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The entertainment industry is driven to sell certain commodities transnationally, particularly in a world where borders are becoming increasingly diffused through the access afforded by the Internet. Media content is easily consumed, making cultural exporting fast and easy. Similar tropes and plot have been replicated in the East Asian film and TV industry, perhaps in hopes of replicating the success. This paper looks at the manufacture of ideal masculinities within East Asia, particularly China. From ex-members of K-pop group EXO to the successful TV series, cross-influence of East Asian popular culture is prominent. Through this paper, I look at the influence of K-dramas on the Chinese TV industry and particularly the manufacturing of a militarized masculinity on Chinese TV. Far from portraying brute and fearsome soldiers, ideal masculinity on TV is portrayed as "steely exterior but gentle internally" and thus desirable romantic partners to heterosexual women. By exploring the basic conception of Chinese masculinity, I then discuss representations of militarized masculinity on the silver screen (Wolf Warrior II) and C-dramas, with particular focus on the series, You Are My Hero (2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TikTok continues to be the top downloaded app in many countries around the world as the short video consumption craze continues. But TikTok has also come under harsh scrutiny for its Chinese origins and data security. For TikTok, the journey of globalization has involved a painful contest with governments, geopolitical manoeuvrers, and, ultimately, finding platform regulation loopholes. TikTok's sister app, Douyin, shares identical digital architectures, but follows different trajectories of development in China. Through interviews with Chinese influencers and media practitioners, along with a content analysis of policy documents and industry reports, this paper identifies and analyzes the borderline practices that have occurred on Douyin – including content transfers, and algorithmic platformization – and evaluates the potential for these practices to be replicated on TikTok. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's Social Credit System (SCS) has been widely considered a centralized surveillance project, whereas recent research found multiple scoring systems co-existing in various fields at multiple administrative levels and in diverse forms. Despite the broadened view toward the complexity of SCS, these research projects continue to focus on SCS mainly as political and digital control mechanisms. Instead, this paper is interested in the social and cultural meanings of SCS constructed in the media, both at the national and local levels. Based on the analyses of news reports since the year 2003, when the term SCS was officially coined, this paper examines the historical narratives about SCS, including its rationales, stakeholders, and intended goals/tasks. It argues that the SCS construction has been a societal project anchored in a distinct moral orientation of financial credit. While credit systems are often used to classify consumers and financial subjects in Western contexts, the case of Chinese SCS shows that the moral dimension of financial credit scoring has enabled its spread into other non-financial domains. Also, the institutionalization of such moral standards is considered an effective approach to addressing various socio-economic and ethical issues that have long baffled economic development and social justice in China's reform era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, production in China’s television sector have reshaped media cultures across the country as well as the geocultural region of East Asia. Through analysis of licensed reality television programs such as China’s Got Talent, this paper examines transnational television formats and their circulation and replication in contemporary China, challenging the traditional concept that television format trade falls within a West-Rest narrative. While highlighting the cultural and media phenomena of interactive ‘glocalization’ of cultural products, this paper calls for de-westernization in approaching Chinese and East Asian media studies. It does so by pointing out unique imitating and adaptive practices of Chinese unscripted television programs, which serve as case studies to the existing literature of television business and cultures. The practice of licensing formats provides a unique perspective into analyzing China’s media strategies in a globalized industry and reviewing the current scholarship on media globalization. With a comparative analysis, the paper attempts to reconceptualize the spatiality of East Asian media production and consumption. I also include my observations while working on the production teams for these programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changes and continuities in TV representations of Chinese Communist Party's revolutionary history and interprets them within the broader context of China's political, economic and cultural transformations since the 1990s. Drawing on a comparative analysis of three state-sponsored TV dramas produced between the late 1990s and mid-2010s, it traces how the state-sanctioned revolutionary narratives have changed over time in response to the Party's propaganda imperatives on the one hand, and to the market-oriented production environment on the other. The paper argues that while recent TV productions in the new century have made increasing concessions to audience taste by adopting visually stimulating depictions and introducing fictional characters as points of identification for the audience, the revolutionary narratives were still aligned with the Party's propaganda agenda at different times. This shows the ongoing competition between ideological and commercial interests in Chinese TV production during the era of market reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to existing literature analyzing how public spaces are strategic mobilization resources for activists, we focus on the inconspicuous constraints placed by the state on public spaces that limit their utility as mobilization resources. Employing the spatial dimensions of social movement theory and Althusser's state power theory analyze an activism case in Guangzhou, China, we argue that through everyday spatial governance by the state, public spaces in China are also