commbox East Asia

China and the Internet: Using New Media for development and Social change

Song Shi

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press (2024), 368 pp.

"Two oversimplified narratives have long dominated news reports and academic studies of China's Internet: one lauding its potentials to boost commerce, the other bemoaning state control and measures against the forces of political transformations. This bifurcation obscures the complexity of the dyna ... more

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Global Journalism in Comparative Perspective: Case Studies

Dhiman Chattopadhyay (ed.)

London; New York: Routledge (2024), xvii, 251 pp.

"This book explores how journalism is practiced around the world and how there are multiple factors at the structural and contextual level shaping journalism practice. Drawing on case studies of how conflicts, pandemics, political developments, or human rights violations are covered in an online-fir ... more

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China’s image-building in Africa: The intersection of the media and economic development investment in Mali

Thomas Ameyaw-Brobbey

International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, volume 19, issue 2-3 (2024), pp. 137-160

"Since the 2000s, China has deepened public relations in its engagement with Africa primarily through economic investment and assistance. The present work looks at China’s African public relations and the mechanism that shapes public perception of China, focusing on Mali. Mali is not a major desti ... more

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Patronage Media in Post-Communist Mongolia

Undrah Baasanjav, Poul Erik Nielsen, Munkhmandakh Myagmar

Central European Journal of Communication, volume 2, issue 36 (2024), pp. 247-267

"We provide a historically informed analysis of the media in post-communist Mongolia thirty years after the transition. In 1990, Mongolia chose a peaceful transition towards liberal democracy following the seventy years of the communist regime. Our analysis first establishes that amid the challenges ... more

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Social Media, Youth, and the Global South: Comparative Perspectives

Emmanuel K. Ngwainmbi (ed.)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2024), xix, 292 pp.

This book illuminates the complex relationship between social media, identity, and youth in the Global South. By examining the profound impact on the psychosocial well-being and economic prospects of young people across diverse regions, the collection present empirical evidence from scholars spannin ... more

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Political Technology: The Globalisation of Political Manipulation

Andrew Wilson

Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press (2024), xii, 486 pp.

"Political technology' is a Russian term for the professional engineering of politics. It has turned Russian politics into theatre and propaganda, and metastasised to take over foreign policy and weaponise history. The war against Ukraine is one outcome. In the West, spin doctors and political consu ... more

News Narration, Local Visibility and Public Life in Chinese Short Videos

Yutan Liu, Zheng Zhang

Journalism Practice, volume 18, issue 8 (2024), pp. 2108-2125

"Short videos are very popular in China. The provincial TV stations in China use short videos to disseminate information. Curiosity about the influence of short video news is the primary motivation of this study. This paper integrates theories of news and place, focuses on local visibility, explores ... more

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China’s Strategy to Shape Africa’s Media Space

Paul Nantulya

Washington, DC: Africa Center for Strategic Studies, April 16 (2024)

"China’s biggest media conglomerate, Xinhua, has 37 bureaus in Africa. This dwarves any other news agency—African or non-African—and is a dramatic increase from just a handful two decades ago. Another Chinese media giant, StarTimes, is China’s biggest player in African digital TV and the sec ... more

Hybrid Investigative Journalism

Maria Konow-Lund, Michelle Park, Saba Bebawi (eds.)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2024), xiv, 203 pp.

"This book explores entrepreneurial attempts to combine traditional investigative journalism with alternative ways of organising this work. It transcends watershed investigative projects in favour of the ways in which new actors (citizens, technologists, bloggers and local reporters, among others) j ... more

Local Journalism, Global Challenges: News Deserts, Infodemic and the Vastness in Between

Adriana Gonçalves, Carmen Neamtu, Chuchu Zhao et al.

Covilhã: LabCom;Beira Interior University (2024), 203 pp.

