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Cutting across the boundaries of media, literature, visual arts, and cultural studies, this study examines the resurgence of cultural entrepreneurship in post-Mao China, focusing on how the new media have contributed to the rise of women cultural entrepreneurs as a new social phenomenon. It investigates the rise of China's women “cultural entrepreneurs” and their roles as tastemakers and cultural trendsetters, using three case studies from China's creative industries: author Anni Baobei, artist Cao Fei, and actress Xu Jinglei. The Chinese women cultural entrepreneurs are examined against the backdrop of the Reform-era history and growing importance of China's creative industries. Analysis explores how these entrepreneurs use the new media for content dissemination while spinning transmedia narratives about themselves. By examining female self-fashioning and the creation of the cultural entrepreneur as a new type of celebrity in China, the article aims to shed new light on the cultural and social negotiations in China's mediasphere.

This Special Issue aims to open new windows on cultural entrepreneurship in China's new media and creative industries from circa 2000 to 2022. It presents four studies on Chinese cultural entrepreneurship in literary production, visual arts, social media, and cinema. These studies analyse from various angles the rise of cultural entrepreneurship – straddling commerce and culture – in China's official and vernacular cultures, including the role of gender and the rise of women cultural entrepreneurs in China's new mediasphere, within an adverse socio-political environment. Analysis of voices, themes, and a network of negotiations and exchanges in literary texts, visual artworks, movies, social media, and the socio-cultural and political discourses in China's mediasphere sheds new light on self-fashioning in transmedia narratives, the new cultural dynamics of the digital age, and the tensions between China's vernacular cultures – which thrive in digital spaces and non-official communities – and the officially ordained culture of the party-state.

The pollution haven hypothesis is studied from a bilateral trade perspective in this study, taking the reference of two Asian giants, namely, India and China. For this purpose, trade in pollution-intensive industries is analysed using data collected from the United Nations Comtrade dataset based on Standard Industrial Trade Classification codes for 1992–2019. The analysis helps us argue that between the two, China's demand is more pollution-intensive and India is the major supplier of pollution-intensive products. From an environmental perspective, this implies that China seems to be gaining from trade, and India is becoming a pollution haven in its trade with China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has since 2013 advocated for an “Asia-Pacific Community with a Shared Future” (APCSF). This concept has rekindled debates on regional integration. The article begins by critiquing conventional Eurocentric theories of community-building while highlighting fundamental features of the Asia-Pacific approach. It recounts erstwhile proposals put forward by Japan, Australia, and America, drawing comparisons with the emerging Chinese vision. The APCSF envisions an inclusive intergovernmental society of cooperative yet interdependent economies in the Asia-Pacific. Unlike the notion of Indo-Pacific, the idea of Asia-Pacific countries belonging to a community has deeper economic and psychological roots. Furthermore, what sets the APCSF apart from previous proposals is its solid foundation that aligns with its ambitious goals. It can draw upon existing initiatives such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership for Trade Liberalisation and the Belt and Road Initiative for enhancing connectivity. Consequently, the APCSF stands a better chance of eventual realisation.

This article investigates the trajectory of Chen Guo, a successful moral educator who became an internet celebrity and bestselling author of self-help books thanks to the originality of her teaching methods. The article reveals that Chen Guo's contributions as a state teacher and as a popular cultural producer, rather than being at odds with each other, are to a very large extent unified, as she has managed to create a moralising but depoliticised approach to teaching which encourages personal self-improvement and social awareness by drawing from the principles and practices of self-help literature. Chen Guo's career and work thus offer a unique case to investigate the interactions and the intersections between official and popular culture in contemporary China, in particular, by observing how the current party-state's ideological apparatuses incorporate the creative use of popular cultural forms in their message with the aim of enhancing the efficacy of the official ideological education.

