Truth and Dare: Market Relations and Sentiment Distance in Digital Space during COVID-19

• In Event: Digital (Un)Democracy: AI, Media, and the New Political Order

Abstract

Under rising authoritarian pressure, nonprofit organizations face intense pressure to align with state narratives. While existing research relies on state–society frameworks to explain civic compliance versus dissidence, this article foregrounds market embeddedness as a critical yet heterogeneous institutional force shaping autonomous organizational expression. We introduce the concept of sentiment distance—patterned departures from state-sanctioned emotional scripts—to capture a resilient form of civic contestation when overt oppositions become prohibitively costly. Following a longitudinal design and analyzing over 20,000 digital posts by Chinese nonprofits during the COVID-19 pandemic combined with survey and interview data, we find that market instead of political relationships drive expressive civic voice amid amplified repression. Disaggregating market embeddedness into three dimensions, we show that relational and financial market embeddedness facilitated sentiment distance from state performative optimism, while managerial embeddedness exerted mixed effects. These findings complicate our understandings of civic resilience under constraint in affective terms which depends less on political alignment than on how organizations are anchored across institutions.

Authors

• Yan Long, University of California-Berkeley

• Wei Luo, Peking University

• Yue Zhang, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Rui Chen, Harvard University