Weishan Miao

What roles do media play in community building? Based on life story interviews with 72 older gay men living in China, this study traces the rise and fall of four significant digital media platforms used by Chinese gay communities since the late 1990s. We propose the notion of community-based media affordance as an analytical device and show that the four platforms vary in terms of pervasiveness, self-presentation, searchability, visibility, editability, and awareness. This variation in affordances has contributed to “the good, the bad, and the ugly” in Chinese gay communities. Our analysis highlights the specific social, cultural, and political circumstances of the development of these platforms. It also suggests a link between certain community-based media affordances and the platforms’ capacity for queer community building. The framework of community-based media affordance can also be used to compare affordances across different media in future studies.

Studies on the Chinese internet mostly focus on how the government censors content and regulate digital platforms. We rarely know how internet companies understand, respond to and negotiate the relationship with the government. This study examines Danlan, the company that runs the world’s largest gay dating app Blued. We approach the interaction between Danlan and the government with an institutional perspective, treating them both as organizations seeking resources and legitimacy. Drawing on fieldwork, we develop the concept of embedded symbiosis, which characterizes the collaborative government-business relationship, and explore how Danlan, the seemingly weak side in this relationship, plays an active role in initiating, negotiating, and maintaining such relations at different stages of embeddedness. Danlan endeavors to form a symbiosis with the government to pursue its survival and development, yet eventually risks alienating from the gay community and colluding with the state in governing homosexuality. The case of Danlan shows the possibility for internet companies to seek legitimacy in an ever-changing political environment through working closely with the authorities and even becoming part of the governmental system itself.

A growing number of PhD scholars graduated from Western universities are returning to China, and this raises a range of research topics for scholars. Previous studies of these returnee scholars have mainly focused on the challenges of publishing in English but have ignored their difficulties in choosing between international and/or local academic communities. Academic publishing is regarded as a social practice in this study. Based on the data collected from 102 Chinese returnee scholars in the humanities and social sciences and drawing on the concept of discourse community, it is found that these volunteers’ publication practices are shaped by the culturally specific academic norms established in particular academic communities. This study highlights the differences between international and local discourse communities and identifies factors influencing Chinese returnee scholars’ publication practices. The ways in which they seek to exercise agency and strategies for publishing in the international and local academic communities are considered. The complexity of these returnee scholars’ publication practices is revealed through their lived experiences, adding depth and detail to current research into returnee scholars across the globe.

With the shift of social interaction to online venues, do women still conform to existing gender norms? This article examines the online performance of professional women in urban China and their interactions with workplace colleagues on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media app that is an important venue for workplace interaction. As interviews showed, workplace interactions on WeChat perpetuated traditional gender norms of hegemonic masculinity, and professional women accommodated to those existing gender norms by using particular “personas.” Three major personas were identified: one that emphasized professional identity and downplayed gender identity; another that accentuated femininity and downplayed professional identity; and a third that performed femininity to please male workplace supervisors by confirming their masculinity. Persona is used as an analytical term to capture the WeChat activities of these professional women because, compared to online self-presentation, the persona represented a strategic conformity to existing norms and the women distanced themselves from their assumed personas. The use of social media, therefore, reproduced and reinforced conformity to existing gender norms because the online gendered persona constituted a comprehensive and enduring constraint.

Guided by domestication theory, this article examines the contextualized and grounded process of how people understand and practice using social media “Likes” in the workplace. Taking the Likes of WeChat Moments in the Chinese workplace as a case, we interviewed 52 people from different professions and identified a multilayered liking practice by focusing on the ambiguity, negotiations, and contradictions caused by using WeChat Likes in social interactions. We contribute to the domestication research literature by showing the importance of being sensitive to culture context and need for multiple dimensions of social analysis.

This article combines semantic network and critical discourse analysis to examine China’s official cybersecurity discourse from 1983 to 2018. By integrating the securitization theory and positioning theory, it shifts the analytical focus from ‘threat politics’ to ‘power politics’ by theorizing securitization as a dynamic power game. Three historical phases of cybersecurity discourse are identified, reflecting China’s evolved understanding of the issue and how it defines rights, obligations and power relations among involved actors. Though the state's self-positioning evolved across time, first as a modernization planner, then an authoritarian paternalist, and ultimately a rising power; all three stages demonstrate continuity in featuring a state-society power relationship with the state in the presiding position to securitize the Internet instrumentally toward pursuing its policy and strategic goals.

This paper surveys the status of Chinese English-language journals in the humanities and social sciences (HSS-CELJs). HSS-CELJs are an important vehicle for disseminating Chinese scholarly voices and culture throughout the world. We used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the status of HSS-CELJs according to a number of attributes: growth rate over time, type of publisher, discipline, region of publication, publishing frequency, independence versus co-publication, and inclusion in citation indexes. We discuss some of the challenges facing HSS-CELJ publishing and highlight several contradictions of internationalization in the Chinese context. As of March 2020, eighty-seven HSS-CELJs covered nineteen disciplines, among which economics (17 per cent) and law (13 per cent) accounted for the highest proportions. The establishment of HSS-CELJs has increased significantly since 2004. Fifty-two per cent of HSS-CELJs were jointly operated with international publishers under two different models of cooperation, and twenty-eight (32 per cent) were indexed in international databases.

Although TikTok has in recent years become a highly popular yet controversial digital platform, few empirical studies have examined its development and the challenges it faces. In this article, we investigate how major media in China, the United States and India have interpreted and responded to the rise of TikTok, based on an analysis of news articles from 2017 to 2020. We identify the dynamic discursive practices of the de-politicisation and re-politicisation of TikTok before and after 2020. In the earlier stage, rather than being framed as a political issue, TikTok was depicted as an unexpected business miracle. However, since 2020, TikTok has been increasingly embedded in the escalating geo-political tensions between China and the other two countries. By highlighting how TikTok shifted from being an ambitious digital platform to a state-centred security issue, we suggest that the political dimension, especially the state–enterprise relationship, is crucial to understanding the discourse regarding internationalisation of the Chinese Internet.