Examining Internet culture in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the US, this book analyzes videos which entertain both English and Chinese-speaking viewers to gain a better understanding of cultural similarities and differences. Each of the chapters in the volume studies streaming videos from YouTube and its Chinese counterparts, Todou and Youku, with the book using a combination of interpretative analysis of content, commentary, and ethnographic interviews. Employing a diverse range of examples, from Michael Jackson musical mash-ups of Cultural Revolution visuals, to short clips of Hitler ranting about twenty-first century issues with Chinese subtitles, this book goes on to explore the ways in which traditional beliefs regarding gender, romance, religion, and politics intersect. Looking at how these issues have changed over the years in response to new technologies and political economies, it also demonstrates how they engage in regional, transnational, and global dialogues. Comparing and incorporating the production of videos with traditional media, such as television and cinema, Internet Video Culture in China will be useful to students and scholars of Internet and digital anthropology, as well as Cultural Studies and Chinese Studies more generally.

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, he presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China—and across Asia.

TikTok has drawn attention from all over the world. Even if you have never used it before, you would still be familiar with its name. Many people have assumed that it is a US-generated platform, and normally awed at its real origin – a Chinese born and operated platform, a sister or parallel platform of Douyin. Because of the short-video platform–TikTok, and also its dispute with the US government, people have started to paying attention to what is really happening and changing in China. Two questions that hang over everyone’s mind seem to be: why China? And why TikTok? This book attempted to answer the question of why short-video platforms such as TikTok—the most popular ‘made in China’ product of all the Chinese digital platforms—became a significant competitor on the global stage. This book explores the reasons behind the rise of short video platforms in China, with a focus on the sudden and unexpected success of TikTok and its parallel platform Douyin. Beginning with the historical development of China’s online screen industry, the book goes on to investigate the ICT industry, its business models and impact on the screen industry, to unfold the reasons behind the domestic popularity of Douyin. It draws on a spectrum of sources including policy documents, industry reports and expert analysis, which is supplemented by interviews with key people in the field. It traces the changing dynamics of the Chinese online screen ecology, and shows how a mixture of technological, industrial and cultural factors contributed to the proliferation of short-video platforms in China. This engaging and topical book will be ideal reading for students and scholars of media and communication studies, platform studies, and political economy studies.

This book discusses the rich and varied culture of China's online society, and its impact on offline China. It argues that the internet in China is a separate 'space' in which individuals and institutions emerge and interact. While offline and online spaces are connected and influence each other, the Chinese internet is more than merely a technological or media extension of offline Chinese society. Instead of following existing studies by locating online China in offline society, the contributors in this book discuss the carnival of the Chinese internet on its own terms. Examining the complex relationship between government officials and the people using the Internet in China, this book demonstrates that culture is highly influential in how technology is used. Discussing a wide range of different activities, the contributors examine what Chinese people actually do on the internet, and how their actions can be interpreted within the online society they are creating.

This book analyzes the ways in which China’s soft power growth faces dilemmas in East Asia through both online and offline platforms. One dilemma for China’s transnational soft power-field expansion lies in the intersection of its source and receiving countries. The author discusses how transnational audiences’ consumption and reception of Chinese television series are shaped by domestic factors, with interpretations of and desires for different forms of capital, further inhibiting the foreign export of these series. Another dilemma is the “outsourced soft power.” While Hong Kong and Taiwan play significant roles as outsourced soft power mediators, their under-established emerging digital media platforms have yet to meet the expectations of transnational audiences in a virtual transnational soft power field. Grounded in the author’s multi-site field research focused on television spheres, Soft Power Made in China argues that China’s soft power paradox in South Korea and Japan—two quasi-Sinophone countries—is not due to a lack of state-level strategy, but linked to soft power pathways that rely on production in one source country, and both distribution and reception in a receiving country.

This book traces the cultural transformation of nostalgia on the Chinese screen over the past three decades. It explores how filmmakers from different generations have engaged politically with China’s rapidly changing post-socialist society as it has been formed through three mutually constitutive frameworks: political discourse, popular culture and state-led media commercialisation. The book offers a new, critical model for understanding relationships between filmmakers, industry and the State.

This book explores the impact of global change in China in what is considered in the West as ‘the Asian century’ and what this in turn means for visual culture. Unravelling a deep understanding of historical shifts in visual culture that represent socio-political mirrors of culture, it expands the Western perception of Chinese visual culture and the intertwined complexities of cultural signification. This book provides a key resource for Galleries and Academic Institutions, offering insights into understanding the systems underpinning ideas, skills and influences of the new visual culture in the Asian century.