Resonance, Routine, and Parasitic Visibility: The Platformed Ecology of Chinese Digital Nationalism during Pelosi's 2022 Taiwan Visit

This thesis examines the structural and temporal dynamics of Chinese digital nationalism during U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's 2022 visit to Taiwan. Drawing on a dataset of 4,625 Weibo posts collected during the peak event window, I adopt an exploratory mixed-method design—combining hashtag co-occurrence network analysis, Louvain community detection, descriptive temporal analysis, and user-level classification—while formalizing my expectations as a set of falsifiable hypotheses about structural, behavioral, and temporal patterns. A central theoretical contribution of the thesis is the concept of parasitic visibility, which emerged inductively from the analysis rather than being imposed at the outset and which I develop alongside the empirical findings. The findings show that the discourse was not a unified wave of nationalist expression but a stratified communication ecology composed of four principal communities that I labeled: a "Mobilization Core" centered on state-aligned ideological messaging, an "Information Ticker" focused on real-time event updates, an "Institutional Routine" sustained by routinized propaganda and promotional content, and a "Parasitic Periphery" in which petitioners, celebrity fandoms, and fraud victims attached unrelated content to nationalist hashtags for visibility. Temporal patterns indicate close alignment between official and grassroots surges around key event moments, a pattern consistent with resonance-based mobilization but not sufficient to establish causality. User-level analysis further shows that different behavioral profiles were unevenly distributed across communities, suggesting that nationalist discourse was shaped not only by political expression but also by platform logics of visibility, repetition, and attention concentration. I argue that Chinese digital nationalism during moments of crisis is best understood as a layered platform-mediated ecology produced through the interaction of state signaling, algorithmic amplification, and strategic user practices. Within this ecology, parasitic visibility specifically explains three of the thesis's findings: the structural coherence of the Parasitic Periphery as a non-political cluster recovered by topology-only community detection, its overwhelming dominance by one-time ordinary users rather than power users or state media, and its delayed temporal peak following—rather than coinciding with—the political mobilization peak. More broadly, the concept clarifies why an apparently unified nationalist event simultaneously amplifies non-political grievances, and is offered as the thesis's main theoretical contribution to the literatures on platform nationalism and authoritarian algorithmic governance.