“Positive energy”: Hegemonic intervention and online media discourse in China’s Xi Jinping era

Abstract

Scholarship to-date agrees that the internet has weakened the Chinese party-state’s ideological and discursive hegemony over society. In this paper, we document a recent intervention into public discourse exercised by the Chinese state through appropriating and promoting a popular online catchphrase—“positive energy” (zheng nengliang). Analyzing the “positive energy” phenomena using Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony and discourse, we argue that the relative effectiveness of this hegemonic intervention rests on the semantic versatility of “positive energy”, which enables “chains of equivalence” to be established between the label’s popular meanings on the one hand and its propagandist meanings on the other.