forms of ideological state apparatuses that latently disrupt activists' attempts to engage in contentious spatial practices to gain resources through media coverage. We further propose the concept of 'spatial inertia', which are durable, routine, and diversified spatial meaning-making practices mediated through media coverage that affect the success of social movements. This paper complements social movement scholarship by examining how the state, through latent processes exercised using public spaces as ideological state apparatuses, competes with and subverts activists' efforts to use these spaces as strategic resources for collective mobilization, especially in authoritarian contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networked digital technologies and Open Access (OA) are transforming the processes and institutions of research, knowledge creation and dissemination globally: enabling new forms of collaboration, allowing researchers to be seen and heard in new ways and reshaping relationships between stakeholders across the global academic publishing system. This article draws on Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘Soft Power’ to explore the role that OA is playing in helping to reshape academic publishing in China. It focusses on two important areas of OA development: OA journals and national-level repositories. OA is being supported at the highest levels, and there is potential for it to play an important role in increasing the status and impact of Chinese scholarship. Investments in OA also have the potential to help China to re-position itself within international copyright discourses: moving beyond criticism for failure to enforce the rights of foreign copyright owners and progressing an agenda that places greater emphasis on equality of access to the resources needed to foster innovation. However, the potential for OA to help China to build and project its soft power is being limited by the legacies of the print era, as well as the challenges of efficiently governing the national research and innovation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces a themed section that focuses on the production of gender discourse and representations in the midst of tightening social and cultural control in China's entertainment industry and digital media landscape. In various ways, the two articles featured case studies that exemplify how the production of gender discourses and representations in this context emerges from the interplay of state control, the market, and the digital realm and unfolds against the rise of platform capitalism and techno-nationalism. Both articles center on the intricate and sometimes contradictory configurations of gender within China's state-market nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to map out the popular phenomenon of misogyny in the specific techno-social configuration buttressed by China's state-market nexus. With a case study of a controversy involving the standup comedian Yang Li and the luxury car brand Mercedes-Benz on the microblogging platform Weibo, I highlight the 'platformization of misogyny.' The conceptualization refers to the way that a platform is evoked as tools to manufacture and amplify misogyny. Weibo has this effect both through its design, features, and algorithmic shaping of sociality and through its users' appropriation of its affordances. On top of that, the platform also engenders a form of governance that is deeply enmeshed in the commercialization of internet opinion, suggesting a techno-nationalist mode of state control that is exercised from afar and deeply imbued with patriarchal and misogynistic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay on "The rise and fall of investigative journalism in China: digital opportunities and political challenges" is presented. Discussed is President Xi Jinping who visited the three major state media outlets such as People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television where he emphasized the Chinese Communist Party's supreme role in media work.

This study focuses on the experiences of disabled individuals in online activism in the context of China. Adopting the social model of disability, this study found an iceberg structure consisting of two levels and three layers. The explicit level included observed labels, attitudes and legislation. The implicit level involved both social and internalized stereotypes. These three layers of social structures interacted with each other and together brought about social exclusion into being. Adopting the social model as an organizing principle represents a starting point to alter social patterns and possibly change social isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming to enrich the conceptual vocabulary of platform and app studies, this article provides a critical political economic perspective on the media industry to understand how platform power is operationalized in the app economy. Using the China-based tech conglomerate Tencent as a case study, four mechanisms are discussed: conglomeration, financialization, platformization, and infrastructuralization. These mechanisms show how Tencent leveraged both a conglomerated corporate structure and access to finance capital. This was combined with the infrastructuralization of the MyApp app store and the WeChat platform by providing vertically integrated app development and distribution services, which are nested in Tencent's holdings and investments. Taking Tencent as the starting point for theory building, this article attempts to "provincialize" US-based platform companies by charting Tencent's corporate evolution and its path to mobile dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates China's efforts to toughen the regulation of its tech companies since the late 2010s in the global context of Big Techs rein-in and the specific trajectory of economic development in China. Focusing on the three-phase development of Alibaba and Tencent since the late 1990s, we propose a regional and historical approach to study platform capitalism concerning how platform companies, through interacting and negotiating with shifting institutional conditions, have developed novel business models, organizational structures, and technological innovations. Not a static domination, state power co-shapes platform capitalism through a constant process of institutional improvisation and innovation, as well as interacting with private