visible to the public and provoke new forms of mediated expression. Indeed, as we prepare this issue, the White Paper Movement – the remarkable widespread public protest – presents a challenge serious enough for the Chinese government to abandon its zero-Covid policy. With a slowing economy and erosion of public support, that draconian approach proved unsustainable and revealed weakness in the president’s signature program.

Given this current context, we are motivated, not just to assess how ‘optimistic’ we should be but to consider new conceptual frameworks and an adequate vocabulary for articulating them. We need to confront the logistics of fieldwork and the resources required – exacerbated by pandemic and geopolitics – especially for scholars outside China (including our own graduate students). Indeed, that was one of the practical motivations for pursuing this collection in the first place. We recognize that these issues around China can be sensitive and increasingly controversial, even within the greater academic community, as a dimension of nationalism becomes part of the discourse, but we hope that the collection of articles here will be useful across the wider academic community – including to those who are not China specialists per se.

Core questions

We propose to focus on China but, more broadly, China as an intersection of technology, norms, and socio-cultural structures, a kind of complex global assemblage that raises theoretical questions of ‘what’ and ‘where’ is China? In developing this issue we entertained a range of innovative theoretical and methodological approaches that could help address these questions. We wanted studies that were not just about or set in China but uniquely able to use this assemblage to provide insights at a deeper level of complexity. We were less interested in the more straightforward application of familiar concepts to the Chinese case in favor of imaginative insights into the unique range of questions.

Official tightening of the social order has made it even more relevant to conceptualize new and unanticipated glocalized, deliberative, discursive, or ‘mediated spaces’ (Reese, 2015) that extend beyond national borders, spaces not so easily controlled by conventional tools of censorship or understood with regard to traditional notions of ‘freedom.’ Beyond the nation-state container, what kinds of less well-defined sub- and transnational spaces may be identified for better conceptualization and, therefore, yielding productive sites for research? These new digitally-mediated spaces are not always clearly self-evident to observers but require looking beyond specific platforms, media sites, and areas of professional production in isolation.

Journalism, for example, has been regarded in Western democracies as a crucial and relatively autonomous contributor to the public sphere. While citizens have taken on some of this role in various forms of ‘citizen journalism,’ including ‘bridge blogs’ (Zheng & Reese, 2016), the constraints on Chinese news media and different professional norms make rethinking this issue even more compelling. Beyond traditional news organizations, for example, ‘me media’ or ‘we media’ make it possible for information entrepreneurs to help readers with civic sense-making (Fang, 2022),² a major theme in our earlier collections (Chen, 2014; Chen & Reese, 2015).

Methodological issues

So, these spaces require interrogation, mapping, and tracing – using new strategies in putting together the appropriate mix of methods, including perhaps less conventional forms of ‘guerrilla’ research. Online gaming and fan communities, for example, may not always be easily available for investigators but benefit from new applications of methods such as digital ethnography. How can vantage points from scholars outside China be best exploited? What are the challenges of field work in and about China, and how can they be ameliorated? Considering that question of ‘how we know China,’ creative methodological strategies are needed, as well as greater reflexivity about larger epistemological concerns over various forms of data, and about what they both reveal and conceal.

Certainly, digital trace data have been widely exploited in lieu of ‘boots on the ground’ fieldwork, raising another set of issues regarding appropriate methods – and the reliability and validity of those data. We recognize that the platforms and other digital media are in a dual role of shaping social practices while also providing the means for knowing about them through these digital traces, which are at the heart of increasingly popular computational methods. What are creative approaches to this data, and what are its strengths and weaknesses? This trend toward addressing questions computationally is not peculiar to China, but presents a special set of concerns when relied on to the exclusion of other empirical work. Scholars often have to settle for data that are easier to access and analyze, shaping their research questions accordingly. These data, for example, have led to a wave of studies of social media patterns on Weibo and make appealing the broad comparisons of, for example, media content between China and other national systems, but they are not as likely to afford deeper sociological explanations that depend on more contextualized local knowledge. We need to be aware of the larger theoretical implications of certain strategies of data archaeology.

Finally, what normative frameworks can best be applied, especially given the usually, often implicit, democratic assumptions embedded in much of the social sciences? These taken for granted assumptions make foregrounding them with greater reflexivity even more relevant to the Chinese context, although scholars often decline to probe these issues too deeply, whether due to prevailing traditions of empirical research or political sensitivities. Right away, of course, we run into a problem of defining citizen and civic, which were never analogous to Western conceptions but have become an even more contested and moving target with the State’s increasing sensitivity over civil society. Regardless of terminology, however, questions still remain of the desired role for communication and the kind of society being promoted.

