Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

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“How can a small app piss off an entire country?”:

India’s TikTok ban in the light of everyday techno-
nationalism

Lin Song & Avishek Ray

To cite this article: Lin Song & Avishek Ray (2023) “How can a small app piss off an entire
country?”: India’s TikTok ban in the light of everyday techno-nationalism, Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies, 24:3, 382-396, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209424

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INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES
2023, VOL. 24, NO. 3, 382–396
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209424

“How can a small app piss off an entire country?”: India’s TikTok ban
in the light of everyday techno-nationalism
Lin SONGa and Avishek RAYb
a
School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China; bDepartment of
Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Silchar, Silchar, India

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In this paper, we employ “everyday techno-nationalism” as a critical lens to TikTok; digital territories;
unpack the Indian government’s ban of TikTok in 2020. We focus on social techno-nationalism; class;
media discussions of the ban on Quora and Reddit, and examine how TikTok cringeworthiness; imagined
community; India–China
is perceived as a “Chinese” platform as contrasted, but simultaneously
conflict
integral, to a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indian-ness.” We put forward
two arguments based on our findings. First, we suggest that TikTok’s
“Chineseness” is a populist affective outcome of the discursive articulation of
Indian “nationhood,” achieved by the effective use of an us-versus-them
rhetoric, which signifies a process of digital territorialization amid globalized
media flows. Second, we observe that the classist-casteist narrative
underscoring TikTok’s association with “cringeworthiness” marginalizes the
working-class content creators – so prominently visibilized by TikTok – both
from the media landscape and the nationalist imagination. Fundamentally,
India’s TikTok ban raises questions about statist interventions into people’s
media practices; and as importantly, their own understanding and use of
digital technology, which, ironically, within a globalized era, seems to be
only notionally more connected, but practically more partisan than ever.

Introduction
In June 2020, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY), Government of
India, banned short-video app TikTok along with 58 other Chinese apps, citing concerns over priv-
acy and the country’s sovereignty and integrity (Phartiyal 2021). Resonating with anxieties about
TikTok’s Chinese ownership in other countries such as the U.S., the ban is a manifestation of tech-
nological skirmish in a world of political polarization. The ramifications of the ban were real – Tik-
Tok had garnered 600 million active users within India, accounting for around 44 percent of the
country’s entire population (Pahwa 2020). However, the Indian government did not offer any
clarity on the ban.1 Why were only these (but not other Chinese) apps banned? Why are only Chi-
nese apps (not other imported goods from China) banned? This is startling particularly in the face
of the fact that, unlike its Silicon Valley peers, TikTok had apparently adhered to the Indian gov-
ernment’s push for data localization, building ‘local’ data centres and taking down contents deemed
offensive in India (Findlay 2021). The question then is, as one 29-year-old former TikTok star in

CONTACT Avishek Ray [email protected] Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of
Technology Silchar, Silchar, India
© 2023 Lin Song and Avishek Ray. All rights reserved.
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 383

India with 1.5 million followers puts it: “How can a small app manage to piss off the entire country”
(as cited in Findlay 2021)?
The TikTok ban is embroiled in a long history of Sino-India geopolitical tensions. The clashes
along the “line of control” in remote mountainous regions between the two countries periodically
give rise to skirmishes, including, most notably, the war in 1962. Though relatively short in dur-
ation, the 1962 war instilled “a permanent Sino-Indian rivalry” (Smith 2013, 317) with continued
border disputes, intrusions, and subsequent protests from both countries to the present day. After
the Modi administration took office in 2014, trade relations between the two countries grew, but
competitive factors also rose, with China being seen as standing in the way of India’s rise (Ying
2018). In public perception in India, the ban is seen as a “tit-for-tat spat” (Mishra, Yan, and Schroe-
der 2022, 814) after face-offs along the two countries’ disputed border in the Himalayan region in
January and June 2020, which caused injuries and fatalities for both sides (BBC 2021). As Mishra,
Yan, and Schroeder (2022) remark, the ban was used as a “geopolitical signalling” through which
the Modi government sought to promote militarism and boost its legitimacy during the border
skirmishes (831). While existing scholarship has explored how TikTok has become embedded in
geopolitical conflicts and nationalist rhetoric, scholars typically set out from a macro perspective,
engaging with international relations, state policies, and media discourses (Gray 2021; Miao,
Huang, and Huang 2021; Mishra, Yan, and Schroeder 2022). How political partisanship undercuts
the perception and use of social media remains an underexplored issue. To address this lacuna, in
this paper, we employ what we call “everyday techno-nationalism” as a lens through which to
examine and critique the intertwining between social identity and affective politics in a hyper-
mediated yet increasingly digitally territorialized world. Undertaking a social media-focused quali-
tative discourse analysis, we ask: how is TikTok perceived as a “Chinese” platform, as contrasted
(but simultaneously integral) to a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indian-ness”? How does
such a techno-nationalist standpoint ascribe “Chinese-ness” upon TikTok, both as a media plat-
form and a new media format? And finally, how does the construction of imagined digital terri-
tories then foster partisan politics?
To address these questions, we collected data through purposive sampling from two social media
sites with sizable Indian userbase: Reddit and Quora. We approach Reddit and Quora threads as
venues where people coalesce themselves as “imagined communities” (Anderson 2006), and use
discourse analysis to study articulations of “everyday techno-nationalism” contained in these
threads. Having said that, we doubt whether TikTok as a media artefact embodies any “national”
character. We rather examine how the discussions on the ban – that is, the discursive articulation
by the members of certain imagined communities – ascribe a national character upon TikTok. In so
doing, they generate “affective intensities [that] both drive online exchanges and attach people
to particular platforms, threads, and groups” (Paasonen 2015, 28). Our study considers the discur-
sive formation of affect, pivotal to the functioning of imagined communities.
Discourses are central to the naturalization of nationhood, for nations themselves are narratives
that arise from interactions in culturally contested domains (Bhabha 1990, 1). As Finlayson (2007)
argues, discourse analysis can “uncover, in concrete instances, the presuppositions and exclusions,
the forms of categorization that make the imagining of the nation possible” (116). Online dis-
courses serve as an “amplifier” that mirrors and reinforces offline social structures and prevailing
discourses (Törnberg and Törnberg 2016, 134). We picked these two media platforms first because
of their popularity among Indian users.2 Secondly, the two sites also diverge significantly in their
platform design, technical affordances, and types of discussions they facilitate. Whereas Reddit as a
social news aggregator collects and structures multimedia news content to foster user-initiated
384 L. SONG AND A. RAY

