As explainable AI gains prominence, the question of how its communication design influences user behavior in online health platforms remains underexplored. This study introduces the Human–AI Communication Pathway Optimization Model (HACPOM). This model integrates AI design nudges to explain how transparency of thinking (opaque vs. transparent), source referencing (no source vs. journal), and response latency (fast vs. slow) can influence adoption intention. In a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment (N = 723), transparency of thinking and source referencing significantly increased users’ adoption intention. This outcome thus validated the direct route. Response latency showed no direct effect. However, it interacted with transparency, with the strongest advantage occurring under fast response conditions. Structural equation modeling supported HACPOM’s theorized indirect pathway. AI design nudges shaped the perceived risks and benefits, which influenced trust and thereby also influenced adoption intention. A supplementary qualitative interview with Shenzhen residents further corroborated the underlying mechanisms of the HACPOM framework. The implications for designing trustworthy AI health consultations are also discussed herein.

This article proposes a “response–emotion–communication” model integrating situational crisis communication theory and emotion dimension theory to examine how corporate crisis response strategies and response framing shape public emotion and communication behavior. It empirically tests the mediating role of seven discrete emotions that are high-arousal (anger, fear, happiness, and surprise) or low-arousal (disgust, sadness, and liking). Study 1 analyzed 515 corporate posts on Sina Weibo, and Study 2 implemented a 2 (strategy: deny vs. rebuild) × 2 (frame: rational vs. emotional) experiment to establish causality. Results show rebuild strategies increase communication via anger, fear, and sadness, while deny strategies operate through disgust. Response framing moderates these emotional pathways. This research advises firms to monitor key emotions and align strategies with frames to improve crisis communication.

This study fills a gap in the research on stand-up comedy in China by shifting attention from mainstream Chinese-language scenes to the expatriate circuit, a key site of intercultural negotiation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2025) at an expatriate comedy club in southern China and Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis, we examine how English-language comedians negotiate historical privilege and marginality in a constrained “third space.” Analysis of the jokes reveals how performers deconstruct cultural binaries to create humor through lexical choices, evaluative adjectives, strategic code-switching, and intertextual play. To navigate state surveillance, they deploy a range of strategies: strategic ambiguity and plausible deniability, deflection and reframing, and topic avoidance. These tactics enable the performance of hybrid identities—authenticating observers who leverage their foreignness to validate state narratives, conscious transgressors who embed subtle critique without posing a direct challenge, and cultural mediators who broker cultural meaning through linguistic negotiation. Ultimately, this liminal persona sustains itself by balancing insider validation with outsider irreverence. Overall, this study extends Bhabha’s concept of the third space by theorizing it as a precarious arena of hybridity—where negotiation is possible yet structurally bounded and where humor arises not against constraint but through strategic engagement with it.

This study examines the “easy girl” discourse in contemporary Chinese digital spaces, specifically its construction, circulation, and public contestation following a high-profile transnational scandal. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), we analyze influential WeChat posts to elucidate how the “easy girl” label is discursively produced and mobilized. The findings show that the “easy girl” discourse functions as a strategic tool for enforcing patriarchal and nationalist boundaries rather than as a simple misogynistic slur. Through strategies of pseudo-scientific pathologization, affective mobilization, and territorialization, the discourse reframes women’s transnational relationships as threats to collective honor. Notably, both men and women disseminate and legitimize this discourse, revealing practices of intra-gender discipline and patriarchal bargaining. We argue that this form of digital misogyny compensates for male anxieties rooted in economic precarity and geopolitical insecurity. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that digital platforms enable affective governance, in which policing female sexuality stabilizes fractured national and masculine identities.

Focusing on Girls Like Us (2021) and Rap Star Dream Maker (2024), this study examines how female rappers strategically navigate gender expression, affective alliances, and negotiated authenticity within the field of Chinese hip-hop reality shows. Drawing on hip-hop feminist theory and critical discourse analysis, the study offers a comprehensive interpretation of lyrics, visual aesthetics, mentors’ critiques, and audience danmu (bullet comments). The study reveals how female expression is simultaneously enabled and constrained by the intersecting pressures of patriarchal norms, platform logic, and state governance. Female rappers, through performative self-positioning and strategic discursive negotiation, challenge dominant expressive boundaries. Although expressions of “sisterhood” are rooted in genuine emotional and political solidarity, they are often repackaged as consumable “emotional moments” that obscure their structural significance. Meanwhile, the hip-hop ideal of “keeping it real” has been reshaped under the interplay of pressures from the state and platform into a form of “negotiated authenticity” that aligns with mainstream ideology and commercial demands. Taken together, these dynamics constitute a form of “instrumental empowerment,” in which the conditions enabling female rappers’ visibility simultaneously constrain its reach. This study aims to contribute to hip-hop feminist and media scholarship by theorizing female rappers’ visibility under techno-state capitalism.

