It is common to see the internet as a cosmopolitan egalitarian space where nations, states, and mass media hierarchies are increasingly irrelevant. However, in the wake of various internet scandals—for example, Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation of social media platforms to influence elections in the United States and the United Kingdom—many are less sanguine about the internet as a force for democracy. The exception, perhaps, is scholarly understandings of the digital politics in authoritarian countries like China, where the internet is still commonly seen as enabling democratization.

Florian Schneider’s China’s Digital Nationalism provides a useful corrective to these views. Rather than looking at how digital culture promotes cosmopolitan egalitarianism, he explores digital politics in China to convincingly argue that nationalism is being produced, consumed, and recirculated in digital online space. Instead of being a democratization project, there the internet is governed by the party-state in league with China’s “Big Cyber” corporations to produce an identity that is largely restricted to a parochial and hierarchical form of nationalism. Lest we conclude that this is a problem limited to authoritarianism or China, Schneider also carefully argues that digital nationalism is a problem of internet design that affects people in both democratic and authoritarian societies. He concludes that we need to redesign the internet, identity, and community to deal with postnational problems—like the climate emergency—that face humanity as a whole.

Schneider’s conclusions are compelling because they emerge from new theoretical concepts that he develops, which then are tested through in-depth, fieldwork-based, mixed-methods analysis; that is, both a quantitative analysis of how networks work in China and a qualitative analysis of the content of online messages. The book’s introduction helpfully outlines cutting-edge research on nationalism, digital studies, and Chinese studies to ask “what happens when nations go digital?” (p. 3). Chapter 2 explores the theoretical issues of nationalism and digital politics to argue that we need to see the nation and the state as technologies rather than as ideologies and institutions. Here Schneider builds on the work of Benedict Anderson and Michael Billig to see nationalism as a “digitally networked community” that emerges from everyday banal interactions, as well as from top-down propaganda campaigns. He underlines how design matters in a digital nationalism that is not passively consumed so much as it is actively constructed.

Rather than look to textbooks, popular culture, and museums to understand the content of national identity (as many of us do), Schneider starts his empirical analysis by exploring nationalism as a technology in chapters 3 and 4. In particular, the chapters trace how technical design choices in search engines and website hyperlinks shape Chineseness in nationalist ways, especially in their positioning of Japan as the negative Other. Nationalism is produced digitally not in terms of content but through design: search engines yield results not just of the historical and legal arguments for China’s East China Sea claims but also yield daily weather forecasts that normalize a banal nationalist understanding of “China’s Diaoyu Islands.” Indeed, Schneider’s network visualization of websites in Greater China shows how the Chinese internet actually reproduces the territorial boundaries of the PRC while recirculating the traditional mass-media logic of the party-state. The chapters thus show how search engines and website networks are parochial and hierarchical, rather than cosmopolitan and egalitarian.

Chapters 5 and 6 shift to content analysis to examine how nationalism is “digitally remembered” on China’s online encyclopedias and its official and NGO websites. Schneider shows how Chinese encyclopedias provide a nationalism that promotes the interests of established stakeholders in the party-state, whereas websites produce a commodified nationalism that looks to the chauvinist themes of guns, games, and girls. Rather than being forums for debate, online encyclopedias and state/NGO websites are “shrines” to official nationalism. The book’s examples show a fascinating overlap between the online and offline world: for example, nationalist trinkets are sold online to support the ship that provides nationalist cruises to the disputed Diaoyu Islands.

Chapter 7 considers how nationalism has changed with the advance of Web 2.0’s interactive technologies. It shows that, even though this participation can afford wider discussion, often the echo chambers of its digital walled gardens reproduce the “visceral sense of shared nationhood.” Chapter 8 zooms out to broader issues of the cultural governance of digital China. It argues that we need to see democracy and authoritarianism not as opposite regimes, but as techniques that can work together in a flexible toolbox. In this way, we can explain how and why many Chinese people actively participate in digital nationalism at home and how and why Beijing is promoting its governance model of “national internet sovereignty” on the global stage. The conclusion summarizes the book’s findings, arguing that digital nationalism is not just an issue for China or other authoritarian states. Many of the design features that promote a parochial hierarchical identity in China are also used in the global internet, as we saw with the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook manipulation of elections in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nationalism thus is not an ideology, but a technology with design features that encourage the “Us vs. Them” logic of parochial identities.

Through theoretically informed empirical analysis, Schneider convincingly argues that rather than asking how digital technology has changed China (i.e., democratized the PRC), we need to consider how China is changing digital technologies— not just for China but also for the world, because the PRC is a global leader in AI, 5G, and surveillance technology. Although the book uses Chinese examples, it makes a number of interventions to show us how nationalism and technology shape domestic and international politics more generally. Schneider’s mix of the discourse analysis of online texts with the technical analysis of internet design choices is particularly welcome.

My only quibble with the analysis is that it looks to the concepts of neoliberalism, capitalist modernity, and digital capitalism to explain what is going on in China. In Euro-America it is popular to criticize how neoliberalism empowers private corporations to use the state to enable their profit-making ventures. Although the market has advanced against the state in China, Schneider’s analysis actually shows that the PRC’s governance logic is more of a patron–client relationship, where the state uses corporations to enhance its power and legitimacy.

Stylistically, the book is compelling: many of the chapters start with Schneider’s recounting of fieldwork experiences in China, which gives a sense of the personal experience of the internet in China. These stories then are used to provoke scholarly analysis through his careful and detailed description of debates about technology, nationalism, and Chinese politics. The book thus weaves together the particular and general to guide a sophisticated analysis of China’s cyber politics, which then yields well-founded conclusions about broader issues of digital politics.

China’s Digital Nationalism is an excellent book that will be valued for its original contributions to the study of nationalism, digital politics, communications, and Chinese politics. I am already quoting it in my own research on cyber politics and China and using it for upper-division undergraduate and master-level classes in political science, international relations, and media/communications.