Yanshuang Zhang

The New York Times\u27 entry into the Chinese media market is off to a seemingly rocky start, writes Yanshuang Zhang in The Conversation. Two days ago, the company launched its Chinese website – cn.nytimes.com – and a corresponding Sina Weibo microblogging account (China’s domestic version of Twitter). But just hours later, the paper’s nytchinese Weibo account was suspended. The first things to disappear were the accounts “forward” and “comment” functions – which were disabled for several hours before vanishing. The missing account resurfaced four hours later, with several new posts and a new page design; and no explanation for the suspension has yet been provided by the NYT, China Weibo or the Chinese Government. Read in full Image: Flickr / Nau Na

A large corpus of banters and jokes has become widespread on the Internet in contemporary China. This kind of “humor” is important to those who have been ridiculing social reality and very often the political system. It can be constructed as a form of resistance, through quiet, nonviolent means, and act as a stabilizing safety valve without doing any harm to their creators. In the meantime, however, such internet banters probably have no effect in undermining the unsatisfactory aspects of society or in inducing any institutional changes. Instead, when “amusing ourselves to death” becomes the tendency of our mainstream culture, making internet banters embeds a danger of keeping deep thoughts from flowing into the public discourse, and thereby deconstructs the seriousness of meaning-making process of what is happening to us as individuals and to this world as a whole.

The emergence of social media over the last decade has substantially altered not only the means people communicate with each other but also the whole online ecosystems. For the common public in particular, social media enables and broadens the social conversation that anyone interested can engage in on urgent social problems such as environmental pollution. In China, the ever-thickening air pollution smothering most urban cities in recent years has provoked a nationwide discussion, and popular social media like Weibo has been fully utilised by various social actors to participate in this “green speak”. This paper examines the civil discourse about the deteriorating air pollution on China’s largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to understand how different social actors respond to and reconstruct the reality. Through a discourse analysis aided by a text analytics/ visualisation software—eximancer, this paper investigates the civil discourse from three angles: the demogr...

The proliferation of social media in China has provided traditional religious authorities with multifarious digital features to revitalise and reinforce their practices and beliefs. However, under the authoritative political system different religions pick up the new media to varying degrees, thereby showing different characteristic and style in their social media use. This paper examines the public discourse about Buddhism and Christianity (two of the great official religions in China) on China’s largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to reveal a distinct landscape of religious online public in China. Through a close look at the social media posts aided by a text analytics software, Leximancer, this paper comparatively investigates several issues related to the Buddhism and Christianity online publics, such as religious networks, interactions between involved actors, the economics and politics of religion, and the role of religious charitable organizations. The result...

Controversies have been longstanding around the application of the concept of public sphere to a Chinese context since China did not ever have the equivalent historical circumstances for the sprouting of public sphere as the eighteenth century Europe did. With a postmodern constructivist perspective, this paper combs a series of important academic works henceforth from the discussion of Chinese public sphere began in late 1980s and tries to unpack the trajectory of the development of public sphere in China as well as the discussions arising therefrom. It argues that the concept of public sphere can be extrapolated but with distinct manifestations taking root in its respective socio-political conditions. The paper echoes with some scholars' proposal that studying Chinese public sphere should break free of the conceptual constrains and establish the theoretical autonomy by examining it in social movements rather than in theoretical argumentation.

The proliferation of social media in China has provided traditional religious authorities with multifarious digital features to revitalise and reinforce their practices and beliefs. However, under the authoritative political system different religions pick up the new media to varying degrees, thereby showing different characteristic and style in their social media use. This paper examines the public discourse about Buddhism and Christianity (two of the great official religions in China) on China's largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to reveal a distinct landscape of religious online public in China. Through a close look at the social media posts aided by a text analytics software, Leximancer, this paper comparatively investigates several issues related to the Buddhism and Christianity online publics, such as religious networks, interactions between involved actors, the economics and politics of religion, and the role of religious charitable organizations. The result supports Campbell's proposition on digital religion that religious groups typically do not reject new technologies, but rather undergo a sophisticated negotiation process in accord with their communal norms and beliefs. It also reveals that in China a secular Buddhism directly contributes to a

