This article critically examines a troubling development in grassroots resistance to authoritarianism, which we term ‘distorted dissent’. Using the Great Translation Movement (GTM) as a case study, we explore how its coordinators mobilise affective claims to substantiate critiques of Chinese people’s national character, whilst leveraging X’s connective affordances to amplify their reach in the transnational digital sphere. Such affective claims shift accountability for China’s structural issues away from the authoritarian regime and onto the perceived moral deficiencies of the populace. As they spread across digital networks, these claims revitalise a long-standing national-character trope that shores up Sinophobia through internalised racism. We argue that this stylised repetition of affective storytelling derives from GTM coordinators’ twofold idealisation of Euro-American democratic systems and white civilisations, a dynamic that distorts their political stakes by aligning aspects of the initiative with Western reactionary causes. These findings complicate simplistic, binary understandings of grassroots resistance, highlighting how distorted dissent against authoritarianism may paradoxically reproduce exclusionary politics, and how the affective logic underpinning its orchestration operates on transnational digital platforms.
Peng et al. (Tue,) studied this question.