The Discursive Construction of Online Chinese Nationalism

The year 2008 witnessed an explosion of online Chinese nationalism, triggered by a series of incidents relating to the Beijing Olympics. In this thesis, I mainly examine the significance and relevance of the internet to the studies of Chinese nationalism, and investigate the extent to which the internet can contribute to the shaping of Chinese nationalism in contemporary Chinese society. I treat online Chinese nationalism as discursive, because the production of online nationalist information, the construction of online nationalist identities and the discussion of online nationalist actions, are all discursive practices which are intrinsically related to the political use of language. Therefore, I argue that the study of online Chinese nationalism should entail critical linguistic analysis of the online texts that discuss Chinese nationalism. Rather than seeing nationalist texts as sheer expressions of nationalist concerns or claims, I am interested in how nationalist texts are made linguistically, and see linguistic features, structures and organisations of the texts as clues for unveiling the underlying nationalist ideologies and power relations. I mainly focus on the online popular discourse of Chinese nationalism, however, since research on nationalism can hardly avoid the power relations between the state and popular nationalist players, I also shed significant light on the official nationalist discourse. To carry out the research, I examine the official newspaper The People’s Daily and the non-official online media the Tianya Forum. By doing this, I intend to find out how the official and online popular nationalist players shaped and reshaped Chinese nationalism through media discourses during the time of the international torch relay of the Beijing Olympics. Moreover, by taking both the official and online popular nationalist discourses into consideration, it also allows me to examine the possible tension and co-optation between both nationalist players, and investigate to what extent online Chinese nationalism as an alternative nationalist discourse, challenges the domination of the state over the politics of Chinese nationalism. To analyse the discourses of Chinese nationalism, I employ Norman Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis as the ultimate research method of the thesis