The Moon is Rounder on the Other Side: Foreign Vloggers and Chinese Nationalism

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain the phenomena of popular foreign vloggers in domestic Chinese media by using existing theories in propaganda, nationalism, and social identity theory. Selecting six videos from domestic Chinese social media Bilibili, I generate original data of 1,125 comments from these six videos. I find that holding everything else equal, videos with foreign vloggers who speak fluent Chinese will elicit more positive comments from the audience than foreign vloggers who do not. Moreover, the word “China”, “U.S.” and “foreign” appeared more frequently in videos by Chinese-speaking vloggers, and comments praising foreign vloggers’ Chinese skills constitute half of all the positive comments in one video. This study contributes to people’s understanding of nationalism and propaganda. It is also the first time, to the author’s knowledge, that social identity theory has been applied to the Chinese context in the discipline of political science. This study has implications for future studies and studies outside of China as well.