600379
research-article2015
NMS0010.1177/1461444815600379new media & societySchneider
Article
China’s ‘info-web’: How
Beijing governs online political
communication about Japan
new media & society
1 ­–21
© The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1461444815600379
nms.sagepub.com
Florian Schneider
Leiden University, The Netherlands
Abstract
In digital China, networked actors ranging from state agencies to private Internet users
engage in highly active online discourse. Yet as diverse as this discourse may be, political
content on China’s web remains highly regulated, particularly on issues affecting the
legitimacy of the ruling party. A prominent issue in this regard has been the conflictladen relationship with Japan. This article asks how Chinese websites shape online
discourse on two Japan issues (the Nanjing Massacre and the East China Sea conflict),
and what these sites can tell us about the leadership’s strategy for managing digital
communication. Combining content analysis and digital tools, the article shows how the
authorities apply a Leninist mass-communication logic to the web, treating websites not
as spaces for networked social interaction but as authoritative information sources that
broadcast approved content to a mass audience, which effectively brings digital media
into the fold of China’s ‘traditional’ mass-media system.
Keywords
China, cultural governance, digital methods, discourse, East China Sea conflict,
Internet politics, Japan, Nanjing Massacre, network analysis
Introduction
With more Internet users than the European Union (EU) has citizens (China Internet
Network Information Centre (CNNIC), 2011), China’s digital spheres are rapidly becoming a highly diverse network of expression, discussion and contestation. In the People’s
Corresponding author:
Florian Schneider, Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, P.O.Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The
Netherlands.
Email: [email protected]
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
2
new media & society 
Republic of China (PRC), networked actors ranging from state agencies and organizations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to commercial enterprises and private
Internet users engage in highly active online communication. The broad public discourses that take place in the PRC’s digital networks today have contributed to the general trend in post-socialist China towards cultural, social and political diversity – a
process that has received considerable attention (e.g. Herold and Marolt, 2011; Qiu,
2009; Zheng, 2008). As various scholars have demonstrated, digital technologies such as
mobile phones (Liu, 2014), blogs (Esarey and Qiang, 2008) and microblogging services
(Huang and Sun, 2014; Tong and Zuo, 2014) afford Chinese citizens with opportunities
to challenge perceived social injustices, environmental problems, and political failings,
whether through subtle acts of resistance or high-profile protests. Discussion between
diverse actors is not only possible in digital China, but in many ways encouraged
(Sullivan, 2014; Tsang, 2009) – at least as long as these actors do not call on Internet
users to mobilize (King et al., 2013).
Guobin Yang (2009), in his study of online activism, interprets these unprecedented
developments as ‘the emergence of a citizen’s discourse space’ that is ‘expanding citizen’s unofficial democracy’ (pp. 212–217). Other scholars likewise see digital technologies in the PRC as tools that empower civil society against the state, and ultimately as
harbingers of a Habermasian ‘public sphere’ (Chan and Bi, 2009; Gang and Bandurski,
2011). Indeed, such research has highlighted the many ways in which digital technologies facilitate collective action, but it has also been criticized for obscuring the uneven
nature of these allegedly emerging ‘public spheres’ (Dean, 2003), for unduly equating
Internet users with politically engaged ‘netizens’ (Herold, 2014), for mainly producing
trivial discussions (Leibold, 2011) and for downplaying the degree to which digital technologies also strengthen established stakeholders (Morozov, 2011). In China, the strong
research focus on contentious politics risks underemphasizing the power that state and
Party institutions exert over the rules of political communication, and the many ways in
which these institutions are successfully adapting to the challenges of governing a complex and dynamic network society in the 21st century.
The PRC’s authorities have long realized that control over communication is vital to
a successful governance strategy, and they consequently deploy a sophisticated system
of hard and soft controls to manage political discourse (Schneider, 2012: ch.7;
Shambaugh, 2007). This is true for cultural expressions that might constitute ‘ideological
challenges’ to Chinese sovereignty or cultural identity, but it is particularly true for political issues such as current affairs or international relations topics – issues that, to the
Chinese leadership, are often matters of national security. This importance that Chinese
leaders attribute to political discourse raises the question of what strategies inform their
attempts to assert sovereignty over digital communication. What does the CCP’s political communication approach to digital media look like?
To explore this issue, this article examines how a particularly important topic in
Chinese politics is presented on China’s web: the relation between China and Japan. By
examining two specific Sino-Japanese issues, it asks what Chinese websites and the digital networks they are embedded in can tell us about the way that different actors construct
and manage such a crucial political discourse.1
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
3
Schneider
This article first discusses how power works in digital networks, specifically in the
Chinese context. It then introduces the methodology and the two case studies on China’s
web: the Nanjing Massacre and the East China Sea conflict. The subsequent sections
present the findings for each case, examining the digital features that various issue websites deploy and how the websites tie into broader online networks. This article concludes by arguing that the authorities’ attempts to exert power over communication
networks and digital discourses are successfully bringing China’s web into the fold of the
traditional mass-media system, where Party and state institutions collaborate with capitalist corporations to retain control over the rules that inform the game of political
communication.
Power in China’s digital networks
As Beck (2007) argued, power in the ‘second modernity’ is not about winning the ‘game’
of politics but about defining the rules of that game, and we need to consequently ask
who is changing those rules, in what ways and with what consequences. A useful way to
think of today’s complex societies and their political dynamics is to see them as networks
that are shaped by ‘communication power’ (Castells, 2009): the power to affect political
decisions by influencing the discursive contexts and symbolic resources through which
politics play out. This strategy extends to Internet networks, where power no longer
simply works according to the traditional Weberian logic of one actor asserting their will
over another against opposition. That logic continues to play a role, but more important
are moves that either ‘switch’ actors into or out of the networked infrastructures, or that
‘programme’ the discourses that flow through these networks in ways that align the interests of actors (Castells, 2009: 52).