We acknowledge that the State is primarily sensitive to the autonomous operation of civil society, while working to keep itself firmly involved in a managerialist role and carefully granting limited involvement of civil society forces in governance processes. For example, the Chinese government has developed ‘e-participation’ initiatives, but it’s not clear whether they actually affect official policies (e.g., Jiang et al. (2019). Other scholars have addressed regime responsiveness (e.g., Chen et al., 2016), NGO-State relationships (Tian & Chuang, 2022) and the nature of (to Western observers often oxymoronic) authoritarian deliberation (He & Warren, 2017). The authoritarian system is certainly capable of efficiency and speed, praised by those touting that model during the pandemic response, but beyond just maintaining authoritarian power what kind of society is being promoted more broadly within the China assemblage? What kind of governance and social problem-solving do these digitally mediated spaces make possible, and what vision of society is being revealed as China promotes its own global alternative to liberal democracy?

A note about Area Studies and the ‘Particularist’ impulse

Given our focus on China with this issue, it is worth taking a moment to consider how our own perspective relates to the tensions embedded in ‘area studies,’ including that between epistemic particularism and generalism (or universalism). Without venturing too far into this philosophical terrain we can consider them simply as opposing epistemic positions of how researchers relate to what they study – and how they frame it as an object of knowledge.³ While the former starts with particulars, namely events or processes in a geographic or cultural context as the gateway to knowledge, the latter starts from some general theoretical propositions with which to approach the particulars. Both are susceptible to epistemic pitfalls. The particularist is prone to dwelling on ‘the essential constituents’ of the particulars and resists allowing them to be subsumed into larger theoretical generalities. Claims for multiple modernities, for example, are at odds with a general framework of modernization (e.g., Schmidt, 2006). The generalist, on the other hand, risks bleaching out the historical and contextual richness of human experiences to satisfy those generalities.

In any area study, the tensions between these epistemic positions also become entangled with conflicts over questions of values, interests, and power that arise from processes of an area becoming part of a global configuration. The knowledge produced in and about that area must take such entanglement into account. The new emphasis brought to the non-West, therefore, means a greater appreciation for its ‘particulars.’ Fittingly, a certain particularist position has gained credence with the scholarly movements bearing the names of ‘de-westernization’ (Curran & Park, 2000; Willems, 2014) and ‘de-imperialization’ (e.g., Chen, 2010). Conversely, the epistemic generalist position has become widely criticized for ‘Orientalizing’ or ‘othering’ the non-West or ‘the Global South.’ Such universalism is criticized for theorizing the non-West only in opposition to, in conjunction with, or in emulation of the West – not taking its particulars into account as speaking for themselves and on their own terms (Willems, 2014).

China study is no exception to these shifts, reflected in the early call for restoring China in scholarly readings of China (Mizoguchi, 1989/2016). In their recent attempt to extend and resituate this particularist position into ‘Global China as method,’ Franceschini and Loubere (2022) identify three frames in how China has been approached, both as an object of analysis and a site of knowledge production: the China exceptionalism frame that resorts to some ‘essential’ characteristics of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese,’ the maieutic frame that values the prospect of assimilating China into the global system by engaging China, and the whataboutism frame that thrives on exposing the hypocrisy among Western analysts in criticizing China for the ills readily found in their own territory. The authors thus call for a reorientation to a relational perspective that focuses on Chinese-global entanglements. Such a perspective does not view China as a discrete stand-alone entity, nor does it view the global system and processes as possible without taking China into account. Rather, it promises to go beyond the never-ending task of taking inventory of all the particulars of ‘Chinese phenomena.’ It means addressing the Chinese experiences, both spatially and temporally speaking, without ‘clinging to “particularism” and rejecting the so-called “universalism”’ (Yang, 2021, p. 571).

We have encouraged this approach, which we would argue benefits from Bourdieu’s (2004) epistemic reflexivity. In their own way, each of our contributors makes the case for this reflexivity. When immersed in China’s particulars, we need to not lose sight of a generalist theoretical concern with the very conceptual categories employed, such as capital, network, and even fans or idols. And when deploying general concepts, we need not take the West-based historical experiences uncritically, as if these concepts capture the only possibility.

