ORCID Profile
0000-0001-8368-4214
Current Organisation
RMIT University
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Communication and Media Studies | Communication Technology and Digital Media Studies | Asian Cultural Studies | Media Studies | Consumption and Everyday Life | Screen And Media Culture | Cultural Studies | Multicultural, Intercultural And Cross-Cultural Studies | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Law and Society | Sociology and Social Studies of Science and Technology | Screen and Media Culture | Communication And Media Studies |
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
The Media | Communication Across Languages and Culture | Cultural Understanding not elsewhere classified | Media Services not elsewhere classified | Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society | International Political Economy (excl. International Trade) | Internet Broadcasting | Evaluation of Health Outcomes | Structure, Delivery and Financing of Community Services | Expanding Knowledge in Language, Communication and Culture
Related Links
Publications
Review: DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film ed. by Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito
Publisher: Project MUSE
Date: 2016
Tongzhi on the move: digital/social media and placemaking practices among young gay Chinese in Australia
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-2019
Abstract: This article examines the placemaking experience of first-generation Chinese gay migrants (18–35 years old) in negotiating their cultural and sexual identities in Sydney and Melbourne. Tongzhi is used as a lingua-cultural reference to their double identity as Chinese and gay. Drawing from interviews and contact with 22 Chinese gay men who initially arrived in Australia on student visas, this article explores how tongzhi migrants use digital/social media to reconstitute their home abroad and to live out their transnational gay identity, politics and desire. Their placemaking practices take place in the intersections of the Internet and outernets, as well as the interzones of one’s gay desires for sexual fulfilment and cultural empowerment.
Local Politics in the Age of Automated Decision-Making in China: A Case Study of the Henan Health Code Scandal
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 16-08-2023
WeChatting the Australian Election: Mandarin-Speaking Migrants and the Teaching of New Citizenship Practices
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2020
Abstract: With the number of Mandarin-speaking migrants on the rise in Australia and the centrality of Chinese social media platforms among a large majority of this cohort, it is time that we examined the role of WeChat in political communication and citizenship education among Chinese migrants. In the lead-up to the May 2019 federal election, WeChat became a political c aigning battlefield in which candidates held live WeChat sessions with Chinese Australian voters. Despite much discussion about WeChat’s impact on Australian politics, there is little understanding of its potential educational role in citizen-making: to what extent does WeChat educate new citizens about Australia’s political system, democratic values, and electoral processes? This article uses the 2019 federal election as a prism through which to explore civic education and citizen-making in the digital space of WeChat. Drawing on online surveys, sustained digital ethnographic observation, and in-depth one-on-one interviews, we ask whether and how the work of certain in iduals in this digital space engenders a new form of community leadership and a more engaged form of civic behavior. We also assess WeChat’s potential in facilitating the process of political integration for new migrants from authoritarian societies.
Mobilizing care? WeChat for older adults' digital kinship and informal care in Wuhan households
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 26-01-2023
DOI: 10.1177/20501579221150716
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic saw the digital lify all aspects of our lives—work, sociality, health, intimacy, care, and inequality. In a time of restrictions and physical distancing, the role of the digital for social inclusion—especially for older adults—was heightened with many having to care at a distance. Our study focuses on older adults from Wuhan and the role of the dominant social media app, WeChat, for intergenerational informal care through digital literacy during and after the pandemic. Often characterized in global media as the place where the virus began, many of the quotidian experiences of Wuhan people have been overlooked. We reflect upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Wuhan in 2020–2021 with 10 households. We are particularly interested in how kinship care practices in Wuhan households—as sites for complex configurations of intergenerational practices that converge digital, social, and material worlds—have shifted during the pandemic. We ask: what are the learnings, opportunities and limitations around smartphone apps like WeChat for informal care as part of filial piety? In sum, what are the possibilities and limitations for mobilizing care?
Elaine Jeffreys with Haiqing Yu, Sex in China
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Date: 10-2016
Review: Celebrity in China ed. by Louise Edwards, Elaine Jeffreys
Publisher: Project MUSE
Date: 2014
Dwelling narrowness: Chinese media and their disingenuous neoliberal logic
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2011
Introduction: Platformization of entrepreneurial labor via Chinese digital networks
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 26-08-2022
DOI: 10.1177/20594364221123841
Abstract: The special issue, “Chinese Platforms and Entrepreneurial Labour,” examines entrepreneurial labor and its relationship with the platformization of Chinese society and economy. The introduction to the special issue sums up three key issues pertinent to the broad field of platform entrepreneurial labor: class, power, and gender. It also contextualizes the platforms—Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and TikTok—that are discussed in five articles by authors from China, India, Japan, Australia, and UK.
