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This paper explores a case of public contention against the censoring of a feature article about a COVID-19 whistleblower on the Chinese social media, WeChat. Moving beyond the normative theory of the public sphere and publics, we draw on Kavada and Poell's theory of 'contentious publicness' which is flexible enough to capture the complexity, diversity and hybridity of digital contention in the context of China. Through a combination of textual analysis and participatory observation, this article analyses how citizens challenged the censorship system and attempted to keep Dr Fen's story online through what we call 'relay activism'. Informed by the three dimensions of 'contentious publicness', we analyse the materiality of the communication infrastructure of WeChat and the temporal and spatial relations of the public contention (focusing primarily on WeChat and GitHub). In doing this, the paper contributes a more comprehensive approach to examining the social, structural and participatory characteristics of the contestation of censorship in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing Douyin users' mediated interactions with interracial couples in everyday contexts, this paper addresses the convergence of anti-blackness and domestic gender tension on Chinese social media. It introduces the perspective of 'multiple triangulations' to examine discussions of four types of interracial relationships on Douyin: black women and Chinese men, black men and Chinese women, white women and Chinese men, and white men and Chinese women. This approach complicates explanations of why Chinese social media users have been rejecting blackness in a potentially mixed-race China in relation to whiteness and Chineseness. It also illuminates how they have encoded gender tension in marriages in China into anti-black discourses. Additionally, this research highlights the race-blind digital infrastructure and the dynamic connotations of anti-black racism in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite extensive studies on ethical data use and algorithms, little is known about the ethical perspectives of tech workers – insiders of a profession that heavily relies on data and algorithms. Nor have there been sufficient cross-national comparisons of their perspectives. Relying on interviews with 98 tech workers in China and the US, this paper is guided by two questions: (1) What are tech workers' perceptions of big data ethics, and (2) what are the cross-national similarities and differences in China and the US? The study found that there are cross-national similarities in tech workers' cautious enthusiasm about the applications of big data in their work, as well as in their complex and ambivalent ethical perspectives on the use of big data in government digital surveillance. The main cross-national differences occur in tech workers' perceptions of whether big data may reinforce social inequalities. US-based tech workers are concerned about the reinforcement of race and gender-based inequalities through the use of big data, whereas their colleagues in China are optimistic that the use of big data may reduce income-based inequalities across geographical regions. The study's findings have implications for how to leverage tech workers' influence and promote the ethical use of data and algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the ongoing pandemic and the so-called 'New Cold War,' physical mobility dwindles and political paranoia surges. China has been increasingly portrayed as a 'black box' in anglophone discourse, scholarly and popular alike. More than ever, digital platforms serve as the sites and means to know 'the Chinese reality.' In this paper, we mobilize insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially its epistemological and ontological reflections on the 'black box' metaphor, to confront the ongoing 'blackboxing' of China and, in tandem, the embrace of digital platform data as 'open source' to penetrate China from afar. Foregrounding the role of technological infrastructures, research positionality, and power relations in knowledge production, we situate this phenomenon in broader shifts in geopolitics and academic ecology. We then suggest alternative routes for empirical investigation: (1) to reembed Chinese platform data in their sociotechnical contexts, (2) to approach a 'networked China' at and across different scales, and relatedly, (3) to attune to obscured positionalities in fieldwork and analysis. Ultimately, we urge communities of China researchers to attend to the politics and materiality of knowledge production and resist the pervading 'New Cold War' framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a large literature on the determinants of generalized trust, few studies have explored the impact of internal migration and attempted to tackle potential endogeneity issues. Using nationally representative data from the latest five rounds of the China General Society Survey, this paper estimates the impact of internal migration on generalized trust by exploiting arguably exogenous, historical changes in the GDP growth target set by the government and the share of migrants at the county level. We find evidence of a significant negative impact of internal migration on generalized trust. We also investigate the moderating role of Internet use, and find that whilst Internet use significantly attenuates the negative impact on generalized trust of internal migration, this moderating effect is much stronger for urban-to-urban migrants than it is for rural-to-urban migrants. The results further indicate that internal migration in China has led to the deterioration