Everyday nationalism online

This Research is inspired by the recent debate surrounding the Taiwanese K-pop star Chou Tzuyu who apologised to the mainland Chinese audiences for her wave of the national flag of Taiwan in a Korean variety show. The various discussion about Chou and the Taiwan issue after Chou’s apology on Facebook provide valuable researching material of studying the everyday nationalism of mainland Chinese/Taiwanese. To understand how mainland Chinese/Taiwanese refer to nationalism in their everyday discussion on Facebook, the comments of the two news articles about Chou and Taiwan’s status posted by BBC News on Facebook was analysed, and the research question is phrased as: how is nationalism challenged/reproduced in people’s discussion about Taiwan’s status on Facebook? To answer this question, a qualitative discourse analysis was conducted. The analysis categorised the comments into four different groups according to their main arguments as well as the association/variation, the characterisation of the agency, and the emphasis/exclusion made by the users. By interpreting the comments with the help of the Micheal Skey’s (2011) five dimensions of national discourse as well as the nationalism theories of the modernists, primordialists, and ethnosymbolists, it is found that nationalism is both challenged and reproduced in those comments. It is challenged through some mainland Chinese users’ reluctance to be generalised as Chinese and it is reproduced through people’s different reference towards territory, history, culture, politics, and self/other distinction. Besides, it is discovered that different groups of people use the approach of modernism, of primordialism, and of ethnosymbolism respectively in their reproduction of nationalism. It is concluded that the spatial, temporal, cultural, political as well as the self/other national discourses are the major discourses people refer to in their daily reproduction of nationalism. And people may be unconsciously influenced by the existing nationalism ideologies proposed by certain political groups in their reproduction of different versions of nationalism.