players. This geographically and historically conscious approach to platform capitalism not only contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the specificities and historicity of platform capitalism in China, but also helps to deprovincialize platform studies and extend its analytical relevance beyond the Euro-American focus or the disciplinary boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nation anthropomorphism refers to the symbol and the symbolization process in which human-like characteristics are metaphorically attributed to a nation. In China, the Homeland-Mother (zuguomuqin) is a widely accepted anthropomorphic image representing the nation. However, a brotherly national image named Azhong-Brother (azhonggege) derived from subcultures was created and went viral on social media platforms with fierce controversy since 2019. Based on 23 in-depth interviews with China’s young netizens of wide variations, this study explored the differences between these two symbols, Chinese youths’ identification with the nation through the symbols, and their identity negotiation amid the controversy surrounding the image of Azhong- Brother. We discussed the symbolic contestation between traditional hegemonic and emergent soft masculinities within Azhong-Brother, the instrumental and sentimental national attachment associated with Homeland-Mother and Azhong-Brother, and the conflicts arising from the negotiation of multiple identities in relation to Azhong-Brother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferating online social networking sites have created opportunities for Chinese queer women to meet new friends and lovers; yet, research on lesbian online dating in mainland China is scarce compared to heterosexual and gay online dating. This article investigates lesbian/ lala women's online dating experiences in the context of economic reforms and the trust crisis in urban China. It is based on 16 in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong from June 2018 to July 2019. It focuses on two digital platforms: Douban Group and WeChat. This article explores how online anonymity and stranger sociality shaped queer women's moral practices regarding turning virtual strangers into real-life partners. Queer women in this research expressed concerns about being cheated by low quality(suzhi) lovers, swindlers, and married women. This article suggests that the emerging online stranger sociality has both enabled and constrained lesbian/ lala women's practice of seeking loving relationships, while they must internalize the potential risks by themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Douyin, which is also known as the Chinese version of Tiktok, is currently the most valuable digital advertisement platform in China. One of the most significant features of this short-video platform is the heavy reliance on algorithmic production and distribution of media. In this emergent configuration, algorithms and data shape the production and circulation of media beyond social networks. Such a system develops by meshing grassroots and professionally generated content, leading to the audience engaging in the production of commercial content for profit. My essay explores the political context and economic logic that underpins these developments. It draws specifically on official reports from Douyin, as well as interviews with users, including individual users and Multiple Channel Network (MCN) employees. This essay proposes the idea of the 'data attraction model' based on the investigation of the emergence of new forms of algorithmic production and distribution. It argues that the data attraction model is characterised by an extreme logic of flexible accumulation, which is radically transforming the content production of participatory media in China [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The male-male romance web series The Untamed reached a height of media interest in the summer of 2019 in China. Numerous Chinese young women were obsessed with the drama centred on the relationship between the two male protagonists, and many fan followers identified themselves as ' The Untamed Girls'. Through online observation of young female fans of the male-male romance web series, this study articulates how they were self-organised as a counterpublic and utilised strategic ways to negotiate with the party-state censorship. Drawing upon the conceptualisation of 'ambivalence', the study analyses a dual ambivalence in their collective actions. It is argued that The Untamed Girls' participation as a popular feminist project is, however constantly intertwined with an assumption of heteronormativity and an internalised misogyny, where these seemingly empowered women are simultaneously reaffirming a heterosexual regulation of sexual desires and devaluing women when they celebrate the male-male romance embodied in such a drama series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italy was one of the first European countries affected by the Covid-19 pandemic after the beginning of the outbreak in China in January 2020. Applying critical discourse analysis and theories of the mediation of suffering, this article explores the discursive strategies used by the Italian media to represent China and Chinese people in relation to the outbreak in the early stage of the pandemic. Employing the theoretical frameworks of Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and other thinkers on biopolitics, racism, and emergency, the results bring to light the persistent ideologies behind the media representations of an imagined Other, which reflect existing discourses toward the Chinese community in Italy. In this study, the contentious discourses around China and the Chinese amidst the pandemic reveal the role of the Italian media in presenting risks, mediating suffering as a distant event and, later, as a national concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hip-hop culture has evolved into a global phenomenon, attracting extensive academic research on its adaptation and localization in different societies. However, most studies have either neglected the influence of political economic power on hybridization or have overestimated the rationality of the artists in hip-hop culture. This study adopted critical transculturalism theory to shed light on the agency and power relations involved in the localization and mainstream emergence of Chinese hip-hop music from both longitudinal