 Okay, hello everybody and welcome to the cultural panel for Serge's 14th annual China US symposium. It's great to see all you here and I hope you're excited to learn more about Chinese digital media, and it's interesting role in China US relations. My name is Megan Starsis. I'm a sophomore here at Tufts, planning to major in international relations and economics, and I'm the panel lead for today's social cultural discussion. I'm also currently the marketing director for Tufts search. Hello everyone, my name is Jake Rubinstein and I'll be co hosting with Megan today. I'm currently a freshman here at Tufts majoring in international relations. We're so excited to have you all here today. My name is Caitlin Wells and I'll also be co hosting this panel with Megan and Jake. I'm a first year student planning on majoring in international relations and civic studies. It's a great honor to be able to learn from the fantastic speakers we have coming up. We hope you enjoy the panel. So with that, I'm just going to give you all some more context about what exactly we will be discussing. This is a new globalized era in terms of communication and social media. The question of how the Chinese government will manage and engage in its evolving digital culture is a matter of pressing concern. It's decisions to censor and contains certain types of digital content will not only affect those in China, but also the rest of the world, because China's cultural influence continues to expand beyond the scope of the atmosphere. This panel will explore the multifaceted capacities of Chinese digital media platforms like Weibo and the relevant cultural implications on Chinese society, as well as the American perceptions of that media. However, the panelists here are free to discuss any aspect of this topic that they find particularly interesting. The first speaker we have today is Daria Berg from the University of St. Galen. Although she's not able to be here to present virtually today, we will be presenting her pre-recorded lecture over Zoom. She has a philosophy doctorate in Chinese studies from the University of Oxford and is chair professor of Chinese culture and society at the University of St. Galen in Switzerland. She has published extensively on Chinese literature, art, popular culture, and cultural history, including her monograph Carnival in China, a reading of the Xing Shi in Yuan Dun. Some of her edited works include Reading China, Fiction, History, and the Dynamics of Discourse, The Quest for Gentility in China, and Transforming Book Culture in China. Her monograph, Women in the Literary World in Early Modern China, won the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in their 2015 specialist publication accolades. Her current research explores urban culture and contemporary China, including new digital media, literature, art, gender, audiovisual culture, and internet culture. The second speaker we have is Bing Chun Mo from the London School of Economics. She is a professor in the department for media and communications, where she directs the Masters of Sciences double degree program in global media and communications with Fudan University. She is also the co-director of the LSE Fudan Global Public Policy Research Center. Her research interests include gender in the media, the political economy of media industries, communication governments, governance, and comparative media studies. She has published widely on these topics in leading academic journals. From 2020 to 21, she served as a senior fellow of global governance teachers, 2035, organized by the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, under the sponsorship of the Bosch Foundation. Her book, The Politics of Chinese Media, Consensus and Contestation, was published by Paul Grave in early 2018. She is currently working on another monograph under contract with Columbia University Press about AI industries in China. Our final speaker is Florian Schneider from the University of Leiden. He holds a PhD from Sheffield University and is a senior university lecturer in the politics of modern China at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He is the managing editor of AsiaScape, Digital Asia, and director of the Leiden Asia Center, also the author of three books. These include Staging China, The Politics of Mass Spectacle, China's Digital Nationalism, and Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series. In 2017, he was awarded the Leiden University Teaching Prize, where his innovative work is an educator. His research interests include the questions of governance, political communication, and digital media in China, as well as international relations in the East Asian region. Wonderful. So the way this panel will work is after I'm done speaking, each panelist has about 10 to 15 minutes for presentation with a slideshow and other visual tools they choose to use. If you in the audience have any questions that come up during any of the presentations, please feel free to leave them in the chat, and we'll address them after everybody is done speaking. Then the panelists will have a chance to address each other's remarks. I'll ask a few guiding questions for discussion, and then the last 20 minutes will be used as a Q&A. So without further ado, we're going to allow Professor Berg to present first so I will play her recorded video. Is everybody able to see this? The author and welcome to my presentation on Celebrity and Post-Socialist China is Transmedia Storytelling. The authors are Daria Berg from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and George Straffella from Palaki University in Ollivore. The research area is connected to the areas of celebrity culture, creative industries and cultural entrepreneurship, women entrepreneurs and transmedia storytelling. The aim of this research is to understand celebrity culture and the cultural transformation in post socialist China's media sphere and the social political implications. Research questions include how do Chinese celebrities use the different media, social, traditional, etc., for cultural production, self-fashioning and communication. The sources are print media, TV, visual arts, etc., web-based literature, blogs and micro blogs. The message is an analysis of print and web-based sources and has to do with both the contents and also the frames to draw connections to the commercial context. Market reforms and cultural commodities play an important role here. Is there a return to the republican era or even early modern China? Market principles pervade the cultural sphere in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Are there seeds of a creative class? This is marginal to the system and stigmatized by intellectuals. The 11th five-year plan in 2006 said that home-growing creativity appears as an economic policy imperative. There's partial reform. Consumers and culture entrepreneurs are between politics and the market. There are so-called social benefits. Beijing has discovered the value of the individual, creative-centered expression and grassroots energy in transforming Chinese economy and society. Qin Wang says. Consumption celebrity is an important concept in this context. Web fiction, print fiction and non-fiction about life in the culture of consumption and architects that we are looking at. The author of the book, The Society of Spectacle, Guy Debord, describes consumption celebrity. Celebrity, he says, is a key element of the banalization of the modern world. One example is Ani Baabe, the internet writer, whose real name is Li Ti. She's the best-selling novelist, a blogger, editor and columnist, a photographer and, more recently, a Buddhist recluse who now writes no longer under the name Ani Baabe or Ani Baby but Qin Shan, which is a Buddhist name, modeled on traditional women writers. She also writes similarly in this case as also Nian Nian and Wei Hui, who've also retreated into reclusion. The consumption celebrity finds all of her persona linked with consumption. Han Han is another example of consumption celebrity. He's a high school dropout who appears in the media as a multi-personality. He's the best-selling, teenage novelist, a car racing champion, the world's number one blogger, a public intellectual, a singer and film director, also named as a playboy or a consumption celebrity. All his