discussions, Quora is a question-and-answer site that labels itself as a “high-quality knowledge

repository” (Paul, Hong, and Chi 2012). Together, these two sites allow us to diversify our samples.
Our dataset was collected through purposive sampling. Upon surveying popular Reddit and
Quora threads on the ban, we drew our samples with full awareness that “the internet is a decen-
tralized medium, and it is impossible to gain a comprehensive picture of everything that is available
online, much less construct a representative sample of it” (Banaji and Buckingham 2013, 15). Con-
sequently, our Reddit and Quora search results are, by no means, exhaustive. Neither are they
representative, for, we understand, they may as well have been screened by “filter bubble” (Pariser
2011): personalized “echo chambers” of information curated by algorithms. This is a generic pro-
blem with online samples. We tried to overcome these limitations through performing the searches
and sampling from different locations (that is, with different IP addresses) and using different
search engines, which might have mitigated the problem to some extent. Even while recognizing
that some element of subjectivity may already be embedded in the corpus, we undertake a discur-
sive analysis of the purposively-sampled discussion threads as a case study. Our aim is not to pre-
sent an exhaustive account of nationalistic commentary on the TikTok ban in India. Rather, we
approach our textual corpus as illustrative of a pattern among Indian discussants on Reddit and
Quora. Here, the discussants demonstrate a particular demographic character. In spite of the plat-
form’s high degree of anonymity, it is glaring that most Reddit users, who discuss India’s TikTok
ban, post on subreddits “r/technology” and “r/videos,” implying their shared interest in “techie”
stuff. For Quora, which is not necessarily anonymous, most of our sampled users identify as
well-educated, working in technology-related fields (e.g. IT analysts and engineers), and living in
India. Taken together, our textual corpus thus reflects the sentiments and views of Indian “techies,”
who purportedly precede the understanding of technology, and in most instances, characterize pol-
itical conformism – what Udupa (2018) calls “enterprise Hindutva,” articulated through the effec-
tive use of social media. The discussants here bear a certain social, political, and ideological
dispensation, which is of relevance to our discussion.
In what follows, we highlight how ethno-territorial functions are superscribed on both discursive
and material practices concerning TikTok. We seek to understand the socio-political conditions
that render TikTok Chinese in the Indian imagination, counter-intuitively though, in an era of
globally “networked” media use within the remit of multinational or global informational capital-
ism (Jameson 1991, 1–5), wherein technological platforms are typically perceived as “global” rather
than “belonging” to their country of origin. The imagination of digital technologies as trans-
national is, perhaps, best characterized by the rhetoric of “border-less-ness,” as articulated by Yim-
ing Zhang (cited in Kaye et al. 2021, 19), the founder of ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company); or
alternatively, that of an “open and connected world,” in the words of the Facebook founder, Mark
Zuckerberg (cited in Chaykowski 2017). Accordingly, Google or YouTube, for example, are hardly
ever perceived as American.3 However, when it comes to TikTok, the Chinese government’s regu-
latory intent to control (digital) media practices, institutions and policies – so eloquently discussed
by Schneider (2018) – arouses anxieties concerning data security, privacy, which in India, more
than anywhere else, is couched in the rhetoric of “national security.” Such a rhetoric, wrought
upon by the prevailing nationalist resurgence in India, then sits well with imagining TikTok as
foreign/Chinese (as opposed to global or border-less). We contend that the “Chinization” of Tik-
Tok is mediated by a techno-nationalist ethos woven from a highly contingent process of political
partisanship. This has more to do with the socio-political outlook and the discursive articulation
rather than any logic of political economy. We demonstrate how the discourse of TikTok ban is
premised on territoriality that, on the one hand, appeals to the political conscience of the nationalist
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 385

subject, and on the other hand, plays on the class configurations of an already-polarized Indian
society.

