4-25-2025
【活動公告】5/7 13:30-16:30｜Revisiting Digital Nationalism in China: Narratives, Technology and Practice 重訪中國數位民族主義：敘事、科技與實踐
Revisiting Digital Nationalism in China: Narratives, Technology and Practice
重訪中國數位民族主義：敘事、科技與實踐
📍Date and Time: Wednesday, May 7, 2025, 13:30 – 16:30
📍Place: Guangfu Campus, NYCU, R102, HC Building 3
📍Forum Language : English
📍Event Overview:
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 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?
📍Speakers:
Florian Schneider (Professor, University Lecturer for the Politics of Modern China, Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University)
Florian Schneider is University Lecturer for the Politics of Modern China at the Institute for Area Studies at the Leiden University. Schneider's research interests include questions of governance and public administration in the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, political communication strategies and political content of Chinese entertainment and recent Chinese economic developments. He is also managing editor of the academic journal “Asiascape: Digital Asia.” Florian’s most recent work focused on the political contents of mainland Chinese films and popular Chinese television series, including their production process, censorship, broadcasting, and audience reception. His work has combined critical discourse analysis, semiotics, and iconography, as well as the analysis of semi-structured qualitative interviews. He published a book “China's Digital Nationalism” (2018). Schneider analyzes digital China first-hand, by empirically examining what search engines, online encyclopaedias, websites, hyperlink networks, and social media accounts can tell us about the way that different actors construct and manage a crucial topic in contemporary Chinese politics. Using two cases, the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and the ongoing disputes over islands in the East China Sea, Schneider shows how various stake-holders in China construct networks and deploy power to shape nationalist discourses. These dynamics in an emerging great power provide crucial lessons on how nation states adapt to the shifting terrain of the digital age.
📍Moderator:
劉紀蕙 Joyce C.H. Liu (Director/Professor, International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)
📍Commentator:
🗨️ 陳奕麟 Allen Chun (Professor, International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)
🗨️ 朱元鴻 Yuan-Horng Chu (Professor Emeritus, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)
🗨️ 劉子愷 Liu, Tzu-kai (Assistant Professor, Department of Ethnology, National Cheng-Chi University)
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