As Gang and Bandurski (2011) point out for the Chinese case, new networked infrastructures enable non-traditional political actors to connect, organize and influence public agendas. While cases of successful activism or citizen journalism highlight that ‘the
nature of the game has changed’ in digital China (Gang and Bandurski, 2011: 71), they
should not obscure that power is unevenly distributed in networked societies. ‘Virtual
spaces are, in fact, bolted to the material world through spatially organized infrastructures’ (Schiller, 2014: 1727), and within these infrastructures traditional stakeholders
like state agencies and capitalist enterprises retain much of the ‘switching power’. This
is particularly evident in the PRC, where the national network is run by three large stateowned conglomerates (China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile) and four public Internet service providers, all of which ‘assume heavy and important responsibilities
of internet regulation’ (Hu, 2011: 523–524) in close collaboration with the authorities.
Similarly, the Party and state rely on their ‘programming power’ to shape the values
that govern networks. Institutions like the State Council Information Office and its newly
established Internet News Coordination Bureau apply a Leninist logic to mass-communication (cf. Jiang, 2010; Shambaugh, 2007; Tsang, 2009) that filters through to large
media conglomerates (Zhang, 2011: 49–50). This approach aligns capitalist interests and
political imperatives: it allows diversity on entertainment and life-style issues while
simultaneously promoting a relatively narrow range of political discourses that are meant
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
4
new media & society 
to strengthen the nation-state and legitimate one-party rule, particularly where sensitive
issues are concerned.
In short, the CCP leadership has been very effective at revising the rules of the game
in ways that serve its interests. Political content on China’s web remains closely monitored, guided, censored and often directly engineered by the Party and state (Deibert
et al., 2010: 449–487; Han, 2013; MacKinnon, 2009). Chinese leaders unapologetically
justify their interventions as safeguards against the ‘harmful effects of illegal information’ (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2010),
and as Denton (2014) has pointed out, ‘to dismiss this state presence as nothing but
propaganda is to fail to understand the complexity of the state/people relationship’ (p. 4).
Exploring how this complexity works has posed a major challenge. While the authorities regularly publish official announcements regarding the PRC’s cyber regulations,
their general scope and vagueness only offer superficial purchase on the issue.2 Overall,
the Party remains secretive about the practical details of how it attempts to ‘guide public
opinion’ on China’s Internet. Bar the occasional informal conversations with officials or
leaked memos (The New York Times [NYT], 2010), researchers thus do not normally have
insight into the intricate workings of the CCP’s propaganda and censorship system,
which consists of shadowy leadership groups and personal networks that crisscross the
PRC’s state and societal institutions at all levels of administration, making it ‘virtually
invisible on China’s organization charts’ (Lieberthal, 2004: 233).
However, the leadership’s strategy for managing digital communication may not be
quite so ‘invisible’. Through their active management of digital discourses, the authorities are leaving traces of their cultural governance approach within the artefacts and digital infrastructures they are managing. As proponents of digital methods have argued
(Rogers, 2013: ch.6), it can be highly fruitful to follow the medium in order to reverseengineer contemporary politics in national webs. By analysing digital media and the
discourses they affect – in this case on topics related to Japan – it becomes possible to
extrapolate the communication model that informs governance in China’s digital
ecologies.
Studying Sino-Japanese discourse on China’s web
China’s relation with neighbouring Japan is one of the most important political issues in
Asia today. Sino-Japanese relations are marred by historical conflicts, which extend
powerfully to present-day current affairs: Japanese history textbooks, political rituals
and contested territories have repeatedly caused outrage among Chinese online commentators, which has at times spilled into the streets as public protest (Stockmann, 2010;
Wallace and Weiss, 2015). While nationalist voices also target other perceived enemies
of China, the ‘fiercest comments and suggestions are reserved for Japan’ (Breslin and
Shen, 2010: 8).
For the PRC leadership, taking control over such nationalist discourses is a political
imperative. Since the 1980s, and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, China’s
leaders have been promoting ‘patriotic education’, with a particular focus on the hardship that imperial Japan inflicted upon China’s populace during the late 19th and early
20th centuries. Through school curricula (Wang, 2012: ch.4), museum exhibits (Denton,
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
5
Schneider
2014), and a wide range of media products such as books, TV programmes, computer
games, maps, and paraphernalia (Callahan, 2010; Nie, 2013), the CCP reminds its citizens to ‘never forget’ the atrocities of the Second Sino-Japanese War (Mitter, 2003), and
to view modern Chinese history through the lens of ‘national humiliation’ (Wang,
2012). This strategy has been part of the Party’s ongoing attempt to construct a ‘pragmatic nationalism’ (Zhao, 2004: 218) that is meant to legitimate its rule in the postsocialist era, and online discourses about Japan are consequently a highly sensitive
matter to China’s authorities.3
To examine how this sensitive relation plays out on China’s highly regulated web, I
have examined two specific cases: the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and the ongoing East
China Sea conflict. The Nanjing Massacre is an important topic in contemporary
Chinese historiography.4 While there are recurring disagreements between Chinese and
Japanese intellectuals about the exact interpretation of the event, particularly about the
number of civilians who were murdered by the Japanese invaders, the topic is largely
uncontroversial in China and makes for a good case to check how an established political discourse works on the web. The second case is the conflict over a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, called Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese.
Sovereignty over these islands has long been an issue of contention between the governments of China, Japan and Taiwan, but particularly during the past years the topic has
emerged as a highly volatile security issue in Asia.5 The topic will serve as a contrast to
the more established historical discourse, showing how a dynamic current affairs issue
is presented on China’s web.
It is important to note that the analysis is not concerned with the actual dynamics of
Sino-Japanese relations (whether economic, cultural, military or diplomatic), or with the
accuracy of historical claims on either side. It is meant to establish what happens to such
politically charged discourses on China’s highly regulated web, and what we can learn
about the PRC’s media governance from the distinct features of the online networks that
surround the two cases. To answer these questions, my study took a two-step approach. I
examined what statements actors make on the two topics by subjecting the relevant websites to what Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) call a qualitative ‘multi-modal’ discourse
analysis (p. 22). What themes do the websites prominently cover, what discursive positions do they relay and what strategic moves do the creators make to frame the issue
through the medium of the website? In practice, exploring these issues meant first identifying websites dedicated specifically to the Nanjing Massacre or the East China Sea
conflict.6 It then meant collecting the relevant content on these websites through computer-assisted manual archiving (preserving screen shots of relevant sites and stripping
pages of text and media elements) before deploying a combination of computer tools to
check for keyword distribution, and finally subjecting pages with representative and outlying keyword results to a qualitative analysis of their linguistic, visual, acoustic and
natively digital features.7 For reasons of space, I will focus here primarily on the digital
features of this discourse.
