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This study focuses on the experiences of disabled individuals in online activism in the context of China. Adopting the social model of disability, this study found an iceberg structure consisting of two levels and three layers. The explicit level included observed labels, attitudes and legislation. The implicit level involved both social and internalized stereotypes. These three layers of social structures interacted with each other and together brought about social exclusion into being. Adopting the social model as an organizing principle represents a starting point to alter social patterns and possibly change social isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the eruption of the COVID-19 outbreak in February 2020, the Chinese Communist Party Youth League promoted VTubers on Weibo to diffuse positive energy. However, the female VTuber Jiangshanjiao was appropriated immediately as political satire by netizens to air public grievances. While political satire is widely considered as political resistance in authoritarian states, little research has addressed its combination with feminist narratives and online activism. This article builds on previous literature on the propagandistic nature of positive energy and the Chinese feminist movement to consider how positive energy lying under Jiangshanjiao was deconstructed and how femininity was invoked to serve for broader political purposes in a repressive online environment. Drawing on the framework of online connective action and political satire as a networked practice, this research sheds light on the hashtag #JiangshanjiaoDoYouGetYourPeriod#. This research explores how the satirical hashtag was collectively produced in an Internet trolling culture and contributed to building a collective identity through personalized narratives. Through the feminist hashtag, netizens expressed their multilayered grievances against misogyny, state propaganda, and censorship. However, this article also offers evidence that the satirical hashtag and ambiguity associated with it limited the influence in catalyzing online and offline changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much attention to affective computing has focused on its alleged ability to "tap into human affects," a trope also foundational to broader theorizations about big‐data surveillance. What remains understudied and undertheorized is affective computing's social life, where interested parties contest and collude on its deployment. This essay traces how such portable technologies as sentiment analysis and "like" buttons wound up redefining collective action in China, which partly explains the conservative turn observed in Chinese online cultures since the mid‐2010s. It unpacks affective computing's ambient politics — the fraught processes whereby social actors aggressively repackage, reinterpret, and remediate these technologies to fit their agendas, changing social standards for denoting emotions along the way. This essay calls to reorient critical analysis of affective computing away from its design epistemics to its ambient politics and, in parallel, to shift the focus from interiorized subjects to conditions of collective existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, Little Pink has emerged as the label for a new wave of female-led cyber-nationalism in China. While increasingly popularized in media and online discourses, little is known about the evolution of this label and its significance for our understanding of China’s digital activism. This article takes the first step at unraveling the Little Pink mystery by examining its origins and contestation in China’s online community during the cross-strait memes war of 2016 when mainland nationalists mobilized to challenge Taiwan’s election results. Drawing on multifaceted digital data, this study shows that Little Pink was an invented label and that gender was used by conflicting cyber groups in their attempts at reframing the imagery of nationalism. More broadly, this article demonstrates that cyber-nationalism is a phenomenon contested across different digital groups in China, and it should be analyzed more as a case of ambivalence in digital activism than as a manifestation of state propaganda or growing radical nationalism in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]