The Political Subculture in Contemporary China: Moha and Its Transformation

This study statistically analyzed survey data to examine the relationship between fulfillment of psychological needs of 223 Chinese sojourners in the United States and their online self-presentation strategies on Chinese and American social media. The results showed that the combined use of proactive and defensive self-presentation strategies on Chinese social media instead of American social media were more effective to fulfill the sojourners’ need for autonomy. Moreover, presentation strategies that helped to meet the sojourners’ need for relatedness were significantly different between Chinese and American social media. Specifically, a proactive strategy was more effective to meet sojourners’ need for relatedness on Chinese social media, while a defensive strategy was more effective to fulfill their need for relatedness on American social media.

This paper examines the differences of design between Chinese and western social media. Using a blandness in society of Francis Jullien's interpretation approach, this paper analyzes the mainstream social media, found that both Chinese and western social media design concept have the characteristic of being pleasing to the taste as new wine in terms of social communication; comparing to western social media, the Chinese social media have traces of being bland as water.

This chapter aims to investigate the extent to which English is used in Chinese social media. It reviews relevant literature regarding the use of English in China more generally and the use of English in Chinese social media which challenges standard English language ideology and gives rise to awareness of the “playfulness” of “new Chinglish”. In addition, the use of English in digital media reinforces the role of English in intra-national communication in China. The chapter explores the extent to which English is used by Chinese bilingual users of English in Chinese social media; and the salient features and relevant issues in relation to the use of English in Chinese social media. The use of English in Chinese social media involves Chinese “users” of English. The conventional use of English in Chinese social media includes the functional use of common English words and sentences.

Who endorses conspiracy theories? A moderated mediation model of Chinese and international social media use, media skepticism, need for cognition, and COVID-19 conspiracy theory endorsement in China

With the mobile Internet development, e-health has become increasingly connected with people's daily life. However, health information on Internet is severely corrupted by misinformation, especially for the aged. It is necessary to analyze the characteristics of health-related misinformation on Internet and to design automated detection tools. In this study, we focus on analyzing common characteristics of reliable and unreliable health-related information on Chinese online social media, and exploring possible detection method using machine learning algorithms. We first collect a dataset containing both reliable and unreliable health-related articles from multiple Chinese online social media sites, with 2,296 reliable and 2,085 unreliable included. Then we analyze their differences with respect to writing style, text topic and feature distribution by both intuitive and statistical analysis. We also manually select 104 linguistic and statistical features that are useful for machine learning classifiers. Lastly, we propose a Health-related Misinformation Detection framework (HMD) that includes a feature-based method and a text-based method for detecting unreliable health-related information. Experiments verifies the performance of our proposed HMD method.

Some of the most attractive economies are located in emerging markets. In this sense, China is one of the most attractive markets in the world. The Web, especially social media, is a platform that can be used to penetrate these markets. Yet, many local and multinational enterprises, particularly the latter, know little about the relationship between Chinese social media and Chinese digital consumers. In this paper the unique Chinese social media landscape is introduced, and the profiles of Chinese digital customers are presented with the aim of informing enterprises about the key features of Chinese social media strategies. In addition, the predominant use of Chinese social media marketing is elucidated and analyzed based on several case studies. We then highlight the challenges for both local and multinational corporations when they are involved in Chinese social media marketing. We discuss current trends in Chinese social media, including cross-platform cooperation and integrated social media, group buying, and mobile social media. Finally, we offer recommendations for companies that wish to successfully engage with Chinese consumers through social media.

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.

Reaching for the stars: DingTalk and the Multi-platform creativity of a ‘one-star’ campaign on Chinese social media

During the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, Eileen Gu attracted considerable attention and sparked numerous discussions on Chinese social media. Using the method of textual analysis, this paper examines the various responses of Chinese women, particularly Chinese feminists, to Eileen’s achievements on Chinese social media, framing these responses within recent studies of neoliberalism’s undoing of feminism as well as long-standing debates about the relationship between feminism and nationalism. This paper argues that discussions about Eileen on Chinese social media not only illustrate how neoliberalism is absorbed, reworked, and resisted in its transnational circulation but also demonstrate how nationalist narratives can be strategically used by Chinese feminists to validate their feminist positions. It further enriches existing scholarship on neoliberalism with a transnational perspective, reaffirms the importance of contextualizing the relationship between Third World feminism and nationalism, and highlights the significance of uncovering indigenous feminist resources in Third World countries.

