Search

This article aims to determine how digital nationalism influences gender politics in the context of gender-issue debates on Chinese social media platforms. To this end, I present an original case study, collecting empirical data from the most popular Chinese community question-answering (CQA) website, Zhihu. By using a mixed-method research design, consisting of content analysis (CA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), I explored gender-issue debates between Chinese internet users. The analysis reveals how such debates inform divided opinions between women and men internet users, and how misogynistic men invoke a nationalist discourse to distort the debates.

This article explores Chinese Internet users’ discussions about Jacinda Ardern’s maternity leave in the wake of her being elected as the Prime Minister of New Zealand, based on an analysis of postings retrieved from the most popular Chinese community question-answering (CQA) site—Zhihu. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA), with the assistance of content analysis (CA), we reveal that Zhihu users’ assessments of Ardern’s electoral success are of a gendered divide in which women and men largely constitute the opposing opinion camps. In particular, male Internet users chiefly direct the discussion, attempting to rationalise the unsuitability of female politicians in Western-style democratic elections. In this process, they also legitimise the return of patriarchal orders to China, reflecting a domestic orientation of their engagement with international politics. The research findings shed light on the gender-politics nexus established in Chinese-language social media discourses, peer-reviewed

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a three-pronged invasion of its southwest neighbor, Ukraine, from the north, east, and south, marking a devastating escalation of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The invasion immediately captured global media attention. Political scientists, such as Maria Repnikova and Wendy Zhou (2022), quickly noted that the Russian side appears to be enjoying official and popular support from China. However, while the Chinese government communicates in vague and ambiguous ways, Chinese social media is more overtly pro-Russian. As a Chinese feminist researcher who closely follows China’s current political climate, I understand the emotionally charged Chinese nationalist appreciation of Russia’s challenges to the coalition led by the United States (US) as both an acknowledgment that China’s only major ally is Russia and that colloquial and provocative posts can be a way to circumvent official censorship and surveillance. However, what strikes me the most is the sexist and racialized nature of my compatriots’ pro-Russian commentaries and even pro-Ukrainian responses, which constantly appear on my personal social media feed.

An iron-catalyzed decarboxylative C-N coupling of α-amino acids with dioxazolones is described herein to synthesize amide derivatives under visible-light. The desired products can be given in good to excellent yields under simple, mild, and oxidant-free conditions. This protocol provides a practical route for the transformation of α-amino acids to the corresponding amides. Computational studies were carried out to shed light on the mechanism of this reaction.

This article provides a feminist analysis of Chinese reality TV, using the recent makeover show— You Are So Beautiful (你怎么这么好看) as a case study. I argue that the notion of gender essentialism is highlighted in the production of You Are So Beautiful, which distances the Chinese show from its original American format— Queer Eye. This phenomenon is indicative of how existing gender power relations influence the production of popular cultural texts in post-reform China, where capitalism and authoritarianism weave a tangled web. The outcomes of the research articulate the interplay between post-socialist gender politics and reality TV production in the Chinese context.

Portrayed by the media as the story of “how a female PhD juggles intimate relationship with four male PhD academics”, the LM incident, named after the female main character of the story, was a high-profile case, which provoked public debates on Chinese social media in 2019. In this article, we explore how the stereotyping of female PhDs plays out in Chinese Internet users’ discussions about the LM incident. We collected a total of 632 relevant posts from the most popular Chinese community question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu and analysed them by drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA). The research findings reveal how a sexualised portrayal of female PhDs, which is dramatically “different” from the traditional, asexual stereotypes of well-educated women, is established in Zhihu users’ postings. Many Zhihu users, including both women and men, mobilise an overwhelmingly sexualised portrayal of female PhDs, which speaks to the normalisation of patriarchal discourses in the status quo of Chinese academia and beyond. The research findings shed light on post-socialist gender politics, which facilitates the perpetuation of gender essentialism in China in the post-reform era.\ud \ud

This article explores the role gender plays in addressing the privacy paradox in the context of young Chinese people’s locative dating communication. Based on a case study of 19 Chinese college students, I explore differing privacy management strategies adopted by female and male participants in their use of WeChat People Nearby. This gendered phenomenon reveals how People Nearby works within patriarchal Chinese society to pose more privacy-related risks to women than to men in locative dating communication. The research findings shed new light on the socio-technological processes through which existing gender power relations are reproduced in young Chinese people’s use of locative social media applications.

