Engaging Social Media In China

Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, this volume shows the complexity behind the central role the party-state plays in shaping social media platforms. The party-state increasingly penetrates commercial social media while aspiring to turn its own media agencies into platforms. Yet state-sponsored platformization does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party’s desired outcomes. Citizens continue to appropriate social media for creative public engagement at the same time that more people are managing their online settings to reduce or refuse connection, inducing new forms of crafted resistance to hyper-social media connectivity. The wide-ranging essays presented here explore the mobile radio service Ximalaya.FM, Alibaba’s evolution into a multi-platform ecosystem, livestreaming platforms in the United States and China, the role of Twitter in Trump’s North Korea diplomacy, user-generated content in the news media, the emergence of new social agents mediating between state and society, social media art projects, Chinese and US scientists’ use of social media, and reluctance to engage with WeChat. Ultimately, readers will find that the ten chapters in this volume contribute significant new research and insights to the fast-growing scholarship on social media in China at a time when online communication is increasingly constrained by international struggles over political control and privacy issues.

"Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, the book shows that, although party-state plays a central role in shaping social media platforms, state-sponsored platformization does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party's desired outcomes"--

Life outside the mobile phone is unbearable.’ Lily, 19, factory worker. Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’. Wang’s fascinating study explores the full range of preconceptions commonly held about Chinese people – their relationship with education, with family, with politics, with ‘home’ – and argues why, for this vast population, it is time to reassess what we think we know about contemporary China and the evolving role of social media.

Pitch, Tweet, or Engage on the Street offers a modern guide for how to practice public relations and strategic communication around the globe. Drawing upon interviews with public relations professionals in over 30 countries as well as the author’s own experience as a global public relations practitioner in the United Nations and in U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, this book explains how to adapt public relations strategies, messages, and tactics for countries and cultures around the globe. The book begins by explaining key cultural differences which require practitioners to adapt their approaches, before discussing how to build and manage a global public relations team and how to practice global public relations on behalf of corporations, non-profit organizations, and governments. Then, the book takes readers on a tour of the world, explaining how to adapt their campaigns for Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Along the way, readers are introduced to practitioners around the globe and case studies of particularly successful campaigns – from a public relations "siege" that successfully ended an epidemic of violence in Kenya to the remarkable P.R. strategy adopted by Bordeaux wineries in China that led to a staggering 26,900 percent increase in sales.

The Internet and social media are pervasive and transformative forces in contemporary China. The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China explores the changing relationship between China's Internet and social media and its society, politics, legal system, and foreign relations.

In Chinese, the term wanghong refers to creators, social media entrepreneurs alternatively known as KOLs (key opinion leaders) and zhubo (showroom hosts), influencers and micro-celebrities. Wanghong also refers to an emerging media ecology in which these creators cultivate online communities for cultural and commercial value by harnessing Chinese social media platforms, like Weibo, WeChat, Douyu, Huya, Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishuo. Framed by the concepts of cultural, creative, and social industries, the book maps the development of wanghong policies and platforms, labor and management, content and culture, as they operate in contrast to its non-Chinese counterpart, social media entertainment, driven by platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch. As evidenced by the backlash to TikTok, the threat of competition from global wanghong signals advancing platform nationalism.

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, nation states found new ways to assert power under the guise of public health, from closing or tightening borders to expanding the boundaries of acceptable citizen surveillance. As these controls increased in intensity, citizens’ passions to cross borders seemed to grow in proportion. Pandemic Crossings explores how these processes of boundary making and crossing, often mediated by digital technology despite inequity of access, had profound and often contradictory consequences on individual lives, national politics, and U.S.–China relations. This rich and geographically diverse collection of studies informed by everyday, individual experiences contribute new insights to the interplay between digital technologies and state governance during the covid-19 pandemic. It opens up new avenues of research not only on the covid-19 pandemic but also on global health crises more broadly.