Everyday techno-nationalism in India

India’s TikTok ban manifests the intertwining between nationalism and the promotion of technol-
ogy, commonly known as “techno-nationalism” (Ostry and Nelson 1995). Though lacking standard
definition or usage, techno-nationalism is usually associated with governmental policies that pro-
mote technological research and development. As Manning (2019) argues, in the twenty-first cen-
tury, techno-nationalism consists of “a set of industrial policies aimed at self-sufficiency, cultivating
‘national champions’ in tech sectors while curbing foreign competition” (para. 6). Although
techno-nationalism is understood as “a wide-gauged method of maximizing national power”
(Evans 2020, 81), it is usually discussed from a macro political economic perspective, with focuses
on national policies, business strategies, and international relations (Low 2003; Hughes 2011;
Nakayama 2012). This is particularly true in recent techno-nationalism literature following trends
of deglobalization, which typically sets out to investigate different countries’ (for instance, U.S.,
China, Russia, and Germany) economic and technological growth strategies, cybersecurity policies,
and their global implications (Shim and Shin 2019; Kim, Lee, and Kwak 2020; Starrs and Germann
2021). Taken together, these discussions usefully shed light on how techno-nationalism “functions
to (re)produce particular meanings and values of the national ‘self’ and the foreign ‘other’ in associ-
ation with technology” (Kogure 2005, 45).
Departing from here, we examine how statist assertions of techno-nationalism find resonance in
how ordinary citizens perceive, use, negotiate, discuss and live out technologies. Möllers (2021, 17–
19) demonstrates how the German public discourse, for example, construes a “national” digital
infrastructure drawing on the rhetoric of techno-nationalism, buttressed by an ethos of state-sanc-
tioned national identity, whereby the “imagined” nativist-nationalist cyber- and information-infra-
structures ought to be secured from foreign “others.” By the same token, we argue that, to make
sense of techno-nationalism, it is important to consider the role of everyday lived experiences.
To better tease out this lived dimension of techno-nationalism, we draw on discussions of “every-
day nationalism.” This stream of research in nationalism studies suggests that nationalism should
not just be seen as a top-down elite construction. More importantly, everyday nationalism scholars
are interested in “how national identity is talked about, experienced, and given meaning in different
ways by the ordinary people it affects” (Knott 2015, 2). Everyday life, in other words, is understood
as “the empirical domain of inquiry” (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 557) and the site where nation
and nationhood are constructed through interactions with human agency (Fenton 2007). The Tik-
Tok ban in India offers an intriguing case of everyday techno-nationalism, especially considering
the ban’s arbitrariness and ambiguity. Indian TikTok users are dispersed across a wide-ranging
population and do not share any unanimous opinion on the ban. In other words, their support
for (or conversely, their protest against) the ban lacks any coherent “national” character. Yet,
when it comes to online discussions, they coalesce a techno-nationalist agency: they speak of the
ban for the Indians, and by so doing, latch onto an ethos of nationalism that, in contrast, renders
TikTok Chinese. This yields a diverse range of ramifications for the articulation of techno-
nationalism.
India’s recent fixation with nationalism, reflected in the resurgence of Hindutva politics,
especially after its transition to a free-market economy, has rekindled debates on the class-and-
caste question in curious ways. The post-1990s economic liberalization has increasingly relied
386 L. SONG AND A. RAY

on a model of urban-based, crony capitalism leading to heightened social polarization unfolding

along classist-casteist lines (Gopalakrishnan 2006; Sahoo 2010; Desai 2011). The tryst between
nationalist resurgence and neoliberalism – often achieved by effectively using digital infrastructures
(Rao 2018; Jaffrelot 2013) – has appealed to an unacknowledged “Hindu(tva) public sphere”
(Udupa 2018; Ray 2021), while laying bare the prevailing practice of political disenfranchisement
of the lower caste-class. Within this neoliberal order, the very condition of political legibility of citi-
zenship is predicated upon the ethico-moral ideal of the “Hindu nation,” wherein “social polaris-
ation is considered an acceptable cost of development” (Desai 2011, 354). These class-and-caste
tensions feature prominently in the controversies around TikTok. The elites, who are assumed
to precede the understanding of nationalist politics, would restrict TikTok by “flag[ging] proble-
matic videos and post it on Twitter and other platforms in a bit [sic.] to ‘expose the platform’
and its allowance of ‘anti-India’ and ‘anti-Hindu’ content” (Ananth and Mandavia 2020).
It is germane in this context to remember that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s social media
campaigns, spearheaded by the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, have broken fresh ground
in the way Indian (electoral) politics play out in the digital sphere. At a time when the rhetoric of
“Digital India” became exceedingly crucial4, social media campaigns helped the BJP effectively
reach out to India’s remote and vastly diverse electorates, otherwise inaccessible (Pal, Chandra,
and Vinod Vydiswaran 2016). While the ruling elites – Modi included, particularly those of the
populist-conservative dispensation, seem to have an affinity for using Twitter (Pal 2015; Pal and
Gonawela 2017; Pal, Chandra, and Vinod Vydiswaran 2016; Gonawela 2018), the foot soldiers
of the Hindutva brigade often go to any length to territorialize Facebook groups (Therwath
2012; Ray 2022). In contrast, TikTok does not seem to be politically territorialized – perhaps,
because it is not considered a serious, and therefore not an effective medium for political mobiliz-
ations. As an emerging platform, TikTok rather continues to be a “free game.”
In what follows, we discuss the TikTok ban in relation to India’s everyday techno-nationalism
from two aspects: first, we examine the ban as a case of digital territorialization by looking at how
online discourses inscribe “Chineseness” upon the platform, one that not only functions to secure
an imagined and endangered “Indianness” as a collective identity but also implicitly ties Sino-
Indian rivalry to a class rhetoric about TikTok’s media format and content. Speaking of which,
we, secondly, study the vexed positionality of “gatekeepers” who imagine TikTok as intrinsically
suited for “inappropriate” or “cringeworthy” content. We suggest that the association between Tik-
Tok and “cringe” is specific to India and acquires meaning and signification only when viewed from
within a nationalist prism.