persona linked with consumption and he also ranks among China's top 10 best-picked writers. The propaganda department's honours are something that we can look here and in this slide, out of 30 top personalities, there are only two or four women. If we look at the years 2016 to 2019, for example, the stage director Wang Chaoge, the TV producer Gao Sunmei, the dance show producers Zhang Xian and Ko Yailing. Their listed personalities are praised for contribution to tourism, the local economies and the official media, etc. Are they marginal? Above you see images of the video blogger Papi Tian on the left, Jin Xing, a dancer and choreographer in Davos. At the intersection of culture and cash, that's where Elizabeth Currid has placed such celebrities. The creation and commercialization of cultural products, marketing, business ventures and self-promotion play important roles here. The celebrity has both an ideological and economic role. It is about exchanging cultural goods while adding to the menus of beliefs, mindsets and cultural preferences from which others choose. Here I'm referring to Joel Morker's research. Mr. Baobai O'Ching Shan, as I mentioned, is the pen name of Li Jie. She became famous on the literary website on the internet, Rong Shu Xia under the Banyan tree. She became one of the pioneers of online literature. In 1997, she published a short story, Gaobie Wei'an farewell to Vivian under the pseudonym of Annie Baby or Annie Baobai. She said she had no publishing connections, playing around more an important concept in the literature of the reform era, writing out a boredom just for fun. Around 2000, she actually changed from a webwriter or a hack to a more prestigious print author by publishing her books only in print after that, the year 2000. She has now about 15 books and is a member of the official Chinese Writers Association. She's also active as an editor, translator, columnist and so on. On social media, she is known for her book promotion and self-fashioning as a Buddhism-inspired traveler. I managed to get an interview with her. Also, she normally never gets interviews, so I was very happy to be able to interview her. She told me, so once I was able to get my writings published as books, I just stopped my online writings. Annie was a successful move from online to the then more prestigious print and rebranding. It also points to the dense and complex connections between multiple traditional and digital media in today's mature media sphere. And as an example is Xu Jinglei, the actress, film director and producer, writer, editor and blogger. My father and I, to go la la go, there's a range of diverse characters that she impersonated and played that hint at the real life Xu Jinglei. Transmediality as an all-around creative promotional strategy has been characterizing her career. It's not just products, but transmedia celebrity persona that is important for her marketing. So, self-sessioning. I have shown her inside is a Xu Jinglei's individuality and personal life in Dominguez with her film roles and together create the Xu Jinglei phenomenon. So Xu Jinglei can also be investigated in the context of the transmedia celebrities. I would like to point to Humberto Eco's distinction between the empirical author, the model author and a character and or as a narrator. With transmedia strategy and the social media, for example, the illusion of contact with the author, there's a flattening of the multi-layered characters under the identity of the author. So the examples of the cultural entrepreneurs identity are the promotion of the product and the promotion of the mindset or lifestyle, for example, a strong woman character, modern and lifestyle, exotic romance and so on. Another example of a cultural entrepreneur is the woman artist, Tau Fei. She's a multimedia artist and international art celebrity. She won a Chinese contemporary art award as best young artist in 2006 and best artist award in 2016. This art reflects on Chinese social cultural transformation from a detached sometimes satirical standpoint. She wants to comment, not criticize the New York Times reports. This points at globalization in the internet age, for example, her work on Renewable City and one of the themes that she discusses or hints at is the alienation. With transmedia or Instagram, she shapes her artistic storytelling while projecting an image of a successful global artist. Here is an example from her Instagram, shining a light on Chinese workers. And number two, and normal art, are works commissioned and exhibited by Gucci. Tau Fei's other project was the BMW art car number 18, called Unmanned, which was commissioned by BMW. It augmented reality in her art, and she also added a short film on a car. The BMW art car number 18, which is based on the BMW M6 GT3 is inspired by the speed of racing cars and the tremendous changes of Chinese society over the past decades, she says on her website. Tau Fei's, it's always case we can see how most experimental of creative industries have broken separation between the elite serious culture and intense commercialization and social media promotion. Most avant-garde cultural languages and darkest commentary on modern society are fully integrated in the market logics of the creative industries. To conclude, there's a relative marginalization, the commercial limelight in which these celebrities find themselves versus the lack of political co-optation. There's a complex relation between traditional and new media such as the digital media with regard to symbolic capital and creative activities. Most mediality appears in cultural creation or communication, and the shaping of the cultural entrepreneurs public persona as a multimedia personality. Artistic experimentation appears as a function of cultural entrepreneurship. Thank you very much. We are so grateful for Professor Berg's participation in the seminar given her very busy schedule, a fascinating presentation as always so again thank you to Professor Berg. Now let's welcome Professor Meng who will be presenting next. Okay, let me try to share screen first. Is it okay for you guys now. All good. Well the nice thing about doing a pre-recorded lecture is that you can make sure that you don't go over time. I do have a tendency of talking too long though so Jake maybe you could remind me if I reached the 12, 13 minutes point. I would know when to wrap up. So my talk today is based on a project that I recently completed with two PhD students about the experience of Chinese overseas students during the pandemic. And when Jake extended the invitation to take part in this symposium, I thought it's related to the overall theme of the panel in two ways. One is because the overall theme of the symposium has to do with final US relation and engagement. And what we did in this project is to conduct in-depth interviews with students who were studying either in the UK or in the US during the pandemic. And a lot of the questions have to do with how their views of the different political system and also their personal experience with xenophobia with anti-China racism sort of shaped also their value during this time. So that's one connection there. And secondly, we call this mediated pandemic experience also because in our interview, there's a large chunk of the topic guide actually asked about people's digital media usage. Because in a way this current pandemic compared with all the previous public health crisis is intensely mediated in an unprecedented way. And for overseas Chinese students because of the prevalence of social media usage, they basically live in different media environments. So they get the mainstream media from their host country, but also they are closely monitoring and also very intensely engaged with social media accounts on WeChat, on Weibo, and constantly also getting message from their parents and family back home. So in a way it's quite a unique mediated experience for these Chinese students. So that's why I think maybe it will be relevant and interesting to talk about this project, although I do realize, you know, given the nature of this symposium, I'm not, this is not exactly a research conference. So I'm going to skip some of the parts that have, you know, focus more on the methodology and the research design. But first, just to set the scene a little bit and