China's Digital Nationalism

China’s Digital Nationalism explores online networks and their nationalist discourses in digital China. It asks what happens to national community sentiments when they go digital. Nationalism, in China as much as elsewhere, is today shared through digital information and communication technologies. It is adopted, filtered, transformed, enhanced, and accelerated through digital networks, and it interacts in complicated ways with nationalism ‘on the ground’. Understanding these processes is crucial if we hope to make sense of the social and political complexities that shape the twenty-first century. In China’s Digital Nationalism, Florian Schneider analyses 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: the protracted historical relationship with neighbouring Japan. Using two cases, the infamous 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 for their own ends. These dynamics in an emerging great power, this book argues, provide crucial lessons on how nation states adapt to the shifting terrain of the digital age.