Issue genesis and editorial process

The groundwork for this issue was laid by hosting a conversation with other scholars, which began with an online conference in 2021, to share ideas and strategies for carrying out this work. Not all those participants are represented here, but we appreciated their willingness to share their ideas, which helped establish the ‘proof of concept.’ From the initial conference we opened a somewhat revised general call for abstracts, and after an initial screening of those submissions invited authors, with our feedback, to submit full papers, which were sent to referees for blind reviews. From there we had a difficult decision to make in choosing a smaller group to advance with requests for revisions, which were then evaluated again by reviewers and by the editors, with particular concern with thematic coherence, yielding the final published selections. We note a strong emphasis on how to access China, given that many of scholars represented here are operating outside the country, even while being shaped by developments inside it. Perhaps, as a result they take up from that vantage point the special challenge of understanding the unique configuration of the Chinese assemblage. We did not impose a specific agenda on what topics to include, but we did try to shape the final submissions with careful critique and challenges to address the issue themes. We had our own vision for many of the articles, of course, but tried to balance that with respecting the choices of the authors. Thus, there is inevitable tension between our a priori conceptual concerns and the final products authors were able to supply.

We know the editorial process of journals varies widely in the range of feedback and constructive advice provided, but we hope that, especially in the case of our junior colleagues, we were able to be helpful. Certainly, the essays selected, having survived the initial screening, were greatly improved over the review process. Even for those we were not able to include, we hope that our feedback will result in publishable work elsewhere.

Special issue articles

In considering ‘How do we know China?’ we found an emphasis on mixed methods approaches, even when including advanced tools such as topic modeling. Of course, this question is directly related to what China is taken to be the analytical object and site of knowledge production. The limitations of digital trace data are tackled head on, but we encouraged a degree of reflexivity throughout each of these contributions regardless of method. In a mix of conceptual and traditional empirical articles, two of them develop crucial concepts that bring a fresh perspective to China: one considering China as a ‘backbox’ and the other using a transnational lens. The others use a mix of methods to explore fan culture, technology entrepreneurs, and the importance of digital repositories to preserve counter-narratives. Overall, our call yielded a clear shift in focus compared to the range of concerns in our 2015 edited volume: which ranged from chapters on anti-corruption cases, campaigns of independent local political candidates, grassroots environmental movements, and civil society organizations, to the civic participation implications for memes, protests, and fan groups. The current articles also explore fan culture, but add the work of amateur digital curation, ICT technology incubation, misinformation entrepreneurs, and the role of gaming in strengthening social connections.

Judging by the submissions to the initial online conference and further by the articles that journeyed through the arduous review and revision process, journalism itself seems to have fallen out of favor as a research focus, perhaps as more likely to involve political sensitivities, and our contributors in general were not immediately quick to explicitly explore the civic implications of their cases, a lens that seems to be less readily taken up in the current trend of digital media scholarship. These observations triggered our reflections above regarding the tensions in area studies, and also suggest to us a tilt in perspective among many digital communication scholars from the universalist to particularist position. We’ve already observed how certain concepts have become more politically sensitive in China, but we also sense that this particularist scholarly impulse was behind this unease among our contributors in more directly engaging with certain conceptual categories, such as the public, the public sphere, civil society, and civic engagement. As editors, however, we remain convinced that these are still part of the conceptual apparatus with which particulars of different contexts – geographical, cultural, and historical – must be assessed. We are also convinced that particularist essentialization is not limited to how conservative analysts in the West view China as an externalized and threatening other, as Franceschini and Loubere (2022) point out, but also creeps into the various declarations of Chinese exceptionalism.

In any case, we encouraged our contributors to point to these issues, and we hope in doing so that these essays help make the case for a broader, more reflexive concern with China. We can present them into two major groups: in search of digital China and digital production of China.

In search of digital China

Chen, Lu & Wu: how to think about China?

