Genre borrowing in Chinese digital culture: Narrative imagination and grassroots storytelling on social media

A notable feature in Chinese digital culture is its playful style. Memes, jokes, parodies, and coded language of all sorts abound on social media. While research has focused on the playful features of individual utterances or eventful protests, this article studies the borrowing of speech genres. Genre borrowing refers to the use of existing genres for purposes unintended by the original genre. An analysis of biographies of Li Wenliang in the style of Shiji (史记, also known as Records of the Grand Historian ) on social media shows that internet users deployed three affordances of the Shiji biography form to tell his life stories. Stylization enhances aesthetic and emotional appeal. Anedotalization makes the stories memorable through emplotment and character portraits. Moralization adds moral significance. In discussing the implications of these findings, the article proposes that in the digital age, struggles for grassroots storytelling will be more powerful the more they can mobilize the affordances of stylization, anecdotalization, and moralization.