The second part of the analysis consisted of a network analysis (cf. Scott, 2013), using
digital methods (Rogers, 2013: ch.2) that map how websites link to each other. This process involved two digital tools: the first is the IssueCrawler software, developed and
hosted by Richard Rogers and the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) in Amsterdam (cf.
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
6
new media & society 
Rogers, 2010). The IssueCrawler is an open-access analytical programme that can be run
from a browser interface in order to locate linked sites and map out online networks.8
The second tool is the network visualization programme Gephi, which I have used to
represent the network data and highlight the most pertinent features.9 In what follows, I
will present the results of this two-pronged analysis.
Digital networks of ‘National Humiliation’
A striking characteristic of the various websites that present the Nanjing Massacre on
China’s web is that their theme, general tone and recurring tropes reproduce the discourse that other scholars have identified as dominant in Chinese-language ‘offline’
materials on the subject (cf. Buruma, 2002; Callahan, 2010; Denton, 2014). The sites use
highly emotive language to construct clear protagonists and antagonists, and they deploy
a range of visual and acoustic signs that evoke strong feelings of humiliation and righteous anger. The result is a ‘victimization narrative’ (Gries, 2004) that is presented as
common sense through various markers of evidentiality (phrases like ‘of course’, ‘as
everyone knows’, etc.) and through a host of evidence (p. 48). Through these strategies,
each site offers a factual voice on the subject, using digitized images of old documents
or photos as illustration. The sites rarely carry any original, digitally native content.
Articles are mostly taken from the traditional media or are digitized versions of academic
articles. The Nanjing Massacre websites thus provide users with an info-web: an archive
of vetted, authoritative narratives about the event.
Overall, this info-web utilizes only very few interactive elements. Comment sections
are largely disabled. In the few instances where the sites provide forums for discussion,
those forums are overwhelmingly characterized by angry comments. These comments
are often explicitly sanctioned by the websites themselves, for instance through mechanisms such as the number of ‘likes’ and digital ‘stamps’ of approval, giving the impression that patriotic outrage is the appropriate response to the already highly pathos-infused
content. I have reproduced one such instance in Figure 1. This comment to a post on
Tiexue (a military affairs website) about rape during the Nanjing occupation suggests
that anyone from China killing a Japanese person should be paid 1000 RMB, and it concludes with the words ‘kill kill kill …’. While this is an exceptionally crude comment
(not all comments are aggressively racist), it is ranked highest by ‘likes’, earning it a red
‘popular response’ stamp.
It is also worth pointing out that many of the sites manipulate the user experience in
ways that suggests a much grander scale than is actually warranted. One web service, the
commemoration site on Sina.com, presents a huge number of pages that are supposedly
web comments, but a closer look reveals that there are only a few hundred such comments, which are then reproduced thousands of times. Actual interactivity within this
section of China’s web is kept to a minimum.
Moving away from the content-level, I have mapped out what kind of online network
these 19 issue websites tie into. What the analysis reveals is that the separate webpages
are not connected to anything that can legitimately be called an ‘issue network’, that is,
a network sharing a thematic rationale (Bruns, 2007; Rogers, 2010, 2013; Schneider,
2015). Aside from one exception (the Sina.com commemoration site, which maintains
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
7
Schneider
Figure 1. Sanctioning anti-Japanese anger on China’s web. User comment on the message
board Tiexue.net; screenshot taken on 15 May 2013 (user name obscured for ethical reasons).
eight links to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall), the various websites do not link to
one another, even though they clearly relay very similar concerns and sometimes identical content. The creators hardly use hyperlinks at all, and when they do, it is mostly to
reference affiliated organizations.
This does not mean the websites are not situated within larger networks, but simply
that these larger networks have little to do with the Nanjing Massacre or with SinoJapanese history. They represent what Bruns (2007) calls ‘secondary issue networks’:
connections between websites that are not grounded in the thematic logic behind the
original starting points of the analysis, but which are instead based on other rationales.
What is noteworthy here is that the Nanjing Massacre websites produce a ‘secondary
issue network’ very early on: a crawl meant to map the immediate neighbourhood of the
starting pages (single iteration) already branches out to include a wide variety of pages
that do not deal with the topic at hand. In fact, only five of the original issue pages are
still present in this network of 80 nodes, which I have visualized in Figure 2 – note the
red nodes, which represent original starting pages, and the blue nodes, which represent
parent websites of starting pages.
Once the analysis is expanded to include an additional iteration, the picture again
changes dramatically. Only one issue page is still loosely included in this 100-node network (the news service China Economic Net). Other original starting points are only
remotely associated with the network through their parent sites (e.g. Xinhua.org and
Xinhua.net, or Sina.com). Yet others are missing entirely at this stage, including large
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
8
new media & society 
Figure 2. The immediate neighbourhood of the Nanjing Massacre issue pages. 3 May 2013.
Node size represents eigenvector centrality, edge size represents degree, colours represent
starting points (crawl depth = 2, iterations = 1; algorithm: force atlas).
sites like the encyclopaedia Baike Baidu. The ‘issue’ has essentially disappeared. I have
visualized this network in Figure 3 by colour-coding the different domain extensions and
resizing the nodes according to their importance within the network. ‘Importance’ here
means a node’s influence or authority, measured by how many links a node received
from nodes that likewise received many links (what in network analysis is known as
‘eigenvector centrality’).
In this extended network, the majority of nodes represent large, institutional players.
This includes academic institutions and commercial media corporations, as well as several state and Party organizations that utilize dot-com extensions (e.g. the People’s Daily
or China News). The overwhelming majority of nodes, however, are clearly marked as
government entities through their dot-gov-dot-cn URL extensions. In fact, the website
that is most commonly acknowledged through hyperlinks in this network is that of the
State Council Information Office (gov.cn), which is the PR department of China’s cabinet. In terms of ‘eigenvector centrality’, government sites generally amass the most inlinks from other authoritative network actors. Based on this criterion, the two most
relevant actors are the State Council and the Ministry of Information Industries
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
9
Schneider
Figure 3. The extended network of the Nanjing Massacre issue pages. 3 May 2013. Node size
represents eigenvector centrality, edge size represents degree, colours represent domain types
(crawl depth = 2, iterations = 2; algorithm: force atlas).
