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Feeling the nation together: Offline esports spectatorship and the sensorial imagined community in China

Zhengxuezi Ji1,2* ,  Ming Ma2
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1 Faculty of Humanities, Xiamen Huaxia University, Xiamen, Fujian , China
2 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, City University of Macau, Taipa, Macau SAR , China
AC, 026180028 https://doi.org/10.36922/AC026180028
Received: 30 April 2026 | Revised: 14 August 2026 | Accepted: 17 August 2026 | Published online: 7 September 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
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Abstract

Offline esports spectatorship has become an important setting in which nationalist feeling generated online is acted out through the body. This article draws on participant observation at four cinema screenings held in Zhuhai during the 2025 League of Legends World Championship, together with semi-structured interviews with eleven participants, to propose the analytical concept of the “sensorial imagined community.” The concept describes how a physical venue converts loose online sentiment into a felt experience of collective identity, and it does so along four interlocking dimensions: spatial anchoring, sensory synchronization, bodily co-presence, and narrative negotiation. Where the body re-enters the communicative process, we argue, the mechanism by which a community is imagined widens from the asynchronous reading Anderson described to synchronous sensory contact and shared physical practice. The framework thus extends imagined community theory into sensory and bodily territory.

Keywords
Digital nationalism
Imagined community
Sensorial practices
Participatory culture
Esports culture
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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