Search

With the promulgation of the "rural revitalization" initiative, China has been promoting the marriage between technology and rurality to chart a digital future for what is christened "a new countryside." Rural revitalization is not simply a socio-economic project but a profoundly ideological one, which choreographs a socio-spatial order, fashions an aspirational rural subjectivity, and realigns imaginaries of rurality. This article examines the role of short video in fostering an emergent rural performativity in line with official ideology through idyll-icized displays of rural lifestyles and landscapes, which are loaded with affective and ideological connotations. A scopic contact zone is thus carved out between rural vloggers and urban viewers, one characterized by mutual appropriation and strategic differentiation. This article foregrounds the limitations of this urban-rural contact zone and its immanent "cruel optimism," while advocating a kind of radical utopia to enable imaginations of the alternative futures of digital rurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative & International Education is the property of Canadian & International Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

With the acceleration of social transformation and “mediatization,” urban women’s parenting practices have become an important factor affecting the demographic structure and national development. The global COVID19 pandemic has further contributed to the networking of social life and the creation of “Internet moms” who rely on the Internet for parenting interactions. Using a mixed-methods design, this paper conducted participant observation and in-depth interviews with 90 mothers from various industries born after 1980/1990 across multiple geographies in China to examine the impact of urban women’s Internet practices on the psychology and practice of parenting during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as how they were empowered by media technologies to practice motherhood and complete their role socialization through the sharing of parenting information, experiences, and actions. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the changing impact of Internet-based parenting practices on Chinese urban women’s daily lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the analysis of these influences, it was found that the whole society, including urban parenting groups, paid attention to self-expression and selfworth and further hoped to arouse society’s recognition, face up to the identity of “mother” and “female,” and give more attention and support to women. The study also found that, as interpersonal communication channels were hindered during the COVID-19 pandemic, the power of the Internet, represented by social media, has created a new platform for information empowerment, action mutual, and ideation of motherhood for urban women formerly bound to family and parenting matters. From individual, family, and individual parenting experiences to group, social, and shared scenarios, urban women are engaged in emotional and memory interactions, including motherhood-related expression, experiences, and collaboration. This shift from virtual to physical has reshaped their parenting view, helping them break through the confines of family experience and traditional customs in addition to providing psychological motivation to express their gender concepts, shape their self-image, construct gender power, and interpret intimate relationships, pushing them to become more reflective of the times, as well as more capable and authoritative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of ESSACHESS is the property of ESSACHESS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The popularity of Internet and mobile media in China has weaken the collective TV viewing culture in Chinese families. Behind the decline of television, the China Central Television's Spring Festival Gala Show (Gala Show) is hard to maintain its glory and gradually being questioned and challenged. Why does TV viewing and Gala Show still matter in some families but not the others? This paper conceptualizes and analyzes how and why the Gala Show became a media tradition, in the Chinese family-nation cultural reproduction for more than three decades. Based on twofold interviewing data collected by 2015 and 2021, respectively, the study found that the invented media tradition- the Gala Show, stimulates the cultural changes and continuity of Chinese family cultural traditions from the golden age of television (from the 1980s to the late 2000s) onwards. In the long processes of its cultural transformation, the evolving media tradition blends past and present cultural materials in the social institution, thus (re)shaping the cultural practices and values of the participants. Moreover, the interviews revealed that ordinary people read the roles of Gala Show as a media tradition in Chinese families differently, because the social implications of the Gala Show shifted and reacted to the social and cultural transformation from the age of television onwards. Finally, regarding the dynamic social changes in media technologies, Spring Festival customs, and collective TV viewing cultures, the Gala Show reflects the divergent structure of feeling of different generations and families' social and technological nostalgia about the technology and cultural formats of television in digital era. The established media tradition to some extent maintains the sense of cultural continuity and particularly anchors a safe zoom particular in nuclear families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As multivalent concepts, projects and formations such as China's Belt and Road Initiative continue to cleave through new spaces, it is increasingly important to attend to the construction, framing, maintenance and dissemination of the sign systems that enable them. Whether or not these systems constitute forms of cultural imperialism, move across '-scapes,' create 'frictions,' or expand geo-political power; the discourses that globally extended actors mobilize will increasingly play the pivotal and contentious role of mapping and stabilizing meaning. This article explores this problematic by considering one actor, the Belt and Road Studies Network (BRSN); one