of subjective well-being, changing perceptions of fairness, increased likelihood of downward social mobility, and deterioration in social relations, which we interpret as potential mechanisms behind our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through document analysis and interviews, this paper examines the patent narratives of Transsion, a Chinese company dominating Africa's smartphone market and a leading innovator in facial recognition technologies (FRTs) optimized for darker skin tones. We identify two major narratives concerning Transsion's FRT patenting practice. First is 'empowerment', through which Transsion argues that there are 'blind spots' in conventional AI technologies and presents its AI camera as a remedy and an empowerment tool for dark-skinned users by 'seeing' their beauty. Second is the 'warfare' narrative, which is shaped by the heightening market competition and accelerating patent races among Chinese phone makers. As the battle for tech supremacy intensifies in Africa, Transsion expresses a strong sense of crisis and considers its FRT patents as 'weapons of competition' in preparation for a future smartphone warfare in Africa. This study makes two contributions. Empirically, through analyzing patents, we examine a relatively less-known Chinese tech company that has tremendous impact in the Global South. Theoretically, we interrogate the possibility of algorithmic empowerment against racist AI and technological independence through patents, although developing AI as weaponry, in the China-Africa context, also hampers the politics of decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 2014, Chinese Internet-users can purchase care and concern online. Customers can hire both male and female virtual lovers (xuni lianren) to talk to them while the lovers perform character roles of their choice. By examining why female customers consume virtual loving services, we argue that women hire male virtual lovers to assuage the frustrations that they accrue in their daily lives, and not to look for offline romantic partners. Inspired by the concept of 'emergent masculinity' (Inhorn & Wentzell, 2011. Embodying emergent masculinities: Men engaging with reproductive and sexual health technologies in the Middle East and Mexico. American Ethnologist, 38(4), 801–815), we coin the term emergent femininity. This term describes how, after a century-long process where the individual breaks free from familial and societal strictures, present-day young and urban Chinese women now exhibit a novel mode of womanhood characterized by historically unprecedented self-confidence, a willingness to openly articulate and purchase what they want, and a high degree of mediatization. Hence, this paper illuminates the appearance of 'new women' in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies recoding practices on the Chinese internet that reframe controversial contents in a socialist discourse to circumvent censorship. Drawing on three cases of 'socialist recoding' for critical discourse analysis (CDA), this article finds different patterns of recoding strategies and power relations manifested in these practices, depicting the nuances of censorship-evading practices in different responses to censorship including but not limited to resistance, negotiation, and problematisation. This article argues that these recodings negotiate terms of censorship and mediate power relations through meaning-making, indicating a permanent instability of authority in internet governance in China. By showing the potentialities of nuanced and pluralised meaning-(re)making practices in contesting and negotiating internet governance and established norms and values more widely, this study advances existing understandings about nuances in China's contested internet and contributes to the broader debate about the decentring and destabilising of authority in contested cyberspace worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, the live-streaming industry boasts 587 million users worth 961 billion yuan in 2020 [Yimei Zixun (2021, 16 March). 2020–2021 Zhongguo zaixian zhibo hangye niandu yanjiu baogao. ]. With so many live-streamers clamoring for fame and fortune, the sheer competition catalyzes the rise of 'live-streaming guilds' (zhibo gonghui) that help members elevate themselves in the performance charts of the various live-streaming apps. In this article, we conducted ethnographic research in one such guild that contracted its business from the live-streaming platform Zhubei. By conceptualizing these guilds as collectives of manipulating 'algorithmic experts' [Bishop, S. (2020). Algorithmic experts: Selling algorithmic lore on YouTube. Social Media + Society, 6(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897323], we argue that they optimize their live-streamers' performance according to algorithmic parameters that the platforms themselves reveal. However, guilds manipulate audience affects more, going so far as to use heterosexual male workers to masquerade as female live-streamers to entice straight male audience members to tip generously. As such, we challenge the still-prevalent epistemological assumption that live-streamers work alone, and the received wisdom that platform algorithms are unknown and unknowable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is increasingly recognised that commercial social media platforms are not neutral tools for online activism, our knowledge of how such platforms concretely intervene in user activities and shape the dynamics of online activism remains limited. This article focuses on analysing the strategies and mechanisms that have been used by Sina Weibo to manage online contention. Based on