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Chinese society today is characterized by the coexistence of numerous social conflicts and social stability. This coexistence reveals the resilience of the Chinese political system.1 A resilient political system allows its citizens to use conflict-resolution mechanisms while preventing what Frederick Barghoorn has called "flabby flexibility" or "lack of principles".2 By this he means that citizens resort to non-institutionalized or illegal modes of action to pursue their interests. Undisciplined actions are likely to threaten political stability. In China, citizens have access to a number of channels of political participation,3 but state power prevents regime-threatening actions and allows the Party-state to maintain the social order amid a legion of social conflicts.4 However, the Party-state faces serious pressures because of the magnitude of conflicts and the recurrence of noninstitutionalized or illegal modes of action.5 These illegal modes of action reveal the limitations of the regular or permitted channels. Hence, an analysis of the factors that affect citizens' choice of the modes of action illuminates the degree of institutionalization of conflict resolution in China. The permitted channels of conflict resolution in China include both the use of the law and non-legal modes, such as petitions or mediation. These non-legal modes are, however, still "in the shadow of the law" in the sense that existing laws or government regulations are referred to when these modes are used to address social disputes.6 Research on Chinese citizens' use of permitted modes, especially the law, suggests a mixed picture. On the one hand, as Diamond et al. argue, "in today's China law matters more than it ever has" because it plays an unprecedented role in helping address social conflicts and citizens' grievances.7 Chinese citizens increasingly make use of the law in pressing their interests despite the widely known flaws of legal institutions.8 On the other hand, these flaws make successful action difficult. Effective lawsuits often require the use of tactics or political resources such as political connections. These tactics or resources require citizens to obtain support from the media or from sympathetic state agents, or to gain access to important institutions.9 Failure, especially when suing state agencies, is not rare.10 Such difficulties are also faced by those citizens who use non-legal modes of action. For example, research on the use of petitions has shown that petitioners often encounter serious or insurmountable hurdles in making state authorities pay serious attention to their grievances.11 The limited effectiveness of permitted channels has not driven the disgruntled to silence. In recent years, there have been numerous incidents of disruptive or illegal modes of action, including protests, demonstrations, violent confrontations, and even attacks on state agencies.12 It is these non-institutionalized modes of action that have led the central Party-state to set "the building of a harmonious society" as a top priority.13 If the use of the law and those non-legal modes of action that are "in the shadow of the law" can be an indicator of the degree of conflict resolution's institutionalization in a society, the recurrence of social protests in China suggests that this institutionalization is rather limited. The relationship between citizens' use of permitted modes and illegal modes of action has not been adequately addressed. The many existing studies on the permitted modes of action commonly point out their limitations, but they stop short of demonstrating the implications of these limitations. There is no systematic research on the likelihood of citizens' legal action escalating into illegal modes. Analysis of this likelihood illuminates the degree of pressure faced by the Party-state in maintaining social order. Previous research has not generated the data necessary to undertake such an analysis. …

With Twitter and Facebook blocked in China, the stream of information from Chinese domestic social media provides a case study of social media behavior under the influence of active censorship. While much work has looked at efforts to prevent access to information in China (including IP blocking of foreign Web sites or search engine filtering), we present here the first large–scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, i.e., the active deletion of messages published by individuals.
 
 In a statistical analysis of 56 million messages (212,583 of which have been deleted out of 1.3 million checked, more than 16 percent) from the domestic Chinese microblog site Sina Weibo, and 11 million Chinese–language messages from Twitter, we uncover a set a politically sensitive terms whose presence in a message leads to anomalously higher rates of deletion. We also note that the rate of message deletion is not uniform throughout the country, with messages originating in the outlying provinces of Tibet and Qinghai exhibiting much higher deletion rates than those from eastern areas like Beijing.

