Relay activism and the flows of contentious publicness on WeChat: a case study of COVID-19 in China

ABSTRACT

This paper explores a case of public contention against the censoring of a feature article about a COVID-19 whistleblower on the Chinese social media, WeChat. Moving beyond the normative theory of the public sphere and publics, we draw on Kavada and Poell's theory of ‘contentious publicness’ which is flexible enough to capture the complexity, diversity and hybridity of digital contention in the context of China. Through a combination of textual analysis and participatory observation, this article analyses how citizens challenged the censorship system and attempted to keep Dr Fen's story online through what we call ‘relay activism’. Informed by the three dimensions of ‘contentious publicness’, we analyse the materiality of the communication infrastructure of WeChat and the temporal and spatial relations of the public contention (focusing primarily on WeChat and GitHub). In doing this, the paper contributes a more comprehensive approach to examining the social, structural and participatory characteristics of the contestation of censorship in China.

KEYWORDS:

• Contentious publicness
• digital activism
• censorship
• WeChat
• China

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their inspiring feedback and constructive comments on our manuscript. Also, we would like to show our respect to those who devoted efforts in the relay on Wechat and granted us permission to use their data.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 According to Bamman et al. (2012), 16.25% of Weibo posts were deleted, while on WeChat 1.5% of public accounts’ posts were censored with 2.44% self-censored.

2 https://github.com/2019ncovmemory/nCovMemory; https://github.com/lestweforget/wuhan2019

3 A hundred and eight versions of the censored article on whistle – giver Dr Fen https://www.ershicimi.com/p/d4962e760b713e763907284ee61908e7

4 This article finally survived censorship. [这篇文章终于不被删了,看哭了!] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?biz=MzU0MzY2MzkyMw==&mid=2247492923&idx=1&sn=ee8fb540577eb381d3e8000ec629a239&scene=0

5 https://github.com/2019ncovmemory/nCovMemory/blob/master/archive/jpg/3142.jpg

6 https://www.scmp.com/tech/social-gadgets/article/1903451/chinas-weibo-follows-twitter-controversial-move-ditch-140

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project when first author was employed at Zhejiang University [grant number 22NDJC045YB].

Notes on contributors

Yu Sun

Yu Sun is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests involve online deliberation, the public sphere, feminist media studies, data activism, mediated publics, platforms and social governance, China media industries, etc.

Scott Wright

Scott Wright is Professor of Political Communication and Journalism and Deputy Dean of Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. His research focuses on political communication, journalism, and political participation.