Making digital territories

As the utopian vision of the cyberspace as an ungoverned and ungovernable, borderless, global net-
work fades in its impending fragmentation, the cyberspace is increasingly understood as “subjected
to continuous processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization” (Lambach 2020, 415). Put
differently, the internet has become a much sought-after space by the states’ territorialization pro-
jects. Möllers (2021) calls this the making of digital territory: “the states’ ongoing struggle to
mobilize science and engineering in order to transform globally distributed information infrastruc-
ture into bounded national territory and invest it with patriotic meaning” (112–113). Such a
definition denotes “a combination of nationalist and technocratic tendencies” (Möllers 2021,
113). This techno-nationalist imaginary creates tension in Chinese tech companies’ attempts to
go global. In order to realize this globalized identity, for instance, TikTok has gone to great lengths
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 387

to navigate diverse cultural, political, and regulatory contexts. Kaye et al. (2021) succinctly describe
TikTok’s globalization attempts as “parallel platformization”: a spatialized strategy in which the
platform’s international versions differ in their infrastructures and governance to cater to different
markets (17). Despite these efforts, TikTok is still thrown into an identity crisis amid challenges
from different national governments. As Kaye et al. (2021) note, “ByteDance is a Chinese tech com-
pany and international audiences, regulators, and interest groups show little willingness to overlook
that fact” (19). Although challenges toward TikTok’s purported “Chineseness” appear univocal in
their framing of the platform’s potential threats, including privacy, cybersecurity, and ideology,
they are also distinctly situated in different countries’ self-imaginations vis-a-vis their positioning
in a global cyberspace. In the Indian context, everyday techno-nationalist discourses imagine Tik-
Tok’s local popularity first and foremost as a symbolic extension of China’s physical territories.
They further dismiss the platform’s media format and content by evoking a rhetoric of Sino-Indian
rivalry. In this way, TikTok is perceived as a “Chinese” platform that is simultaneously contrasted
and integral to an everyday techno-nationalist imagination of “Indian-ness.”
Indian discussions of the TikTok ban appear anything but related to technology. It is telling that
the subreddit bearing the news about the TikTok ban in India, posted on Reddit’s technology sec-
tion and accumulating 61.7k likes and 987 comments, was locked by moderators because of “bri-
gading or vitriolic and inflammatory comments as well as numerous reports of conduct of
unbecoming and unsuitable to a technology forum” (Veritanuda 2020). Most of these comments
discuss the TikTok ban as an extension of heightened Sino-Indian tensions. “Gohandhi,” for
instance, praised the Indian government’s decision, claiming: “your nations are not acting right
now because you don’t share land borders with China, once your country gets invaded every
other day (research China land grabbing strategy), you’ll understand.” (Gohandhi 2020) “BCex-
plorer” echoed these sentiments by saying: “I gained a lot of respect for India today. They showed
they have balls. Something Europe and NA [North America] have been lacking as they bow down
to China” (BCexplorer 2020). Here, Reddit users made sense of the TikTok ban by alluding to
recent face-offs along the two countries’ disputed border, which were interpreted as China’s
attempts to expand physical territories (“land grabbing”). As the references to borders and invasion
make clear, online discourses draw an equivalence between digital and physical territories, conceiv-
ing TikTok’s popularity in India as just another case of Chinese aggression (to which many
countries “bow down”). This imagined alignment between physical and digital territories enabled
Reddit users to take the TikTok ban as an opportunity to express concerns over China’s ambitious
expansion. Such an attitude reflects the ascendance of priority of Sino-India border issues among
an increasingly radicalized public. It casts a sharp contrast to the situation prior to the digital era,
when the two countries’ focus has mainly been to maintain the balance of power in the border area,
despite small-scale troop deployments (Holslag 2010, 129). The making of digital territories, viewed
in this light, is not only about the popularization of territorialist understandings of digital technol-
ogies, but also the resurgence of border issues as a central framework through which the two
countries’ identities and relationships are understood.
Curiously, in this emerging “digital territories” rhetoric, India was posed both as the victim,
which was “invaded every other day,” and the hero, since unlike other countries, it had “the
balls” to say no to China. A manifest sense of patriotic morality undergirds reactions toward the
ban, where the Indian government’s redrawing of digital territories is seen as a heroic act of secur-
ing (a virtual) India from a “Chinese threat,” that is, TikTok. This techno-nationalist narrative is
fundamental to the popular imagination of the territorialized cyberspace, which is characterized
388 L. SONG AND A. RAY

not by connectedness, but by national rivalries. Quora user “Himanshu Dubey” articulated this
point vividly:
TikTok, one among many Chinese digital products, was banned with 59 others. Being part of strategic
soft power from our rival country, its BAN was need of the hour, as the Chinese Government comple-
tely coerce [sic] their companies to share their data with the government.