This article examines centenarian memoirs as a popular cultural phenomenon and through it the promises of post-reform vernacular history. The argument posits that these memoirs are a genre that has been commercially successful through their transformation of self and historical narratives in the People’s Republic of China, in particular, the transformation of these memoirs from vestiges of state-cultivated intellectual confessions to vernacular cultural memories in the popular print market. Focusing on celebrated centenary memoir writers centring on Yang Jiang, the study develops Chen Sihe's conception of the vernacular, emphasising its shifting intersection with the political–institutional and the intellectual elite. The popular historiography emerging from these trans-generational memory “fevers” reveals vanishing modern Chinese intellectual values percolating through the vernacular ethos in the cultural industries of the early twenty-first century. The vernacular has been the post-reform locus for contesting and retaining critical intellectual traditions.

While slogans have been an indispensable propaganda and mobilisation tool in Chinese political life for a long time now, the unprecedented pressure brought by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic made them take on a totally new appearance. What, then, do these slogans look like? How do they work? By conducting a rhetorical analysis of 228 anti-COVID-19 slogans used by grassroots governments in China, this study further finds multiple persuasion strategies embedded in them. On the one hand, at the grassroots level eye-catching language and expressions are used to attract public attention, linking individuals’ behaviour to the interests of their families, as well as those of society and the country as a whole. On the other hand, those who violate government policies are negatively portrayed through a series of authoritative discourses. Behind these persuasion strategies lies a political pragmatism with regard to crisis response, attempting therewith to demonstrate and expand the legitimacy of the party-state. However, some slogans also contradict the Communist Party of China's advocacy of modernising the country's governance system and capacity, even though they may have been useful in slowing down or containing the spread of COVID-19.

This study examines the Chinese party-state's reactions to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, focusing on its response to the European Union (EU) and its own population during the first six months of the war's outbreak. Drawing on actor-centred institutionalism, it analyses institutional changes and political steering actions by Chinese party-state actors, a perspective that has rarely been applied to China's foreign policy. The “explaining-outcome process tracing” method was applied to reconstruct political processes and interactions between actors based on extensive document and secondary data analysis. Findings reveal that the EU and its partners warned Chinese leaders not to help the Russian government evade sanctions. In this modified institutional setting, the Chinese party-state has responded with “soft” discursive steering towards the EU and, in addition to this “soft” element, with targeted “hard” steering actions towards its own population. While the political steering towards the EU has failed, the steering towards its own population seems to have been partially successful.

Community screenings in this study are understood as the exhibition of moving images outside conventional theatres and commercial circuits. Based on fieldwork observations and interviews conducted between January 2019 and January 2020 with film workers, community groups, and venue providers who knitted together a rhizomatic community screening network in Hong Kong, this paper explores the (self-)making of urban cultural space by way of the reinvention of “screens” and the rebuilding of a place-based, people-centred community with ethical concerns for small businesses, artists, craftspeople, workers, and members of the public during the first two decades of postmillennial era. The paper concludes with some observations about the phenomenal shift in not only the mode, but also the site of film dissemination from Hong Kong to overseas diasporic communities before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and following the emigration wave in the 2020s.

This article explores the theme of marginality in the art of Yang Zhichao, a critically and socially engaged experimental artist who has been active in China since the mid-1980s. Yang’s oeuvre – which includes performance artworks, drawings and installations – revolves around the issue of sociocultural marginality in reform-era society, from the condition of migrant workers, beggars and psychiatric patients to the borderlands of Chinese civilization and the condition of the avant-garde artist. Drawing also on Chinese art criticism and two interviews with the artist, this study examines in particular the performance Within the Fourth Ring Road(1999) through its photographic and literary documentation. While writing on Yang Zhichao’s art has largely focused on his most extreme performances of ‘body art’ such as Planting Grass(2000), the artwork at the centre of this study highlights an anti-spectacular approach to performance art and reflects Yang’s stated belief in the importance of placing oneself in the circumstances of marginalized people in order to move beyond a voyeuristic gaze. Through a critical analysis of said approach the article reveals a quality that pervades Yang Zhichao’s multi-disciplinary artistic career – that is, its ‘contemporariness’, in Giorgio Agamben’s sense as a focus on the darkest, most emblematic aspects of one’s society and time.