“Ascending dragon or blasting the dragon vein?”: How Chinese netizens construct environmental meanings in digital publics

Corporations’ sustainability communication is increasingly challenged by digital publics. Yet research on how netizens contest corporate sustainability narratives, and thereby construct environmental meanings, remains largely confined to Western contexts. This study addresses this gap by examining Chinese netizens’ discursive responses to a controversial fireworks display in the Himalayas staged by international mountaineering brand Arc’teryx. Comments from the seven most popular Weibo posts were selected to compile a corpus (140,584 tokens), and analysed through corpus-assisted discourse analysis, particularly keyword and concordance analysis. Findings show that netizens mobilise multiple meaning systems to express strong disapproval, including scientific ecological knowledge, perceptions of environmental governance failure, spiritual-cultural references, consumer action, and nationalism. These interconnected meaning systems converge around a distinctive feature of Chinese digital environmentalism: a nature-centred view of human-nature relations and harmony. The study extends understanding of digital environmentalism beyond Western contexts by showing that environmental meanings in Chinese digital spaces are place- and culture-based, intertwining ecological concerns with emotion, spiritual wellbeing, perceptions of justice, and national interests.