thinking about the context, I think, you know, there are a few things to note here. One is the outbreak of the COVID-19 takes place at the high point of new liberal globalization when both global interconnections and the backlash against it on various fronts have reached an unprecedented level. Already, you know, before the pandemic, there was discussion about the so-called decoupling of the US and China, there was the trade war, there's also the talking about whether we are witnessing the Cold War 2.0. So it's, you know, really two sides of the same coin we see in unprecedented interconnection, but also there's very strong backlash against it. And economically and geopolitically, compared to the 2003 SARS epidemic, China now also occupies a very different position in the global capitalist orders. And for the overseas Chinese students as they, and I, you know, this is also partly the reason why I started this project, I started this project really because I was witnessing the kind of experience that my Chinese students were going through, especially around 2020. So in the early 2020, when China was the epic center, and Chinese students were experiencing all the anxiety and they had to make the difficult decision about whether they should wear masks coming to the class because at that time, it's not happening, you know, it's not really erupting in Europe yet. And they were also, there was also very, you know, ugly racist attack and racial abuse happening in the UK at the beginning of 2020 because Chinese students were somehow considered being, you know, infectious contagious or simply because they were wearing masks. But then as the epic center shifted from China, as things will put under control in China and then the epic center shifted to Europe and as UK went into lockdown. And they then also experienced also intense anxiety about whether they should stay here, or, and especially after all the teaching went online and whether they should go back home and if they decide to go back home is it possible to do that, some of them bought multiple air tickets, just to make sure that they can finally make the trip home. So this was really, you know, partly the project was really triggered by what I witnessed as the struggle and the stress and anxiety that my Chinese students were going through at that time. So putting this, you know, in an academic context, the questions we are asking in this project is what have been the lived experience of Chinese overseas students during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in relation to racism, xenophobia and nationalism. And what are the main discrepancies and incongruencies that Chinese overseas students have to negotiate in their mediated understanding of the crisis, as I mentioned at the beginning because you know they are getting information from both media outlets in their host country and also from their, their home country. And also because of the omnipresence of social media, you know, they were basically, if they choose to, they can stay online 24 seven and I'm going to talk about later how they then learn to manage their own media consumption as a way also to manage anxiety and stress. And then have their assessment of the political system in both China and their host country in any way affected by the pandemic and this of course is the continuation of the first research question about how you know they're, they experience racism, xenophobia and nationalism. And putting this in a bit of a theoretical context. So basically there are two sort of theoretical threat here one is or expect notion of risk society and the extent to which the risk of society should mobilize a cosmopolitan cooperation and also to mobilize a cosmopolitan mindset. So his argument is that you know as the, the anticipation of global risk could could result in everybody, an everyday global awareness among citizens of modern societies and give rise to cosmopolitan in imperative of cooperation. So this is, you know, of course, you know, he, he, his notion of cosmopolitan imperative has both a normative and analytical dimension and what we want to ask is to problem ties this and ask the question to what extent, or whether this has really, you know, the current global crisis has contributed to the rise of cosmopolitan imperative. Another sort of theoretical threat here is, is about diaspora and media consumption, and especially at this day and age of social media, pervasiveness, how have the diaspora population negotiated their national identity and political legions with vocabularies and discursive resources provided by both, you know, media from their home country and also media in the host country. And, you know, so based on this sort of deriving from these two theoretical threats, we want to better understand how is the current public health risk made, made sense of by an elite group that epitomize mobility and connectivity. And we do recognize very much the very strong elite band in our sample, because these are students studying in elite UK and US universities, and some of them even started their overseas education from secondary school. So we are talking about a particular group that used to take mobility and connectivity for granted, and then suddenly during the pandemic, this mobility and connectivity are halted, and which also prompt a lot of deliberation and reconsideration. And how individuals navigate the incongruous and uncertainty by piecing together very dispersive resources in an effort to articulate a coherent narrative. So I'm going to skip these slides about the research design and but just to note that basically the topic guide has three main components and one of these components is asking about their daily media usage. And I will also skip this slide about the sample but generally we try to achieve a balance in terms of gender major and also the length of study overseas but but as you can see here, we have quite a number of interviews who had more than five years of studying so this would often include part of the secondary education. And, you know, this is, this is a quote from this is what an article published during the pandemic. So the Columbia based historian Adam tooth, and he was saying that a back is the most important to me before gorgeous that could help us understand the current crisis. And in this quote, in particular, he talked about how back was talking about you know in contemporary risk, global risk society. There is this almost this demand for individuals to acquire more knowledge acquire more information and to become the so called private expert on a very complicated issue. So, partly, you know, the, our interview question dealing with media usage and media consumption, really highlights the cost of becoming the private experts on the risk of modernization, and in this case, the pandemic. Now, generally speaking, in terms of media literacy and the media usage across the board because of the nature of the demographic feature of this, this group. We see very high level of information literacy and the fairly sophisticated pattern of media consumption. And often when we ask them where they get their news from, they were able to make this distinction between different types of English language news media and they are critical of institutional media on both sides on both the their home country and the host country. And even more so, of the mainstream news media in the US and the UK. And I think partly this has to do with the fact that it's a given that they understand that media environment in China is heavily censored. But many of them said, at least when they come to study in the UK or in the US, they were expecting something different, but they were many of them were basically disappointed during the pandemic, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. Because of the way that international news media reported on the situation in China. And in terms of social media usage. Also, they demonstrate very nuanced understanding of different types of social media platforms in terms of, you know, I go to this media platform for this type of information, but I don't go there for such and such. So I go to Xiaohongshu if I want some everyday, you know, life, daily life tips, but I would go to Zhihu if I want to find more reliable informational content. So they were able to make