“Bamboo shoots after spring rain”: platform-mediated community building among overseas Chinese civil society groups in the post-pandemic era

The post-pandemic era has witnessed a surge in Chinese transnational migration, which has been accompanied by an increase in new waves of activism transcending national borders. Chinese overseas civil society groups have emerged in a dispersive and pluralistic manner—similar to bamboo shoots sprouting after spring rain—in Europe and North America. Defining this new wave of Chinese transnational migration as the Running Generation, this paper focuses on the new forms of overseas Chinese grassroots activism and the formation of transnational dissident communities online by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with four civil society groups in Western Europe and the United States. Migrating to non-Chinese digital platforms has largely facilitated Chinese diasporic activism in the post-pandemic era. An Instagram-first strategy has been adopted by Chinese overseas civil society groups to initiate and organize their diasporic activist communities, which have subsequently evolved into various forms of participatory activism across different platforms. Both activists and civil society groups have utilized platform-specific functions to avoid political surveillance and expand the civil spaces available for collective actions. By actively contributing to social activism and community building on these digital platforms, Running Generation activists are adding a new Chinese narrative to the global solidarity discourse.