(miibeian.gov.cn), which is one of the institutions responsible for managing the Chinese
Internet.
What these findings suggest is that when it comes to an established topic like the
Nanjing Massacre, this section of the web functions like the digital equivalent of a classic mass-communication environment, where a few authoritative sources broadcast their
information to a mass audience. Actors in this network use hyperlinks not to reference
related content but to acknowledge affiliated organizations and, ultimately, Chinese government institutions. As one industry insider I talked to put it, this is an example of how
China’s web has ‘matured’ into an info-web (personal interview, July 2014), though
future research will need to explore further whether we are indeed witnessing an ‘evolution’ over time. The findings at the very least raise questions of whether we see similar
characteristics in the case of a more volatile, current affairs issue and whether that issue
presents a similarly united discourse on Chinese history and sovereignty.
The East China Sea conflict in China’s digital networks
To see what informational infrastructure the East China Sea debates are embedded in on
China’s web, I have reproduced the work-steps I adopted above. This analysis shows
that, much like in the Nanjing Massacre case, the various web outlets dealing with the
Diaoyu/Senkaku island conflict heavily infuse their narrative with a sense of factuality:
the history of the islands as well as the recent conflicts are presented in the form of numbers, maps and factual information pieces that all present the core argument – that the
Diaoyus are an inviolable part of the PRC’s national territory – as an ‘indisputable fact’
(e.g. on the website Xilu). The websites relay this position by creating the sense of interactive newsrooms. The conflict is visualized in the form of infographics, and the visual
elements (arrows, crosshairs, comic-like explosions, etc.) lend the topic an ostensible
simplicity and clarity. Figure 4 shows one such example: a graphic from the website
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
10
new media & society 
Figure 4. Infographic on a 2010 East China Sea confrontation.‘Chinese fishing boat and
Japanese patrol boat collide’; screenshot of Leiting001.com, taken on 10 July 2015.
Leiting (originally published on Sohu.com), depicting the 2010 confrontation between
Chinese and Japanese vessels.
Such infographics create a dynamic impression, but it is important to note that they do
so entirely with the tools of classic print media. The graphics include no animations or
digitally native elements like hyperlinks. The Diaoyu discourse thus relies heavily on the
visual vocabulary that users are familiar with from the established print renditions of the
topic: the Chinese web-versions of this particular conflict remain committed to traditional media scripts, digitized for online consumption.
Particularly noteworthy is how the Japanese side of the issue is presented within this
discourse. News websites like iFeng, Leiting, Huanqiu or China International Strategy
Net (Chinaiiss) tend to showcase the issue as a standoff between the two sides, often
using symbols such as national flags or images of military units to visually create a sense
of antagonism. A closer look reveals that this antagonism is by no means one between
equals. The Chinese sources are careful to provide a moral framework for the conflict
that leaves no doubt about the perceived irrationality and maliciousness of Japanese
actions. This is achieved, for instance, by frequently placing key terms on the Japanese
side in quotation marks (e.g. ‘air defence identification zone’), but not doing the same for
claims on the Chinese side. Figure 5 provides an account by the Chinaiiss website of a
maritime conflict in July 2012: the top section presents the Chinese side, including
unmarked quotes and claims to national territory; the lower section presents the Japanese
side, now clearly marking direct speech as well as claims to similar ‘territorial waters’ – a
strategy that frames the Japanese position as counter-factual.
Across websites, the choice of national symbols is revealing. The websites frequently
draw from a pool of national symbols to visualize national antagonisms, but also to suggest unity between otherwise disparate Chinese audiences. Most notably, this includes
combining flags from the PRC, from Taiwan’s Republic of China and from the Special
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
11
Schneider
Figure 5. The two positions in a 2012 East China Sea conflict. Screenshot of Chinaiiss.com,
taken on 10 July 2015.
Administrative Region of Hong Kong. The websites thus suggest that defending the
Diaoyu Islands is a project that creates a united front between Chinese people the world
over. The seemingly banal nationalist symbolism (Billig, 2009) constructs a sense of an
‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 2006) that is united not through shared citizenship
but shared ethnicity, with the territorial integrity of the ‘homeland’ serving as a major
signifier of that ethnicity. Interestingly, this narrative is almost exclusively constructed
by actors from mainland China (the exception being the League for Defending the
Diaoyu Islands, which is a non-governmental organization based in Hong Kong, but
which notably deploys the simplified mainland-Chinese character script rather than the
traditional script commonly used in the Special Administrative Region itself). Taiwanese
and Hong Kong activists are repeatedly covered, but the websites do not normally provide a forum for the voices of these activists. In fact, in the overall structure of the online
network, Taiwan is represented by the websites under the PRC’s State Council that are
responsible for showcasing Taiwan affairs from a mainland perspective, that is, depicting
Taiwan as a renegade province rather than a sovereign state. The discourse is thus very
much a mainland-Chinese political discourse that is presented as a universal element of
pan-Chinese ethnic identity.
Who are the main actors in the Diaoyu web network, and how are they connected?
The web content is generally provided by large, authoritative websites, much as was the
case with the Nanjing Massacre online. The issue webpages themselves do not link to
each other; linking happens vertically within the hierarchies of a particular web domain,
and then horizontally only between large information hubs. The effect is that the Diaoyu
Island topic again does not generate a true ‘issue network’ in which information on the
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
12
new media & society 
Figure 6. Guns, games and girls – click-bait on a military affairs website. Screenshot of the
section ‘military history picture archive’ on Xilu.com, taken on 10 July 2015.
topic is shared, referenced through hyperlinks or connected across different domains.
Instead, the topic plugs into secondary issue networks that deal with general current
affairs, military news or tabloid-like popular information. The core players in this network are established news corporations and state information outlets.
