Reassurance and pride: Narrating and legitimating digital surveillance in China

As digital surveillance becomes routine governance, how do states publicly legitimize expansive monitoring? Using China as a case, we analyze 8,096 Weibo posts from verified government and state-media accounts about Skynet and Sharp Eyes. Combining topic modeling, narrative coding, and emotion annotation, we identify four narrative families—Livelihood and Security, Governance, Information Disclosure, and National Pride—and their affective profiles. Official messaging relies less on fear than on reassurance and pride, framing surveillance as everyday problem-solving and administrative infrastructure. Narrative supply varies by institution: policing accounts stress concrete protection; functional departments emphasize governance modernization and disclosure; central actors amplify patriotic achievement. The findings show how authoritarian legitimation can normalize surveillance by coupling competence and service frames with carefully calibrated emotions rather than overt coercive rhetoric.