space, its website, brsn.net; and the sign system these construct. The language and technological affordances of brsn.net are analyzed with respect to a selection of salient contextual aspects: the monumental revival of a new 'Silk Road', the propaganda work of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the United Front Work Department (UFWD), and the expansion of think tanks in response to the continuous uncertainties of geo-political ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the internet changes the way we deal with and plan time in Germany and China. It looks at culture and media theories of temporal change from Germany and China, differentiates these according to micro, meso, and macro levels and integrates them in a micro-meso-macro-model. We consider network, connectivity, acceleration, and mediatization theories, and place particular emphasis on the effects of social media, online journalism, and algorithmic intermediaries. We then inquire in which ways the sub dimensions of the nine-dimensional construct 'temporal understanding' change through internet-mediated communication. Findings suggest a temporal homogenization in both countries laid out as Meta trends: The focus on the 'future' is reduced, 'present' focus increases and the 'past' fluctuates paradoxically between decrease and increase. Moreover, 'fatalism' and the 'pace of life' increase and with it 'interacting experience (polychronicity)' and 'future as trust-based interaction', with the last sub-dimension only increasing in China. 'Instrumental experience (monochronicity)' and the 'future as planned expectation' decrease. These Meta trends encompass inconsistencies and paradoxical notion and move past binary classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media are avid portrayers of gender binarism and the belief in male-female distinctions, which are mainly attributed to perceived differences of a physical nature. In this paper, we investigate representations of female kung-fu practitioners (nuxia) in films to discuss how processes of mediation and mediatization depict their femininity, so as to mitigate their appropriation of Chinese martial arts masculinity. Often, nuxias are portrayed as empowered women who are equipped to take control of their own lives and to courageously take on challenges from a variety of opponents. However, multimodal deconstruction of the various characteristics of nuxias must be placed in an Asian-specific context in order to understand the femininity specific to these characters and to move beyond Western gender ideologies displayed by the media. Perpetuating Confucian patriarchal ideals, nuxia roles constantly and consistently associate conformation to Confucian values with virtuousness and non-conformation with wickedness. We therefore can use the ideals of Confucianism as a more accurate foundation in deconstructing the identities of nuxias, which allows us to better understand the mediation and mediatization processes of ideologies associated with Chinese femininity and masculinity in martial arts films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article demonstrates representations of racialized speech styles of Chinese masculinities in popular wushu ‘martial arts films’. For the detailed analysis, I concentrate on four blockbuster films that represent general depictions of wushu heroes and their expected Chinese masculinities. By focusing on discursive practices employed in the films, such as the heroes’ reticence and use of formulaic or philosophical speech styles, in combination with visual arts, I discussed how these mediatizations index masculinity in ways that mesh with the audiences’ expectations for Chinese martial arts figures, as such figures have developed through mediatization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Beijing Olympics was the largest sports mega-event in history and represents an opportunity to assess the dynamics of the media sport cultural complex in a post-broadcast age. This article argues that the internet and web are transforming and intensifying the digital mediatization of Olympic sport in terms of the amount and types of content available across multiple platforms. From the perspective of Olympic and sports officials, these developments possess a Janus-faced character, simultaneously offering additional avenues to promote the Olympic brand and experience globally and challenging their capacity to maintain control over Olympic related media in online environments. This situation is the result of long-established broadcast media strategies colliding with the networking capacity of Web 2.0 and the operation and popularity of 'social software' such as blogs and Facebook. The evidence presented is drawn from Olympic policy documents, media reports and interviews with sports officials and athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internet provides a free and convenient platform for the public to obtain political information and participate in political life. Meanwhile, there occurs fierce confrontation of various values and ideologies, shaping a complicated and changeable field of public opinion. The strategies of civic participation and the generation of public opinion show quite different characteristics in such a mediatized society. This article aimed to study civic participation in Chinese cyberpolitics and to find its patterns and the logic behind it. Due to the natural advantage of the environmental issues in its commonality, the internet events in the last decade related to the PX (para-xylene) project were selected as the research object. This study used grounded theory as the method and conducted a cross-case analysis on the original data captured on Weibo-one of the most popular social media sites in China. Finally, four patterns of civic participation in internet events were found and summarized, as well as the intervention and influence of media logic in different modes. However, it is political logic, rather than media logic, that reveals greater vitality in the civic participation of cyber deliberation. Mediatization does exist but is far from dominance. It has certain significance for the supervision and management of public opinion and the rational and harmonious development of civic participation in public issues.