Overall, this network is highly commercialized. Official institutions interact with
a complex set of private and commercial actors, which includes state-owned news
conglomerates like the People’s Daily Group or Nanfang Group, but also private
content providers like Sina, Tencent or China’s search engine giant Baidu. These
private companies are known to cooperate closely with state institutions, particularly
when it comes to censoring users (cf. MacKinnon, 2009), but the content they provide follows more than just political rationales: user ‘clicks’, ‘likes’ and reposts are
the bred-and-butter for these enterprises, which rely on advertising sales for their
profits (Esarey and Qiang, 2011). Across these websites, the political discourses are
thus highly commodified. Popups are ubiquitous. The content leans heavily towards
tabloid-like features, interspersing information on military issues with images of
scantily clad girls in uniforms and with click-bait leading to conspiracy theories,
gambling sites or pornography. Figure 6 provides an example from the homepage of
the military website Xilu. Such content choices are suggestive as to who the perceived target audience of the issue might be: young men with a fetish for military
imagery. The amount of computer-game advertising further suggests that content
creators are hoping to attract the group of men that have become known as the ‘diaosi’: China’s ‘loser’ generation of unemployed young men, who are known for
embracing Geek culture (Szablewicz, 2014).
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
13
Schneider
Figure 7. The extended network of the Diaoyu Island issue pages. 20 April 2014. Node size
represents eigenvector centrality, edge size represents degree, colours represent domain types
(crawl depth = 2, iterations = 2; algorithm: force atlas).
The fact that the issue is closely tied to commercial interests is also apparent from the
link networks that it is embedded in. While there is significant turn-over throughout the
years in terms of websites that get linked, most of the resources come from websites with
dot-com extensions. While this includes state-owned corporations like Xinhua news
agency or the People’s Daily, most websites indeed seem to be privately run.10
So who are the ‘stars’ of the network? Over time, there is considerable flux, which
reflects the contemporary nature of the issue, but also the current-affairs function of the
news websites that host it. This section of China’s web is subject to continuous change.
Nevertheless, two features within the networks are worth noting (Figure 7): the first is
the strong, recurring presence of media conglomerates like the state-run People’s Daily
Group or the private Phoenix Satellite Television Group with its online platform iFeng.11
iFeng hosts one of the most detailed web-hubs for the East China Sea conflict, and the
organization’s news homepage is represented in the wider networks as an authoritative
resource. Finally, Party and state institutions remain important.12 They retain a continuous presence through CCP propaganda department websites like wenming.cn or State
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
14
new media & society 
Council outlets like Taiwan.cn. In a sense, the Diaoyu Island issue is located in a media
ecology that resembles traditional, capitalist mass-media models with their strong focus
on commerce and entertainment, and with their close links to the political establishment
(cf. Herman and Chomsky, 1988/2002).13
Conclusion: programming China’s Japan discourse
This article has examined how different actors construct a cornerstone of political discourse on China’s web: the conflict-laden relationship with neighbouring Japan. The
analysis of two cases (the historical Nanjing Massacre and the contemporary East China
Sea conflict) offer insights into how the Party’s media management strategies work out
in digital networks. As this analysis has shown, the networks surrounding the two issues
generate a discourse on Sino-Japanese relations that is overall in line with depictions of
Japan in China’s mainstream media and in officially approved cultural products. The
online discourse, which is often carried by commercial actors, reproduces the recognizable rhetorical tropes and visual signs that characterize official narrative scripts about
Japan. These scripts rely heavily on statements that are framed as factual and self-evident, and they deploy recognizable emotive cues to construct righteous indignation as the
default mode for understanding the topics.
These online discourses, and the wider digital infrastructures that give rise to them,
provide a look behind the scenes of the Chinese authorities’ cultural governance system
and their political communication strategies. This study suggests that the CCP has been
highly successful at integrating the web into its existing mass-communication paradigm.
Information is presented on a range of isolated beacons on the web, which are not directly
connected online, almost exclusively digitize and reproduce Party-approved materials,
and allow only a modicum of discussion within the confines of sanctioned parameters.
The outcome of this model is a Chinese Internet that has ossified into a highly regulated
yet profitable info-web, and which media workers in China today rightly describe as a
‘traditional medium’ (interviews in Beijing, July 2014).
As Gang and Bandurski (2011: 71) have pointed out, digital technologies have been a
game changer for political communication, in China as much as elsewhere. However, the
game has not changed solely for the benefit of the much evoked contentious ‘civil society’. In post-socialist China, the ruling CCP has been placing a high priority on ‘guiding
public opinion’ through cultural governance and media management. It is trying to harness what Castells (2009) has called ‘switching power’ and ‘programming power’ – the
ability to include or exclude actors in networked infrastructures and shape the discursive
parameters of these networks. Through market mechanisms, ideological guidelines, legal
coercive tools, technological innovations and a good deal of persuasion, China’s ruling
party and state are revamping political communication for the digital age (cf. Esarey and
Qiang, 2011; Han, 2013; Schlæger, 2013; Sullivan, 2014). Rather than follow the kind of
open, distributed network logic that informs digital politics in many foreign contexts (for
the United States, see the programmatic speech by Clinton, 2010), the Chinese authorities have developed a different framework for making sense of politics in the digital age
– one that relies on decentralized clusters of established commercial and state actors.
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
15
Schneider
This is not to say that divergent, contentious voices are not available in China’s digital
networks. Not all digital political communication in China is in line with the mainstream,
and even for the case of Sino-Japanese relations, we can find conciliatory narratives or
even outright satirical criticism of the more nationalist discourses (cf. Henochowicz,
2015). It is noteworthy, however, that in the case of dispute with Japan, such voices
largely express themselves through social media channels like Sina’s microblogging service Weibo or Tencent’s chat app Weixin, not on China’s increasingly ‘traditional’ web.
Future studies will need to assess whether the policy choices and managerial strategy of
the authorities are also bringing such channels into the fold of officially approved
mass-media.14 The government’s Internet policy agenda indeed seems to be geared
towards this end (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of
China, 2010; also cf. Jiang, 2010), and recent studies demonstrate that the state has been
fairly successful at extending its capitalist mass-media logic to the more socially interactive sphere of microblogging (e.g. Ng, 2013; Sullivan, 2014; Svensson, 2014). These
developments, seen together with recent moves to eliminate access to foreign emailing
services like Gmail and block virtual private networks that allow users to circumvent
China’s censorship system (Gao, 2015), suggest that the authorities are stepping up their
efforts to make their vision of political communication a reality across all media forms.
