Internet memes and the mobilization of a “One-China” cyber nationalist campaign: the case of the 2016 Diba Expedition to Taiwan

ABSTRACT

This study examines the 2016 Diba Expedition to Facebook, a mass collective organized campaign directed at independence-leaning Taiwanese individuals and institutions, as an example of cyber nationalism through a highly organized meme war between anti- and pro-Taiwan independence users on Facebook. Drawing upon a social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis of the nationalist campaign, this study examines the ways Diba members deployed multimodal elements of political propaganda and popular culture in the preparation and mobilization of the campaign as well as the playful memetic interaction between the two camps on the battlefield. The analysis and discussion underscore the playful and carnivalesque ecology of Chinese social media that users deployed in the 2016 expedition while also demonstrating the dilemma of undertaking a Chinese nationalism campaign beyond the Great Firewall, where those based in the Mainland needed to overcome the state's regulations of online security to defend the motherland. This study contributes to the growing research on cyber nationalism in China and adds a further dimension to the study of Chinese social media.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyber nationalism
• memes
• multimodal discourse analysis
• the 2016 Diba Expedition to Facebook

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The “fifty-cent army” refers to the state-sponsored commenters who are paid 50 cents per post, while the “voluntary fifty-cent army” is a group of users who defend the regime on an unpaid basis.

2 Little pink refers to a group of young Chinese nationalists from a popular literature website called Jinjiang Literature City (晋江文学城) who help in building and shaping a pro-CPC narrative.

3 Simplified Chinese is the writing system widely adopted in the Chinese Mainland, while traditional Chinese is the written script widely used in regions such as Taiwan, part of Hong Kong, Macao, some coastal cities in the Chinese Mainland, and Chinese-speaking immigrant communities.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by The Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Projects of Guangdong Province “广东省哲学社会科学规划 2020 年度青年项目”[grant number GD20YXW03] and the Start-up Fund of BNU-HKBU United International College [grant number UICR0700008-22].