Is the interconnectivity of the world wide web producing a new cosmopolitan global culture beyond the nation-state? Will the free flow of information on the internet put an end to the Chinese state's media monopoly and destabilize China's one-Party system? Today, the obvious answer to both of these questions is a resounding “no.” Yet in our facing an interconnected world that only feels ever more nationalistic, as well as a reformed Chinese state that is only ever more authoritarian, it is easy to lose sight of how so many common-sense assumptions about the role of digital media in our lives ended up being so wrong.
This is one of the main questions that Florian Schneider answers in his compelling book China's Digital Nationalism. Schneider begins the book by challenging the simplistic assumption of a tension between the world wide web and the nation-state. Developing a novel definition of both the nation and the state as technologies, Schneider argues convincingly that novel digital technologies are adapted within the national frame, resulting in not only the reproduction but indeed in many cases the affective strengthening of the nation-form through these technologies.
The remaining chapters unpack how these technologies have fed off of one another in China. In chapters three and four, Schneider examines China's search engines and the hyperlink networks between websites, finding that many aspects of digital media in China do not break with the traditions of traditional state media but rather perpetuate said media's assumptions and framings. For example, Baidu search engine results reproduce the discourses and thus the biases of China's state media, filtering searches through national orthodoxies. Similarly, Schneider's examination of hyperlink networks on the Chinese web in chapter four reveals the largely self-referential nature of these networks.
State censorship is of course a significant contributor to the perpetuation of these frames: the world wide web in China is not a free collection of pages and links but instead an artifact of obsessive monitoring and censorship. Schneider's analysis, however, moves beyond a singular focus on censorship, arguing that we cannot understand ongoing trends solely through the singular variable of state control. Rather, Schneider argues that national frameworks, seen as the natural order of things precisely because they appeal to universal desires, fuse with new technologies to keep people in (or rather enable people to keep themselves in) their ideological comfort zones: the internet does not take us beyond the nation-state, but rather provides us with new and ever more intimate ways to interact with and reaffirm our investments in the shared symbols of the nation-state.
Schneider's book is at its most fascinating in chapters five and six, which demonstrate the mutually reinforcing synergies between digital media and nationalism through two case studies. Comparing user-generated online encyclopaedia entries on the Nanjing Massacre, he finds that narratives of the massacre on the Chinese internet (e.g. Baidu encyclopaedia) actively avoid the controversies and ambiguities surrounding this event unfolded in international forums (e.g. Wikipedia), embracing instead a singular, coherent narrative of seemingly objective historical truth: entries function more as a shrine than as a forum for discussion. A similarly “objective” vision of a unified national past is revealed in narrative representations of the Senkaku/ Diaoyu dispute examined in chapter six.
Yet, while embracing this ideal of factual objective history, these portrayals also rely heavily on emotive language and representations, making a distant historical event not only real and resonant but also immensely personal. The examples that Schneider cites in illustrating these trends are some of the most fascinating aspects of this study. In chapter five, Schneider discusses the problematic eagerness to equate the Nanjing Massacre with the Holocaust. In chapter six, he also briefly discusses the intersection of nationalism and pornography on the Chinese internet. Demonstrating the richness of this topic, each of these short sections of analysis are in my reading worthy of a chapter in and of themselves.
Chapters seven and eight look at the development of social media and the Chinese state's management of online content. In chapter seven's discussion of social media, Schneider challenges commonly held assumptions that the openness of a medium produces openness of thought. Rather, he illustrates how communication dynamics in social media privilege the most aggressive forms of nationalist commentary, such that the incorporation of the broader public into the writing of national discourses in fact only reproduces and reinforces nationalist stereotypes and chauvinism. In chapter eight's discussion of digital governance, Schneider again challenges commonly held assumptions about China's censorship regime, arguing that the internet has, despite all of the limits discussed in the preceding chapters, created spaces of deliberation wherein the public can relay their concerns to the state.
China's Digital Nationalism is a readable study that provides an innovative reconceptualization of the nation-state, as well as an evocative theory of digital technologies’ impacts on politics and nationalist thought. Schneider's contributions to the theorization of online nationalism are greatly enriched by compelling examples that would be ideal for classroom discussion and reflection. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in reflecting on the dynamics of nationalism on China's internet.