Funding
This research was made possible with the generous support of the Netherlands Organization for
Scientific Research (NWO), through a veni grant for the project ‘Digital Nationalism in China’
(grant 016.134.054).
Notes
1. Discourse here refers to communication practices that systematically construct our knowledge of society by creating commonly accepted truths (cf. Foucault, 1976/1995).
2. On the often intentional vagueness of Chinese censorship guidelines and the logic of uncertainty this creates, see Hassid (2008).
3. For studies on Chinese nationalism online, see Leibold (2010), Xu (2007) and the contributions in Shen and Breslin (2010).
4. On the Nanjing Massacre’s relevance today, see Buruma (2002), Callahan (2010: ch. 6) and
Denton (2014: ch. 6).
5. For recent discussions, see Hagström (2012) and Schneider (2014: 695–701).
6. To this end, I conducted Chinese keyword searches (for ‘Nanjing Massacre’, ‘Nanjing
Incident’, ‘Sino-Japanese War’, ‘East Sea’ and ‘Diaoyu Islands’) on three prominent search
engines, using a research browser that had been cleaned of personal data (cf. Rogers, 2013:
111) and that simulated searches from within China (Baidu, Yahoo) and Hong Kong (Google)
through local proxy servers. I then manually reviewed which results were relevant and
checked them for links to other websites on the topics. At the time of the study, this process
yielded 19 issue-related websites on the Nanjing Massacre (Table 1 in Appendix 1) and 16
websites on the Diaoyu Islands (Table 2), all of which were accessible from within China.
7. See Chilton (2004) on discourse analysis, Rogers (2013) on ‘digitally native’ elements, and
Knox (2009) and Pauwels (2005) on website analysis.
8.Available at https://www.issuecrawler.net. For an introduction, see http://wiki.digitalmethods.net. Bruns (2007) and Schneider (2015) discuss the programme and its analytical
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
16
new media & society 
implications.
9. Gephi is available online, along with tutorials, at: https://gephi.org/users/.
10. Many of the sites are registered as companies with limited liability, but it is not always clear
to what degree they constitute independent commercial actors. Affiliations are often obscure.
Considering the amount of military imagery and discussions of national interests on sites like
Leiting, Chinaiiss, Qianyan or Xilu, it is likely that the editors maintain connections to the
Party’s propaganda system that are not visible through information on the web.
11. Phoenix is based in Hong Kong, but the fact that iFeng presents its content in simplified
Chinese characters and focuses on mainland news suggests that the target audience consists
of mainland Internet users – the website also strongly features advertisement for PRC entities
such as the People’s Liberation Army, again hinting at some collaboration with the CCP’s
propaganda system.
12. Note that on China’s web, not all dot-com extensions represent privately owned enterprise.
Many of China’s state-owned enterprises and even some of its government’s agencies also use
such domain names for their web presence. A prominent example is china.com.cn, which is a
site run by the State Council Information Office and the State Internet Information Office.
13. While hyperlinks should not be mistaken for evidence of direct information exchange
between commercial and public actors, they do hint at the level of acknowledgement that
private actors feel they need to provide in order to function in China’s media environment.
The same is true for occasional propaganda banners or official news content, which the private websites at times carry parallel to their more tabloid-like commercial contents. Being
politically acceptable and commercially successful are not mutually exclusive endeavours
on China’s web.
14. Similarly, the phrasing of web comments deserves more attention in future studies than I
could afford them here. In particular, it would be worth exploring to what extent (and with
what effect) such comments reproduce the lexicon and the semantics of ‘official’ discourses.
References
Anderson B (2006) Imagined Communities. 3rd rev. ed. London; New York: Verso.
Beck U (2007) Power in the Global Age. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Billig M (2009) Banal Nationalism. 9th ed. London: SAGE.
Breslin S and Shen S (2010) Online Chinese nationalism. Chatham House Asia Programme Paper
ASP PP 2010/03. Available at: www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/public/
Research/Asia/0910breslin_shen.pdf (accessed 10 February 2015).
Bruns A (2007) Methodologies for mapping the political blogosphere: an exploration using
the IssueCrawler research tool. First Monday 12(5). Available at: http://eprints.qut.edu.
au/7832/1/7832.pdf (accessed 10 February 2015).
Buruma I (2002) The Nanjing Massacre as a historical symbol. In: Li F, Sabella R and Liu D (eds)
Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 1–9.
Callahan WA (2010) China – The Pessoptimist Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Castells M (2009) Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chan E and Bi CG (2009) The Internet and state media: the 4.5 estate. China Elections and
Governance Review 3: 1–15.
Chilton P (2004) Analysing Political Discourse – Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.
Clinton HR (2010) Remarks on Internet Freedom. Speech delivered at The Newseum,
Washington, DC, 21 January. Available at: http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/
rm/2010/01/135519.htm (accessed 10 February 2015).
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
17
Schneider
China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) (2011) Statistical Report on
Internet Development in China. CNNIC. Available at: http://www1.cnnic.cn/IDR/
ReportDownloads/201302/P020130221391269963814.pdf (accessed 10 February 2015).
Dean J (2003) Why the net is not a public sphere. Constellations 10(1): 95–112.
Deibert R, Palfrey J, Rohozinski R, et al. (eds) (2010) Access Controlled – The Shaping of Power,
Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.
Denton KA (2014) Exhibiting the Past – Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in
Postsocialist China. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.
Esarey A and Qiang X (2008) Political expression in the Chinese blogosphere: below the radar.
Asian Survey 48(5): 752–772.
Esarey A and Qiang X (2011) Digital communication and political change in China. International
Journal of Communication 5: 298–319.
Foucault M (1976/1995) Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Gang Q and Bandurski D (2011) China’s emerging public sphere: the impact of media commercialization, professionalism, and the Internet in an era of transition. In: Shirk SL (ed.)