[…] Giving lead to your opponent in any aspect will be fatal and India by banning such apps, hits
where it hurts the most and also asserted its intentions towards China and its false propaganda. We
have already lost our soldiers and welcoming betrayer, and their murderer would be an insult to
our soldier’s VEERGATI (Hindu, meaning martyr). (Himanshu Dubey 2020, Emphasis in original)

We see from the Quora post how techno-nationalism has become a dominant framework
through which digital technologies are understood. Concerns about TikTok’s alleged lack of pro-
tection of data and privacy are imagined vis-a-vis the company’s relationship with the Chinese gov-
ernment, and further subsumed in an overarching discourse of Sino-Indian rivalry. Along this
techno-nationalist line of thinking, the TikTok ban is justified because the platform’s popularity
in India might give China – the “rival” – an edge in the technological front. This rivalry rhetoric
is significant, because it characterizes TikTok as a “Chinese” app not only based on its geographical,
technological, and financial backgrounds but also in contrast to an “Indian-ness.” In other words,
the territorialization of TikTok as “Chinese” in fact functions to fuel an imagined nationhood in
Indian society. Kinnvall (2019) suggests that the recent rise of populist narratives of nationalism
in India derives from an ontological insecurity where “identity and autonomy are always in ques-
tion” (cited in Kinnvall 2019, 285). In order to mitigate these insecurities, Modi’s populist regime
resorts to governance through emotions, constructing “foreign” others, as a threat to the nation’s
integrity, onto whom fear and anxiety can be projected (Kinnvall 2019, 286). The outcome of such a
self-other dichotomy is a territorial-nationalist imaginary that “institutes boundaries relating to the
essence and accepted conduct of what it means to be Indian” (294). As the Quora post’s war-related
lexicons, such as “soldiers,” “betrayer,” “murderer,” and “veergati” make clear, seeing TikTok as
“Chinese” is as much about securing a sense of “Indian-ness” through constructing a foreign,
rival “other,” as it is about continuously defining the “essence” of such an “Indian-ness” by identi-
fying who do or do not belong. These dynamics play out fully in how online discourses understand
TikTok’s media format and content. Sharing thoughts on Quora about the ban, for example,
“Navaneeth” wrote:
We are the only generation facing 3 pandemics. Covid-19, TikTok and stupidity. One pandemic is over
in India … (TikTok). If this is over, then automatically the next pandemic (stupidity) automatically
ends bcoz [sic.] TikTok is full of stupidity. So as an Indian, I am very happy. (Navaneeth 2020)

The invocation of “three pandemics” is a metaphor of racializing and victimizing Chinese-ness, so

pervasive during COVID-19. This is indicative of an affect that welds China’s two purported “con-
spiracies” – spreading the pandemic and “corrupting” the Indians with TikTok – together in the
Indian public imagination. Here, the focus is no longer on privacy or data security, but on the plat-
form’s media content, posited as stupid and dangerously contagious. This characterization of Tik-
Tok shows how the racialization of certain media content feeds into a techno-nationalist discourse
toward establishing a national identity, which then legitimizes the statist intent to control everyday
media practices.5 By labelling TikTok “stupid,” this techno-nationalist discourse seeks to implicitly
define the standards of what is “appropriately Indian.”
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 389

Writing on the concept of national rivalries, Thies (2001) suggests that the issue of territory often
comes to be “fused with national identity,” so that “seemingly disparate territorial conflicts separ-
ated by time and space can be considered linked to form a spatial rivalry” (399). Although such a
spatial rivalry is a long-standing issue in Sino-India relations, in the pre-social media age, public
perceptions were positively shaped by the interdependence between the two countries, which
resulted in “ambivalent” attitudes in both China and India that fused both positive and negative
appreciations (Holslag 2010, 104). The case of TikTok shows how the digital communication
environment has polarized public understandings of both national identity and digital technol-
ogies. In the online discourses we surveyed, TikTok was seldom seen as a case of cultural exchange
or digital globalization. Rather, physical territorial conflicts and spatial rivalry have come to define
how digital technologies and media content were understood. This territorialist approach not only
conflates physical and digital spatial imageries – much contrary to the virtual-transnationalist
imagination of the internet, but has become a defining heuristics through which digital artefacts
are made sense of. In this way, TikTok’s “Chineseness” has become a crystallization of India and
China’s historical territorial disputes and tensions emanating from their shared techno-nationalist
aspirations. This production of “Chineseness,” we posit, functions to not only establish and secure,
but also judge and regulate, an imagined “Indian-ness” in a digital era. In the next section, we
explore how this imagined “Indian-ness” generates classist-casteist tensions in India.