In their conceptual essay, Chen, Lu and Wu take up the question of how to think about China, especially in light of ‘new Cold War’ framings pitting China against the West. From a socio-technical perspective, they use the concept of the ‘blackbox’ as a cautionary metaphor in two connected ways: to describe the opaque way China is often perceived from the outside and to refer to how an often taken for granted and naturalized picture of society is provided by platform-generated digital traces. In considering the politics of knowledge, the authors ask ‘What and which China is brought into being by whom and how?’ How do we ‘know’ China in such a climate, particularly when fieldwork access for scholars has become more difficult (making the ‘black boxing’ of digital trace data in China particularly problematic)? In spite of barriers of access, language, and cultural familiarity – and indeed often because of them – observers have found ever more appealing the availability of online material. China study like other fields, has been tempted to privilege this kind of data, so valued by computational social science, at the expense of more subject-centered study. But platform data has its own institutional context, political imperatives, and historicized logic of measurement, which naturally shape the kind of conclusions drawn by researchers.

These non-neutral, digital trace data are limited in their ability to open the blackbox, of platforms and their algorithms, leaving the complex range of Chinese society to be represented instead by more simplified images of authoritarian determinism. Thus, one blackbox leads to another. How are we to ‘un-blackbox’ this situation? Certainly, the authors see an important role for embodied fieldwork – not just as a matter of ‘access’ but as a process of self-aware navigation and exploration. This leads to noticing everyday acts of resistance and negotiation rather than have them obscured by images of the omnipotent (and blackboxed) power of techno-authoritarianism, which is never as stable as the images would suggest. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies, they suggest treating the algorithm for what it is – a mediated cultural object enacted within a particular social setting and observable by tracing connections across multi-sited ethnographies. Indeed, these global assemblages need not be entirely in mainland China but make themselves available with greater imagination in what can be accomplished, beyond the insufficiently reflective and reified reliance on digital traces.

Zhao & Fang: how to 'locate' digital China?

In their largely conceptual article, Zhao and Fang consider the transnational perspective on digital China by drawing on cases involving their own empirical work on digital labor: gamers and disinformation entrepreneurs. They argue that it reveals a more diverse array of actors and dynamics, ranging across interconnected platforms around the Sino-phone world. In taking this prism of ordinary labor and resistance at the grassroots level they aim to push beyond the emphasis on the State’s censorship regime and citizen efforts to circumvent it. More fluid digital borders between servers and clients have enabled Chinese-speaking video ‘game workers’ to find a market for their expertise. They provide, for example, training in gaming skills and companionship during the games. In-China gaming professionals sell their services to middle-class diasporic Chinese who can more easily afford the cost: thus providing a transnational awareness and sociability not otherwise available.

In showing similar ability to cross national borders, disinformation imported from outside China can be monetized within it, subject to the government’s platform and algorithmic control, as long as it portrays a declining West and avoids sensitive domestic issues. Outside China, technologically sophisticated but marginalized workers spread disinformation as a way to ‘connect and mobilize around common concerns,’ translating right-wing Breitbart information content to Weibo, for example. The authors suggest that their grassroots perspective emphasizes ‘civic engagement,’ but that may not be all to the good. Game workers may engage with others as ‘citizens,’ in the sense of horizontal relationships, but under conditions of global inequalities and economic extraction. Disinformation entrepreneurs may be ‘engaged,’ but, when incentivized by authoritarian state power and financial incentives, that can take a dark turn toward extremism and intolerance. In any case, it raises the question of how we should think about civic implications of these engagements when nation-state has become disassociated from transnational flows.

Zhang & Yuan: how does China build an alternative to Silicon Valley?

Zhang and Yuan draw on archival research, interviews and ethnographic field work to understand the Chinese digital political economy of technology entrepreneurship. Probing the paradox of how dynamic, free-market-style bottom-up entrepreneurship can exist alongside top-down State planning, they argue that the government does not exert power from afar but becomes integrated into the sector as strategic investor, creating an alternative geo-imaginary to Silicon Valley through new assemblages of State and non-State actors. In their investigation of two major technology incubators in Beijing, they aim to take a more historical view of how this integration – revealed through the stories of individual entrepreneurial actors – shapes civil society, regarded as a set of political economic relations. Society, as revealed through these relationships, has not shown the expected equity of empowerment, relief from economic precarity, and a stronger bond between citizens and state. Elite entrepreneurs exploit complicated State-Market-Entrepreneur negotiations, but grassroots entrepreneurs are not as successful, unbuffered as they were against the financial risk off-loaded onto individuals. As President Xi has cracked down on entrepreneurs in recent months, favoring politics and security over a more free-wheeling approach, we will see what strategies of the State remain in place and driven by what vision.

