Panel 4: Digital Media, Discourse, and the Making of Subjects

May 8, Afternoon Session

Chair:

Puck Engman, Department of History, University of California Berkeley

Discussant:

Guobin Yang, Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

Jeff Lockhart, Department of Sociology, University of California Berkeley

4.1  Making Gendered Citizens: How the Chinese State Constructed Citizenship through Domestic Violence Narratives on Social Media

Zhifan Luo, Department of Sociology, McMaster University

Muyang Li, Department of Sociology, York University

Abstract

The making of modern states is gendered and uneven processes of making institutions, boundaries, identities, and subjectivities. This dynamic is particularly salient in the domain of domestic violence, which operates at the intersection of state power, patriarchal family relations, and women’s social citizenship. In the case of China, the government’s legislative advances on domestic violence over the past few decades provide an opportunity to examine the forms of female citizen subjects that the Chinese state attempt to produce. To answer this question, we analyzed a dataset of the Chinese government’s Weibo posts about domestic violence between 2010 and 2019 (N = 56,557). We combined Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling with qualitative content analysis to examine how the government narratives construct legal, political, and social citizenship.

We found that in the government’s narratives, gendered victims of domestic violence are offered legal protection, which comes with obligations that demand victims—and potential victims—to act as political and moral vanguards of the state. The state “colonizes” the family sphere by discursively constructing individual families as constituent cells of the state–society. Each “family cell” is transformed into the basic unit for fulfilling collective goals, which include maintaining social order and fulfilling the state’s policy of gender equality. Within these cells, women are expected to assume multiple cultural, legal, and political obligations that are not always mutually compatible. Thus, women become the citizen subjects that embody—and are hoped to reconcile—the conflicts embedded in the state-making project.

4.2  Do Nothing and Win: China’s Digital Charm Offensive through Social Media

Rongbin Han, Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia

Abstract

A Spring 2025 Pew survey reveals that compared to the previous year, perceptions of China and President Xi Jinping have improved among 15 and 16 out of the 25 countries surveyed, respectively, including some of the close allies of the United States. Given its perceived “lackluster ideology” and the significant disadvantage in global media influence compared to the West, how has China achieved significant gains in international favorability?

Through digital ethnographic work on three selected cases of drastically different natures in 2025, namely the TikTok Refugee phenomenon, the American YouTuber IShowSpeed’s China tour, and the viral “Kill-line” narratives, this paper explores the ground mechanisms of a potential “soft power strategy” for China. Preliminary research shows that this strategy of digital charm offensive, by design or unintentional, has two key components: (1) instead of engaging in ideological disputes, it leverages performance legitimacy by emphasizing tangible governance outcomes, especially its achievements in economic development, infrastructure, and improvement in people’s livelihood; (2) instead of resorting to heightened state propaganda, it relies on people-to-people exchange, especially social media influences which not only avoids popular backlash but also enhances credibility of the narratives.

This research demonstrates that while pursuing technological prowess and effectively deploying it are undoubtedly crucial for the Chinese Party-state in the intensified geopolitical competition with the U.S., such an approach has inherent limitations when it comes to soft power competition. The key to winning the war of ideas may ironically be “doing nothing”—instead of escalating overt state propaganda, the regime may recede to the background and focus on delivering governance achievements, which in turn will empower popular voices to carry the narratives for it on the global stage.