these distinctions. And this very, you know, because of the very high level of media literacy and information literacy, this daily curation of media consumption is often deployed as a protective mechanism to shield themselves from negative feelings such as anger, distress or anxiety. And in reality, these students experience often acute sense of fragmentation, confusion, and contradiction while living abroad during the pandemic, as much as these feelings were psychologically discomputing and emotionally draining. They also enabled, you know, opportunities of introspection and reflection, which is sort of the second part of our, the result of our data analysis. So we call it the personal is political. You know, in the meantime, as they experience anxiety trauma, and all this, you know, the stress, there was also a sense of political awakening. And this happened, of course, not just during the pandemic, some of them said it happened after they leave mainland China. And one of the interviews that here, you know, when I was in China, I was discouraged to talk about political issues. But when I was studying in Hong Kong, I suddenly realized that I am part of the political discussion of other people. So there's no way for me even to escape this discussion. They also feeling there's also, you know, the sense of feeling stuck in an increasingly polarized world, in the sense that they felt that they are constantly compelled or demanded to take sides. And often they say, you know, the issue is more complicated. I don't always want just what want to take sides, but I'm, you know, caught up all the time to do that. And they, as a coping strategy, they tried to separate the political from the personal. But of course, this is not always possible. And actually in the article, probably this is a very long quote, you won't be able to read through it. Given the limited time, but in the article we had quite a few lengthy original quotes from interview transcripts is when our interview is really open up and talk about their personal experience with with race with with class. And sometimes also, this experience is also relate closely connected with their, the intimate relationship that they went through. So, you know, partly as a, because we are talking again, talking about an elite group who have very high level of cognitive capacity. But in the middle of this kind of confusion, and the, you know, the stress, there is also a conscious effort, trying to articulate counter hegemonic discourse trying to trying to make sense of all this, and trying to also make sense of the discrepancy, of the incongruence that they went through after leaving China and after going through the pandemic. So we were able to see my ties. What we call four types of counter hegemonic discourses. The first one is the, you know, at the most surface level the criticism of the political system in the US or the, the, the UK. You know that also the shifting boundary of multiple identities, and this is related to what I said earlier about this discontent with the imperative of taking sides in in a polarized world. And the four types of counter hegemonic discourses we identified there's a, there's a tiny slice among all our body five interviews there was actually one vocal Trump supporter. And he was able to articulate a, you know, a reason for for being that. And he was also very much aware that he said, you know, I'm probably in the minority and I don't always tell my friends that I support Trump. And there's also another, a second type, which has is also more or less in the minority among our interviewees, but is of larger number than the first one that those are the people who were able to link the racial problem and racial tension in the US or the UK, with the class issue. And sometimes they say, you know, this is not about race, it's about class. And, and they were actually able to claim that I will actually now I'm really discovering marks that even though I was sort of indoctrinated in my middle class politics, you know, textbooks back in China, and I never liked it and suddenly now I'm really discovering. So, so that's, that's the second type of counter hegemonic discourse. And the third one is what we call the status to develop mentalism people and this is probably I would say more in the majority, more or less in the majority. And this is also the group that has the strongest the nationalist tendency in the sense that the way they evaluate different political system is based on economic growth and the ability to govern or the efficiency to govern. And in that, you know, regard when they compare the, you know, the, the efforts, the government led efforts against the pandemic. It's quite clear for them, you know, which, which side or which system is better. There's also another, I would say probably also in the minority, an articulation of more of a social democratic value. Those are the people who were questioning this developmentalism mindset. And some of them were even saying that I don't understand how people in China nowadays can evaluate everything based on economic development. That's just insane. So, so these are the people who are questioning whether a good society requires more than the efficiency of governance and economic growth. But they are also very critical of the new liberalism in that the witness they witnessed in us and the UK. So in conclusion, I know I'm going over time. We will conclude that leading China has been enabling and empowering experience but returning for many of them when we asked about their long term plan. Returning is an increasingly desirable option for many. And the pandemic serves as a prism through which overseas Chinese students reflect on the host of interesting intersecting issues including race national identity and ideological affiliation. The elite population has more resources, undoubtedly including the capacity of buying multiple tickets just to make sure that they can eventually travel back home. And these are definitely privileges, both that they have the both the material and the intellectual privilege in mitigating the global risk. But they are also experiencing and some of them are already able to articulate the frustration with neoliberal globalization and their very critical comments on liberal democracy. So I think remains an open question. If we think about, you know, these are the people who are going to occupy, you know, important positions in the future and think about the sort of longer term implication of of this experience. I think a lot of the issues remain open ended, depending on you know how they, their trajectories develop. But this is the gist of our study. Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you so much Professor mom we really appreciate it that was a fantastic presentation. Our final speaker will be Professor Schneider from the University of Leiden. You may go ahead and share your screen. All right, well let me go ahead and see if you can see this my Prezi here, switch to full screen. Yes, so let me switch to a topic that is slightly different from what we've heard so far I think you're going to notice a whole lot of connections in the moment. I'll try to stick to 15 minutes. I myself work mostly on digital nationalism but today I wanted to reflect a little bit more broadly about what happens when people come together online, what kind of community formations we see coming together and what that has to do with politics specifically in the cases where the community sentiments turn into a kind of tribalism, the sort of thing that you do indeed see in nationalist movements. So just to get us started I wanted to create a little bit of a connection to politics more broadly, and to give you a brief rundown of why looking at popular culture at subculture groups might have something to do with politics and I'm going to start us off with the US. So that you have that connection and then you'll see in a moment what we might uncover in the Chinese instances. So this is just a brief relationship diagram here from the 2014 infamous gamer gate case I don't know the age that you might know this right so in 2014 there was this moment where right wing gamers were criticizing women in gaming in gaming in the gaming industry, designers and journalists under the guise of trying to criticize game journalism and supposedly