Digital production and performance of and in China

Wang & Luo: fans

Wang and Luo take a different perspective on the enormous online idol fan groups, using computational methods to analyze six-million Weibo fan posts, supplemented with in-depth interviews. Focusing on a subsample of Covid-related posts during a pandemic year highlighted a more concentrated fan discourse and related official narrative regarding a common national challenge. This fan work can easily assume qualities of cybernationalism when incentivized by official media, including ‘positive energy’ as a form of this nationalism. They show how supporters take a pragmatic, utilitarian approach to promoting their idols, by using the commercial logic of the fan economy while strategically engaging with official discourse. Fans recognize the benefit this linkage can have for the primary goal – promoting the idol, connecting the idol to positive contributions to society. Expressing national pride and compliance to official measures while quoting an idol is believed to enhance the possibility of endorsements from official media and, in turn, the idol. So, although fans are willing boosters of nationalistic soft power discourse as the price for idol-promotion, the authors suggest that they develop a ‘sophisticated set of skills,’ organizing, communicating, and reading between the lines of official discourse. These have implications for civic engagement and represent a ‘double-edged sword’ if not managed carefully.

Zhang, Huang & Li: idols

To explore an idol community on a Chinese digital platform, Zhang, Huang and Li draw from their mixed method field work to show how fans skillfully engage with the algorithms on Weibo to boost their idol’s visibility: promoting, for example, positive content, controlling anti-idol trolling, boosting artificial visibility, and other tricks. Meanwhile, although finding certain idol practices profitable and valuing the user engagement, the platform tries to preserve credible metrics for itself by banning certain keywords and blocking fake accounts. In a continual tension with Weibo, fans help construct the ‘algorithmic imaginary’ in an ongoing push and pull contestation with the platform, with neither exerting complete control. Fans in this context are empowered to the extent they become technologically sophisticated, learning active strategies to advance their interests. Yet, they are often discouraged by platform capitalism when it leads to constraints on their idol-supporting work. The authors consider through this window on idol-supporting engagement how this imaginary, that is the way people ‘make sense of algorithms,’ may be spread to other fan work and contexts beyond fandom.

To the extent that it spreads to non-fan communities, the authors suggest that this algorithmic knowledge has implications for broader civic engagement in boosting expression around social incidents. That raises an important question of how ‘data-ization’ designed to improve the commercial values of idols is conceptually related to, and differentiated from, civic engagement in democratic theories? If the Super Girl (or ‘Super Girl Voice’ Chaoji Nüsheng) phenomenon once was deemed politically risky by giving viewers a ‘democratic’ input or deliberation (e.g., Fung, 2013; Meng, 2009; Wu, 2015), what is different about this kind of idol phenomenon? Might fan discourse ever diverge from the State line, especially, one may speculate, as public exhaustion increases over COVID policy? There is no way to know from this data, but it raises the question of whether fans really believe the nationalist values they express, or whether it’s just a strategic way to boost their idols’ status in connecting them to State-approved themes. Or perhaps the question is moot, to the extent that they internalize those values over time.

Han: digital memories

Han examines a new space for digital curation in three collaborative projects on GitHub, a platform normally used by software developers for code hosting. The preservation of COVID-19 memories, the suffering they recount, and their endangered digital traces, was particularly important given the government’s effort to impose strict social controls and manage the discourse surrounding them. Although ephemeral, digital memories from multiple platforms can be made more permanent through centralized archiving and curation by volunteers, imposing some order and timeline on the memory work, with the repository owner ultimately having the final say. She shows that the affordances and social features of GitHub have allowed it to serve functions beyond its original group of users, who have been worried about attracting too much official scrutiny and risking an important resource for their work. These functions enable a counterpoint to the official narrative of pandemic victory, which has left little room for resistance. From nCovMemory, which hosted individual narratives, links were followed by the author to other repositories: including ‘The Pandemic and Public Opinion: Timeline of n-Cov’ and ‘2020 COVID-19 Individual Stories.’ Curation actions included organizing events chronologically, providing relevant daily summaries, verifying story contributions, and screening out official propaganda. In this contentious arena, these projects reveal the struggle over not only what is the ‘correct collective memory,’ as defined by the government, but over who is entitled to deem a memory worth preserving.

