Media/Tech

posts related to Chinese media (tv, internet, social media, etc.) and technnology

Non-human celebrities–cfp

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Non-Human Celebrities in Digital East Asia
Special Issue of Celebrity Studies–Call for Papers

We are seeking proposals for articles to be included in a special issue on non-human celebrities in East Asia. Celebrity Studies has expressed interest in publishing the special issue.

This proposed special issue explores the phenomenon of non-human celebrities in East Asia in the digital age. Non-human celebrities refer to prominent figures that are not human beings but have nonetheless achieved celebrity status in media, culture, and public life. These include animals, fictional characters, mascots, computer-generated personalities, and even personified objects. With the advent of AI-generated figures, some virtual entities are now designed to be virtually indistinguishable from real humans in both appearance and behaviour, further complicating ontological distinctions and challenging the very definition of celebrity.

While existing scholarship has addressed some of these figures, key gaps remain. As John Blewitt (2013) observes, non-human celebrities, particularly animal stars, are “a human construct,” and their popularity often reflects human desires, anxieties, or ideals. This perspective becomes even more relevant in the context of today’s platform-driven media environments, which amplify the visibility and marketability of non-human figures. However, most studies to date have taken a predominantly anthropocentric and Western-centric view. There is thus a need to reconceptualise non-human celebrities from a posthuman perspective, while also examining how the phenomenon is shaped by the specific cultural, technological, and social conditions of non-Western contexts. Continue reading Non-human celebrities–cfp →

China wants to silence RFA

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Source: NYT (5/2/25)
China Wants to Silence My Organization. Why Is Trump Doing It?
By Bay Fang (Ms. Fang is the president and chief executive of Radio Free Asia.)

An illustration of a journalist in a green suit with a microphone and a camera climbing up a ladder to mount a red wall. On the other side of the wall is a red flag. A man below in a suit is trying to cut the ladder with a chain saw.

Credit…Elaine L

In February 2020, weeks before Covid-19 paralyzed the world, the Radio Free Asia reporter Jane Tang received a panicked text from a source in Wuhan, China: “They are following me,” the message read. “I’m too scared to move.” Ms. Tang had been investigating China’s cover-up of a new disease that had spread through Wuhan when she learned that Li Zehua, a journalist who had quit his state media job to chase the story, was being trailed by the police. Shortly after Ms. Tang received the message, Mr. Li was arrested.

In contacting RFA, Mr. Li turned to one of the last reliable channels for on-the-ground, uncensored news in China. Since it was established in 1996 by the U.S. government in response to China’s massacre of pro-democracy student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, RFA has reported from regions in Asia hostile to independent journalism: China, North Korea and Myanmar, among others, filling an important gap where free press outlets cannot exist.

RFA’s impact has been crucial in China, where the Chinese Communist Party maintains a stranglehold on all media. The party, which leads the world in imprisoning journalists, relentlessly monitors and surveils social media and punishes people for online comments that run afoul of Beijing’s official narrative. Its advanced censorship and surveillance technologies are constantly upgraded to block unsanctioned news from reaching ordinary Chinese people. Continue reading China wants to silence RFA →

AI pedagogy workshop

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PedAIgogy: Teaching Chinese Language, Literature & Culture in the Age of AI
Date: Saturday, May 3, 2025
Time: 9:30am – 4:00pm
Location: Founders Room, Claremont Colleges Library
800 N Dartmouth Ave., Claremont, CA 91711

The integration of AI into higher education presents both challenges and unprecedented opportunities. This interdisciplinary workshop provides a collaborative space for instructors in Chinese language, literature, and culture to share insights, strategies, and experiences in integrating AI into their teaching, learning, and research.

Click here for more information.

Registration (due 4/10/2025 PST)   Please register here to attend.