and comparative perspectives. The findings, which are based on qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis of news articles published in the three golden years (2008, 2010, and 2017) of the development of Chinese hip-hop music, suggest that whereas cultural and political factors were influential on both the localization and mainstream emergence processes, economic factors played a greater role in mainstream emergence. The enhancement of literacy in professional knowledge aroused public interest, and the use of symbolic hybridity created a role model for underground rappers and attracted social attention. Both these factors helped Chinese hip-hop music enter the mainstream industry. The idea of symbolic hybridity proposed in this study, which provides a mesolevel perspective, is worth further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ghana's mobile phone markets are currently dominated by a Chinese company called Transsion. Based on 7-month ethnographic research, this article examines Transsion's distribution and marketing practices in Ghana, which are largely labor-intensive, rural-centric, low value-added, and lower-class-oriented. Taking a historical approach, this article reveals that this business strategy originated in China and has been translated to Ghana by a wide variety of translators. By elaborating various translation scenarios, this article demonstrates that translation as a practice, be it cultural, technological, or managerial, is a complicated process with tensions, adaptations, and innovations. As a tech company from the Global South, Transsion provides a critical case to think beyond the urban-centric and high value-added business model of Silicon Valley-type companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Folk economics has become increasingly influential in today's era, where laypeople can (inter)actively deconstruct official discourse and form their truth in social media. This article examines the formation and popularization of folk economics by investigating the localized China collapse theory known as zhibao in one of the most influential online forums in Hong Kong. By analyzing the popularization of zhibao as citizen curation – the subjective and non-professional collection, assessment, and criticism of information by participants in online discussions for the benefit of the group – this article questions the dichotomy between folk economics and mainstream economics, arguing that laypeople may selectively appropriate conventional economics into their discourse. Furthermore, by investigating the citizen curation of zhibao diachronically, this article suggests that online discussion participants' attention to the credibility of the news sources may be negatively related to the credibility of the discourse they are curating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the politics of time are an important dimension of Chinese state discourse about Tibet, it remains insufficiently explored in theoretical and practical terms. This article examines the written and visual discourses of Tibetan temporality across Chinese state media in the post-2008 era. It analyses how these media discourses attempt to construct a 'regime of temporality' in order to manage public opinion about Tibet and consolidate Chinese rule over the region. While the expansion of online technologies has allowed the state to consolidate its discourses about Tibet's place within the People's Republic of China (PRC), they have also provided Tibetans a limited but valuable space to challenge these official representations through counter readings of Tibet's past, present and future. In doing so, this article contributes new insights on the production of state power over Tibet, online media practices in China, and the disruptive potential of social media as sites of Tibetan counter discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the smart phone app Kuaishou emerged in China with more than 400 million registered users. An app where users upload pre-recorded videos and a small number of vetted ones live-stream as zhubos, Kuaishou distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack with the unabashed earthiness of its contents. We have two goals in this article. First, we examine how the app's performers attract, cultivate and retain their fans to make money off their activities. Second, we treat zhubos as 'digital housewives', who produce two use values of alienable user data and inalienable affects like offline houseworkers do. Zhubos can earn money from their work, but they ultimately provide highly exploited labour to Kuaishou under a façade of innocuous play. Indeed, by selling their supposedly inalienable affects, zhubos embody 'digital housewife-ness' even more so than Jarrett's original formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the recent development of Xinhuanet.com, a news website launched by Xinhua News Agency, one of China’s key central state-owned news organisations. Xinhuanet Co. Ltd, the business entity running the website, went public in October 2016 in Shanghai. This marked the first step in the state news agency’s financialisation. Two main questions are addressed. First, what were the main driving forces behind Xinhuanet’s transformation from a governmental cultural organisation to a publicly traded enterprise, the majority shareholder of which remains Xinhua? Second, how should the nature of this transformation be understood, in relation to Xinhua’s wider marketisation process and that of the Chinese media sector as a whole? The article argues that Xinhua’s financialisation via Xinhuanet is best understood as part of a state-administrated initiative in accord with Xinhua’s own business ambitions. The financialisation of news by state players such as Xinhuanet does not alter the underlying ownership structure of Chinese news media, which remain ultimately state-controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on an empirical analysis of the testimonies of Chinese journalists to (re)consider the nature of professionalism in contemporary Chinese journalism. We draw on earlier work by a number of scholars to develop an analysis of the testimonies in order to trace both how professionalism is shaped by cultural, social, organizational, institutional and political influences, and how these work to shape everyday journalistic practices and outputs. We conclude that professionalization is best understood not as