Changing Media, Changing China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 38–76.
Gao H (2015) China sharpens its censorship blade. The New York Times, 2 February. Available
at: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/opinion/china-sharpens-its-censorship-blade.html
(accessed 10 February 2015).
Gries PH (2004) China’s New Nationalism – Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Hagström L (2012) ‘Power shift’ in East Asia? A critical reappraisal of narratives on the Diaoyu/
Senkaku Islands incident in 2010. The Chinese Journal of International Politics 5: 267–297.
Han RB (2013) Adaptive Persuasion in cyberspace: the ‘Fifty Cents Army’ in China. Paper submitted for the 2013 annual meeting of the America Political Science Association. Available at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2299744 (accessed 10 February 2015).
Hassid J (2008) Controlling the Chinese media – an uncertain business. Asian Survey 48(3): 414–
430.
Henochowicz A (2015) I love the Chinese dream; a coffee, please, and cream. China Digital
Times, 6 February 2015. Available at: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/02/love-chinesedream-coffee-please-cream/ (accessed 10 February 2015).
Herman ES and Chomsky N (1988/2002) Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the
Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.
Herold DK (2014) Users, not netizens: spaces and practices on the Chinese Internet. In: Marolt P
and Herold DK (eds) China Online: Locating Society in Online Spaces. Abingdon: Routledge,
pp. 20–30.
Herold DK and Marolt P (eds) (2011) Online Society in China: Creating, Celebrating and
Instrumentalising the Online Carnival. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hu HL (2011) The political economy of governing ISPs in China: perspectives of net neutrality
and vertical integration. The China Quarterly 207: 523–540.
Huang RG and Sun XY (2014) Weibo network, information diffusion and implications for collective action in China. Information, Communication & Society 17(1): 86–104.
Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China (2010) The Internet in
China, 8 June. Available at: http://www.china.org.cn/government/whitepaper/node_7093508.
htm (accessed 10 February 2015).
Jiang M (2010) Authoritarian informationalism: China’s approach to Internet sovereignty. The
SAIS Review of International Affairs 30(2): 71–89.
King G, Pan J and Roberts M (2013) How censorship in China allows government criticism but
silences collective expression. American Political Science Review 107(2): 1–18.
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
18
new media & society 
Knox JS (2009) Punctuating the home page: image as language in an online newspaper. Discourse
& Communication 3(2): 145–172.
Kress G and Van Leeuwen T (2001) Multimodal Discourse – The Modes and Media of
Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
Leibold J (2010) More than a category: Han Supremacism on the Chinese Internet. China Quarterly
203: 539–559.
Leibold J (2011) Blogging alone: China, the Internet, and the democratic illusion? The Journal of
Asian Studies 70(4): 1023–1041.
Lieberthal K (2004) Governing China – From Revolution through Reform. 2nd ed. New York;
London: W.W. Norton.
Liu J (2014) Mobile communication and relational mobilization in China. Asiascape: Digital Asia
1(1–2): 14–38.
MacKinnon R (2009) China’s censorship 2.0: how companies censor bloggers. First Monday
14(2). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2378/2089 (accessed 10 February
2015).
Mitter R (2003) Old ghosts, new memories: changing China’s war history in the era of post-mao
politics. Journal of Contemporary History 38: 117–131.
Morozov E (2011) The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. London: Allen Lane.
Ng JQ (2013) Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China’s Version of Twitter (And Why).
New York: New Press.
Nie HPA (2013) Gaming, nationalism, and ideological work in contemporary China: online games
based on the war of resistance against Japan. Journal of Contemporary China 22(81): 499–
517.
Pauwels L (2005) Websites as visual and multimodal cultural expressions: opportunities and issues
of online hybrid media research. Media Culture Society 27(4): 604–613.
Qiu JLC (2009) Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information
Have-Less in Urban China. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rogers R (2010) Mapping public web space with the Issuecrawler. In: Brossard C and Reber B
(eds) Digital Cognitive Technologies: Epistemology and Knowledge Society. London: John
Wiley, pp. 115–126.
Rogers R (2013) Digital Methods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schiller D (2014) Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis. Kindle ed.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Schlæger J (2013) E-Government in China: Technology, Power and Local Government Reform.
London: Routledge.
Schneider F (2012) Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series. Leiden;
Boston, MA: Brill Publishers.
Schneider F (2014) Reconceptualising world order: Chinese political thought and its challenge to
international relations theory. Review of International Studies 40(4): 683–703.
Schneider F (2015) Searching for ‘digital Asia’ in its networks: where the spatial turn meets the
digital turn. Asiascape: Digital Asia 2(1/2): 57–92.
Scott J (2013) Social Network Analysis. 3rd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.
Shambaugh D (2007) China’s propaganda system: institutions, process, and efficacy. China
Journal 57: 25–60.
Shen S and Breslin S (eds) (2010) Online Chinese Nationalism and China’s Bilateral Relations.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Stockmann D (2010) Who believes propaganda? Media effects during the anti-Japanese protests in
Beijing. The China Quarterly 202: 269–289.
Sullivan J (2014) China’s Weibo: is faster different? New Media & Society 16(1): 24–37.
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
19
Schneider
Svensson M (2014) Voice, power and connectivity in China’s microblogosphere: digital divides
on SinaWeibo. China Information 28(2): 168–188.
Szablewicz M (2014) The ‘losers’ of China’s Internet: memes as ‘structures of feeling’ for disillusioned young netizens. China Information 28(2): 259–275.
The New York Times (NYT) (2010) What Chinese censors don’t want you to know. NYT, 21 March.
Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/world/asia/22banned.html (accessed 3
March 2014).
Tong JR and Zuo LD (2014) Weibo communication and government legitimacy in China: a
computer-assisted analysis of Weibo messages on two ‘mass incidents’. Information,
Communication & Society 17(1): 66–85.
Tsang S (2009) Consultative Leninism: China’s new political framework. Journal of Contemporary
China 18(62): 865–880.
Wallace J and Weiss JC (2015) The political economy of nationalist protest in China: a subnational
approach. China Quarterly 222: 403–429.
Wang Z (2012) Never Forget National Humiliation – Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and
Foreign Relations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Xu W (2007) China’s Cyber Nationalism – Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications. Lanham,
MD: Lexington.