Posted by: Eileen Cheng <eileen.cheng@pomona.edu>

A River Crisis Prompts Rare Coverage

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Source: China Media Project (3/24/25)
A River Crisis Prompts Rare Coverage
Chinese media outlets have taken the unusual step of more openly covering a toxic thallium contamination in Hunan’s Leishuei River, exposing a crisis kept under wraps for a full week.
by David Bandurski

According to rare reports today from Chinese media, an environmental crisis is unfolding along a stretch of the Leishuei River in Hunan province that impacts the prefectural city of Chenzhou (郴州), home to more than four million people. Abnormal concentrations of thallium — a highly toxic, colorless heavy metal that causes organ damage and cancer through water contamination — have reportedly prompted the city to activate a Level IV emergency response, and residents are stockpiling drinking water.

In neighboring Guangdong province, the Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报), a commercial newspaper published under the state-run Nanfang Daily Group, splashed the crisis across its front page today, with the headline: “Thallium Abnormality in Hunan’s Leishuei River.”

The front page of today’s edition of Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily.

According to reports from both the Southern Metropolis Daily and Caixin Media, the crisis began nearly a week ago, on March 16, as automatic monitoring stations along a section of the river between the cities of Chenzhou and Hengyang, population 6.6 million, showed abnormal thallium levels, “causing trans-municipal pollution and threatening downstream water safety” (造成跨市污染，威胁下游饮水安全).

Continue reading A River Crisis Prompts Rare Coverage →

Shrinking the humanities to make way for AI

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Source: China Media Project (3/19/25)
Shrinking Humanities for AI
As China makes a national push toward technology-driven ‘new productive forces,’ Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University pivots from humanities to artificial intelligence. Is this the right move?
By Alex Colville

The main gate of Fudan University.

Shanghai’s Fudan University (复旦大学) is one of China’s most prestigious universities, with a raison d’etre unchanged, it claims, since the institution was founded in 1905: improving China’s position in the world through education. As artificial intelligence takes the world by storm — and becomes a crucial priority from top to bottom in China — the means of achieving that mission is changing, according to the university’s president, Jin Li (金力).

On February 25, Jin announced that Fudan would drastically reduce its course offerings in the humanities, instead focusing on AI training. In an interview with Guangzhou’s Southern Weekly (南方周末) on March 6, Jin said the university wanted to cultivate students that “can cope with the uncertainty of the future.” For Li, cutting the liberal arts cohort by as much as 20 percent is a social necessity. As he asked rhetorically in the interview: “How many liberal arts undergraduates will be needed in the current era?” (当前时代需要多少文科本科生?).

At present, courses related to artificial intelligence at Fudan are at 116 — and counting. And the university isn’t alone in downsizing the arts. Combing through Ministry of Education statistics on university courses cancelled in 2024, the commercial newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报) noted that the majority were for liberal arts degrees, with some universities even abolishing their humanities colleges altogether. Continue reading Shrinking the humanities to make way for AI →

A Walk through Huaqiangbei

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Source: positionpolitics (3/17/25)
Back to the Future: A Walk through Huaqiangbei in 2025
By Fan Yang

As someone who grew up in Shenzhen in the 1980s-1990s and has lived in the US since 2000, I’ve come to see returning to the Special Economic Zone today as a journey “back to the future.” During my last trip there, I walked down the “memory lane” of Huaqiangbei (Huaqiang North Road, or HQB), the place once known for Shanzhai (or “knockoff”) cell phones back in the early 2000s but that was re-branded around 2015 as China’s “No. 1 Electronics Street.” To many, HQB emblematizes the city’s 40-year history borne of China’s post-1978 Reform and Opening Up. As I found my way there just after the Chinese New Year in 2025, the comingled notion of time – simultaneously captured in the “back to” and “the future” – was precisely what I experienced.

It was one of those warm winter afternoons in southern China, now designated as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). I took the East Rail Line from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) (where I had been a visiting scholar) with an old friend from Shenzhen, a CUHK alumna who now works at Amazon Web Services in Hong Kong. We were going to Shenzhen to have dinner with friends from our elementary and high schools. Arriving at Lok Ma Chau, we joined the crowd heading “up” – what the Hong Kong locals would say, referring to the geographical movement up north to the mainland. Back when I first arrived in Shenzhen in 1986, visiting Hong Kong (or even purchasing goods from there at duty-free stores in the city) was an encounter with the more modern, the more advanced, the more “developed” world – “the future.” These days, however, more people regularly travel from Hong Kong (including Hong Kong natives and residents originally from mainland) to Shenzhen for leisure, entertainment, and consumption in general. As friends in Hong Kong have repeatedly told me, everything is “half-price” once you cross the border, and the service is better and choices more abundant. Many have opted to live in Shenzhen and commute to Hong Kong to cut the costs of living, hailing the GBA into everyday being. . . [READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE]

