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Rongbin Han offers a powerful counterintuitive explanation for China's survival in the digital age. Han reveals how the state, service providers, and netizens negotiate the limits of discourse, interrogating our assumptions about authoritarian resilience and the internet's democratizing power

The Internet was supposed to be an antidote to authoritarianism. It can enable citizens to express themselves freely and organize outside state control. Yet while online activity has helped challenge authoritarian rule in some cases, other regimes have endured: no movement comparable to the Arab Spring has arisen in China. In Contesting Cyberspace in China, Rongbin Han offers a powerful counterintuitive explanation for the survival of the world's largest authoritarian regime in the digital age.Han reveals the complex internal dynamics of online expression in China, showing how the state, service providers, and netizens negotiate the limits of discourse. He finds that state censorship has conditioned online expression, yet has failed to bring it under control. However, Han also finds that freer expression may work to the advantage of the regime because its critics are not the only ones empowered: the Internet has proved less threatening than expected due to the multiplicity of beliefs, identities, and values online. State-sponsored and spontaneous pro-government commenters have turned out to be a major presence on the Chinese internet, denigrating dissenters and barraging oppositional voices. Han explores the recruitment, training, and behavior of hired commenters, the "fifty-cent army," as well as group identity formation among nationalistic Internet posters who see themselves as patriots defending China against online saboteurs. Drawing on a rich set of data collected through interviews, participant observation, and long-term online ethnography, as well as official reports and state directives, Contesting Cyberspace in China interrogates our assumptions about authoritarian resilience and the democratizing power of the Internet.

This article examines popular nationalism and regime support in the Xi era by evaluating news comments from a major overseas Chinese website on the 2018 constitutional amendments removing presidential term limits. It finds that the event was not only contested among overseas and domestic Chinese, but also has alienated many nationalists who previously supported the regime. Even the subsequent pro-regime discourse is less focused on support for Xi or the regime, and more about distrust of the West and dissidents. However, some citizens have become less critical toward the regime out of the concern of external threats. The findings confirm the Xi Jinping effect on nationalist regime support, and show how China's international and domestic environments may activate nationalist sentiment differently. (J Contemp China / GIGA)

AbstractRecent studies on internet politics in China have gone beyond the once dominant control–liberalization perspective and directed intellectual attention to the varieties of online activism. Based on extensive in-depth online ethnographic work, this project explores the pluralization of online expression in Chinese cyberspace. Following a constituency of internet users who identify themselves as the "voluntary fifty-cent army," the paper explores how these users acquire and consolidate their identity and combat criticism that targets the authoritarian regime. Analysis of the confrontational exchanges between the "voluntary fifty-cent army" and their opponents suggests that a perspective that goes beyond state censorship and regime-challenging activism is required in order to gain a better understanding of online expression in China. Close examination of why and how internet users may voluntarily defend the authoritarian regime also reveals how the dynamics in online discourse competition may work to the authoritarian regime's advantage.