Regional discrimination is a significant social issue that leads to divided societies. In China, people from Henan Province, who are verbally abused by non-Henan users on the Internet, are often victims of regional discrimination. This article presents a case study of Chinese Internet users’ discriminatory practice against Henan people in the commentary sections of two major Chinese news portals – Tencent and NetEase. By advancing an affective critical discourse analysis approach with the assistance of content analysis, I analysed user comments on news reports that covered a news event relating to regional discrimination against Henan people. The analysis showed that Internet users’ discriminatory practice was notably amplified by the locative IP-address function in NetEase’s commentary section. The research findings shed light on the interplay between Internet users’ discursive practice and the technological architecture of interactive digital platforms in the context of regional discrimination.

In this article, we examine Chinese assessments of Western democratic systems in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This research is based on an up-to-date case study of how Chinese Internet users discussed the UK Prime Minister – Boris Johnson’s infection with COVID-19 in late March and early April 2020. The research collected original data from the Chinese community question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu. Using a mixed-method approach, consisting of content analysis (CA) and thematic analysis (TA), we show how Zhihu users evaluate the incident (1) as a way to express their sentiments towards Boris Johnson, (2) as a case to assess British politics and (3) as a vehicle for rationalizing their views on Western democratic systems in relation to China’s domestic politics. The research findings shed new light on a Chinese gaze at Western democratic systems in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

This article analyses Chinese Internet users’ discussions about the former UK Prime Minister—Theresa May. We gathered data from China’s most popular community question-answering (CQA) site—Zhihu and analysed how Chinese Internet users discuss May. The research findings suggest that Chinese Internet users often deploy gendered discourses in discussing May and that these gendered discourses often contain sub-textual commentary on international politics more broadly. We, therefore, point to gendered mediation of Chinese political discourses, which is shaped by the current political climate and revival of patriarchy in Chinese society. This research contributes to feminist media studies by providing a Chinese example of the growing misogynistic voices in politics across the world and highlighting the role of gendered discourses in political commentary. \ud \ud

In July 2019, the Chinese mobile payment application, Alipay launched a new update that incorporated “beauty filters” into its face-scan payment system. The “beauty filters,” which beautify users w...

This article aims to explore how racism plays out in China’s sports fandom in the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement sweeping across the globe. To this end, we conducted a case study of basketball fans’ postings on the most popular Chinese-language sports fandom platform, Hupu. The research discovered that the often-negative assessments of the BLM movement posted on Hupu were largely informed by racism deeply held in traditional Chinese thinking, which provided the grounding for Chinese sports fans to appropriate racial discourses to assess progressive equal-rights politics in Euro-American societies. The trajectory of such a discursive practice was twofold, enabling these sports fans to rationalize their political views pertaining to both international and domestic arenas. The research findings urge scholarly attention to the dynamic interplay between regional popular cultures and global equal-rights politics in the digital age in China and beyond.\ud \ud

PM2.5 (particulate matter

Drawing on a techno-feminist approach, this article foregrounds the socio-technological process of beauty app development in China’s high-tech industry. I conducted semi-structured interviews with ten professionals, six women and four men, who previously worked at a leading Chinese high-tech company and participated in the development of a pioneer, popular beauty app – BeautyCam (Meiyan Xiangji). The research findings reveal that Chinese high-tech professionals often perceive the development of beauty apps as providing female users with a sense of empowerment and facilitating the inclusion of female professionals in the high-tech industry. Despite this feminist veneer, beauty app development poses no challenge to the status quo in Chinese society. Instead, it supports an underlying gendered logic not only by reinforcing existing standards of beauty but also in creating a niche job market that restricts female professionals’ career development. The discussion sheds light on the intersection of gender and technology in an East Asian context where neoliberal pseudo-feminism is evidently on the rise.\ud \ud

The COVID-19 pandemic provoked public attention to medical treatments across the world. In China, a debate on the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) took place amid the government’s active promotion of it for COVID-19 patients. Rather than addressing such a debate from the perspective of medical science or health communication, this paper explores how TCM was politicised on Chinese social media. The research is based on a case study, collecting data from the most popular Chinese community question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu. By triangulating content analysis (CA) and thematic analysis (TA), we reveal how nationalist sentiments and dissenting opinions are expressed through approval or criticism of TCM among the Zhihu community. The research findings uncover the political momentum behind the debate by shedding light on how Zhihu users engage with public affairs through medical commentaries. This paper thus contributes to understanding the politicised discourse of TCM in China in the wake of the global pandemic.\ud \ud