The secret campaign to save a chained woman

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Source: NYT (3/25)
The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck
By Vivian WangGraphics and illustration by Pablo Robles

Screenshot from a video showing a woman chained by the neck.

The video blogger had visited Dongji Village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.

But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.

She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. When the blogger asked if she could understand him, she shook her head. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.

The video quickly spread online, and immediately, Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.

Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.

Public outrage only grew. People wrote blog posts demanding to know why women could be treated like animals. Others printed fliers or visited the village to investigate for themselves. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.

The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.

And yet, it did. Continue reading The secret campaign to save a chained woman →

Get married or get out

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Source: NYT (3/4/25)
Chinese Company to Single Workers: Get Married or Get Out
As China’s government worries about the falling birthrate, some private employers have ordered workers to do their part, or else.
By Vivian Wang, Reporting from Beijing

A bride and groom hold hands in front of a church as photographers take their picture from about 30 feet away.

Taking wedding photos in Shanghai in 2023. Last year, only 6.1 million Chinese couples got married — a 20 percent decline from a year earlier.Credit…Qilai Shen for The New York Times

The ideal worker at the Chinese chemical manufacturer, according to the internal memo, is hardworking, virtuous and loyal. And — perhaps most important — willing to have children for the good of the country.

That was the message that the company, Shandong Shuntian Chemical Group, sent to unmarried employees recently, in a notice that spread widely on social media. It instructed them to start families by Sept. 30, or else.

“If you cannot get married and start a family within three quarters, the company will terminate your labor contract,” the memo said.

Shandong Shuntian was not the first company to try to dictate its employees’ personal lives amid rising concern about China’s plummeting marriage and birth rates. Weeks earlier, a popular supermarket chain had told its staff not to ask for betrothal gifts, to lower the cost of weddings. Continue reading Get married or get out →

DeepSeeking Truth

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Source: China Media Project (2/10/25)
DeepSeeking Truth
When it comes to assessing the risks of DeepSeek, are we asking the wrong questions? Governments, journalists, and coders need to know that it’s a much more sophisticated propaganda tool than we all thought.
By Alex Colville

Can you tell me about the Tiananmen Massacre? When did China invade Tibet? Is Taiwan an independent country? When pointing out DeepSeek’s propaganda problems, journalists and China watchers have tended to prompt the LLM with questions like these about the “Three T’s” (Tiananmen, Taiwan, and Tibet) — obvious political red lines that are bound to meet a stony wall of hedging and silence. “Let’s talk about something else,” DeepSeek tends to respond. Alternatively, questions of safety regarding DeepSeek tend to focus on whether data will be sent to China.

Experts say this is all easily fixable. Kevin Xu has pointed out that the earlier V3 version, released in December, will discuss topics such as Tiananmen and Xi Jinping when it is hosted on local computers — beyond the grasp of DeepSeek’s cloud software and servers. The Indian government has announced it will import DeepSeek’s model into India, running it locally on national cloud servers while ensuring it complies with local laws and regulations. Coders on Hugging Face, an open-source collaboration platform for AI, have released modified versions of DeepSeek’s products that claim to have “uncensored” the software. In short, the consensus, as one Silicon Valley CEO told the Wall Street Journal, is that DeepSeek is harmless beyond some “half-baked PRC censorship.” 

But do coders and Silicon Valley denizens know what they should be looking for? As we have written at CMP, Chinese state propaganda is not about censorship per se, but about what the Party terms “guiding public opinion” (舆论导向). “Guidance,” which emerged in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, is a more comprehensive approach to narrative control that goes beyond simple censorship. While outright removal of unwanted information is one tactic, “guidance” involves a wide spectrum of methods to shape public discourse in the Party’s favor. These can include restricting journalists’ access to events, ordering media to emphasize certain facts and interpretations, deploying directed narrative campaigns, and drowning out unfavorable information with preferred content.

