Politics of mainland China has been a contested topic in social sciences since the 21st century. Despite its insights, the existing body of literature is deeply implicated with a neocolonial/west-centric interpretation of the increasing tension between China and the so-called global north. More recently, the academic landscape is becoming more complicated under the surge of anti-China sentiment triggered by the China-US Trade War and the COVID19 pandemic. It is not uncommon today to see scholars taking an explicit stance on China, which unveiled the long-standing, taken-for-granted criticism on the Chinese government encouraged by well-known institutions around the world.
Due to the forged linkage between such academic production and China-targeting propaganda, and the lack of responses from Chinese academia, research on politics of China is characterized by an exclusive focus on the Chinese government. In this line of work, Chinese citizens are often viewed as passive subjects, who presumably align with either one of the two political positionings imagined by the historical anti-China narratives: as either 'brainwashed' to support the government or 'repressed' for challenging its perceived political oppression. Their voices, however, are decontextualized from local epistemologies, treated as the data evidence to justify some structural organizations pre-determined by researchers in a top-down matter (e.g., authoritarianism). Less explored is who make these voices, for what individual or collective purposes, and with what positionings enacted on the ground that could potentially transcend the dominant support-vs-repressed categorization of Chinese citizens.
In this paper, I adopt a sociolinguistic perspective to investigate the situated processes in which the political positionings of Chinese citizens are discursively constructed and circulated. Drawing on my two-year online ethnography that examines the emergence of 'new' Chinese nationalism on Chinese social media, I focus on Chinese netizens' comments on the continuous COVID lockdown that seems to have caused growing public concerns since 2022. Informed by Agha's (2006) theory of enregisterment, I trace how seemingly isolated comments on COVID-related news constitute larger interactional networks on major social media platforms. I provide a nuanced account of how such networks create a space for the complex meaning-making process of what counts as political, what as unpolitical but social, and how this distinction enables what I call a critical positioning of Chinese netizens shaped by the ambiguous status quo of China in the post-pandemic era.
With this analysis, I aim to explicate the often-backstaged heterogeneity underlying the enactment of political positionings in China. I argue that the dominant narratives – from both academic and public domains – that routinely politicize China are problematic not only for taking a colonial stance, but also for adopting a reductionist view on the real-life complexities faced by Chinese citizens on the ground. This, as I hope to show, calls for a ground-driven, sociolinguistic perspective that zooms in on the discursive formation of politics in everyday life.
Agha, A. (2006). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
