Riding with the Patriotic Tide: An Exchange-based Relationship between the Official and Popular Discourse on the Chinese Internet

The online public discussion on the Chinese Internet is a complicated arena with the coexistence of authoritarian control and bottom-up public opinions. The two most significant discourses that get discussed most frequently are on the one hand official discourse produced by political speeches and official media outlets and, on the other hand, popular discourses generated by society. This research explores the relationship between these two actors by studying posts on Weibo, a twitter-like social media platform in China, from a nationalistic boycott in 2021. By scraping data from Weibo and applying clustering methods in natural language processing on the corpus, this study aims to understand the forming of nationalism discourses in Chinese cyberspace. This article discovers that in the boycott, certain groups, such as fandoms, played a role in causing the responsive posts from the official media outlets. This article introduces an exchange relationship between the state and non-state actors growing out of the finely controlled Internet in China, besides the existing coercive or dialogic mode of interaction proposed in the previous literature.