Trigger mechanism centralized but discursive frame fragmented: China as a case for studying populism at the grassroots level in the social media age

ABSTRACT

While most research focuses on top-down populism practiced by political actors in democratic countries, we paid attention to populist phenomena at the grassroots level in an authoritarian context. Specifically, we proposed a perspective of investigating populist discourse embedded in public opinion and adopted a fine-grained discursive frame approach to study Chinese online populism. Using large-scale social media data around trending events and employing cutting-edge computational semantic analysis methods, we discovered that economic anxiety is central to the trigger mechanism of Chinese online populism, and the specific populist discourse is fragmented in terms of ideological resources, cultural toolboxes, and semantic structure. This study not only provides a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary Chinese populism phenomena, but it also contributes to global populism research by providing valuable empirical evidence in authoritarian contexts and broadening the theoretical perspective of studying populism at the grassroots level.

KEYWORDS:

• Online populism
• populist discourse
• Chinese context
• social media
• grassroots level

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An authoritative online opinion monitoring institution in China reports the top 100 trending news events on the Internet in China each year.

2 https://ltp.ai/

3 We treated the appearance of two terms in the same Weibo post as a co-occurrence.

4 Events related to the issue of ‘other’ were not included in the figure.

5 A political theory that emphasizes that policies should benefit the masses and serve their interests.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuzhou Tao

Yuzhou Tao (MA, 2012, at Fudan University) is a PhD candidate in the School of Journalism at Fudan University. Her research interests include computational social science and social media.

Zhenyu Wang

Zhenyu Wang (PhD, 2021, at Fudan University) is an assistant research fellow in the Journalism Institute at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. His research interests include Chinese populism, data science, Chinese politics, and digital media.

Zhiqin Zhan

Zhiqin Zhan (ME, 2022, at Fudan University) graduated from Fudan University, Master of Engineering. His research interests include computational social science and medical imaging.

Han Zhou

Han Zhou (MA, 2022, at Fudan University) is a PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests include computational social science and media psychology.