interviews with Weibo operators and opinion leaders, and analysis of relevant cases and documents, this article finds that in its early days Weibo actively facilitated the production and spread of online contention to establish itself as a key avenue for users to discuss and follow the development of unfolding incidents. Meanwhile, subtle strategies were applied to mitigate the tension between engaging users and conducting censorship. By showing how Weibo managed online contention in order to advance its own commercial interests, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the role social media platforms play in online activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current digital era, crucial questions include whether and how nondemocratic regimes retain information control in the face of proliferating new communication technologies. The scholarship has long cited China as a prime example of how authoritarian regimes implement internet censorship. Echoing emergent studies that have called attention to the highly fragmented nature of China's censorship agencies, which operate at different government levels, this research addresses local censorship agencies and their practices. Combining participatory observations and in-depth interviews conducted in a district in H City, one of China's digital economy hubs, this research explores how the local censorship regime deploys soft forms of maintaining control over information. Based on an institutional approach, the findings show that the local censorship regime has adopted proactive strategies to build a reciprocal relationship with local news start-ups, forming a variant of 'contingent symbiosis'. The local censorship regime uses policy and economic stimulus to co-opt news start-ups, inducing them to distance themselves from politically sensitive issues and local negative news and boost local propaganda agendas. These internet organisations have attempted to sustain positive relationships with the local censorship regime to acquire government resources and patronage, which would ensure their stable operation and survival under stiff competition in a precarious institutional environment. This research further explains the conditions of fragmented governance and platformisation under which this contingent symbiosis forms and the routinised practices that sustain it. This relational governance is covert and brings new challenges to the free flow of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introductory essay, the editors consider the current challenges in understanding a networked China. We consider how the digital media landscape has changed just since an earlier collection of research in 2015, subtitled 'global dynamics of digital media and civic engagement.' We take up this orienting concept of civic engagement to explore emerging mediated spaces for cultural production through global connectivities. Beyond an area studies contribution, we focus on China more broadly as a complex global assemblage: an intersection of technology, norms, and socio-cultural structures. Our contributors were invited to consider 'what' and 'where' is China, and 'how do we know China?' Along with logistical challenges of fieldwork involving constraints of geopolitics and pandemic, we encouraged an epistemic reflexivity around reliance on certain paradigms, concepts and kinds of data. This research is further complicated by sensitivities around by the very vocabulary often involved, including public, civil society, and civic engagement itself. In the search for digital China, contributors consider how to think about China and how to locate a digital China. In exploring digital production and performance of and in China, we include analyses of fandom, idols, and the curation of collective pandemic memories. Together, this collection provides a rich set of deeply researched cases and imaginative new strategies to understand how the contradictions of digital China – between connectivity and control – are playing out, with important implications for the changing nature of public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the 'alt-right' (alternative right) and their communications on the Internet are not unique to the West. This study follows a mixed-methods approach combining topic modeling, social network analysis, and discourse analysis to analyze the discursive and network structure of an online Chinese alt-right community on Weibo. We summarize the topics Chinese alt-right influencers discuss and examine how these topics are interrelated. We find that the Chinese alt-right discourse can be deemed as both an extension and localization of the global alt-right: they frequently discuss global alt-right issues and also hold alt-right ideologies on domestic issues. Meanwhile, influencers in the community are densely connected, suggesting a high level of coordination and cooperation. We particularly identify two discursive strategies that alt-right influencers employ to reproduce the transnational alt-right discourse, namely invented common crisis of majority culture and transnational metaphor usage. These findings provide insights into the transnational aspect of the rise of global alt-right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese idol fans have been identified among the main forces in cyber nationalist activisms in recent years, acting as the nationalist fans protecting the state as an idol in response to external political shocks. Their skills in acknowledging, involving, and even reinventing the image of the state and national pride in cyber nationalist activisms do not emerge in a vacuum. This article examines how idol fans involve and reinvent the nationalist discourse in