the corruption happening in gaming journalism. And it was really just a misogynist rant against women in gaming to the extent that a lot of women were receiving death threats. You can see this here at the bottom, freight threats of rape was absolutely horrific. And it was at the time by a lot of gamers brushed away as OERs is either boys being boys was just, it's just games. And a lot of people were, if they weren't in the gaming industry and plugged in with cultures and subcultures weren't really paying a whole lot of attention to this but they should as subsequent research and especially investigative journalism has shown a lot of the themes that have come up in that 2014 movement directly informed other right wing themes and connected with groups like the so called alt right or the in cell movement. And so if you're not familiar, the people who think the men who think that their inability to find a sexual partner is somehow involuntary, and is caused by evil women who are all inferior to men so an absolutely misogynist group of people. Some even qualify them now as a terrorist movement because they're out to murder women. And then there's the Marga movement which has an interesting intersection with some of these groups as well. And then all of that provides a foundation of right wing discourses and practices and cultural themes that all provide the feeding ground for what we've seen today. And that is not to say that the gamer gay people are the same people who are here in this picture stormy the capital, but just to say that they have provided much of the foundation that then later in terms of discourses symbols practice and so on, lived on in these other more egregious context or similarly egregious but now very very political context. Now let's turn to the Chinese case. Where fandom practices are in some cases even more extreme than what you see in Europe or America and we found groups are often very emotional and engaged and often also very activist all around the world. But in China, these dynamics often take on a whole new dimension and a good example is what happened in 2020 I don't know if you're familiar with Xiao Zhan who's a famous actor soap opera actor really he was in a TV series called the untamed which had a very erotic undertones and was a big hit. And so a lot of his fans started writing gay fan fiction about him and about his character on archive of our own which is a fan fiction website. And another group of his fans got so upset with this because they didn't want their icon to have this gay label that they petitioned the government and agitated against archive of our own until the CCP shut down access to the China to this resource for cultural production. And so the archive of our own folks were infuriated and there was a backlash calling for a boycott of the actor and of the boycott of all the brands he was associated with doing significant amount of damage, and was really just a toxic slugfest between these two groups of fans over who owned the symbol of Xiao Zhan and what it should mean. There's so much to unpack I don't have enough time to unwrap it all in terms of the political economy in China and how all of this works but what I wanted to draw attention to you here is how some of the practices that we see on display here have been on display also much earlier and all across cultural forums in China when fandoms emerge and how that can be connected to politics and for example also to nationalism so my question here and I want to discuss with you is how to digital interact with tribalism in China and with these kind of community sentiments and I myself as I said work a lot on nationalism. So you also see the nationalism and spilling into the streets for example when diaspora students in this case in London, protest. This was on Hong Kong, and we've heard from Professor Meng, the complexities of how people try to come to grips with their chineseness in often quite hostile environments, but a lot of that is also underscored by activities online. And here's another example. This is a satire I suppose rather tasteless one that appeared in a Danish broadsheet at the start of the pandemic, which cast the PRC's national flag as on these viral particles. This did not go over well with a lot of people, especially of course people from the PRC, the ambassador to Denmark, the Chinese ambassador even wrote a follow up piece in which he was, yeah, attacking essentially the Danish people for having heard the Chinese people's feeling you have to always imagine the scare quotes I'm putting in here. So that's already quite interesting that state activists state officials would get involved and have opinions on this and voice them. But of course the cultural sphere was very quickly ablaze with retaliation with Chinese internet users creating memes and mocking the Danes and using the Danish flag in various more or less offensive ways to drive home their point. But then there was a backlash to the backlash as well, especially among people from Taiwan from Hong Kong. People who are critical of the PRC who picked up the original symbolism of the flag and the viral particles, and then reproduced it in all sorts of other cultural products this is a video game that was very briefly available in April. 2020 on the steam platform. Very simple game really but yeah offensive racist really pretending or making you pretend that you are murdering all the evil Chinese zombie folks were trying to leave the PRC to spread the virus on. I don't know why how it fits that you are playing the virus. But yes that's that was the premise and it got pulled relatively quickly because it doesn't meet the platform criteria. But I have also looked at the discussions around that game and the common sections while it was still available. And you very quickly see these entrenched groups, forming, each defending its own side not really having any conversation with each other and what does that remind us of. So, overall, these kind of fan practices are important because they already established a set of strategies of tactics of how to behave online how to agitate and how to achieve things that includes doxing people so identifying who is doing things online and identifying where is available in the real world for retaliation bullying people cyber bullying and forming on people in sensitive context so that their employees that their employers might punish them as employees or drowning out opposition or sometimes called the water army. And we can talk a little bit more also about the 50 cent army the more official people who are going online to defend the PRC but there's a lot of voluntary defenders as well, and they use a lot of these strategies that people have developed in fandom communities. Now I want to say a thing to about really three factors that I think drive how these kind of dynamics can turn, especially toxic, how they congeal into communities and what that might mean, not just in China but also for the rest of us. Both in terms of how maybe people in the US deal with Chinese online culture and interact with it, but also how we might deal with our own internet cultures in various different places. So let me just sort of three three points one is technology, one is political economy and one is the state. Let me start with technology and just point out to you that communities are pretty much always constructed right there often imagined. So when we see and know people face to face that has a very specific dynamic, but as soon as we're talking about people who you don't all know, all communities are imagined whether it's you know all the, all the students at Tufts University don't know everyone right that's an imagined community. But so our nations. So our fan groups. So they already have something in common they really exist because people are circulating symbols and engaging in rituals with each other that are recognizable to others. So that creates this illusion really in people's minds that they all have something in common, and that illusion can become real because people are able to leverage it and mobilize around it in certain moments and under certain conditions. What's important when people share these discourses these symbols is that they're using media and solve the medium matters as a delivery mechanisms I'm always reminded of Marshall