Research

How do citizens in authoritarian contexts interpret everyday nationalist messages? While research shows that nationalism is reproduced through routine practices, less is known about how audiences interpret, adapt to, or contest official messages--and why. I argue that outward nationalist alignment persists not through uniform conviction, but because divergent interpretive pathways converge on surface-level conformity. This study examines China’s entertainment industry, where the state mobilizes celebrities to amplify nationalist messages. Using a two-stage mixed-methods design, I first survey internet users (N=2,211) to show that audiences judge celebrities' nationalist transgressions as significantly more severe than non-political misconduct, with systematic variation across social groups. To uncover the interpretive logics behind this heterogeneity, I draw on 55 in-depth interviews, identifying four orientations shaped by individuals’ primary information repertoire and lived experiences of positioning within the national community. These orientations range from emotional affirmation to pragmatic compliance to tactical reinterpretation that enables indirect critique. By revealing how everyday encounters with celebrity culture--such as scrolling past a star's nationalist post--normalize nationalist expectations, I demonstrate that the ideology endures even where internalization is limited. Grounded in the Chinese case, the study advances debates on cultural governance, audience reception of official messaging, and symbolic boundary-making in authoritarian settings.

How are social movements that address democratic states’ wrongdoings and violence perceived and discussed by the publics under authoritarian regimes? This significant topic engages in dialogue in three key areas of social movement research—discourses, globalization, and authoritarianism. We address this topic by studying the discourses of the Black Lives Matter movement in four Chinese-speaking publics through an analysis of 1,911 reports and posts from traditional and social media. The discourses vary within and across the publics in complex and surprising ways. The diverse discourses, however, share two patterns: (1) a strong preference for stability, often expressed through exaggerating violence in the protests and using negative historical analogies to the Cultural Revolution; and (2) a popular racism, represented in the racially biased image of “uncivil Blacks.” The variations and commonality can be explained by the interactions between the authoritarian Chinese state’s different modes of involvement—restriction and intervention—and the diverse global experiences of discourse participants. The interactions enact and amplify certain elements of authoritarian political culture in the participants’ horizons of interpretation. This study paves the way for a more systematic research agenda on public discourses of social movements situated at the intersection of democracy and authoritarianism.