Those testing DeepSeek for propaganda shouldn’t simply be prompting the LLM to cross simple red lines or say things regarded as “sensitive.” They should be mindful of the full range of possible tactics to achieve “guidance.” Continue reading DeepSeeking Truth →

The Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet

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Source: NYT (1/20/25)
TikTok, RedNote and the Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet
Leer en español | 阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
China’s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing.
By Li Yuan

Dongyan Xu.

The Chinese social media app RedNote is full of cute, heartwarming moments after about 500,000 American users fled to it last week to protest the looming U.S. government ban on TikTok.

Calling themselves “TikTok refugees,” these users paid the “cat tax” to join RedNote by posting cat photos and videos. They answered so many questions from their new Chinese friends: Is it true that in rural America every family has a large farm, a huge house, at least three children and several big dogs? That Americans have to work two jobs to support themselves? That Americans are terrible at geography and many believe that Africa is a country? That most Americans have two days off every week?

Americans also posed questions to their new friends. “I heard that every Chinese has a giant panda,” an American RedNote user wrote. “Can you tell me how can I get it?” An answer came from someone in the eastern province of Jiangsu: “Believe me, it’s true,” the person deadpanned, posting a photo of a panda doing the laundry.

I spent hours scrolling those so-called cat tax photos and chuckled at the cute and earnest responses. This is what the internet is supposed to do: connect people. More important, RedNote demonstrated how competitive a random Chinese social media app can be from a purely product point of view. Continue reading The Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet →

Peace and Love poetry reading (1)

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On December 31, I participated in a New Year’s  Eve and New Year’s Day poetry marathon on the internet in Chinese and other languages, hosted by the poet 桉予 An Yu. Altogether 300 poets reading over 24 hours. One section  was devoted to poets from Ukraine. An Yu has now been circulating video recordings of readings from this section on WeChat, under the title Real Tiktok Refugees. I have seen reports from Ukraine and even online anthologies of poetry from Ukraine censored on WeChat, but for now, these voices are there to be heard and seen. It is a diverse selection, maybe as diverse as possible in this situation.

Real TikTok refugees – Ukrainian section of New Year poetry readings on the Chinese internet: Introduction and nine poets reading their works, along with translations.
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ifq5ZTOPY7c0d4eemiJr7g

Real TikTok refugees, part 2: Ten more poets reading their works, along with translations
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jG7IN-2rH-nkApXSW4FGeg

Martin Winter 维马丁

American refugees

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Source: China Media Project (1/16/25)
American Refugees
As TikTok users seek asylum on China’s RedNote, and glee ensues from commentators in the world’s most restricted internet environment, the lines of repression in the promised land are quickly revealing themselves.
By David Bandurski

As a January 19 deadline looms to ban or sell TikTok, and as a key decision awaits from the US Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the related July 2024 act on “foreign adversary controlled applications,” many users of the popular video-sharing platform are already rendering judgment with their feet, seeking refuge in the most unlikely of places — the international version of a popular Chinese app that has a long track record of censorship and surveillance.

This week, more than 700,000 self-styled “TikTok refugees” have flocked to China’s RedNote platform, known at home as Xiaohongshu (小红书) — literally “little red book” — an Instagram-like platform that has long been a go-to space for posts on shopping, makeup, fashion and travel. The app currently has 300 million monthly active users, nearly 80 percent women.

The mass migration, announced with the hashtag #TikTokrefugees, has made the Chinese lifestyle-sharing app an odd escape route for American users of TikTok, some of whom have posted videos criticizing the actions of US lawmakers, and declaring provocatively that they are prepared to volunteer their personal data to the Chinese government. As of yesterday the hashtag had received more than 250 million views and was closing in on six million comments. Continue reading American refugees →

Cutting micro-dramas down to size

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Source: China Media Project (1/9/25)
Cutting Micro-Dramas Down to Size
China’s government has signaled stricter rules this year for micro-dramas, a bite-size entertainment format with mega market potential.
By Alex Colville

Micro-dramas — TV series cut into short snippets of one to 15 minutes — are becoming a huge business worldwide. The global market for this new, bite-size format is said to be worth two billion dollars a year, with forecasts that this could double by the end of 2025. And that’s excluding China, which has emerged as a global leader in the production and consumption of weiduanju (微短剧).