The classist-casteist underpinning of “cringe”

Quora and Reddit threads that discuss the TikTok ban are replete with concerns about how TikTok
promotes low-quality “cringy” content and vanity that intoxicate India’s youth. “Soumyadeep Man-
dal”’s popular Quora response (71.5k views, 308 upvotes) in support of the TikTok ban, for
example, states:
[I]t really pisses me off that people with such minute talent get paid for moving lips and shaking legs for
about 15–20 s. […] The young generation of our country is spending their valuable time (and also
mobile data) and viewing these stupid 15 s acts which makes no sense at all and neither impart any
values (Soumayadeep Mandal 2019).

In this post, TikTok’s characteristic format – creative short video accompanied by music – which
offers a low threshold for entry and immediate sensory stimuli (Wang, Gu, and Wang 2019) – was
described and dismissed as “stupid 15 s acts” of “moving lips and shaking legs.” The platform’s
video-based format was also framed as a waste of time and mobile data. Importantly, these criti-
cisms, though targeting TikTok’s allegedly nonsensical and worthless nature (associated with its
“Chineseness”), were directed inwardly at India’s “young generation” for consuming such content.
These concerns, strictly speaking, are not unprecedented. Similar “puritan” concerns are often
voiced, for example, when it comes to discussing pornography, or for that matter, were invoked
during the advent of kindred media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. That
being said, the heuristics of “cringeworthy” – as a discursive category – is exclusively wedded to
TikTok. Put differently, the central preoccupation to brand “cringeworthy” TikTok content as
the constitutive outside of what is perceived as normative in the Indian media ecology is a new
phenomenon. We therefore approach “cringeworthiness” not from the point of view of aesthetic
judgement, but as a “discursive formation” – in the Foucauldian (2002, 24) sense, illustrative of
“reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, institutionalized types” – that dis-
tinguishes TikTok from other media platforms in the Indian imagination. We argue that the
390 L. SONG AND A. RAY

discursive category of “cringe” associated with TikTok is underpinned by a classist-casteist anxiety

that articulates itself through, first, a prudish moral dismissal of TikTok, and secondly (but relat-
edly), a certain claim to cultural “nobility” derived from an imagined hierarchy among the existing
digital media platforms. The ensuing class war sets the discourse of cringe in motion around Tik-
Tok, which, because of the class-caste intersectionality in India, eventually culminates in casteist
articulations.
According to byod (2015, 75), “[e]ach technology has its affordances, and what’s powerful about
certain technology often stems from these affordances.” Likewise, we argue that TikTok’s “power”
to visibilize a large section of the ungentrified lower-(middle-)class Indian population, otherwise un
(der)represented in the popular media landscape, stems from the affordances of its specific format.
Thompson (2015), though in the context of the Caribbean, discusses the role of technology in
influencing “performances of visibility” that showcase certain ways of self-representation and aes-
thetic choices. She examines how certain photographic and videographic genres give rise to a cer-
tain aesthetic of self-representation by reinventing the standard visibility tropes. Along similar
lines, Brighenti (2010, 3) introduces the concept of “regimes of visibility” which treats visibility
and the aesthetic of curation as an “inherently ambiguous” phenomenon “highly dependent
upon contexts and complex social, technical and political arrangements.” Specifically, in the context
of India, Gupta and Ray (2022) demonstrate how Instagram, for example, gives rise to “insta-
worthy-ness” as a specific aesthetic regime wherein the materialities of photo-making overlap
with the discursive practices of self- and place-making, which has profound implications for
class configuration. Drawing on Thompson (2015), Brighenti (2010) and Gupta and Ray (2022),
we stress on how the modalities and materialities of the platform – in this case, TikTok – and
the discursiveness of the “regimes of visibility” specific to the platform are co-constitutive. By
this, we mean that the platforms reinvent and reorganize their aesthetic infrastructures, as a mar-
keting discourse to find relevance among a specific target audience within the remit of what Bueno
(2018) calls “attention economy,” which then constitutes the very platforms in question. Thinking
in these terms, the specific format of short “cringeworthy” videos characteristic of TikTok,
“invented” long before competing platforms like Facebook and Instagram introduced the Reels for-
mat, gave rise to a specific aesthetic template: a visual regime that, we contend, would become
exceedingly popular with a certain class of Indian users.6
In discussing the TikTok ban on Quora, “Samyak Rout,” for example, asks: “But tell honestly,
ain’t because of this TikTok, mostly the useless fellows were getting the attention rather than the
talented one[s]?” The notion of “talent,” and by extension, “fame” is associated with the politics
of visibilization. Even in deriding TikTok, “Samyak Rout,” in fact, acknowledges that the platform
visibilizes “useless fellows,” who emerge as micro-celebrities “with a significant personal audience
but … [are still] perceived as sufficiently ‘ordinary’” (Giles and Edwards 2018, 155) – perhaps too
ordinary to feature within India’s otherwise classist-casteist media ecology. This entails a type-
specific type of performance – a form of “doing” as opposed to “being” celebrity (Marwick 2015,
115) – which is an object of ridicule and derision, so telling of the classist-casteist antagonism
between, as Sharma (2020) evocatively puts it, “raw aspiration and entrenched entitlement.”
The war reached its climax when “Carry Minati” “roasted” TikTokers in a viral YouTube video
titled “YouTube vs TikTok – The End,” which had to be eventually removed in May 2020 for “vio-
lating the platform’s terms of services” – a euphemism for libelling the TikTokers. Following this,
many “influencers” debated and revisited the war. Today, a simple search with “Youtube vs TikTok
India” yields about 230 million results comprising viral YouTube contents and news items pub-
lished by popular national media outlets like The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 391