their everyday fan activities – idol promotion. We focus on the pandemic in 2020 as it provides a specific social and political context that allows us to understand better the interaction between idol fans and the state in their mundane fan activities. We construct our analysis under the computational grounded theory framework with over 6 million fan posts collected from Weibo and 11 in-depth interviews with active idol fans. Our findings show that when engaging in pandemic-related discussion, idol fans actively borrowed official discourse on nationalism and strategically responded to key political and social events in their idol promotion activities. The idol images they built are not only positive but also nationalist. Therefore, they play not only the commercial logic commonly seen in the Japanese and Korean K-pop/idol culture but also the political logic propagated by the state in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(How) are Chinese actors contributing to increased state influence in Internet standard-making? In its open and private-based dimension, the Internet is possibly the twenty-first century's epitome of the liberal international order in its global spatial dimension. Therefore, many see deep normative challenges deriving from the rise of powerful, non-liberal actors such as China. In particular, China and Chinese stakeholders are often portrayed as supporters and promoters of a multilateral Internet governance model based on digital sovereignty aimed at completely replacing the existing multistakeholder, private-based model. Academic views on this topic have become less dichotomous throughout the years, especially as China's position on it has become more nuanced. However, this academic and policy debate is still open. This article analyses Chinese stakeholder actions in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the key venue for Internet standard-making. Through network analysis, this article maps the engagement of Chinese stakeholders in selected working groups of the IETF over time. Through expert interviews, this article interprets the drivers, evolution, and impact of such engagement. This research yields two main findings: first, it shows that the Chinese government does not have full control of its domestic private actors, among which there is both collaboration and conflict. Second, it concludes that Chinese stakeholders have increasingly accepted the existing functioning of IETF standard-making as they grew influential within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory essay summarizes how our understanding of Chinese internets – in the plural – has shifted in the past two decades. The incumbent approach sees 'Chinese tech' as a unitary and statist monolith, an incomplete view whose utility has declined. By contrast, the articles in this special issue collectively substantiate a novel geopolitical approach that analyzes 'Chinese internets' as internally diverse and externally border-crossing; as both public (governmental and non-governmental) and private (e.g., corporate); as discursive and policy entanglements beyond the dichotomy of multistakeholderism and multilateralism; and as global, regional, and local formations that are connected to, but not entirely constrained by, their national counterparts. Pluralist and multilayered, this new approach to analyzing Chinese techno-geopolitics shall provide a better fit for contemporary internet research involving state and nonstate actors in China, including Chinese companies operating both overseas and globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing literature on labor control of on-demand platforms primarily concentrates on algorithmic management. Based on the case study of Didi Chuxing, China's ride-hailing giant, this article introduces some additional complexities into the dominant storyline by bringing two managerial elements to the fore, namely, labor intermediaries and communication technologies. Although both have long been integral to the control of flexible labor forces in the post-Fordist era, they remain underexplored in the context of the on-demand economy. I argue that labor intermediaries emerge as quick solutions to the indeterminacy of labor mobility power, a critical problem inherent in the just-in-time labor strategies that challenge on-demand platform companies. Communication technologies are crucial for the functioning of this mediated relationship, formulating a virtual space where daily managerial practices take place. Ultimately, I stress that, while the labor process of on-demand platforms represents a shift towards fluid workspace, it does not mean the elimination of the organization-based control that usually occurs in a physical and formal workspace. This case study urges scholars to understand labor control of on-demand platforms as a regime of hybridity that features both continuity and renewal of the various forms of managerial strategies common to flexible production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study gives voice to socially marginalized women from the Global South whose struggles with sexual harassment are largely invisible in the #Metoo movement. Employing an ethnographic approach, this study examines the digitized resistance of Chinese rural–urban migrant women (n = 41) against sexual harassment faced in their workplaces. We adopt the lens of intersectionality to reveal the nuanced impacts of mobile communication practices negotiated in the context of gender, class, and the organizational structure across informal and formal economies. We find contrasting pictures of bottom-up disruption in the informal labor market and top-down transformation occurring in the modern