‘Positive Energy’ in Chinese Social Media Coverage of US Politics

I’m chairing the next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference, which is on disinformation and trolling. We start with Hanyu Zhang, with a paper on the Donald Trump assassination attempt and its discussion on the Chinese platform Douyin. In China, there has been a strong focus to ‘positive energy’ on social media, promoting core ideological values and nationalist narratives. This has also been applied to discussions of Donald Trump, where responding narratives highlighted both the challenges to China and the country’s resilience in the face of such challenges.

Douyin, whose international spinoff is TikTok, has been a crucial space for the proliferation of such positive narratives, not least also for discussions of Sino-US relations. This represents a form of bidirectional nationalism (from the top down as well as from the bottom up), but these processes have not yet been sufficiently researched by scholarship outside China. Hanyu’s work analyses some 20 Douyin videos from a particularly prominent account, discussing Trump, and the comments attached to them.

Such videos reuse footage from US news coverage as well as from well-known far-right conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, using them for humour and satire as well as in an attempt to explain American politics to Chinese audiences. Bold red and yellow titles create urgency and sensationalism; they express skepticism, uncertainty, conspiracy theories, and critiques of the US political system.

This can be understood as a form of playful patriotism, which makes such coverage more accessible and fun for audiences, reinforcing Chinese perceptions of Donald Trump and the United States, amplifying state propaganda, as well as asserting Chinese pride and superiority. This also represents a dynamic interplay between top-down government rhetoric and bottom-up content creation and discussion. This is not purely submissive to government propaganda but also actively engages and reinforces it; it embeds ideology into everyday discussion.