CIVIC PARTICIPATION IN CHINA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN WECHAT AND DOUYIN AS A DEMOCRATIC ARENA

Abstract

Online media platforms have become an arena for activists to engage with political discourses. Since COVID-19, an increasing number of citizens have begun to actively participate online to express their ideas towards political issues. Various types of user-generated content were circulated on various social media platforms: they wrote textual content on Wechat with various metaphors and created user-generated videos on video-streaming platforms to express their opinions. In this context, this study examines how citizens express democratic opinions against ideological discourse, what role social media platforms play as an arena for activists’ participation, and what social media factors facilitate active online civic participation. Adopting a cross-platform perspective, this study compares how Douyin and Wechat facilitate civic participation differently and how people engage with political content differently on these two different media platforms. I employed digital ethnography, augmented by the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018), and qualitative content analysis to examine how WeChat and Douyin play different roles in civic participation. This study argues that the social networking platform WeChat provides more in-depth participation and has more resistant forms than Douyin, especially for expressing counter-ideas to mainstream discourses. Among the various forms of resistance, sharing WeChat articles is one of the most visible and effective ways to express democratic opinions in mainstream discourse.