Micro-blogging Memories

‘Micro-blogging Memories: Weibo and Collective Remembering in Contemporary China is one of the best books on Chinese internet culture and politics in recent years. It offers a stunningly original and insightful analysis of how journalists and ordinary citizens in China create news, remember contested histories, and explore personal and collective identities on China’s preeminent microblogging platform Sina Weibo. Skillfully weaving together stories of past and present, the local and the global, control and resistance, the book provides a rich and textured account of not only the highs and lows of a popular social media platform, but also the dramas of social change in China. This book makes important contributions to the scholarship on digital media and culture, collective memory, and global communication.’– Guobin Yang, University of Pennsylvania, USA

This book offers an in-depth account of social media, journalism and collective memory through a five-year analysis of Weibo, a leading Chinese micro-blogging platform, and prism of transitional China in a globalizing world. 
How does society remember public events in the rapidly changing age of social media? 
Eileen Le Han examines how various kinds of public events are shared, debated, and their historical significance and worthiness of remembrance highlighted on Weibo. Journalism plays a significant part in mobilizing collective remembering of these events, in a society with rapidly changing topics on the platform, the tightening state control, and nationalism on the rise. 
The first five years of Weibo reflect a dramatic change in Chinese society, where journalists, media professionals, and opinion leaders in other fields of expertise, together with ordinary citizens directly affected by these changes in everyday life collaborate to witness the rapid social transition.