Speaking up for the suffering (br)other: Weibo activism, discursive struggles, and minimal politics in China

Abstract

More than two decades after China was first connected to the Internet, scholars still debate the political impact of online media. Yet, the debate is stalled by a limited view of both politics and the media's role in political contestation. In order to offer a more nuanced account of the relationship between online media and politics, this article proposes a theoretical framework that pays attention to discursive struggles, identifies strategies to contest hegemonic discourses, and employs a broadened notion of politics, referred to as minimal politics. The framework is then used to analyze a corpus of Weibo (microblog) posts published by the charity organization, Love Save Pneumoconiosis (LSP). LSP activists use Weibo to campaign for medical treatment for workers with pneumoconiosis, and the article identifies two strategies of contestation in LSP activists' online activism. First, LSP activists articulate alternative discourses that challenge the hegemony of official discourses. Second, LSP activists' discourses are polyphonic expressions that legitimize the organization's work, while subtly politicizing the problem of pneumoconiosis. The strategies of contestation used by LSP activists exemplify how political contestation is possible in repressive contexts and illustrate the need to refine the theories used to study the political impact of online media.

Affordances of social media in collective action: the case of Free Lunch for Children in China

“…The three co‐founders, for example, have been aware of ‘how to make things work’ in the political context in China: when social problems receive public attention, the focus should not be on the problem but on solutions (Gleiss, ). Exposing the socio‐structural problems of inequality is a politically sensitive topic in an authoritarian state, yet feeding hungry children by soliciting care and love from the public would fit in well with the party‐state's official discourse of building a harmonious society.…”

From Being a Problem to Having Problems: Discourse, Governmentality and Chinese Migrant Workers

“…The result is a diversification of both media structures and media discourses and the development of a pluralistic public sphere in which alternative discourses can exist alongside propaganda [36,62]. Scholars have argued that online media are less controlled than print media ( [35], 684-688) and identified the emergence of alternative discourses in media such as SMS [26], blogs [16] and microblogs ( [25] author removed a). However, the development of investigative journalism demonstrates that alternative discourses are not confined to online media, but can also be found in print media such as commercial newspapers [23,45].…”

“…While previous research has demonstrated how the new discourse on migrant workers is contested in online media ( [25] author removed a), studies of more traditional media, such as newspapers, either focus on representations of migrant workers in the 1990s and early 2000s [13,[17][18][19]53] or analyze newspapers known for toing the Party line [52]. In both cases, scholars overlook how the development of investigative journalism has engendered a new and more problem-oriented media discourse [45].…”

Approaches to civil society in authoritarian states: The case of China

“…A second way in which civil society organizations can exercise their agency is to bring their engagement into the public sphere through traditional or social media. While this way of exercising agency has received less comprehensive attention in the literature on Chinese civil society, scholars have demonstrated how civil society organizations use the public sphere to raise awareness and express their voice on issues such as environmental protection (Sima, ; Yang, ; Yang & Calhoun, ), occupational diseases (Gleiss, ), women's rights (Li & Li, ), and domestic violence (Bräuer, ; Keech‐Marx, ). In the case of women's rights, Li and Li () argue that first‐ and second‐generation feminist civil society organizations adopt different mobilization strategies.…”