Background Waist circumference is becoming recognized as a useful predictor of health risks in clinical research. However, clinical datasets tend to lack this measurement and self-reported values tend to be inaccurate. Predicting waist circumference from standard physical features could be a viable method for generating this information when it is missing or mitigating the impact of inaccurate self-reports. This study determined the degree to which the XGBoost advanced machine learning algorithm could build models that predict waist circumference from height, weight, calculated Body Mass Index, age, race/ethnicity and sex, whether they perform better than current models based on linear regression, and the relative importance of each feature in this prediction. Methods We trained tree-based models (via XGBoost gradient boosting) and linear models (via regression) to predict waist circumference from height, weight, Body Mass Index, age, race/ethnicity and sex (n = 60,740 participants). We created 10 iterations of each model, each using 90% of the dataset for training and the remaining 10% for testing performance (this group was different for each iteration). We calculated model performance and feature importance as an average across 10 iterations. We then externally validated the ensembled version of the top model. Results The XGBoost model predicted waist circumference with a mean bias ± standard deviation of 0.0 ± 0.04 cm and a root mean squared error of 4.7 ± 0.05 cm, with performance varying slightly by sex and race/ethnicity. The XGBoost model showed varying degrees of improvement over linear regression models. The top 3 predictors were Body Mass Index, weight and race (Asian). External validation found that on average this model overestimated waist circumference by 4.65 cm in the United Kingdom population (mainly due to overprediction in females) and underestimated waist circumference by 1.7 cm in the Chinese population. The respective root mean squared errors were 7.7 cm and 7.1 cm. Conclusions XGBoost-based models accurately predict waist circumference from standard physical features. Waist circumference prediction using this approach would be valuable for epidemiological research and beyond.

Additional file 2: Supplemental Figure 1. Example of one decision tree (out of 1000) in the first iteration of the gender-aggregated XGBoostmodel. Nodes contain cut-offs for the variable of interest and leaves contain output values.

A large body of literature has explored the interplay between neoliberal feminism and womanhood. However, little existing scholarship has tackled the impact of neoliberal feminism on women’s perception of manhood. This article presents a case study of Mimeng, an iconic Key Opinion Leader (KOL) using social media, such as WeChat, to engage with Chinese women. I employ a critical discourse analysis (CDA) method to investigate how Mimeng uses a neoliberal feminist discourse in composing posts for her WeChat account. One notable feature of Mimeng’s discourse that I identify is her attempt to construct a feminized male ideal. This discourse strategy reveals a commercial objectification of men in order to attract women followers, amid the increase of Chinese women’s consumer power. Yet, such a discourse places an emphasis on refining a woman’s capacity for housetraining her partner or husband, which is a motive embedded in the agenda of Chinese neoliberal feminism. The outcomes of the research shed light on the revival of patriarchal values in contemporary China and beyond.\ud \ud

Across the world, young people are increasingly using locative social media applications to socialize with strangers for dating opportunities. This phenomenon is also found in Chinese society, where such applications are very popular with young Chinese urbanites. This article presents a case study of how young Chinese urbanites navigate social interactions with strangers on WeChat People Nearby, based on the findings of interviews with 19 Chinese university students aged between 18 and 23. By drawing on the notion of interface, we uncover how gender dynamics are established in young Chinese urbanites’ People Nearby use and how the gender dynamics are engineered by the privacy paradox of interfaced social interactions between strangers in the locality. The outcomes of the present research help us to understand the gender-related opportunity-risk axis established in young Chinese urbanites’ everyday use of locative social media applications.\ud \ud

Additional file 1: Supplemental Table 1. Training and testing statistics for sex-aggregated XGBoost model.

Introduction Blood biomarkers are measured for their ability to characterise physiological and disease states. Much is known about linear relations between blood biomarker concentrations and individual vital signs or adiposity indexes (eg, BMI). Comparatively little is known about non-linear relations with these easily accessible features, particularly when they are modelled in combination and can potentially interact with one another. Methods In this study, we used advanced machine learning algorithms to create non-linear computational models for predicting blood biomarkers (cells, lipids, metabolic factors) from age, general adiposity (BMI), visceral adiposity (Waist-to-Height Ratio, a Body Shape Index) and vital signs (systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, pulse). We determined the predictive power of the overall feature set. We further calculated feature importance in our models to identify the features with the strongest relations with each blood biomarker. Data were collected in 2018 and 2019 and analysed in 2020. Results Our findings characterise previously unknown relations between these predictors and blood biomarkers; in many instances the importance of certain features or feature classes (general adiposity, visceral adiposity or vital signs) differed from their expected contribution based on simplistic linear modelling techniques. Conclusions This work could lead to the formation of new hypotheses for explaining complex biological systems and informs the creation of predictive models for potential clinical applications.

