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Digital remediation increasingly plays a pivotal role in delivering political messages. This study examines postings of corporeally mediated tattoos in a China-based blog, focusing on in what sense blogs can provide a breathing or even emancipating space for Chinese tattoo wearers and enthusiasts to control the viewer’s perceptions of tattooing and negotiate long-standing stigmatized associations of tattoos there. The study analyzes 305 postings collected from the blog covering a period between 24 April 2020 and 3 May 2021, taking a quantitative approach. Methodologically, it first analyses the distribution of the signs across body parts as displayed. By applying multimodal perspectives, this study also investigates photographic techniques such as distance, angle, gaze, and modality harnessed and exploited for visual manipulation during digital remediation of turning body narratives into digital narratives. Findings of the study suggest that digital remediation facilitates personal expression of tattoo wearers and photographic techniques play a critical role in introducing ready alignment of the viewer with the postings. The study thus adds quantitative inquiries to existing, mostly qualitative, studies of tattoos which usually rest on interviews with tattoo wearers, enthusiasts, and artists for an account of tattoo narratives in connection to personal expression and self-definition. Its findings would be inspiring to socially stigmatized and marginalized groups to circumvent social, cultural, and political barriers to communicate and make their stories heard to more people.

The identity of a city matters in a global age. This article explores the discursive construction of the global city’s identity in relation to semiotic landscape, using the construction of Shanghai...

This paper examines within the theoretical framework of intertextuality the mobilization of glocalization as an international marketing strategy in Nike’s and Adidas’s 2008 advertising campaigns in China. Intertextuality is seen as a form of mediation through which the glocalization strategy conducted within the domain of global marking is taken up in the domain of advertising communication. The paper also assumes the interrelations of intertextual performance to value orientations and group affiliations. By analyzing intertextuality in relation to affinity groups, it aims to resolve to some extent the conundrum of Nike’s more successful than Adidas in the sportswear market of China in a social-semiotic perspective. Two print ads constituting a representative example of the corpus were selected for a qualitative analysis. The comparative analysis of intertextuality reveals the contrasting methods of glocalization applied by Nike and Adidas in their 2008 advertising campaigns, thus offering an explanation for Nike’s triumph in competition with Adidas in China.

The concept of linguistic landscape (LL) covers all of the linguistic objects that mark the public space, i.e. any written sign one observes from road signs to advertising billboards, to the names of shops, streets or schools (Landry & Bourhis, 1997). Because it both shapes and is shaped by social and cultural associations (Ben-Rafael, 2009; Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010: 6–23), the LL has proved an important area for investigating the dynamics of major aspects of social life (e.g. Backhaus, 2006; Huebner, 2006; Curtin, 2009; Lado, 2011; Papen, 2012). One strand of this research is particularly concerned with the role of LL in relation to ethnolinguistic vitality that ‘makes a group likely to behave as a distinctive and active collective entity in intergroup relations’ (Giles, Bourhis & Taylor, 1977: 308). The higher the vitality an ethnolinguistic group enjoys, the more it will be able to use language so as to survive and thrive as a collective entity.

One's native language is normally a marker of national identity. This is particularly true of China, which many regard as a relatively linguistically homogeneous nation. The huge impact of the spread of English on the local culture of China alongside a buoyant wave of global capitalism raises interesting questions such as the following: (i) Does the spread of English challenge or undermine the sense of China's national identity? (ii) By drawing upon English as a new linguistic and cultural resource, is China now redefining its own culture? (iii) What strategies are observable in the use of English intranationally in contemporary China? To answer these questions, this study examines the use of English in China's real estate advertising. The relatively new discourse of real estate advertisements in mainland China has been attributed to the process of increasing urbanization which has accelerated since 2000. In addition, as one of the most fundamental symbols of a nation, land is closely associated with national identity, which suggests that real estate transformed from land can be taken as a source discourse for an investigation of national identity (Smith, 1991; First and Avraham, 2007). By focusing on the use of English in China's real estate advertising and its possible association with the national identity of mainland China, this study discusses the strategic use of English as a linguistic and cultural resource in identity construction.

Does English always play an important role in constructing identities within the multimodal ad? This question has wide-ranging implications for the study of identity constructions in bilingual advertising in particular, and for bilingualism and multilingualism generally. This article presents a critical-cognitive approach that is an evidence-based account of whether, and to what extent, English plays a role in identity constructions and their connection to the local politics of English. This approach is analytically powerful and productive not only in capturing the varying degrees of the contribution of the English language and its role but also in unraveling the ideological dimensions of identity and the English language. Examples of Chinese–English bilingual ads that are representative of the structural features of English mixing are used for the illustrative analysis. The article concludes with a suggestion of the wider applicability of this approach to other bilingual or multilingual contexts that are currently regarded as suitable for study.