The emergence of social media over the last decade has substantially altered not only the means people communicate with each other but also the whole online ecosystems. For the common public in particular, social media enables and broadens the social conversation that anyone interested can engage in on urgent social problems such as environmental pollution. In China, the ever-thickening air pollution smothering most urban cities in recent years has provoked a nationwide discussion, and popular social media like Weibo has been fully utilised by various social actors to participate in this " green speak ". This paper examines the civil discourse about the deteriorating air pollution on China's largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to understand how different social actors respond to and reconstruct the reality. Through a discourse analysis aided by a text analytics/ visualisation software-Leximancer, this paper investigates the civil discourse from three angles: the demographics, the discursive strategies and the potential social effect. The result suggests that proactive civil engagement in this issue has produced an environmental discourse with a wide range of topics involved, and that the benign interactions between social actors could give rise to a proactive interactional mode between Chinese state and civil society which would definitely be beneficial to the democratisation process in contemporary China.

Against the backdrop of this harsh reality, in an investigation into the group of Chinese in Australia, which mainly focuses on Chinese employers, employee and overseas students, this white paper (created by LinkedPower) takes a unique look into local Chinese people’s attitudes towards employment and career in an Australian context. Through an extensive independent market research involving surveys with more than 1300 target participants nationwide, this white paper provides a validated, enlightening insight into the occupational outlook of Chinese currently living and working in Australia.

In recent years, the “discourse of resistance” has taken a cue from the current waves of political movements and revolutions in some less free nations which have been largely attributed to the flourishing social media. In China, social media have also increasingly been used to facilitate public expression and civil participation in public efforts to achieve possible social changes. This study focuses on how social media was used in a significant Chinese political event to practice resistance against censorship and the authority’s powerful discourse. The corpus comprises mainly microblogs from a social media platform-Sina Weibo, and news articles from several official media outlets. The study applies content analysis and discourse analysis to investigate how social media discourse are used to create issue-based virtual community and a vernacular public sphere through language variations and social interaction between involved actors in order to project individual resistance, self-determination and the civil struggle for freedom of speech online. It further examines how the state-society relation is reflected in this context via the social media discourses in relation to the Chinese state.


Keywords: social media, discourse of resistance, Sina Weibo, censorship, China

The Internet has long been the focus of utopian arguments proposing its democratic potential. Most recently, social media has been proposed as facilitating the Arab Spring and other political changes toward democratic ideals in authoritarian societies. While many observers are fascinated by the revolutionary potential of social media, others are skeptical of this excessive optimism. This paper investigates the most significant Chinese political event of 2012, the 18th National Congress of Communist Party of China in which China’s new leadership was elected, through the twin lenses of social media and traditional media. It empirically compares and contrasts depictions of the event in the most popular Chinese social media service, Sina Weibo, against those from the most circulated traditional mass media outlets. Through a combination of computational text analytics and qualitative content analysis, we observe a remarkable topical similarity between the two media spheres, albeit a distinctive narrative pattern and some subtle resistance in Weibo posts. It is argued that, insofar as China still retains a restrictive approach to press and internet freedom, social media is more inclined to be dominated by traditional media in framing certain major political events, where the mediasphere is critically censored, and the public discourse heavily swayed by institutional accounts representing the official orthodoxies. In such circumstances, social media’s purported power thus has a substantial boundary that constrains itself from serving as an obvious quasi-revolutionary facilitator of dramatic institutional changes envisioned by Western commentators. The impact of social media on Chinese society is, therefore, an extremely complex and long term evolutionary issue.

Controversies have been longstanding around the application of the concept of public sphere to a Chinese context since China did not ever have the equivalent historical circumstances for the sprouting of public sphere as the eighteenth century Europe did. With a postmodern constructivist perspective, this paper combs a series of important academic works henceforth from the discussion of Chinese public sphere began in late 1980s and tries to unpack the trajectory of the development of public sphere in China as well as the discussions arising therefrom. It argues that the concept of public sphere can be extrapolated but with distinct manifestations taking root in its respective socio-political conditions. The paper echoes with some scholars' proposal that studying Chinese public sphere should break free of the conceptual constrains and establish the theoretical autonomy by examining it in social movements rather than in theoretical argumentation.