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Language as Social Practice on the Chinese Internet

This chapter presents a discourse analysis of two bulletin board systems (BBS). The analysis was done to identify online linguistic practices within the contextualized parameters of online communities and ongoing sociopolitical development in China. Chinese Internet users employ various discourse strategies to establish community identities, organize online interactions, and defy censorship. These practices demarcate an emergent, public, non-official discourse universe apart from but responsive to the official discourse universe of Chinese political communication. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-833-0.ch018