Based on the case of Bilibili, a popular Chinese video-sharing social media with a core focus on animation, comic, game and novel, this article examines the transnational prosumption practices of Chinese urban youth who mostly belong to Generation Z. I conduct ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with animation, comic, game and novel fans to investigate the construction of heterotopia on Bilibili through their various practices of tactical prosumption. This article demonstrates that young animation, comic, game and novel fans prosume, socialise and express themselves in a tactical and poetic way within the heterotopia, a place of otherness. Various tactics are employed to challenge and counter control, social norms as well as consumerism. Starting with a critical engagement with Azuma’s pessimistic view on animation, comic, game and novel fan culture, the notion of ‘database animals’, I argue that a neglected, albeit nuanced, poetic and tactical prosumption process is evident on Chinese social media. Being the results of an interdisciplinary study, the findings will be helpful to scholars who are interested in contemporary Chinese studies with a focus on the animation industry, fandom, consumption and social media.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 infodemic has been disseminating rapidly on social media and posing a significant threat to people’s health and governance systems.ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate and analyze posts related to COVID-19 misinformation on major Chinese social media platforms in order to characterize the COVID-19 infodemic.MethodsWe collected posts related to COVID-19 misinformation published on major Chinese social media platforms from January 20 to May 28, 2020, by using PythonToolkit. We used content analysis to identify the quantity and source of prevalent posts and topic modeling to cluster themes related to the COVID-19 infodemic. Furthermore, we explored the quantity, sources, and theme characteristics of the COVID-19 infodemic over time.ResultsThe daily number of social media posts related to the COVID-19 infodemic was positively correlated with the daily number of newly confirmed (r=0.672, P<.01) and newly suspected (r=0.497, P<.01) COVID-19 cases. The COVID-19 infodemic showed a characteristic of gradual progress, which can be divided into 5 stages: incubation, outbreak, stalemate, control, and recovery. The sources of the COVID-19 infodemic can be divided into 5 types: chat platforms (1100/2745, 40.07%), video-sharing platforms (642/2745, 23.39%), news-sharing platforms (607/2745, 22.11%), health care platforms (239/2745, 8.71%), and Q&A platforms (157/2745, 5.72%), which slightly differed at each stage. The themes related to the COVID-19 infodemic were clustered into 8 categories: “conspiracy theories” (648/2745, 23.61%), “government response” (544/2745, 19.82%), “prevention action” (411/2745, 14.97%), “new cases” (365/2745, 13.30%), “transmission routes” (244/2745, 8.89%), “origin and nomenclature” (228/2745, 8.30%), “vaccines and medicines” (154/2745, 5.61%), and “symptoms and detection” (151/2745, 5.50%), which were prominently diverse at different stages. Additionally, the COVID-19 infodemic showed the characteristic of repeated fluctuations.ConclusionsOur study found that the COVID-19 infodemic on Chinese social media was characterized by gradual progress, videoization, and repeated fluctuations. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the COVID-19 infodemic is paralleled to the propagation of the COVID-19 epidemic. We have tracked the COVID-19 infodemic across Chinese social media, providing critical new insights into the characteristics of the infodemic and pointing out opportunities for preventing and controlling the COVID-19 infodemic.

Deep learning technology has been widely used in the field of natural language processing, making the deep learning-based Chinese Social Media Named Entity Recognition (NER) method is becoming more and more important. However, the public datasets in the field of Chinese Social Media are small in size, which cannot allow deep learning models to fully learn, resulting in low accuracy of model recognition. At the same time, Chinese Social Media has more new words and abbreviations, which contains a lot of noise. To solve the above problems, we propose a Chinese Social Media NER model based on multi-scale features BiLSTM-CRF, which combines character features, word segmentation features, radical features and pinyin features at the embedding layer to obtain multi-scale semantics information. Then, the acquired features are transferred to the BiLSTM network (CIFG Cell) for encoding, and finally the encoded tags are decoded through the CRF layer to obtain the prediction results. Experimental results prove that the BiLSTM-CRF model based on multi-scale features can improve the accuracy of the model when performing Chinese social media named entity recognition. At the same time, we use CIFG Cell to have higher recognition efficiency than Basic LSTM Cell in network coding. When the model is trained, we use the gradient truncation method and the Dropout layer to further avoid problems such as gradient explosion and model over-fitting.

In this article we present an analysis of the concepts of fenxiang and gongxiang – the Mandarin words for ‘sharing’– in the context of Chinese social media. We do so through an interrogation of the words fenxiang and gongxiang as used by Chinese social media companies. Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we created screenshots of 32 Chinese social network sites between 2000 and 2018 and tracked changes in the usage of fenxiang and gongxiang over time. The Mandarin translations in some ways operate like the English word, ‘sharing’. Fenxiang has the meaning of participating in social media, and gongxiang refers to technological aspects of sharing, while also conveying a sense of harmony. However, the interpersonal relations implied by fenxiang, and the political order implied by gongxiang, are quite different from those conveyed by ‘sharing’. Together, fenxiang and gongxiang construct a convergence of micro-level interpersonal harmony and macro-level social harmony. Thus, the language of sharing becomes the lens through which to observe the subtlety, complexity and idiosyncrasies of the Chinese internet. This article offers a new heuristic for understanding Chinese social media, while also pointing to an important facet of the discursive construction of Chinese social media. This implies a continuing need to de-westernize research into the internet and to identify cultural-specific meanings of social media.