Platformed Chineseness: Intergenerational Diaspora Visibility and Everyday Geopolitics on TikTok

• In Event: Soft Power, Hard Borders: The Geopolitics of Diaspora Engagement

Abstract

This paper examines how intergenerational diasporic belonging becomes visible and contested in a platformed media environment. Focusing on a public TikTok video that presents a Chinese diasporic family watching a Chinese technological spectacle during the Spring Festival season and 480 comments collected from its comment section, the paper analyzes how viewers interpret the parents’ reactions, the child’s act of filming, and the spectacle of Chinese technological modernity. Through an exploratory digital case study of publicly available platform texts, the paper asks how generational difference is publicly framed through migration memory, technological trust and disbelief, Asian family intimacy, Chinese soft power, and China-West geopolitical comparison. I argue that diasporic intergenerational tension is not only imagined as a private family matter, but also becomes visible, commented upon, and politicized in platform publics. The case shows how a domestic media scene can be transformed into a site of everyday diaspora geopolitics, where viewers read parental skepticism and youthful mediation as signs of broader struggles over China’s changing global image, migrant temporalities, and the boundaries of digital Chineseness.

Author

• Chao YANG, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University