McLuhan famous victim that the medium is message. And that something happens in social media rather than just in the newspaper or on television, the technology has its own affordances that enable so this is another famous historian of technology who said that technology is neither good nor bad so we should be careful with technological determinism, but it's also not mutual right design matters. We design things for certain purposes and the way something is designed like Facebook, the fact that you can have a angry button or sad button changes the dynamic of a conversation that only had like buttons, for instance, right and so that is true for technology all around. And certainly also in the Chinese context. This is an example for me studying sign or Japanese relations and how they played out, especially in 2012 and there was a major dispute between the two countries. And I was looking at issues in the East China Sea as one of my cases that the islands in China, Senkaku islands in Japan. And if you put the islands into by do which is the Chinese search engine comparable in a way to Google in terms of certainly it's market share it's very influential. If you put down into the search engine what comes up among other things is a widget that shows you the weather on these rocks, which doesn't make any sense because you cannot go there doesn't matter other than to maybe some fishermen what the weather there might be like, and even the fishermen might have trouble going to those waters considering their controversial nature. And yet you get the impression here that it's just a place just like Shanghai or Beijing, it goes even a little bit further by the actual website Chinese weather, logging this as the Diao'ui Islands, China if you speak Chinese you can see here that the autocomplete automatically adds this as China, and it even registers the Diao'ui Islands as a city district bizarrely in Fujian province, which makes very little sense. And that tells you already a little bit about how seemingly banal little choices which are informed by a combination of social interaction and technological interaction someone inputting something algorithms doing the rest creates an impression that people may not even notice is quite political. Here's another example, a little bit older one from 2010, but you see comments like this on the internet of course on all the Internet all the time. And this is a hate comment by someone commenting on the nuns newspaper article on the nuns in massacre, and writing that you know anyone who kills a Japanese person will receive 1000 R&B, you know what this person has some money, and then just says kill kill kill over and over And you see this to imply that everyone on China's internet produces this kind of garbage that's not the case. This might just be a quite exceptional comment in many ways. But when these kind of discourses emerge, they sometimes float to the top of algorithmically governed platforms, as is the case here you can see on the top right a red stamp, and even if you don't read Chinese you can see this must be important. It means particularly popular response to that article. And that comes up, because people have liked it and interacted with it shared it and commented on this comment enough for it to move to the front and so you know of course these popularity mechanisms that you also see on other platforms and read it and so on. That then also produce the impression that some things that might not even be worth of much attention are actually representative and important. Another example here technologically is Billy Billy, this is a video sharing and streaming platform, which has this special feature where you comment or can comment on the video in the video itself or sort of across the video which is called the bullet commentary or bullet curtain. I did a study on bullet curtain commentary on videos that dealt with COVID at the beginning of the pandemic, the Wuhan lockdown. And one of the things that I found was that these comments often are almost like people just leaving the note, you know, I've been here. It's asynchronous by the way so you leave a comment, and weeks later people will still see that comment together with all the other comments, but they also then sort of start merging into a conform message where people start commenting in the same manner that they presumably assume that this is expected. This is the correct way to write about things so you can see in these videos that people frequently use phrases like go Wuhan, go China, right. So the classic comment at that time, and similar phrases recurring phrases that mark them both as all being part of a similar community with a repertoire of science and language, but also that signal to others you know I know what I'm supposed to be doing I'm active here, even though it's probably mostly clictivism, as it's sometimes called, but I'm interacting with these materials in the appropriate manner, with other people who might have criticism or, you know, have more nuanced views, don't find necessarily the space in this forum on this format to voice them, or they stay silent because they're worried about not offending the mainstream in these instances. So that viral villages I refer to networks of social technical engagement that generate recursive feedback loops, in which these various kinds of people share the community sentiment and it becomes amplified and amplified through these algorithmic mechanisms. And I use the word village viral village because I'm again I like Marshall McLuhan on what he wrote about villages. He used the term global village and coined it, but he didn't mean what people often mean which is sort of a cosmopolitan wonderful world or closer together, he meant this. When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each other, village people aren't that much in love with each other, and the global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations. So you can probably see why I have this quote here, this is from 1977 and I think Marshall McLuhan would have recognized many of what we're much of what we're going through in that context. Now I'm pretty much out of time I just wanted to point out beyond the technological level, the state level, the way that nationalism and techno nationalism on this Chinese state side and the Communist Party side is creating a context in which national discourses and that kind of tribalism that they breed are a logical response to politics and to international affairs, even though the Communist Party has a very specific understanding of what it thinks patriotism means, compared to what people in China mean and then also many, many different nationalisms in China emerge, but there is already a infrastructure that pushes a particular kinds of national nationalist narrative and perspective in China. And then there is the commodification the political economy that the digital capitalism really that fuels these various platforms just one image trigger warning this is pornography and some violence as well. This is images from a supposedly a military history picture archive, but it's mostly porn snuff film, really nasty stuff in many ways, which sits alongside political commentary and discussion of sign of Japanese relations. And that is because the people who run a platform like this notice that people click this stuff. And so that's what gives them money when I would make some money, and the algorithm feeds back into it. And so I think to the makers that this is something that is lucrative and so they produce more and more racy content, and it kind of spirals out of control, regardless of what the people make the content might think about it, or what even the viewers and the people click on it think about it we don't really know, but it creates a context in which discourse becomes more and more toxic. So let me just conclude very briefly here by telling you why any of this matters matters because these guys think it matters. Legitimacy concerns are at the top of what the Chinese Communist Party has to worry about domestically to assure social stability. The party monitors big data social media data bizarrely it has sort of a dual track goal on one hand, it's trying to guide public opinion on social media at the same time it is trying to measure public opinion on. It's a way more for instance, in