https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4937-0059
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In the Web 2.0 era, memes have emerged as playful and versatile forms of communication in the daily interactions of social media users. In countries that embrace digital authoritarianism, memes have been deployed as a vehicle of political communication under the online surveillance system. Based on long-term observation of Chinese cyberspace, the author adopts a deep China approach and conducts multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of a series of political memes which poach transnational TV series and movie scenarios or characters. The remix of symbols from foreign TV dramas and movies with indigenous Chinese symbols devotes to three fundamental dimensions of meaning-making strategies: direct captures, reproduction of the original scene, and the reworking of specific elements. By producing, deploying, and proliferating ironic political memes, Chinese netizens have the capacity to engage in innovative discursive guerrilla wars under the rapidly evolving landscape of surveillance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The Great Firewall effectively obstructed numerous foreign popular websites and social media platforms, thereby demarcating the simplified Chinese cyberspace as relatively separate from the broader Internet landscape that employs traditional Chinese and other languages.
2 The term “argot” pertains to specialized language or secret words utilized by a particular group, which can be difficult for outsiders to comprehend. In the context of this article, it is employed synonymously with the Chinese phrase Heihua (黑話). During the feudal society in China, secret societies crafted specialized jargon imbued with concealed meanings, namely Heihua, to facilitate their daily communications. In the digital age, online argots or Heihua as “secret language” have been created by Chinese netizens to convey antagonistic expressions implicitly in response to political pressure and social surveillance.
3 The year 2018 marked a transformation of the Cyber Administration of China (CAC) into the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, which performs as the regulatory body governing China’s cyberspace and handling concerns pertaining to internet security and content censorship.
4 The website of TUPUTECH: https://shenhe.tuputech.com/audiovisual
5 Understanding the memes of toad worship from the perspective of subculture, Xu (Citation2017, 7) points out that the creative underground culture is an open field in which people from different standpoints can find their positions.
6 The “expedition” was triggered by the public apology of Zhou Ziyu, a Taiwanese member of South Korean entertainment company JYP’s girl idol group Twice, who was perceived to be pro-independence. Since the Chinese government has banned popular international applications including Facebook and Twitter, netizens in China have to “climb” beyond the Great Firewall with proxies or VPN to make these webpages accessible. The word expedition here refers to the online campaigns of defending the “One China” principle and pro-China discourse (Wu and Fitzgerald Citation2023).
7 Diba is an online community of nationalists and also a symbol of cyber-nationalism in China.
8 In Zhejiang Province and Guangdong Province of China, there are many cases of citizens being punished administratively for using proxies (翻牆 “climbing beyond the wall”).
9 Memes are not simply a tool for resistance or a creative outlet for the weak, but also a weapon that can be manipulated by those in power. For example, it has been noted that Russia has used memes to spread disinformation in order to influence the outcome of U.S. elections (Navarria Citation2019).
10 The film is a collaborative production of the UK and France.
11 Due to official control over the cultural industry, overseas movies and TV shows broadcasted on” the internet in China must go through the scrutiny and approval of the administrative department. Under the circumstance, Zimuzu (fansub groups) perform as the poachers of foreign cultural products as they add Chinese subtitles to foreign films and dramas, and share the translated versions on the internet.
12 Zhihu is a Chinese question-and-answer forum, exhibiting analogous functionality to the English platform Quora.
13 Weibo, a Chinese microblogging application, is often considered the equivalent of Twitter.
14 Due to the efforts of Zimuzu, the scenarios usually contain Chinese subtitles.
15 As figure 4 is a meme downloaded from Douban, it also circulates on WeChat and Weibo, especially during the years 2018 and 2019. Douban functions as an interest-based social networking platform, often likened to a mix of Facebook, IMDb, Goodreads, and Spotify.
16 Humorous political stunts that challenge the dominant has been conceptualized by Sørensen (Citation2016, 64) as "attacks in the discursive guerrilla war,"
17 This term gained widespread usage among Chinese netizens, and was censored on social media platforms for a period in 2018.
18 Jiuzhou (九州) is a synonym of ancient China. The green leek field in the image refers to mainland China.
19 A view from behind is deployed to evade censorship.