‘Just Like Eating Chocolate’: A reflection on China's DV culture
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2009
DOI: 10.1386/JCC.3.1.63_7
The evolution of the Chinese internet: Creative visibility in the digital public
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-08-2021
Disability, technology innovation and social development in China and Australia
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-07-2019
Asian internet histories: an introduction
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-10-2021
Disability participation in the digital economy: Introduction
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-01-2019
Food and Digital Lifestyles in Asia
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 16-03-2022
WeChat and the Chinese Diaspora
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 17-02-2022
The biopolitics of China’s HIV governance
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 13-01-2016
Philanthropy on the move: Mobile communication and neoliberal citizenship in China
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 15-02-2017
Abstract: This essay examines the phenomenon of embodied philanthropy on the move, with a focus on the WeRun (weixin yundong, an add-on to Weixin) for charity initiative. It analyzes key features of mobile-enabled micro and handy philanthropy that is at the same time on the move and examines its cultural and political implications on Chinese society. It also critiques embodied philanthropy, which is a market-driven, consumer-empowered, and in idualistic form of bodily improvement or engagement in the name of charity. It points out that philanthropy on the move is used as a platform to educate, nurture, and realize neoliberal citizenship, which is managed, sponsored, and aspired by the Chinese state, the private sector, and in iduals. It argues that cultivating neoliberal citizenship through micro, in idual, and highly mediated activities (via volunteering and handy philanthropy) can displace criticism of the Party-state and disinterest people from participating in social actions on the ground. But it also has the potential to transcend the dichotomies of altruism versus self-interest or state versus society.
Homeless food delivery riders and their transportal home in Shanghai's lockdown
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-08-2023
DOI: 10.1177/20501579231194500
Abstract: This article draws on the concept of “transportal home” to examine the intersection of mobile media, mobility, and place-making among homeless food delivery workers in the Shanghai lockdown. Shanghai's lockdown lasted from February 28 to May 31, 2022, and was one of the strictest in China, resulting in thousands of food delivery riders being locked out of their homes, treated as potential carriers of the virus, and forced to sleep on the streets until the lockdown was lifted. The article uses qualitative research methods to explore the COVID-related homelessness of food delivery riders during the lockdown, focusing on their media practices and highlighting their experiences and agency in using mobile media to negotiate their lives amid the (im)mobile mobility they faced. It argues that mobile phones, as a transportal home, can offer a technological imaginary of home out of “homelessness” however, they also serve as a reminder of the constraints of such an imaginary, as these (temporarily) homeless food delivery riders continue to be subject to platform exploitation and pandemic surveillance.
From active audience to media citizenship: The case of post-Mao China
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2008
Living in the era of codes: a reflection on China’s health code system
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 12-2022
DOI: 10.1057/S41292-022-00290-8
Abstract: This article offers a critical analysis of China’s health code system, a data-powered pandemic control and contact tracing system that supposedly subjects all in iduals in the country to its panopticon control, a surveillance system that monitors and categorises the Chinese population into the healthy (green), the dubious (yellow), and the unhealthy (red). The article highlights the pretence of surveillance as care and the digital ide that normalises discrimination against the elderly and other digitally left-behind population. It also illustrates how, from policy making and technological design to user engagement, the health code system is implemented, optimised, and used in everyday life to meet the needs of the vulnerable population. The health code is better taken as a medium of adaptable and communicative process that can reset the relation between the system and the lifeworld. It is the process of interchange between the system and the lifeworld that deserves our critical attention.
Regulating and governing China's internet and digital media in the Xi Jinping era
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 25-07-2022
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221116402
Abstract: The article outlines key regulatory and governing issues and actions in China's internet and digital media in the first decade under the leadership of Xi Jinping. It argues that both the domestic and global dimensions are equally crucial to understanding China's internet regulation and governance in the Xi era. It further argues that the two interrelated dimensions that emphasise the state's centrality and supremacy in internet-related regulatory issues and frameworks help strengthen China's existing political structure at home and promote China's digital power globally in the digital age.
Beyond gatekeeping: J-blogging in China
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2011
Abstract: This essay contributes to the continuing debates on the changing horizons of journalism in the era of Web 2.0 by examining blogging as a deliberative practice among Chinese professional journalists, who, as gatekeepers of the mainstream news media, nevertheless go beyond gatekeeping by watching the ‘gate’, poking the ‘gate,’ and mocking the ‘gate’ through blogging. I argue that j-blogging represents an experiment of amateur journalism by professional journalists in the blogosphere. The creativity in gate-watching, gate-poking and gate-mocking is situated in the feedback loop of blogosphere and mediasphere in general. J-bloggers are essential to the mediated loop that is in itself a liminal zone, where ideas, visions, emotions and beliefs can be tested. J-blogging forms a crucial link in the formation of the mediated loop and transformation of the liminal zone, upon which the viability of Chinese public sphere depends.
