Political Sense-Making under Transnational Constraint: Reading Black Lives Matter on Diasporic WeChat

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 9. Digitalization & Transnationalism

Abstract

While existing research has examined how racial-justice movements are framed across mainstream and alternative media, we know far less about how such movements are framed and interpreted within diasporic media environments structured simultaneously by homeland governance and host-society diasporic experiences. This study addresses this gap by examining how first-generation Chinese immigrants interpret Black Lives Matter (BLM) coverage on diasporic WeChat. Drawing on 24 semi-structured interviews, the analysis identifies three interrelated dynamics. First, WeChat’s indispensability as a transnational digital infrastructure embeds political news exposure within routine diasporic social interactions, making information consumption not only a deliberate choice but also a byproduct of everyday social participation. Second, this embeddedness contributes to a widely shared perception of a dominant delegitimizing framing of BLM on WeChat, characterized by recurring catchphrases and discursive patterns that emphasize violence, chaos, and racialized threat. Finally, differences in cultural and social capital mediate Chinese immigrants’ critical interpretive capacity to contextualize stigmatizing portrayals or make sense of their ideological origins. Despite a general awareness of WeChat’s subjective reporting style and the presence of online state censorship, participants who rely more heavily on the platform tend to internalize stigmatizing representations of the movement and, in some cases, of Black Americans as a whole. Together, this project draws attention to the ambivalent role of transnational diasporic media, which simultaneously supports immigrants’ everyday integration while reconfiguring host-country movement politics through authoritarian homeland-regulated infrastructural constraints. By showing how differential access to cultural and social capital mediates immigrants’ interpretive capacities within these media environments, the study contributes to explaining why misalignments can emerge between Chinese immigrants and Black political struggles.

Author

• Manqing Ye, The University of Chicago