ORCID Profile
0000-0003-2450-277X
Current Organisation
City, University of London
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Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-02-2020
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 05-09-2018
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Date: 2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 31-08-2020
Abstract: This article investigates Chinese urban youth’s mediated ‘slice of life’ and playful encounters as part of their identity construction and performance work on Bilibili, one of China’s most influential video-sharing social media sites mediating anime, comics, games and novels. Using a mix-method approach of digital ethnography, participant observation, interviews and data visualisation, this article examines fans’ hermeneutic practices through anime, comic, game and novel prosumption, exemplified by danmaku: ‘bullet screen’, barrage-like comments overlaid on videos. This article argues that Bilibili works as an ‘identity college’ for fans to perform various roles and explore their hybrid identities in a social-hermeneutic engagement process. In particular, the function of anonymous danmaku comments will be closely analysed as it offers a quasi-real-time engagement experience for fans and helps shape fans’ social self. Following a symbolic interactionist tradition, Mead’s ‘generalised other’ and Goffman’s dramaturgical theory are contextualised in the Chinese socio-cultural milieu where fans’ identity performance is regarded as masquerade. Departing from the moral panic rhetoric that Generation Z is ‘amused to death’, becoming ‘infantile and animalised’, or even enslaved by their desires and capable only of ‘cold intimacies’, the findings of this explorative study present a more complex understanding of Chinese youth’s identity work through participatory social media use and networked fandom.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2021
Abstract: Following the third copyright law amendment in China, this paper offers a timely contribution to the debates on the shifting policy, governance and industry landscape of the Chinese music industry. This paper conducts a historical and socio-legal analysis of the development of Chinese copyright law with regards to the music industry and argues that the Chinese digital music industry has developed to a stage where three business models collide, namely the cultural adaptation model, the renegade model and the platform ecosystem model. This paper draws on interdisciplinary literature and discourses from legal studies, business studies and cultural studies and provides new evidence of the much neglected autonomous development of Chinese copyright law on top of foreign pressure and the desired reforms to further integrate into the global market economy.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 14-11-2022
DOI: 10.1177/20594364221140812
Abstract: This paper situates the ‘Blind Box’ consumption, collection and prosumption practices in China within globalisation and the ‘media-mix’ fandom, which is to consume and resell media merchandise in opaque packages as probability goods. We re-centre the focus of fandom studies on the then much neglected ‘missing child’ and now the ‘emerging adult’ in a globalising world. We argue the Chinese emerging adult consumes, collects and resells Blind Boxes as a generative and agentic collection and fandom practice, defined as ‘probabilistic and elastic prosumption’ in a quasi-social and quasi-in idual manner. We then critically examine and unpack the cultural production and meaning making process undertook by collectors who also accumulate sociality and form identity through affective and economic investments, mediated collection and exchange of figurines in a post-socialist and consumerist society.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-07-2021
Abstract: 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.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 18-10-2022
DOI: 10.1186/S40711-022-00173-2
Abstract: International social exchanges have always been important to China’s cultural soft power and image construction overseas. This study focuses on an internationally renowned mega influencer Li Ziqi and her vlogs on YouTube. These orchestrated vlogs tell stories of rural Chinese life and construct a desirable traditional Chinese rural culture for netizens at home and abroad. Informed by framing and cultivation theory, this study examines how user-generated content on national images can affect social media users’ perceptions of reality. Content analysis is used to analyze the visual portrayals of Chinese rural culture, including its customs and values, aesthetics, and cultural and scenic places in Li’s vlogs. Discourse analysis is further used to examine user comments and demonstrate her vlog content’s impact on user perceptions of Chinese rural culture. This study sheds light on how a complex and hybrid national image with ‘Chineseness,’ and a personal image with self-Orientalized and performed ‘soft but independent’ Chinese rural female image, is constructed by a social media influencer Li Ziqi with affective associations. At a conceptual and practical level, the findings of this study contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussions on how China engages with the globalized world through cultural diplomacy from the bottom-up, while existing research primarily takes a top-down approach.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 04-05-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2023
DOI: 10.1177/01417789231155896
Abstract: This article analyses how performatively heteronormative, male teenage Chinese fans consume sports games through the prism of masculinity, using secondary school students’ engagement with the NBA (National Basketball Association) as a case study. Drawing on focus groups of twenty-three participants, we discover that male teenage sports fans constantly evoke elite NBA athletes as male ideals to define a desirable, heteronormative wen-wu masculinity specific to the post-reform era. In this process, they often engage in a double-standard practice, manifesting as their appropriation of the CP (coupling) rhetoric to ‘ship’ athletes and their problematisation of heterosexual women and LGBTQ fans’ similar usage of it. This double-standard practice constitutes an attempt to monopolise the interpretation of masculinity both within and outside of the sporting context. It sheds light on the heteronormative male cohort’s rejection of alternative masculinities, underscoring how aspects of gender politics unfolding in wider society are reflected in China’s teenage sports fandom.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-02-2022
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Date: 2021
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 12-2022
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Ltd.
Date: 2022
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-2021
DOI: 10.1177/20594364211041683
Abstract: Using Van Gennep’s theory of Rite of Passage as its framework, this article examines the impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Chinese culture as depicted through death and mourning in Wang Fang’s (penname Fang Fang) recently published Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. As part of the efforts to control the outbreak, the Chinese government took over the managing of the deceased, which triggered heated discussions on Chinese social media. Fang Fang’s diary, originally written as daily entries on Chinese social media platform Weibo, serves as a voice for those suffering during the pandemic, mediating between personal accounts, accounts of friends, family and those living in Wuhan during the pandemic. These flesh out how the virus has not only been disturbing for Chinese people’s lives but also disrupted the death rites and mourning rituals for those who have passed. Our article infuses a digital ontological reading with an anthropological twist that helps to understand how the diary mitigates the disturbances to mourning rituals inside and outside the confines of digital metaphysics. We argue that the digital diary mitigates these disruptions by allowing Chinese people to nourish their sorrow by identifying with the symbolic rites of passage and mourning rituals online at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan. In doing so, this article examines three stages of rite of passage, including separation, liminality and integration as they unfold in the diary, through which discourses and subjectivities based on collective and in idual traumatic experiences are built, as a form of digital mourning that could reconcile both the official and the alternative voices of anonymous narratives about the handling of this crisis.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 04-2022
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 10-08-2023
DOI: 10.1057/S41599-023-02006-0
Abstract: This article investigates the emergence of "erotic entrepreneurs" in China, a new category of male influencers who engage in erotic activities and target followers of all genders on platforms such as TikTok/Douyin and Bilibili. Through ethnographic research, we examine how these young in iduals strategically marketize their private and intimate experiences as a form of aspiration and commerce. We use Foucault’s concept, "docile bodies," to interrogate how these erotic entrepreneurs navigate the power and knowledge systems of the creative economy. We argue that the paradoxical position of these docile male, queer bodies helps to increase their visibility on one hand, whilst renders them vulnerable to exploitation, censorship, and commodification on the other. The findings suggest that this paradox disrupts traditional gender stereotypes and the underlying power structures, but also reinforces the neoliberal and patriarchal order specific to postreform China.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Start Date: 2019
End Date: 2021
Funder: Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
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