Print, The Quint, among others, that top the list. From scanning these results, one observes that
while the issue merited “national” attention, the “roasting” of TikTokers often involved “hurling
casteist and classist slurs … comparing TikTok content creators to the so-called ‘lower’ strata of
the society” (Mehta 2020). Surprisingly though, the derision of TikTok does not exclusively orig-
inate from a conservative viewpoint. Celebrity YouTuber, Dhruv Rathee, apparently a left-liberal
who otherwise critiques India’s current political dispensation, for example, admits that he does
not like the platform “for its [sic.] decreasing attention span, [and] extremely passive interface
and politics” (Rathee 2020). At the heart of his concern is, after all, a classist anxiety, which – iro-
nically, given his left-liberal orientation – strips political agency off the lower-middle-class TikTo-
kers.7 Indeed, if we imagine these digital platforms as mediated spaces, we need to question who
retains the agency of mediation, and as importantly, how it is legibilized with reference to the
class-caste question in the context of TikTok use in India.
The anxiety that “TikTok has truly democratised content creation, lowering entry barriers”
(Ananth and Mandavia 2020; italics ours) is prevalent particularly among the YouTube content crea-
tors in India. As “Better Life Sutra” puts it, in their comment under the Quora thread “Who started
the war between TikTok and YouTube?”, “The issue is not between YouTube and TikTok, but it is
particularly between the Indian creators in these two platforms” (italics ours). It is important to
observe that, although the “YouTube vs TikTok war” was unfolding concurrently with the ban,
never did it attempt to pass TikTok as Chinese. It had manifested merely as a “class war” – one
that, as we mentioned earlier, was inwardly directed to and polarized the Indian content creators
on the two platforms. However, it is with the involvement of the Indian state that TikTok purportedly
emerged as Chinese. When the Indian state stepped in, such already-polarized public sentiments gal-
vanized into nationalist templates. In this scheme, media practices around TikTok were already being
tailored to fit into a pre-existent taxonomy that allows them to be situated and recognized as “crin-
geworthy” with respect to a cultural polarity based on an imagined dialectic of low/high (culture),
talented/useless, etc. This polarity, although it never explicitly invoked the rhetoric of Chineseness,
was, in some sense, rife with an ethos of partisanship, which is the staple of (territorial) nationalism.
It bears mention in this context that in countries such as China and the U.S. TikTok is not
exactly perceived to be “cringeworthy.” On the contrary, within the Chinese media ecology, TikTok
is marketed as rather “posh,” “urban” and “high-quality.” According to Statistica (2022), a majority
of China’s TikTok users are based in 1st- or 2nd-tier cities. The number casts a striking contrast
with its Indian user base, where the majority were from 2nd-tier or 3rd-tier cities (Chandar
2019). The disparity in the demographic configurations of TikTok in India and China, when
read alongside the Indian derision of TikTok, yields a nuanced nationalist narrative: what is
“posh” for China is “cringe” for India; the technology the urban elites use in China is relegated
to a status associative of the rustic and working class in India. Clearly, this narrative is meant to
appeal to the Indian ethos of “everyday techno-nationalism” – the cornerstone for partisan politics
– which irrevocably reinscribes national characteristics upon TikTok.
We therefore argue that what is referred to as “cringe” in connection to TikTok, in the Indian
imagination, emerges from a working-class response to the mainstream-elitist media narratives.
The mainstream media obfuscates the myriad range of local working-class media practices that
TikTok visibilizes from outside of the text-heavy technocracy of other social media platforms.
The elitist denigration of TikTok practically denigrates the agency – both aesthetic and political
– of TikTok users, thereby perpetrating “epistemic violence” by relegating them to a “low” or “use-
less” position when it comes to showcasing their aesthetic taste as well as media practices. They are
not shy of using whatever means – often those labelled “cringe” – they can in order to be seen. Even
392 L. SONG AND A. RAY

the very act of denigration, in a way, visibilizes them. The point therefore is to observe how the
analytic of class accounts for the logi(sti)cs and constituency of TikTok as a platform in India.
In this context, we argue that the quality of “cringe” – in Sara Ahmed’s (2004) words, the “sticky
association” between “cringeworthy” and TikTok – is not necessarily embedded in the materialities
or, for that matter, the aesthetic of TikTok per se; it has rather accrued discursively through the
circulation of signs and social significations.

