Modernizing China: The Impact of Place on Political Communication

Over the past three decades, information and communication technologies (ICT) have been introduced in rapid succession to China as an essential part of its modernization and nation-building project. Almost simultaneously, the government tightens its control over information and manipulates it to control society. Society itself quickly adapts to ICT and responds to state-led change by initiating its own political discussions, sometimes nationalistic, to a broad online audience. Drawing on a massive volume of spatial and textual data, including news, social media, and satellite images, I examine political communication during and after two major events: anti-corruption campaign in Beijing and the railway station attack in Kunming. I show that state dissemination of information through ICT has limited impact on society’s political communication. Instead, I draw attention to a neglected player in such discourse, which is place or places. Places, especially public squares, communicate nonverbally and spontaneously. To show their impact, I focus on two groups of religious believers in Beijing, Buddhists and Christians. I find that the political content of their conversation increases and converges as they approach a public square of religious significance to them, and that it dissipates and diverges as they move away from it. More generally, places—wherever people naturally flock, such as teahouses, restaurants, and bookstores—invite uninhibited gossip, of which politics, both local and national, is very much an ingredient. Such gossip, invited by the subtle messages of place, knits together community and, potentially, nation and does so quite apart from the feverish world of constant messaging—the world of ICT.