factory. Migrant women working in the unregulated market restructured the existing patriarchal culture by deploying mobiles to establish collaborative groups for job information sharing. This mobile-mediated sharing enabled the rise of self-employed entrepreneurship, thus avoiding male intermediation in their livelihoods and thereby reducing the chances of encountering harassment. However, these benefits were uneven, with digitally-challenged women missing out. In contrast, migrant women employed in a registered factory with established rules actively negotiated top-down transformation of patriarchal culture. Female managers, in newly gained leadership roles, exercised their professional authority to encourage female workers to re-shape the discursive gender power of mobile spaces shared with male workers. Women actively confronted sexually provocative behavior of men on chat groups. We argue that subtle and covert mobile practices, in addition to visible and direct ones, allow for the construction of digitized female resistance culture as part of broader societal change influenced by mobile communication. We conclude with comments on the complexity and dynamism of mobile-mediated gender transformation in the context of rapid socio-economic development in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in South China, this study employs Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism to examine how Chinese rural migrant workers – an economically and culturally disadvantaged group – use digital dating services and select dates. It juxtaposes the rural migrant workers' encouraged engagement with digital dating with interview accounts which reveal that digital dating presents a large sum of obstacles to the fulfilment of sexual and romantic desire. Our research shows that these obstacles (both 'virtual' and 'real') are highly gendered, which is partly related to a cultural shift towards materialism in the Chinese society. Specifically, rural migrant men have described themselves as being harshly excluded or exploited on the dating scene, whereas rural migrant women have reported that they have unwittingly dated men with deceptive profiles or developed romantic relationships that were dashed by economic turmoil. Hence, the study empirically extends the literature on digital dating beyond its traditional focus on Western contexts. It also clearly demonstrates that, while digital dating ignites a sense of possibility and desire, particularly among individuals of lower socioeconomic status, it fails to support these users in tackling the structural inequalities obstructing realization of their desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, mainstream digital gaming has long been marked by compulsory (hetero)sexuality and hypermasculine gender norms, making it an ideal arena for exploring gendered power relations. This article critically examines how the participation of Chinese women digital gamers has taken on a distinctive shape in the context of newly emerging local online games that serve as an extension of the market mechanism. We examine the players' experience of two games: namely, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, King of Glory (wangzhe rongyao), and an otome love simulation game, Evol LoveR (lian yu zhizuoren). Results of 31 in-depth qualitative interviews with Chinese women gamers show that Chinese women's gaming experience has been profoundly shaped by both changes and continuities in the norms governing Chinese women's participation in play, romance and sex. We conclude that Chinese MOBA and otome games are not isolated new media products, but actually part and parcel of a broader digital media economy which provides audiences and players with information and cues that reinforce the dominant view that women and men have fundamentally different characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have examined how non-verbal functions are implicated in online communication and in non-Western contexts. Addressing these lacunae, this article analyzes interviews with Hong Kong youth to interrogate how likes are exchanged in online interactions within the context of guanxi. This article discovers that likes are reimagined as a digital gift of renqing representing targeted attention from specific giver-identities that generates circuits of likes exchanged between participants for tie-maintenance and tie-formation. For weak ties, lower frequency of reciprocity and sense of obligation were reported, whereas strong ties engendered reports of higher frequency of reciprocity and sense of obligation. However, across all dyadic guanxi ties, participants felt a constant renqing debt demanding repayment. As such, participants felt the need for some baseline frequency of like exchange and offended when alters neglected reciprocity altogether, yet continued giving likes for fear of damaging their reputation and relationship. Thus, mianzi is reconceptualized as embedded in interpersonal evaluations of one's reputation based on how well they maintain relationships and bound up in the social interactive tendency to exchange renqing over time. These webs of meaning and exchange encircle the objective of maintaining relationships by invigorating their emotional content. Here, the non-verbality of likes deepened their ability to replicate the raw, emotive charge of renqing: stripped of the burdensome complexities of verbal communication, likes convey a simple, one-dimensional, powerful sentiment of agreement that, in participants' experiences, is useful to generating future exchanges of likes and improving online relationships enough to create relationships offline as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]