In January 2025, the Chinese social media platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu) witnessed a surge of users identifying as “TikTok refugees” as a reaction to the potential US government ban on TikTok. Under the viral hashtag #tiktokrefugee, memes emerged as a key tool for communication between these new users and local Chinese users. This study examined how memes were used by both groups during this cross-cultural platform migration, focusing on the elements of memes, the ideas they convey, and their roles in facilitating affective publics. Drawing on Shifman’s tripartite typology of memes and Papacharissi’s concept of affective publics, we conducted a multimodal discourse analysis of 250 image-based memes and identified three key roles that memes played. First, as cultural connectors, memes combined Chinese cultural symbols with Western icons and English-language text to facilitate intercultural communication, although they may occasionally have led to misinterpretation. Second, as affective mediators, memes mitigated TikTok refugees’ anxieties about platform migration and eased intercultural and ideological tensions between China and the West. Finally, as political navigators, memes enabled subtle expressions of political satire and national pride through humor and playful visuals. We argue that memes function as both communicative instruments and affective artifacts, facilitating intercultural exchange and affective resonance amid platform migration.

This qualitative study explores how female rural-to-urban migrant digital laborers in China re-domesticate platform algorithms to protect their multidimensional health. Based on in-depth interviews with 21 participants in Shanghai and grounded theory analysis, the researcher identified a four-phase iterative process: re-appropriation (repurposing third-party tools for rest), re-objectification (spatial adjustments for care needs), re-incorporation (temporal negotiation via gender norms), and re-conversion (authentic persona extension). This study advances domestication theory by focusing on health and gendered agency, offering insights for designing equitable and health-sensitive algorithms.

Humor maintains social order through punishment and normalization. Gender order is one type of social order. Previous gender-based studies of humor have empirically demonstrated the impact of derogatory gendered humor on gender temperaments. Theoretically, humor has been identified as a tool for perpetuating a hegemonic gender order. Based on past research, this paper adds a Chinese experiential perspective to humor and gender studies. By introducing the categories of hostile gendered humor and benevolent gendered humor, this study elucidates two primary mechanisms that produce gender temperaments: the reflexive construction of masculinity and the imaginative construction of gender temperaments. It further analyzes four secondary strategies through which these mechanisms operate: identification, differentiation, demonstration, and imagination.

This article employs a Foucauldian framework of governmentality to examine how singing talent shows operate as cultural apparatuses that shape institutional, ideological, and administrative influence over popular memory. A Foucauldian discourse analysis foregrounds the ways discourse, visual representation, and strategic silence work as techniques of governance that guide how the public perceives, feels, and remembers, while also revealing the subtle interplay between power and knowledge in producing “truths.” Through an analysis of the Cantopop-themed talent show Infinity and Beyond, coproduced by Hong Kong–based Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) and Mainland China’s provincial satellite network Hunan TV, this study demonstrates how the program actively sanitizes and reprograms popular memory of Cantopop, particularly for a Mainland Chinese audience. The show emphasizes the integration of Hong Kong culture into the Mainland’s dominant narrative, promoting national unity and presenting a curated account of the genre’s development—recontextualizing its hybridity to align cultural memory with contemporary national integration goals. As a supplementary dimension, the analysis contrasts these official mnemonic framings with diverse narratives circulating on social media, specifically across Mainland platforms (Weibo) and international platforms (X). This comparison illustrates how digital discourse complicates top-down memory construction and exposes tensions between state-aligned memory initiatives and dispersed, networked practices of recollection.

This study used data from a survey conducted in China to investigate the factors influencing two types of science knowledge measures, as well as attitudes toward science. The findings reveal that the use of government media supports science literacy education and opinion guidance, while engaging with science media facilitates knowledge acquisition and the development of critical thinking skills. The use of social media, however, shows a different pattern, especially in relation to factual knowledge. Interestingly, in contrast to observations in Western contexts, the study indicates a negative correlation between factual knowledge and attitudes toward science. These findings offer valuable insights into the relationships among media use, knowledge, and public attitudes in science communication in China.