Yang GB (2009) The Power of the Internet in China – Citizen Activism Online. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Zhang XL (2011) The Transformation of Political Communication in China – From Propaganda
to Hegemony. Singapore: World Scientific.
Zhao SS (2004) A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Zheng YN (2008) Technological Empowerment – The Internet, State, and Society in China.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Author biography
Florian Schneider, PhD, Sheffield University, is Lecturer for the Politics of Modern China at the
Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He is the author of Visual Political Communication
in Popular Chinese Television Series (2012) and managing editor of Asiascape: Digital Asia. His
research interests include questions of governance, public administration, political communication
and media in China, as well as international relations in the East Asian region. This article is part
of a 3-year research project titled ‘Digital Nationalism in China’, funded by the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), in which he analyses how Sino-Japanese relations
are presented and discussed in Chinese online networks.
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
20
new media & society 
Appendix 1
Table 1. Chinese Nanjing Massacre issue websites (retrieved summer 2013).
Description
Starting page URL
Institutional affiliation
Action Committee for Defending
the Diaoyu Islands issue site
http://www.diaoyuislands.org/
photo/1/nanking.html
Baike Baidu issue page
CBS’ Fengniao issue page
http://baike.baidu.com/view/5778.htm
http://image.fengniao.
com/130/1306613.html
http://www.ce.cn/ztpd/xwzt/
guonei/2005/njdt/bx/200508/11/
t20050811_4418106.shtml
http://www.china918.net/91803/njkill
Hong-Kong-based activist group
Action Committee for Defending
the Diaoyu Islands
Baidu Inc.
CBS Interactive Group, China
China Economic Net issue page
China918.net issue site
Chinese University of Hong Kong
issue page
Communist Youth League issue site
Huanqiu issue page
Leiting Military Affairs issue page
Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall
website
Resource collection on 163.com
Sina commemoration site
Sina issue site
Sino-Japanese History issue site,
Nanjing Normal University
Tiexue issue page
Wikipedia entry (Chinese simplified)
Xinhua (Jiangsu Province) collection
of issue images
Xinhua commemoration page
Xinhua issue page
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/
NanjingMassacre/NMGB.html
http://njdts.china1840-1949.net.cn
http://www.huanqiu.com/zhuanti/
Nanjing_Massacre/
http://www.leiting001.com/huati/
nanjingdts
http://www.nj1937.org
http://zhy-xianger.blog.163.com/blog/
static/56788522200991614817983
http://php.neverforget.sina.com.cn
http://neverforget.sina.com.cn
http://www.sjhistory.net/site/newxh/
yjzt.htm
http://data.tiexue.net/history/
njdts4921
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%e5%8d
%97%e4%ba%ac%e5%a4%a7%e5%b1
%a0%e6%ae%ba
http://www.js.xinhua.org/subject/
dts/039.htm
http://news.xinhuanet.
com/politics/2007-12/13/
content_7236129.htm
http://news.xinhuanet.com/
ziliao/2003-09/12/content_1076902.
htm
Economic Daily Newspaper (Party
paper)
Personal website (handle: ‘Five
Minutes’) – possible affiliation with
Nanjing Sanjiang College and the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Chinese Communist Party
The Global Times (People’s Daily
affiliated Party tabloid)
Leiting001.com Inc, affiliated with
Shanghai Guangyu Net Science and
Technology Company
Class 1 State museum under the
PRC’s Ministry of Culture
Personal blog on NetEase Inc.‘s
163 blog service
Sina Corp
Sina Corp
Nanjing Normal University
People’s Liberation Army
Wikipedia
Xinhua News Agency
Xinhua News Agency
Xinhua News Agency
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016
21
Schneider
Table 2. Chinese Diaoyu Island issue websites (retrieved summer 2013).
Description
Starting page URL
Institutional affiliation
Action Committee for
Defending the Diaoyu
Islands
Baike Baidu full entry
http://www.diaoyuislands.org/
Hong-Kong-based activist
group Action Committee for
Defending the Diaoyu Islands
Baidu Inc.
China.com
http://baike.baidu.com/
subview/2876/6475776.htm
http://military.china.com/zh_cn/
critical3/27/20090212/15321255.
html
Chinese University of
Hong Kong
CIS issue site
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.
hk/NanjingMassacre/DD.html
http://diaoyudao.chinaiiss.com
Huanqiu issue site
http://www.huanqiu.com/zhuanti/
world/diaoyudao
http://v.ifeng.com/zt/diaoyudao/
iFeng issue site
iFeng News history site
Leiting issue site
Nanfang Net news
article
People’s Net issue site
Qianyan001 issue site
Sina issue site
Tencent issue summary
Xilu Military Website
issue site
Xinhua issue page
http://news.ifeng.com/history/
zhongguojindaishi/special/
diaoyudao/
http://www.leiting001.com/zt/
diaoyudaoyu
http://www.southcn.
com/news/international/
gjkd/200406110497.htm
http://military.people.com.cn/
GB/8221/72028/205795/
http://www.qianyan001.com/
zhuanti/bwdyd/
http://news.sina.com.cn/z/
ourdydao
http://news.
qq.com/a/20080617/001801.htm
http://www.xilu.com/diaoyudao/
http://news.xinhuanet.
com/ziliao/2003-08/25/
content_1044000.htm
Global Broadcasting Media
Group, a subsidiary of
state-owned China Radio
International
Chinese University of Hong
Kong
China International Strategy
Net, by the Hongzhi Tianxiang
Network Technology Group
Ltd.
The Global Times (People’s
Daily affiliated Party tabloid)
Phoenix Satellite Television
Group
Phoenix Satellite Television
Group
Leiting001.com Inc, affiliated
with Shanghai Guangyu Net
Science and Technology
Company
Nanfang Media Group
(commercial state-owned media
conglomerate)
People’s Daily Group (Party
News and Propaganda Outlet)
Military Affairs portal. Affiliation
unclear.
Sina Corp
Tencent Holdings Ltd.
Subsidiary of privately run
Guangdian Science and
Technology Managing Group
Ltd. (Engl.: CSNS)
Xinhua News Agency
Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016