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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

The Everyday Practices of Resistance in Chinese Social Media: The Uses of Memes for Civic Engagement

XING, ZHUOXIU January 2022 (has links)
This thesis aims to understand the everyday use of digital media by Chinese ordinary citizens as new forms of civic engagement under strict online censorship and CCP’s authoritarian control. With the announcement of the Third-child Policy as the analytical background, I adopted a qualitative research method and conducted digitally mediated ethnography on Sina Weibo users. Specifically, I took a close look at their strategic usage of social media practices, memes, as means to participate in the discussion of third-child policy on the platform. My theoretical framework builds off on James Scott’s (1989) theory of everyday forms of resistance and Flinders & Wood’s (2018) notions on everyday political participation, supplementing with concepts of connective action and collective identity. This paper shows how participants used low-key, tactical, and mundane memes to criticize third-child policy, the motivations, and intentions behind their acts, how meme expressions are organized, sustained, and what makes these acts politically effective. By doing this, I highlight how participants’ everyday self- determined online practices result in the formation of collective identities that eventually lead to the emergence of underground centrality among ordinary Chinese people and challenge CCP authority and legitimacy. As such, it will contribute to a deeper insight into the collective nature of and resistance power of participants' individual online actions and enrich our understanding of the active agency of Chinese actors and their civic engagement under censorship regimes.

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