order to inform politics, create five year plans that are responsive to the audience and so on. But that means that they're basically measuring something of their own creation. And that also means that some of the problems I've just outlined now might feedback into policymaking choices by convincing politicians that the people might be more influential than they actually are and making choices that are more radically say anti Western anti American and I anything else really and more domestically oriented, then might be good from a more cosmopolitan perspective. And so in the end, we have a construction of a sense of homeland as an existential problem whether it's during political crises whether it's during pandemics that combine the human psychology of what people do online with technological in the states position and commercial rationales, and that then gets feed fed back through various other groups as they challenge these narratives and create more conflict. I could say more about the milk tea alliance if we have time in the, in the section in the q amp a in a moment, but essentially what emerges here is a nationalism or various forms of nationalism that are despite, or attempts to the contrary not to influence control also not the CCP's. So I'm going to conclude here looking forward to your questions and comments. And yeah, thank you for your attention. Thank you so much professors night Schneider that was really amazing. So now we'll open up the floor to anybody in the audience who wants to ask a specific question, or if the panelists themselves would like to address each other's presentations anything we find interesting. We can also do that. So yeah, leave any and all questions in the chat. People are a little bit scared to ask a question, I do have one for Professor mong in a moment, but maybe we'll give our participants a chance for us right. I love, I'll give a general question to start. Professor Schneider and mong feel free to answer as you see fit. It's very actively digitizing many aspects of everyday life, arguably at a greater pace than the United States. What kind of social consequences does this rapid development and technology and government sponsored acceleration of these things. What sort of consequences and implications is that have on the public, and the government's relation to the public as well. You want to get started. Sure. Well, I guess. I'll mention maybe two aspects. One is that they. I think this kind of very aggressive rolling out of digital technology and digital infrastructure is part and parcel of this state led development, developmentalism mentality. And I think it also helps to reinforce that mentality and and I see that also in some of my interviews for that, for that study. And it certainly also helps to because it's all part of that discourse. It helps reinforcing the legitimacy in the sense that the legitimacy comes from development comes from technological superiority. And what we see is that increasingly now, when Chinese people traveling overseas, they would initially be startled at the backwardness of digital infrastructure, I think, especially in Europe. I think in the UK, for example. So that certainly is part of this developmentalism mentality that that adds to the legitimacy. And it gives the sense of pride and superiority. But on the other on the social side, what I see as a very sort of under discussed negative consequence of this is the kind of exclusion this creates. And we see this very clearly during the pandemic when the QR code, the QR health code was rolling out for the old folks who don't really know how to use smartphone or who don't want to use smartphone, especially when they are going out. It becomes a real issue. So as you roll out this and as you lay this out as the daily informational infrastructure, you are also basically setting up the digital barriers, barriers that make it difficult for the underprivileged for the more marginalized group to enjoy the full service. And this is of course, you know, it's not something new, we've been talking about digital divide. But in China, I think this become particularly acute, because, you know, now your everyday life relies on how much of your everyday activities are is now being conducted on WeChat. It's being taken for granted, but if they're being taken for granted, who have the resource and the capacity to do that, but not for everyone. So and then when at the moment, like the pandemic, you do see the negative exclusive no the negative consequence of this. Yeah, I can only second that my my client and not on what my colleague here around the corner, the university in good hope calls speed leads. So only very specific groups of people are actually in the position to make the most use of digital technology and that's certainly the case in this at this rapid pace in China. So you have urban audiences who are very good at this, not everyone of course in urban centers, but it's very different story and role areas, and also the, the roll out of digital technology interacts with capitalist ambitions in a very interesting and often very worrying way, pushing people to follow a highly individualist like I find it quite interesting how Chinese students in the UK are commenting on individualism in the UK, they're not wrong. But there's so much individualism in China as well when it comes to elbows out and I have to be on top to the point where you see the streamer culture video streaming people trying to make money of that. Only the smallest amount of people can ever live off that and there's a long tail of people. And my colleague John girl has written on this, who are just in front of the camera streaming their entire lives from morning to evening and have zero views or one view right, and they're hoping to at some point maybe make a buck of it. It's, it's incredibly depressing. So you have an entire large group of society that is switched off and that's going to be a serious problem. And you have dynamics in which it's easy to make a big quick buck by exploiting people and by scamming them. And so that's something that a lot of people outside of China don't always see. I don't want to defend the Communist Party's online regulation, I have a lot of problems with it. But a lot of it is not informed just by the attempt to keep political oppositions quiet or shut down the activists and so on. Often the direct response by grab from for grassroots initiatives and grassroots pushes from the public to say you know I as an urban middle class person and not safe shopping online. I get scammed, you have to do something right or here's all these celebrities. And these celebrities are cashing in weird ways or spreading body shaming images and do something about it. That is these are concerns also the sort of misinformation fake news and concerns that we all recognize across the globe, and that the Communist Party is also acting on. It just so happens that it then also happens to be one of the biggest spread of disinformation on the planet on top of everything else right but there's so this is a very complicated dynamic and I think it reveals some of the contradictions that you see emerging in digital capitalism. Great, thank you so much for those insights. We have a couple questions in the chat so the first one comes from Michelle Lynn, and she says a question for Dr Schneider, would you say China's internet controls or interests are threatening the liberal world order. That's a big question. I have my problems with the threat stories. I like Professor monks comments on respect and on risk. I think that's a much better way to understand how our world works and our actors in our world that create risk for others. It's certainly the case that we see the Communist Party rolling out a campaign to influence public opinion abroad and to become active for its own gains. I think in many cases that's not that different from what other countries do necessarily, but it is often in liberal, so I can see how liberals will be worried and we see for example. This is documented Chinese official actors intervening in Taiwan for instance in order to undermine democratic process then are doing similar things in Hong Kong also to shut down discussion. I'm not concerned, but I'm also concerned about that narrative about threat, which is so old and so tried. I