Truth and Dare: Market Relations and Civic Dissents in Digital Space during COVID-19

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: The Politics of COVID-19

Abstract

Digital spaces have increasingly become critical battlegrounds where state and nonstate actors construct consistent or conflicting narratives about crises. Current debates on these discursive battles focus heavily on how the relationship between state and nonstate entities shapes the expression of grassroots dissenting voices. However, scholars have largely overlooked the role of nonstate actors' connections with the market in influencing their collaboration with or divergence from state rhetoric. This article examines an authoritarian country with heightened state surveillance, distinguishing three types of market relations—interorganizational, financial, and managerial—and assesses their different effects on the discursive autonomy of civic organizations. We analyze 11,968 WeChat articles published by 203 randomly sampled civic organizations in a cosmopolitan Chinese city during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022, using computational sentiment analysis, supplemented by survey and in-depth interview data. Interestingly, conventional political factors—such as these organizations' advocacy history or relationships with the government—did not significantly affect their posting of content that contested state-approved pandemic narratives. Instead, we find that civic organizations more embedded in the market—through executives' prior employment in the for-profit sector, collaborations with businesses, or financial reliance on corporate resources—were significantly more likely to voice concerns or criticisms online. In contrast, adopting business-like managerial practices or merely participating in corporate-sponsored events did not increase, and in some cases decreased, the likelihood of posting critical content. Contrary to the growing assertions on the collusion between authoritarian states and market forces, our findings suggest that different forms of market relations can, to varying degrees, facilitate alternative civic voices during crises.

Authors

• Yan Long, University of California-Berkeley

• Wei Luo, Peking University

• Yue Zhang, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Rui Chen, Harvard University