[Online Event] Make China Great Again: Online Fictions and Digital Cultural Hegemony in the Making

Short Bio of the Speaker

Rongbin HAN is an associate professor in the department of international affairs at the University of Georgia. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and studied at National University of Singapore and Peking University before that. His research interests include contentious politics, media and cyber politics, and civic participation in China. He is the author of Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience (Columbia University Press, 2018) and has recently published in The China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China and Political Research Quarterly, among others. He also has a forthcoming co-authored book titled Directed Digital Dissidence in Autocracies: How China Wins Online with Oxford University Press (with Jason Gainous, Andrew MacDonald, and Kevin Wagner).

Abstract

In his recent Foreign Affairs article, Andrew Nation discusses the alternate history of China, asking: Could Beijing have taken a different path? As tempting as it is to China observers, the question is not completely new. In fact, millions of Chinese have in the past few decades raised and explored similar questions through the popular genre of Internet literature—the alter-history fictions. By producing and consuming such works, the writers, and readers alike, task themselves with questions such as whether China could have taken different paths of development and how they would change the nation’s history were they ever offered the opportunity. This book project studies such a phenomenon and the subsequent implications for authoritarian politics. I find that Internet literature has become a commodified political field where the state, market, and citizens engage in ideological contestation through digital cultural consumerist experiences on a daily basis. In particular, many alter-history fictions feature a shared theme of “Make China Great Again” (MCGA) that quests national revival by (re)examining, (re)interpreting, and hypothesizing Chinese history, especially at critical junctures. In doing so, writers and readers together imagine an ideal China that may confirm or challenge state ideology. While these MCGA stories represent how the society negotiates official ideological constructs like the “Chinese dream,” such popular participation, I argue, has overall contributed to authoritarian legitimation thus far, and may ultimately lead to China’s digital cultural hegemony in the future.