a shift towards an ideal version of autonomous, public service–oriented journalism, but instead as a process informed by diverse and somewhat contradictory influences, including many that are internal to China as well as some that are near universal. Not only are journalists clearly concerned to be distinguished from ‘propagandists’, but editors also engage in tactical practices and organizational strategies that allow a meaningful autonomy from the state. These are not only influenced by conflicting normative discourses of journalism but have also become both a necessity for establishing the legitimacy of individual journalists and news institutions and to facilitate their viability in highly competitive news markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective memory about past events needs to be ‘recalled’ to influence current happenings. Social movements relying on collective memory to articulate and legitimize their identity and causes thus need to engage in memory mobilization, that is, organized efforts to bring collective memory to the fore for the purposes of social mobilization. This article examines and reconstructs the process of memory mobilization through the news media in the case of Tiananmen commemoration in Hong Kong. The analysis shows that social organizations attempted to make news through scheduling their actions in association with multiple temporalities and through engaging the established political institutions on the issue. The news media served as both messengers and mobilizers. Meanwhile, attempts to contest the movement’s representation of Tiananmen inadvertently contributed to memory mobilization due to the power of the dominant collective memory. The article illustrates how the dynamics of memory mobilization can impinge on commemoration of past events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For scholars with an interest in Chinese society and politics, protest is not a new subject, especially rural resistance and urban strikes. Numerous studies have been conducted which focus on social movements and popular protests, but the online protests by Chinese Internet users have not received the same amount of attention. The focus of this article is on how Chinese citizens use the Internet as a platform to protest against official misconduct or more specifically the emergence of a type of online protest called the Human Flesh Search Engine (HFSE). This type of protest has largely been overlooked by the literature on protest in China. This study aims to provide an appropriate and comprehensive definition of HFSE as a form of online protest via exploring its structural characteristics and general contexts. Drawing on the findings, I argue that a full understanding of protest in the digital age is possible only when the Internet and online forms of protest are taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometimes the Chinese dream is of sustainable development, of anti-corruption, of constitutionalism, of a clean environment, or of social harmony. Essentially, like the American dream or any dream for that matter, the Chinese dream can mean anything to anyone. However, more so than in ‘democratic societies’, where dreaming is free and extensively discussed, the authoritarian Chinese government and Communist Party seem to have a problem as these slogans do not resonate with the broader public, neither nationally nor internationally [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a recent bizarre phenomenon on China’s Internet – the enormous popularity of a scatological Chinese neologism called diaosi, which literally translates as ‘dick string’. Seeing the diaosi phenomenon as a case of ‘infrapolitics’, a space of nuanced discursive practices mediating overt online politics and benign online entertainment, we analyse the ways in which an infrapolitical practice such as the diaosi phenomenon fuses political critique, cultural processes of identity construction and meaning-making as well as cyber ritual communion. Specifically, we interpret the infrapolitics of diaosi as simultaneously an instantiation of a prevalent scatological online culture that defies hypernormalization, a collective identity-making that seeks to create critical social solidarity and a practice and politics of cultural intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If the cultural system reform in the 1980s and 1990s was peripheral and sluggish, in the 21st century it has become a central part of China’s unswerving reform and noticeably gained velocity after 2008. Aiming to build up a cultural market economy, the reform is transforming the majority of cultural institutions into state-owned and even state-controlled shareholding corporations, while strengthening the public service obligation of state financing in a few non-profitable areas. By chronicling and contextualizing reform efforts, this article not only documents some major lines of market development but also examines why and how the state is realigning its public and corporate sectors in such a particular mode of synthesis, especially in two leading media sectors: film and TV broadcasting. While Chinese communication scholars have documented how the overlap between the state and market forces creates dominant cultural processes in China, focusing on the state’s straightforward efforts at commercialization, this article offers an updated understanding of verifiable policy and institutional changes—especially the ‘de-commercialization’ movement embodied by the return of public units. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Media convergence is thriving in terms of either practical experience or scholastic debates around the world. This study aims to examine journalistic convergence in China. Using qualitative data drawn from the case study of Shenzhen Press Group in Guangdong, South China, we argue that the media’s response to the Chinese government’s push for media convergence is simply a gesture of compliance. While media management do not consider convergence as a prime concern, rank-and-file editors and journalists respond to media convergence with non-cooperation or non-acceptance. The study concludes, on the basis of the specific contexts in which China’s media convergence operates, that social context and, in particular, the relationship between media and state should be fully taken into consideration in studies of media convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]