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Recent years have witnessed heated debates in Western societies on how neoliberal discourse has 'hijacked' feminism, but little is discussed about neoliberal feminism in non-Western societies. This paper analyses the self-representations of an emerging digital community in China – female PhDs, with a focus on how they create and circulate alternative self-representations to challenge the biased portrayals in mainstream media. In confronting the de-sexualizing or over-sexualizing media narratives, female PhD influencers have localized the popular notions of neoliberal feminism and constructed a neoliberal feminist subject who manages to 'have it all' – namely, knowledge, career, family, as well as physical beauty. Besides discursive confrontations, female PhD influencers also cash in on their cultural capital to earn extra income. Despite the individualist tendency in neoliberal ideology, these female bloggers are not isolated from one another but facilitate a digital community that gathers young women with academic dreams. Believing in the slogan that 'women help women,' young women seek career advice and emotional support online, giving rise to the imagined 'academic sisterhood.' This paper argues that the Western solution of 'collective action' is less viable in authoritarian states and thus calls for a transnational perspective to study neoliberal feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three cases of graffiti production characterized by showing the connections between three key ideas (aura, carnival, and publicity) in the context of contemporary China. This paper attempts to construct a paradigm for this particular cultural phenomenon by analysing three cases situated in three different social levels. First, graffiti as artwork, as exhibited by the contemporary artist Zhang Dali, is discussed. Second, sponsorship of graffiti culture by the local government is studied. The last and most controversial topic of discussion is how graffiti's online circulation reflects civil society in China. This paper explores the complex intersection of street culture, public space, and media. In revolving around the questions of what defines graffiti producers and spectators, what can be said about graffiti-writing practices, and who has the ability to speak out, this discussion illustrates the extent to which graffiti can be understood as a means of public communication against the backdrop of, and amid the moments of crisis in, the construction of modern Chinese cities. This paper illustrates how the aesthetics and the politics of representational forms and their intermediality are mobilized in a variety of contested spaces, where producer and spectator change and exchange identities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Internet brings about ‘new media power’, which transforms the power dynamics associated with traditional mainstream media. This form of power has largely been associated with a (co)producer perspective, which stresses that ordinary Internet users are able to participate in news production. In many cases, however, Internet users merely read news online and may leave comments. Instead of contributing to news production, these comments are likely to reflect how news is consumed. Does online news consumption also have power implications? Using a case study from China, this paper examines newsreaders' consumption of online news in a network consisting of news websites, discussion forums and blogs. It argues that this networked consumption gives active readers a strong voice and thus power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As camera phones become more commonplace in the explosion of smartphones – along with new contexts for image distribution like microblogging and location-based services (LBS) – we are witnessing emergent types of visuality. In particular, through LBS such as Facebook Places we see ways in which users create new contexts for the overlay between place, ambient images, and geographic locations. While globally camera phone genres like self-portraiture have blossomed, we are also witnessing the flourishing of vernacular visualities that reflect a localized notion of place, social, and identity making practices (Lee 2009). As LBS transforms the context, and thus content, for camera phone images, there is a need to reassess the role of such visualities. Can we speak of ‘smartphone visuality’? This paper considers the shift through a case study of Jiepang users in Shanghai. As an emergent area in mobile communication, we reflect upon some of the ways it rehearses and extends earlier studies on networked visuality as well as reflecting a localized notion of mobility and place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cultural tourism has become one of Australian tourism's most lucrative sectors, and the regional location of many of its prime sites and events means that increasing numbers of visitors are travelling beyond the major cities for 'authentic' local experiences. This paper focuses on Nundle's 'Go for Gold Festival', which is held annually over the Easter weekend. For its first six years, the festival had no relationship with Chinese heritage but in 2004, the seventh festival was rebranded as the 'Go for Gold Chinese Festival' and the event experienced something of a revival. Its transformation into a festival celebrating Chinese history and heritage has helped it develop into a major regional event, second only to Tamworth's Country Music Festival. What, however, are the finer-grained circumstances and consequences of these initiatives for Nundle's identity? What might it mean for 'Chinese heritage' to be mobilized in this way, and for Chinese Australian representation in the region? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the exponential growth of Chinese migrants in Australia, and despite the sizable body of work in various locations, the picture of how the Chinese-language media have developed in Australia over the past decade is still somewhat unclear. Even less clear is a sense of how the field has changed since the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games, a significant event that signalled China's ascent on to the global stage. This paper seeks to update the picture of the Chinese-language media landscape in Australia. We explore a number of angles, which work in articulation to produce a picture of growing complexity and fluidity. In doing so, we put forward a number of arguments. First, the diasporic Chinese-language media are subject to, as well as respond to, the vagaries of the wax and wane of the multicultural polity of the host nation. In addition, the diasporic Chinese-language media, for a wide range of reasons - technological, cultural, and economic - need to reassess their cultural role and strategies in the wake of the PRC's new status as a global power and its push for expansion of its media content and cultural impact outside China. Furthermore, to a varying extent and in a variety of ways, the diasporic Chinese-language media have become part and parcel of the global transnational cultural economies of Chinese-language media productions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we now know, once you introduce audience ratings, as China has done, you have not just introduced 'a measure'; you have introduced a huge apparatus that brings with it certain types of agreements, values and behaviours. No doubt, China's leaders saw the ratings as a neutral mechanism in mapping broadcast audiences. The history of ratings, however, is quite the opposite. It is a set of standards, values and conventions that drives particular kinds of expectations in organizations, technology and content. Audience ratings first provided a coordination rule for advertiser-supported media and then became a convention, harnessed by TV to change media economics. In this paper the authors provide an insight into how audience ratings, as a convention - a compact - emerged in Australia and America, and some of the major differences between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blogs or weblogs are online journals that are regularly updated, and cover thousands of topics. In a way blogs represent the free speech philosophy of the early days of the Internet in that they allow users to distribute opinion on an enormous variety of topics, and in some countries relatively uncensored opinion, though potentially they can be monitored everywhere. The blogosphere creates a new space in which public discourse can be expanded and viewed. Indeed, my research for this paper relied heavily on an excellent blog called EastSouthNorthWest, where a variety of articles from China's media are translated and posted, with some comment and analysis. During the Burma protests in September 2007 blogs were one of the few sources of information about the unrest not directly controlled by the Junta. Reporters without Borders claim on their website that 'Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure' ('Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents'). However, in the People's Republic of China (PRC) the emergence of blogs and the development of the Internet in general have been used to reinforce the central authority of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I extend the notion of franchise nations, borrowed from Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1993), in order to employ it as a device for thinking about the future of the nation. I argue the concept to be particularly well suited for such contemplation because of its sound grounding in the historical intermesh of economic, political and cultural motivations intrinsic to the concept as well as lived experience of the nation. I illustrate this very briefly by casting (mainland) China as the master franchisor and the overseas Chinese as franchisees. Specifically, I discuss the media events concerning China that took place during 2008, such as the protests and counter-protests that occurred at various legs of the Olympic Torch Relay, the Sichuan earthquake of 12 May and the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on 8 August, and reactions to these happenings from overseas Chinese located variously in Australia, Canada and the United States. I argue that employing the notion of franchise nations lays bare the commercial and political instrumentalism behind the promotion and courtship of diasporas by home nations but, crucially, also aids in the understanding of the reciprocal processes by which franchisees are fashioned out of these communities. Finally, I suggest that, aside from China, franchise nations may also be a useful approach for thinking about how nations like India and Singapore are expanded, exported and explained into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]