Exposing State Repression: Digital Discursive Contention by Chinese Protestors

Author(s)

Diana Fu, Christian Göbel

Abstract

One of the major issues in international development is how disadvantaged populations mobilize in response to state repression. Whether in the Black Lives Movement or in the 2011 Arab Spring, digital exposures of police abuse have spurred social movements when people took to social media to expose it. Yet, in authoritarian regimes, citizens cannot easily initiate or participate in social movements. In such cases, how do victims of police violence express their dissatisfaction? This study examines this question in contemporary China, where repression of protesters is well documented. Based on a dataset of microblogs—Chinese tweets—documenting 74,415 protest events in the early Xi administration (2013–2016), this study analyzes how ordinary protestors, including migrant workers, peasants, and the urban poor, expose police abuse in social media. A close reading of microblogs documenting 150 randomly sampled events finds that Chinese protestors adopt three distinct narrative types: citizenship, solidarity, and confrontational. An accompanying quantitative analysis of the wider dataset further finds that ordinary protestors frequently expose police abuse online and that mentions of police abuse are closely associated with the above three narratives. Overall, this study contributes to understanding how abused protestors discursively contest authorities in the world’s most powerful authoritarian regime.

Organisation(s)

Department of East Asian Studies

External organisation(s)

University of Toronto

Journal

Studies in Comparative International Development

ISSN

0039-3606

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-024-09428-0

Publication date

08-2024

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

506014 Comparative politics, 506003 Development policy, 508020 Political communication

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Development, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/939a2b28-4b43-40ea-99cc-6e61131b8d43