Internet Memes and Cyber Nationalism in China: A Social Semiotic Analysis of the Diba Expedition

Before 2016, Diba was known for its memetic discourse 屌丝 (diaosi). Diba members of
this period were regarded as a representative of China’s post-80s generation who struggled for their social identity offline and constructed a group identity online. After 2016, Diba was known for its nationalist expeditions to Facebook. Diba participants of this period were officially praised as a patriotic group and represented China’s post-90s generation who united in response to certain political events.
This research investigates Diba’s self-generated internet memes and their role of articulating pro-government opinions in online expeditions across four years. These collective expeditions respectively involved Taiwan in 2016, Sweden in 2018 as well as Hong Kong in 2017 and 2019.
After classifying 11,386 memes collected during a non-participant observation, 980 representative data were selected to create a multimodal corpus. Synthesising concepts from meme studies and multimodal research, the corpus was annotated in terms of representational meanings and formal properties. From a social semiotic perspective, the annotated corpus was used to assist the exploration of how Diba participants’ pro-government stance is multimodally represented in the situational contexts of four different expeditions.
Based on an in-depth qualitative analysis, I argue that Diba’s memes rely on the multimodal components’ formal features to generate desired visual impressions and communicate with potential audiences of different socio-cultural backgrounds. Moreover, Diba’s memes are innovative in recontextualising and appropriating elements from popular cultures, regional conventions, historical events, and official discourses. The appropriation enables Diba participants to express or justify their political opinions in a creative and sometimes playful manner. The recontextualisation further helps Diba participants intertextually depict the expeditions as sacred and patriotic self-defence. However, I also argue that Diba’s memes are aggressive in deploying the confrontational rhetoric to threaten, harass, provoke, and intimidate the named targets. This type of rhetoric demonstrates Diba participants’ intentional persuasion from a position of power.
Overall, I argue for the integration of innovation, aggressiveness, patriotism, and nationalism in Diba’s online expeditions and user-generated memes. This feature not only results from the young participants’ absorption of the “China rising” narrative since the early 1990s but also stems from the surge of nationalist sentiments within the Chinese context in recent years.