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Public Humiliation: Carnival Marketplace and Discourse Power Shifting in Chinese Social Media

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Transcultural Encounters in Knowledge Production and Consumption

Part of the book series: Encounters between East and West ((EEWIP))

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Abstract

This article aims to explore the Chinese mechanisms for civic participation and how power shifts take place in Chinese social media today. This article proposes a framework of “Carnivalesque participatory discourse” to provide a deeper, more contextually-valid understanding of Internet culture and behaviour in Chinese online communities. This is illustrated through media events of the Smiling Face of Yang Dacai and 7.21 Beijing Flood in which one smile or one sentence lead to public humiliation and fire. This research looks at the carnival marketplace features of the Chinese public sphere that defeat other ways for disciplining officials, and those features of Sina Weibo that allowed for these cases to unfold and discourse power to shift.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.cnnic.net.cn/hlwfzyj/hlwxzbg/201502/P020150203551802054676.pdf

  2. 2.

    South Reviews (2013), hua zong, wo bu jian biao hen jiu le, 30 July http://www.nfcmag.com/article/4179-2.html

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Fund

This work was supported by the [The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China] under Grant [number 0232005202001].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Journalism and Communication, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China

    Minghua Wu

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  1. Minghua Wu
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Correspondence to Minghua Wu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Western Australia, Perth, West Australia, Australia

    Xianlin Song

  2. Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China

    Youzhong Sun

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Wu, M. (2018). Public Humiliation: Carnival Marketplace and Discourse Power Shifting in Chinese Social Media. In: Song, X., Sun, Y. (eds) Transcultural Encounters in Knowledge Production and Consumption. Encounters between East and West. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4920-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4920-0_3

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