Appropriating the Propaganda Symbol in a Chinese Feminist Upsurge: The Construction of a Collective Identity on Social Media

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The use of popular youth culture for the service of political propaganda is not new, but the risk of doing so is unpredictable. During the early COVID-19 pandemic, the virtual idol project launched by the Chinese Communist Party Youth League was immediately appropriated by feminist netizens and evolved into an online protest event that finally cut short the infamous attempt. This article focuses on how collective identity is constructed among the protest’s participants on social media. Previous literature pointed out the power of social media to connect dispersed individuals that promotes social movement participation without previous identity building, while others reaffirmed the continuous importance of the concept. Taking the “Jiang Shanjiao” incident that initially criticized menstruation shame in China as a case study, this article analyzes the slogans applied by participants, which contribute to building feminists’ cognition of the current problems, their moral sense, collective consciousness, and emotion, and highlights that the affordances of social media are instrumental in the process of constructing collective identity in online protests. The article also argues that even though collective identity created on social media protests emerges and disappears in a short period of time, the content of collective identity exemplified in the protest, including women’s experiences, shared emotions toward gender injustice, and solidarity, is steady and gives lasting vigor to feminist movements.

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