Yielding to Overcome: Human Rights Sanctions, Backlash Effect, and Cyberspace Control in China

From 2019 to 2021, the Uyghur internment camp crisis in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) results in a series global human rights sanctions against the Chinese government. The present study suggests that the Chinese government's successful resistance to sanctions regarding the Uyghur crisis and the Chinese public's retaliation against foreign entities are the outcome of the Chinese government's rigid cyberspace control, especially with an effective online censorship regime, and a highly visualized online propaganda portraying China's aggressive diplomatic performance. With a qualitative research based on evidence collective from one of the largest social media platforms in China, Sina Weibo, this study attempts to extend the current field of study on the impact of foreign sanctions, which mostly focuses on how regime types and political structures of impacted interest groups affect the outcome of human rights sanctions, lacking a closer analysis on how the target government's proactive response to the pressure influences the sanctions' effect.