We appreciate the comments of Liu et al.1 and Peng et al.2 in relation to our previous study. Currently, the controversy on the relationship among SARS‐CoV‐2 infection, the ocular surface and conjunctivitis are reflected in two aspects as follows: (i) can SARS‐CoV‐2 infection cause conjunctivitis? (ii) can SARS‐CoV‐2 be transmitted through the ocular surface? This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

An emerging body of literature has revealed that social media enhance digital business governance to facilitate Internet companies in generating profit throughout regulating the everyday lives of users. However, although existing debates are often contextualized in the West, little attention has been paid to China, where social media are widely used. To fill this knowledge gap, this article investigates the digital business governance practiced by Chinese Internet companies such as Tencent. Specifically, I employ an affective lens to analyze how WeChat, the most popular social media application launched by Tencent, allows this Internet company to influence users for its own business purposes. Chinese college students, which constitute a representative group of young people, were early adopters of WeChat, and they have led the trend of social media use in China. Based on a yearlong netnographic study of Chinese college students, the results reveal that the affective design of WeChat captured their attention and influenced their everyday practices. These results provide insight into how digital business governance operates in the Chinese context, in which authoritarianism and capitalism work closely together.\ud \ud

This chapter examines the discussions about Mingzhu Dong (the chair of the board at a China-based international conglomerate company) and Angela Merkel (the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany) on Zhihu, focusing on how women in powerful positions are stereotypically portrayed in the Chinese digital environment. This chapter highlights the gendered evaluation of women’s career achievements and political participation in the Chinese context and the patriarchal rationale behind such an evaluation. It sheds light on the continuous marginalisation of women in China’s business domain and political arena, and its impacts on Chinese Internet users’ perception of womanhood in business and politics.

This chapter provides an overview of digital cultures in the Chinese context, where both political censorship and neoliberal capitalism weave a tangled web. The chapter identifies a wide range of socio-political issues in post-reform China and discusses how these issues feed into Chinese Internet users’ communicative practices on popular participatory social media platforms. In this way, the chapter foregrounds the socio-political grounding for the establishment of a gender-politics axis in China’s digital public sphere. This chapter addresses the socio-political contexts in which the present research is situated.

This chapter uses a case study on the most popular Chinese community question-answering site—Zhihu to reveal the divided opinions on gender relationships shared by Chinese Internet users. In doing so, this chapter explores how female and male Chinese Internet users respectively engage in gender-issue debates on Zhihu that have prompted the recently intensifying public attention to gender inequality in Chinese society. In particular, the analysis highlights male Chinese Internet users’ appropriation of nationalist rhetoric in debates. This phenomenon points towards the compatibility between nationalism and patriarchy. In this way, the chapter provides a better understanding of how anti-feminism campaigns and misogynist voices converge with nationalist sentiments in Chinese digital cultures.

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) characterized with pneumonia, firstly occurred in Wuhan city, China, in December 2019 has so far spread in over 200 countries and territories in the world. One of the important goals in facing outbreaks of COVID-19 is to reduce the case fatality rate. We reported here that the fatality rate of COVID-19 in other provinces of mainland China was 0.82% (121/14,708), significantly lower than 6.62% (4512/68,128) in Hubei province (p < 0.0001). The main reason for the lower fatality rate was likely due to the timely management of the patients in other provinces, highlighting the importance of timely management of patients in reducing the fatality rate of COVID-19.

This chapter uses case studies of two women-focused Chinese digital influencers to examine the rise of pseudo-feminism in Chinese society. The chapter integrates how women-focused Chinese digital influencers use pseudo-feminist discourse to target female followers on the Internet, and how their practice creates a blurred boundary between feminism and patriarchal values. This chapter illustrates how neoliberal influences reshape Chinese digital discourses of gender, focusing on the implicit form of patriarchal values that target Chinese women. This chapter sheds new light on how the divide between female and male Internet users is constructed within the Chinese digital environment today.

This chapter provides an overall assessment of gendered digital cultures in post-reform China. Based on a discussion of deeply held socio-political issues in Chinese society, this chapter explains how imbalanced gender power relations between Chinese women and men are established in Chinese society and how the gender power relations intersect with Chinese Internet users’ civic engagement with public affairs. Through a critical review of existing literature in Chinese digital cultures, this chapter advances a feminist cultural studies approach that helps to unpack the gender-politics axis established in China’s digital public sphere today.