Concluding remarks
Probing social media reactions toward the TikTok ban in India, this paper offers insights on how
everyday techno-nationalism serves as an analytical framework through which TikTok and its ban
are sought to be understood. In sum, it offers two critiques. Firstly, it is a critique of the “macro”
research framework applied by the disciplines of area studies and international relations, which
attribute agency to the state rather than the people (and their everyday practices). Secondly, it pro-
vides an effective critique of nationalism in our time. The concept of “everyday techno-national-
ism” informs questions like “the construction of imagined digital territories” and the
intensification of “partisan politics” in the digital and neoliberal era. The ethos of techno-nation-
alism produces populist discourses about TikTok in the Indian imagination, which is couched in
the rhetoric of us-versus-them. In other words, techno-nationalism arbitrarily constructs an ima-
gined community against the threatening foreign “other.” As a powerful rhetoric, this is informed
by populist nationalist idioms, and thus fraught with tensions and anxieties that characterize “the
nation.”
In parallel, the way in which TikTok is perceived as cringeworthy in India illustrates how clas-
sist-casteist anxieties underpin such a techno-nationalist discourse that outrightly dismisses the
platform’s “tastelessness,” “worthlessness” and “stupidity” as a function of imagined “Chineseness.”
Fundamentally, India’s TikTok ban raises questions about statist interventions into people’s media
practices; and as importantly, their own understanding and use of digital technology, which, iro-
nically, within a globalized era, seems to be only notionally more connected, but practically
more partisan than ever. It is important, in this context, to understand how, within the remit of
a nationalist-ideological dispensation, digital technologies acquire “national character”: the strat-
egies that render it possible and their affective outcomes. Comparing Instagram Reels with TikTok,
Divya Kandukuri, an anti-caste activist and former devoted TikTok user, evocatively recalls: “Tik-
Tok was a canteen; Instagram is a cafe. But the canteen has better food, and the cafe serves costly
coffee that not everyone drinks” (cited in Sharma 2021). This analogy, so telling of the class (and by
extension, caste) question, prompts us to consider the “fragments” or “fringes” of the nation: when
“global” technology platforms are rendered “national,” what is included in and excluded from the
nationalist imagination, and who jostles to determine it.

Notes
1. The ban was executed in two phases. The first phase of the ban was “interim”. It was implemented judi-
cially – that is, the Court (not the Indian government) implemented it – in April 2019. The rationale
furnished by the Court was: “to protect children in cyberspace” (cited in Mukherjee 2019). This ban was
lifted within a week. It was, in fact, preceded by several pleas from civil society organizations to ban
TikTok in India. Between these pleas and the interim ban, some six million “objectionable” videos
were deleted from the platform. Meanwhile, #BanTikTok trended on Twitter and TikTok’s rating on
Google Play dropped significantly. Again, between June 2020 and January 2021, the Indian government
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 393

issued multiple orders banning 267 Chinese apps, and TikTok was the first among them. This ban was,
however, made permanent. This time, the government announced that these apps had been “engaging
in activities which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, the security of
the state and public order” (Government of India 2020). In other words, there were different actors –
the civil society, the judiciary and the government – with at least two different (but perhaps intercon-
nected) rationales for banning TikTok in India.
2. India contributed to 38.8% of Quora’s visitors in 2020 according to Alexa (quoramarketing.com 2021),
and Reddit attracted 13.57 million Indian visitors in the same year, making the country the second lar-
gest Reddit user base outside the U.S. (Sattelberg 2021).
3. For critique of this perceived “border-less-ness” of the world wide web, see Goldsmith and Wu (2006).
4. The Digital India program seeks “to transform the entire ecosystem of public services through the use of
information technology … with the vision to transform India into a digitally empowered society and
knowledge economy” (Government of India 2019).
5. This thesis is not specific to India, but a staple of conservative nationalism, in general.
6. Cross-tally our thesis with Sharma’s (2021) observation: “To achieve stardom on TikTok, Sanatan
Mahto had only to access a low-end smartphone and a limited data connection … He taught himself
to use the TikTok app by playing around with the buttons, and never gave too much thought to the
image he was presenting of himself.” Sharma (2021) contends that, at least in the case of India, Face-
book Reels and Instagram Reels have failed to substitute TikTok, precisely because these platforms,
unlike TikTok, have “erased working-class [content] creators.”
7. Likewise, consider how the comic effect in Tanmay Bhat’s (2000a, 2000b, 2000c) YouTube “roast” is
practically derived from a classist denigration of the platform videos. Bhat is an otherwise-liberal celeb-
rity YouTuber and comedian from India. In 2020, he made a series of comic videos on YouTube “roast-
ing” the Indian TikTokers. All his videos garnered millions of views.

Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Inter-Asia Intermediality Workshop” co-hosted by Uni-
versity of Southern California (Los Angeles) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The authors thank
the workshop participants who commented on our paper. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their
feedback and Neha Gupta for alerting us to the “TikTok vs. YouTube wars” on YouTube.

Funding
This project was supported by Social Science Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (22C10559023)
and Social Science Co-construction Project of Guangdong Province (GD22XXW03).

Notes on contributors
Lin Song is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Communication at Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.
His works have appeared in Journal of Computer-mediated Communication, Asian Studies Review, Feminist
Media Studies, Continuum, and Convergence. He is also the author of Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public
Culture in Globalizing China (Hong Kong University Press, 2021).
Avishek Ray is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Technology Silchar,
India. He is the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Representation, Agency & Resilience
(Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India
(SAGE, 2020).

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