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Paper Short Abstract

This paper examines how content creators of the Chinese diaspora in Italy navigate Italian-language digital spaces amidst increasingly polarised global politics by creating avenues for both transnational diplomacy and shifting politics of belonging.

Paper Abstract

In recent years, questions around diasporic identity have begun to be posed from new angles that highlight the increasing role played by both sending and receiving states’ need for political legitimation and national image building. In light of mounting tensions between the United States, China and the world, members of the Chinese diaspora today are increasingly asked to take sides within highly polarised political and discursive fields articulated not only through the PRC state policy, but also across host states and societies— with interlinking pressures leveraging multiple kinship and affective ties. Diverging experiences of Chineseness around the world are thus forced within an imagined coherent cultural and political body by both the PCR's increasingly pervasive diaspora governance strategies and by host societies that construct ethnic Chinese as political and cultural Others. As part of the GRF project “How China Speaks to the World in the Covid-19 Era: China’s Political Communication and Mobilisation in Europe” led by Hong Kong Baptist University, this paper employs digital ethnography and interviews with content creators of the Chinese diaspora living in Italy to explore how people of Chinese descent navigate Italian-language digital spaces amidst growing threats to multiple belongings. We argue that different digital spaces create avenues not only for transnational public diplomacy but also for questioning the necessity of monolithic diasporic identities in favour of shifting politics of belonging.