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Portrayed by the media as the story of "how a female PhD juggles intimate relationship with four male PhD academics", the LM incident, named after the female main character of the story, was a high-profile case, which provoked public debates on Chinese social media in 2019. In this article, we explore how the stereotyping of female PhDs plays out in Chinese Internet users' discussions about the LM incident. We collected a total of 632 relevant posts from the most popular Chinese community question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu and analysed them by drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA). The research findings reveal how a sexualised portrayal of female PhDs, which is dramatically "different" from the traditional, asexual stereotypes of well-educated women, is established in Zhihu users' postings. Many Zhihu users, including both women and men, mobilise an overwhelmingly sexualised portrayal of female PhDs, which speaks to the normalisation of patriarchal discourses in the status quo of Chinese academia and beyond. The research findings shed light on post-socialist gender politics, which facilitates the perpetuation of gender essentialism in China in the post-reform era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While public relations (PR) scholars have increasingly criticized the privilege of organizational interest , limited research has problematized the dominant analytical locus of organizational site . As a consequence, our understanding of the complexity and fluidity of PR in wider socio-cultural contexts has been constrained. To combat this shortcoming, this paper invokes the notion of “field” from institutional theory to examine how the field of Chinese PR is socially constructed, negotiated and contested by a range of actors based on their shared or competing logics and contingent inter-relations. Data were mainly collected through 48 in-depth interviews with PR agency consultants, in-house PR practitioners, journalists and industrial regulators as well as through complementary documents. The results indicate that studying PR as a socially constructed field can refresh extant PR scholarship by providing a dynamic and relational account of PR practices, and by reflecting the multifaceted interaction among various institutional actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This study explores an under-examined "vertical" dimension of social capital as a mechanism of political influence in China. • This study contributes to enriching the underdeveloped literature on government relations, public affairs, and/or lobbying. • Individual-level social capital (e.g., guanxi) can be strategically developed into organizational social capital. • Social capital enables corporations to exercise agency in negotiating policy within pre-existing, vague regulatory environment. Social capital has emerged as a promising theoretical approach to understanding political influence in the public relations literature. However, the rationale of using social capital to influence corporate government relations in authoritarian societies is indistinct. To remedy this, we integrate Bourdieu's (1986) and Lin's (2001) social capital theories to explore how applying a variant form of social capital (e.g., guanxi) might shape corporate government relations in authoritarian China. A multi-method, qualitative approach was employed involving 44 interviews, participant observation and document review. The findings highlighted an underexamined "vertical" dimension of social capital (i.e., links with authority in a hierarchy), which enables corporations to exercise agency over the pre-existing and often vague regulatory environment. This study adds a new perspective to social capital with hierarchical guanxi that enriches our understanding of guanxi -based political influence in Chinese corporate government relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]