Conclusion

These studies have brought out the back and forth dynamic of the controls sought by both State and platforms in managing narratives, rather than a more one-directional flow of power. Part of this involves understanding the historical moments in constructing understandings such as Covid memories, with scholars recognizing the ephemerality of these narratives and the importance of intervening when possible (Yang, 2022). The GitHub study of memory curation, for example, shows how resourceful people can be, exploiting in unpredictable ways the affordances of repositories beyond their original intent.

The essays show a number of important themes and insights at multiple levels of analysis, paying close attention to changing global connections. Throughout, the role of the State is never far from the analysis but not treated uncritically as a one-dimensional source of influence. Some emphasize the role of officially guided values, such as the work of disinformation entrepreneurs studied by Zhao and Fang, but this is less so in their example of the market for the work of gaming professionals. In either case, creative application is made by our contributors of the advice from Chen, Lu and Wu, to pursue multi-sited work that follows the people, money, and practices of ‘global assemblages’ (Ong & Collier, 2007).

In spite of the globalization of these circuits, the glocal implementation of national policy on the ground cannot be ignored (e.g., Chen, 2022). The political economy of State-encouraged technology entrepreneurialism, for example, is carefully documented by Zhang and Yuan in their study of Beijing enterprise zones. We can distinguish this case from other examples of state industrial policies for the primacy attributed to digital entrepreneurship and its influence on innovation and social values, illustrating how social actors negotiate with bothstate and market forces to advance their goals. Here, as elsewhere, the role of the government is co-creating, providing an incentive structure with which entrepreneurs willingly participate.

Finally, two of our essays show the range of engagement with State discourse, beyond a passive acquiescence to official narratives. Wang and Luo show that engagement by way of idol promotion, official discourse mediated through more mundane cultural practices. Fans are actively engaged, certainly, using sanctioned discourse for their own purposes. Han, on the other hand, shows the willingness of memory curation volunteers to subvert official control, running the risk of having the entire platform attract unwanted attention and have those affordances of GitHub curtailed. Thus, once again the use people make of technologies cannot be completely predicted but must be explored and documented as done here.

We hope this special issue will make a contribution to research into networked China – introducing new imagination, methods, concepts and questions into this important arena of scholarship. As we contemplate the issues explored here, we don’t want to overlook the human dimension and the emotional impact of seeing rarely witnessed, large scale social-system frictions, played out on in real-time before a global audience. The editors have each benefited from the travel and academic relationships, personal and professional, we have cultivated over the years, and hope that these ties will continue into the future and become routine again. This pandemic period has caused immense suffering around the world, contributing to an unfortunate climate of fear and distrust. But we are heartened to see the work of the scholars represented in this special issue, who collectively have demonstrated, despite these geopolitical tensions, constraints on travel, and other challenges, the possibilities of civic engagement – in its various forms and absence – in the current Networked China.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen D. Reese

Stephen D. Reese has been on the University of Texas at Austin faculty since 1982, where he is now the Jesse H. Jones Professor of Journalism & Media. His research focuses on press performance, including the sociology of news, media framing of public issues, and the globalization of journalism. A fellow of the International Communication Association, his most recent book is The crisis of the institutional press (2021, Polity). [email: [email protected]]

Wenhong Chen

Dr. Wenhong Chen is an associate professor of media studies and sociology, the co-director of Center for Entertainment and Media Industries, and a Distinguished Scholar in the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at UT Austin. Dr. Chen has more than 100 publications, including articles in top-ranked journals in the fields of communication and media studies, sociology, and management. [email: [email protected]]

Zhongdang Pan

Zhongdang Pan is Professor of Communication Science in the Department of Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on mediated communication in public life. He has published research on news framing and its effects, civic implications of political talk, perceptions of media effects, Chinese journalism, and mediated civic engagement in China. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1 Dahlgren (2009) uses the term to describe how people become involved with others for voluntary activities, perform their agency as citizens and/or members of a community, enact their understanding of shared interests and values, and utilize their efficacy and skills in building connections and working together with others.

2 Note that there is no consensual translation of the Chinese phrase Zimeiti. Some translate it to ‘self media’ and others ‘we media.’ Yu (2017) traces its transplantation from ‘we media,’ the term popularized by the American digital news industry watcher Dan Gillmor.

3 These often operate as two opposing intellectual impulses. But it does not mean they never intersect. We can recognize the tension between the two impulses at both some metaphysical level (e.g., Tong, 2009) and the analytical levels in research design and/or narrative building (e.g., Davison & Martinsons’s, 2016; Krishna, 2017).