"[...] Pedro Jerónimo’s anthology addresses a highly relevant topic. It offers insights into the state of local media in countries where little research has been published to date. Of the eight contributions in the volume, four focus on Europe and Latin America (Romania, Portugal, Europe, and Bra ... more

Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere

Jessica Imbach (ed.)

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (2024), 312 pp.

"Over the past decade, digital technologies have profoundly reshaped the Chinese cultural landscape. With a focus on the creative agency of new media and online communities, this volume examines this development through the notion of the Sinocybersphere - the networked spaces across the globe that n ... more

Learning along the Digital Silk Road? Technology transfer, power, and Chinese ICT corporations in North Africa

Tin Hinane El Kadi

Information Society, volume 40, issue 2 (2024), pp. 136-153

"While much attention has been paid to how China’s rise as a digital superpower could threaten US hegemony over cyberspace, much less has been written on what the Digital Silk Road, or the presence of Chinese tech firms in developing countries more broadly, means for technological upgrading and de ... more

Communications, media and internet concentration in China, 2019-2021

Min Jiang, Xiaofei Han, Jing Zhang

Global Media & Internet Concentration Project (GMIC);Carleton University (2024), iv, 58 pp.

"Broadly speaking, the Chinese media and internet economy experienced considerable growth from $524.17 billion in 2019 to $652.11 billion in 2021, despite the inhibiting impact of the COVID pandemic on growth in many sectors of the global economy. The Chinese media and internet economy— estimated ... more

Problematic Encounters with Wolf Warrior II: Antithetic Reception of “China in Africa” Amongst Chinese and African Audiences

Yu Xiang, Xiaoxing Zhang, Jiarong Zhang

Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, volume 20, issue 2 (2024), pp. 50-70

"China in Africa’ has become an irresistible topic in any discussion of China, with the former’s growing engagement with the latter. The unprecedented popularity of Wolf Warrior II in China, which is set in Africa, is a testament to how official propaganda of national selfconfidence can be affir ... more

Constructing Africa in Chinese international news reporting: Peace or conflict journalism?

Valerie A. Cooper, Innocent Chiluwa

Critical Discource Studies (2024), 17 pp.

"China’s extensive media presence in Africa aims to distinguish itself through the use of constructive journalism in contrast with the perceived dominance of conflict journalism by Western media outlets. However, many scholars have raised questions of consistency surrounding Chinese media’s use ... more

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Digital Platforms and the Global South: Reconfiguring Power Relations in the Cultural Industries

Philippe Bouquillion, Christine Ithurbide, Tristan Mattelart (eds.)

London; New York: Routledge (2024), xiii, 239 pp.

"This book addresses the issues raised by digital platforms in the Global South, with an emphasis on the cultural stakes involved. It brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers - including political economists, socio-economists, geographers, media sociologists or anthropologists - who ... more

The curious case of blockchain in rural China: Unravelling power, profit, and surveillance

Alvin Hoi-Chun Hung

Big Data & Society, issue April–June (2024), 13 pp.

"Blockchain originated from the aspiration for decentralization, and in Western countries, its association with freedom from governmental and corporate dominance remains unwavering. However, in China–where blockchain has taken an intriguing foothold–the socio-technical imaginaries of blockchain ... more

Privacy cynicism and diminishing utility of state surveillance: A natural experiment of mandatory location disclosure on China’s Weibo

Yuner Zhu

Big Data & Society, issue April–June (2024), 17 pp.

"This article examines the public response to mandatory location disclosure (MLD), a new surveillance technology implemented on China’s Sina Weibo. Initially introduced to geo-tag posts related to the Ukraine War, the MLD eventually expanded to encompass all posts and comments on the platform. Dra ... more

Data communism: Constructing a national data ecosystem

Brett Aho

Big Data & Society, issue July–September (2024), 14 pp.

"Over the past decade, China has gradually begun to take a more proactive approach to digital development, passing a range of policies that aim to restructure how data is treated within its national economic system. These policies reflect the construction of a new data ecology in which data is gradu ... more