Soft power struggles: A diasporic perspective on the competing ideologies and innovative practices regarding the Chinese writing system

This critical essay aims to assess the linguistic ideologies regarding the Chinese writing system by locating them in historical and diasporic contexts and the new digital communication space. Drawing data from a long‐term and ongoing digital ethnography of online communication and creative Sinographs in the global Chinese diaspora, it analyses how multilingual Chinese language users manipulate the affordances of the writing system in combination with the affordances of new, digital communication platforms to challenge the dominant language ideologies and policies, to articulate a new sense of transnationalism, and to participate in social activism. It argues that the diasporic perspective is not simply a context for the study of language variation and change but a crucial space for radical new thinking and actions that challenge orthodoxies of various kinds and enables cultural flow as well as social participation at a global scale.