Chinese micro-dramas: heavy on history and romance, light on Xi.

With the PRC’s micro-drama market growing at a blistering 250 percent annually, bringing in some RMB 37.4 billion (5.2 billion dollars) in 2023 according to state media reports, the authorities are also acting quickly to figure out how they can control this new entertainment format and ensure it serves their interests. On January 4, the National Radio and TV Administration (国家广播电视总局), or NRTA, publicized its plan to create hundreds of short videos on Xi Jinping’s political thought — for example, by promoting his vision of uniting classical Chinese culture with the latest technology and teaching netizens about the benefits of Xi’s version of the rule of law. Continue reading Cutting micro-dramas down to size →

‘Aim the rifle an inch higher’

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Source: China Digital Times (12/12/24)
Words of the Week: “Aim the Rifle an Inch Higher” (枪口抬高一厘米, qiāngkǒu táigāo yī límǐ)
By 

What to do when the law and basic humanity are in opposition? The Chinese internet has an answer: “Aim the rifle an inch higher” (枪口抬高一厘米, qiāngkǒu táigāo yī límǐ). The phrase is shorthand for subverting orders that violate one’s conscience.

“Aim the rifle an inch higher” has its origin in historical fact. In 1992, two former East German border guards were convicted of fatally shooting Chris Gueffroy as he fled across the no man’s land that divided East and West Berlin. While rendering the guilty verdict, the presiding judge of the trial stated: “At the end of the 20th century, no one has the right to ignore his conscience when it comes to killing people on behalf of the power structure.” After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an apocryphal version of the German judge’s closing statement began to circulate on the Chinese internet: “You had the power to aim your rifle one inch higher.” The phrase’s true origin stretches back even further, to the 1954 film “Reconnaissance Across the Yangtze.” In that film, a veteran Nationalist soldier advises a new recruit not to shoot to kill at advancing Communist troops so as to accrue potential amnesty in case they are defeated and taken prisoner: “When we’re in battle, aim your rifle an inch higher; that’s how you accumulate hidden merit.”

The phrase is now ubiquitous. As rapt Chinese netizens watched South Korean civilians block the military from occupying the National Assembly in Seoul last week—scenes that brought to mind the “Tank Man” of 1989—some commentators mocked the military’s restraint. In a now-censored essay, one author hailed the South Korean military’s decision not to use force, noting it as a real-life example of “aiming the rifle an inch higher.” Some have also used the phrase metaphorically to encourage China’s domestic security forces or online censors to shirk their duties so as to allow citizens greater freedom of expression. In a note addressed to China’s internet police after authorities shut down a 2016 in-person symposium of former Tsinghua University Red Guards, organizer Sun Nutao wrote: Continue reading ‘Aim the rifle an inch higher’ →

Telling Zhejiang’s story

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Source: China Media Project (12/4/24)
Telling Zhejiang’s Story
As international communication centers, or ICCs, open across China to beef up its global impact, one province has become home to a disproportionate number. What’s behind the ICC boom in Zhejiang?
By Alex Colville

International communications centers, or ICCs, are sprouting up all over China. These centers, a crucial piece in the leadership’s bid to remake its external propaganda matrix, have opened in nearly every province and dozens of cities nationwide. Their spread has been expansive — but far from even. One province, coastal Zhejiang, now hosts 16 “local international communication centers” (地方国际传播中心) at the municipal level or lower — five times the national average.

Zhejiang is one of China’s wealthiest provinces, but this alone cannot account for its surge in new ICCs. Even wealthier provinces, like neighboring Jiangsu and Fujian, have not experienced similar growth. So why has Zhejiang become home to so many ICCs? Continue reading Telling Zhejiang’s story →