The cultural power metric: Toward a reputational analysis of China’s soft power in the Asia-Pacific
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 30-05-2019
Abstract: The advent of new media technologies has changed how people watch, engage with, and share digital media. Conventionally, audiences were surveyed selectively, and the results were collated by professional agencies and often kept confidential. However, the conspicuous ratings given to media and cultural products outside their country of origin and their very public success and failure raises questions about the validity of such methods, particularly at a time when media and cultural products are used as proxies for cultural “soft power.” This term, first used by Joseph Nye in a political context, evokes reputational impact: a particular nation’s cultural and media products can “go global” if they prove sufficiently popular, reflecting positively on the originating nation. This article examines the various methods used to evaluate China’s “cultural power.” It notes the current weighting given to the humanities and social sciences. By applying some basic big data analysis and machine-learning techniques, the authors build on previous studies by offering new insights into the rise of “Digital China” and China’s digital and Internet trailblazers. The authors consider two major international metrics, as well as China’s early experimental attempts at devising its own standard, before introducing an alternative model, the cultural power metric.
WeChat subscription accounts (WSAs) in Australia: a political economy account of Chinese-language digital/social media
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 19-06-2021
Abstract: This article is a political economy account of Australia-focused subscription accounts on the social media platform WeChat, based on an analysis of 50 top-ranked WeChat subscription accounts (WSAs) in Australia over a 1-week period in July 2019 and empirical data collected from 2 large surveys conducted among Chinese Australians in 2018 and 2019. It provides a nuanced understanding of the institutional context, regulatory framework and modus operandi of these WSAs, illustrating the development of and connection between the following three components: online Chinese-language media content, WeChat as a content delivery platform and WSAs as business initiatives. The article argues that the status of Chinese-language digital/social media in Australia is confined by a pre-existing technological infrastructure and regulatory framework, rather than any direct intervention of a specific authority, media outlet or platform, and that these media outlets and platforms should best be understood as an instance of transnational entrepreneurship.
Game On: The Rise of the eSports Middle Kingdom
Publisher: University of Michigan Library
Date: 05-06-2018
Doing Chinese media studies: A reflection on the field's history and methodology
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2011
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X1113800109
Abstract: This article reflects on the history and methodology of ‘Chinese media studies' as a (sub)-field of inquiry in academia. It identifies some key features in its trajectory of development, and particularly addresses some of the methodological concerns with regard to doing media studies – some of which are specific to ‘Chinese’ media studies and some of which are relevant to all inquiries about our mediated lives. It discusses methodology as outlook and orientation in ‘approaching’ Chinese media studies and as techniques and methods in ‘doing’ Chinese media studies. This article provokes, rather than promotes, questions and thoughts on the state of Chinese media studies.
“Canary in the coal mine”
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 17-02-2022
E’gao: Culture of Internet Spoofing in China
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Date: 2014
Further notes on WeChat and the Chinese diaspora
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 17-02-2022
Chinese digital platforms in Australia: From market and politics to governance
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 19-04-2022
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221095594
Abstract: Through the lens of platform governance, this paper examines the market, politics, and governance of made-in-China digital platforms in Australia, with a focus on WeChat and TikTok. It investigates how formal and informal arrangements are intertwined in the governance regimes and market strategies of these Chinese digital platforms when trying to navigate the turbulent waters of intensified Sino-Australia relations and a global trend towards increased government intervention in platform governance. The two made-in-China platforms represent two different models in platform governance adopted by Tencent and ByteDance: one conditioned by the Chinese ‘strict liability’ model and the other leaning toward the Western ‘broad immunity’ model. The Australian case illustrates the strife, success and politics of outbound Chinese digital platforms in a Western liberal democracy. It also highlights the dilemma, conundrum, and possible breakthrough in platform governance on a splintered and yet increasingly interconnected social media space.
WeChat and the Chinese diaspora: Introduction
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 17-02-2022
After the “Steamed Bun”: E'gao and Its Postsocialist Politics
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2015
China's E-Commerce: Empowering Rural Women?
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 07-02-2019
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741018001819
Abstract: This article employs a feminist political economy perspective to explore the connection between e-commerce, entrepreneurship and gender in rural China. It discusses gendered engagement with, and discourses of, the new digital economy represented by Taobao villages, and asks: how has the success of rural e-commerce impacted the evolving gender mandate and hierarchy in a competitive market economy in rural China? Has rural women's participation in digital economic activities changed their gendered roles and the patriarchal structure in their family and village? This article argues that women's socioeconomic enablement does not necessarily translate into cultural and political empowerment. The enabling potential of female entrepreneurship is tempered by traditional constraints on women and digital capitalist exploitation of their cheap, flexible and docile labour.
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