think it creates a self fulfilling prophecy in which a lot of Chinese actors feel the need to step up the more aggressive hawkish aspects of their policies in response to what they see as a antagonistic quote unquote West, because China is not monolithic it's not just one actor it's many many different ministries and organizations that all have different interests. And it's I think a question also for people in Europe or America, who are we empowering with our own responses, who is served by a trade war for instance, or by shutting down certain technology companies brought and so on. And I'm a bit worried that it steps on the agenda of more liberal minded potential allies in China, and empowers the people who are maybe closer to the PLA or the domestic ministries that mainly care about domestic status development, rather than say for ministry people are much more liberal. So I hesitate as a good academic I would question the question that says now to step on Michelle's indeed very very good question, but just as a little bit of a warning and how we frame these kind of issues. I hope that answers your question. Okay, so we have just one more question. This is from, we can do to more if we have time if you just want to quickly touch on these. One is from our team. How has Chinese state media and censorship responded to the public's interest and Russian in the Russian invasion in Ukraine. And you want to start us. Yeah, that's, that's an interesting question. I, I, I don't think I've witnessed a lot of examples of sensory in this particular case, because if you think about the timing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think it coincided with the COVID situation getting out of control in Shanghai. So I think it's fairly easy for you to draw the conclusion which one gets much more attention from the center which is that it is deemed as you know, they need much closer management and monitoring. You know, at least I haven't really, but witnesses. The censoring of this case, but I would also make two observations. One is that in terms of the state media it has been sticking to the official you know foreign ministry sort of spokesperson official line saying that we are against any war. We don't think any invasion, we don't think any for any country interest for the sake of securing their border they could wage a war. And we stick to the you know we we are, we have concern with people in Ukraine and and but of course you know as everyone know what happened during the week before the Winter Olympics, sort of this special sort of alliance being declared. So, so I think the official media has been walking a very tight line here trying to not offend both either Ukraine or Russia both are important partners to China. On the other hand, I think interestingly on social media though, the range of view is quite diverse that we see people saying that, you know, calling for the separation to go you know we need to, we need to get clear with with Russia we shouldn't maintain this special relationship and that was by a quite a high profile academic nation relation. But then, on the other hand, of course, there are people saying that this war, the, the, the, it's because of the expansion of NATO is because of the US so Russia was only responding to that and and there was also a lot of support and and there's also of course, as you can imagine, the energy between the situation in in Taiwan. So I would say generally you know the official media has been sort of controlling the narrative quite carefully, but there's a diverse view on social media. Yeah, I mean if you're interested in this. I don't think it's published yet but our colleague Jennifer punnet Stanford University is doing research on this with a team of people. And she's been tweeting about it so I can only repeat what she said which is that there's about about 50% of the way board tweets that they've been analyzing our pro Russian and produces kind of misinformation that we're familiar with also from Russian TV from RT, but the rest of the commentators for somewhere along all sorts of diverse spectrums, including liberals and critics and so on. So it is indeed quite complicated also on the Chinese Internet. I am a little bit worried about how much disinformation is circulating though, but that is not just the case in China you also see this in Europe I think 40% of people in Greece are supporters of Putin. I mean that is that shocking in the Netherlands is 15% I find that shocking already, but 40% so we don't have to point to Russia to say I added to China say 50%. Yeah, it's not that different in other places sometimes. Yeah, go ahead. If Professor among Professor Schneider have time for one more question. There is one from Dr straffella who co authored the speech that Daria bird gave today. I know that we're over time it's about 250pm here in Boston. Would you like to stay behind for one more question. I'm happy to stay a moment. Yeah, sure. Wonderful. So the question goes, when researching online culture in China or elsewhere. How do we deal with comments like the one you mentioned, which is highlighted by the algorithm but not otherwise representative in our analysis of the culture as a whole. This is for Dr. Schneider. I like golf man sociologist anthropologist right. And the idea of the front stage and the backstage I find it very important to distinguish these two things there's a public facing communication element that we can analyze but we're really just analyzing discourses were analyzing the resources the statements the symbols that are available to people and that they reuse invisible ways where we're observing something people do. We're never observing what people think we don't have no idea what people think. And we're also not observing what people do in their private home you know what what do they take home from these comments we don't know who's behind this comment. Maybe they ate something bad and posted it then you know we don't know what the people thought who are liking it or interacting with it. So I always make sure to have additional caveats in place to assure that we're not insinuating that we're actually studying public opinion and real public opinion. And social the Chinese government is always doing that because I think there's people there who do think they are studying public opinion by looking at big data, which is never the whole story. So in that sense, it's, I think it's important because of the way these non representative but very visible shouts and screams that we see online affect the discussion, how they can push political decisions. There were cases with Xiao Zhan example there were other cases with Taiwanese pop star where it was basically became an international well because she had a Taiwanese flag in a little video, and she got criticized extensively. And so you see these online debates, and suddenly the polls for sign when in Taiwan go up by a couple of points, because Taiwanese people are so angry that this pop star is forced to make an apology. So the words have consequences, even if we don't know who who's making them, but we should be careful about what happens on the backstage. I was reminded of some very good scholarship on the Soviet Union, right before it fell, all the Russian experts the vast majority of Russian experts had no idea that Russians were dissatisfied or the degree to which they were dissatisfied. They thought that the story everyone was telling on the front end was the real story. And that's a mistake because that may not be the case, right so careful with buying the propaganda or the the hegemonic discourse, it might just be there because it circulates the best not because people actually buy it. So I think that concludes our culture panel. Special thanks to Dr. Schneider, Dr. Mung and of course, Dr. Burke who was unable to be here synchronous synchronously today. And of course Drs. Trafello who co wrote her speech. We're so appreciative of your contributions. Thank you so much for making this a wonderful experience. If your audience has any more questions. I'm sure all of our speakers would be happy to talk to you through email and such, and we can provide you with those after an email but yeah, I think that's everything. Thank you guys so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Bye. Have a great weekend.