Chinese Internet

Xu, J & W, S (2015). ‘Is Sina Weibo on the way out as the most popular weiguan platform in China’, Internet Policy Observatory (IPO), https://www.global.asc.upenn.edu/is-sina-weibo-on-the-way-out-as-the-most-popular-weiguan-platform-in-china/

The present contribution provides a diachronic perspective on the last 15 years of online platforms in China analysing the success and the evolution of four platforms that are: Youku, Tudou, iQiyi and Kuaishou. The experience of the Chinese platforms shows how cultural dynamics, economic and linguistic policies contributed to create a peculiar online environment in China and how they should be considered within the theoretical framework of “platform studies”.

The relationship between online media platforms in China and fan groups is a dynamic one when it comes to the distribution of international TV series and other media content, as media platforms incorporate user-generated content to encourage or foster audience engagement. Through a series of case studies, this article investigates how international TV series are acquired, distributed, marketed and curated on Chinese online video platforms. This helps to identify specific strategies and themes used by these platforms to promote international content and engage users. These marketing techniques, however, are not always as successful as expected, suggesting the need for a closer examination of the types of engagement sought by media platforms, and the ways in which Chinese audiences have responded within their cultural context.

Weibo is considered to be the Chinese media phenomenon of 2010 and 2011.
This paper provides a brief historical overview of microblogging in China and identifies the social and cultural roles held by Sina Weibo, a multimedia-enabled Weibo website. Using as case studies three of the most significant news items and events of 2010 and 2011 on the Weibo platform, we investigate how
microblogging has been used in China and then analyse this using
communication theories. Specifically, communication on Sina Weibo is examined in terms of impersonal–interpersonal–hyperpersonal interaction; individual–group–mass transmission fission; and communication interaction, taking into consideration the involvement of both the multimedia platform and citizen journalism. The final part of the paper discusses the relationship between Sina Weibo’s development and Chinese culture—a factor that the authors believe must necessarily be considered in future studies of Weibo’s growth.

Little Monk Yichan is both a typical and unique product of Chinese new media. The core part of the project are short videos in 3D animation technique with sketches from the life of a six-year-old boy and a Buddhist monk who adopted the orphan. The project was launched in 2016 and became so popular by 2019, that at some point Yichan was called “the first virtual idol” of social networks. Chicken Soup for the Soul (since 1993) is “the most successful series of inspirational true stories in the world” (Wikipedia, Russian). In China, apart from the book brand, the phrase “xinling jitang” also refers to any motivational, inspirational and positive sentimental texts, pictures, podcasts, videos etc.
Thematically and stylistically, Yichan more or less fits “under the umbrella brand” of xinling jitang, but equally important for its discourse are 1) the experience of existential loneliness and 2) farcical and absurd humor of the so called “poisonous chicken soup” (du jitang) type. The inner conflict of the main character Yichan and the dynamics of stylistic shifts give vitality and dynamism to the whole project, and together with high-quality texts, excellent visuals and a memorable universe it ensured quick success for a wide audience.

«Маленький монах Ичань»-типичный и уникальный продукт китайских «новых медиа». Основное направление-короткие видеоролики в технике 3D анимации с зарисовками из жизни шестилетнего монашка-подкидыша и принявшего его на воспитание буддистского монаха. Проект был запущен в 2016 г., к 2019 г. общее количество подписчиков на китайских платформах приблизилось к 80 млн., а количество просмотров перевалило более 160 млрд, что дало повод называть главного героя, Ичаня-«первым виртуальным идолом» соцсетей. «Куриный бульон для души» (с 1993 г.)-«самая успешная в мире серия вдохновляющих реальных историй, каждая книга которой состоит из 101 короткого мотивирующего рассказа и эссе» (Википедия). В Китае словосочетание синьлин цзитан получило распространение вне зависимости от книжного бренда и указывает на любые тексты, картинки, подкасты и т.п. мотивационного и шире позитивно-сентиментального характера. Тематически и стилистически «Ичань» разворачивается под «зонтичным брендом» синьлин цзитан, но важную роль в создании дискурса играют также переживания холода мира и экзистенциального одиночества, с одной стороны, а с другой-фарсово-абсурдистский юмор в духе «ядовитого бульона» (ду цзитан), который любим в Китае не меньше, чем сам синьлин цзитан. Внутренняя конфликтность образа Ичаня и стилистическая динамика проекта в целом придает жизненности и динамичности, а сочетание с качественными текстами, прекрасным видеорядом и запоминающейся вселенной обеспечило быстрый успех у широкой аудитории. Ключевые слова: ичань сяо хэшан, синьлин цзитан, ду цзитан, куриный бульон для души, новые медиа, анимация, контент, IP В современном информационном пространстве, вне зависимости от языка и географических локаций, идут более или менее схожие процессы, но локальное своеобразие при этом не стирается-на одном и том же материале, по одним и тем же лекалам, с использованием одних и тех же технологий выстраиваются культурно специфические явления. «Маленький монах Ичань» (Ичань сяо хэшан 一禅小和尚) привлекает внимание масштабностью, скоростью развития и качеством контента. Во всех этих отношениях он представляет собой типичный продукт бурно развивающейся индустрии китайских «новых медиа». Основное направление в этом проекте-короткие (1-2 мин) и ультракороткие (меньше минуты) видеоролики в технике 3D анимации с зарисовками из жизни

The article aims to provide a historical overview on the Chinese vision of Internet information society starting from the 90s in order to identify the constitutive choices of the Chinese Internet governance. A particular attention is addressed to the role of private sector and its co-evolutionary approach in relation to the state government as well as the shift from an approach primarily focused on domestic issues (对内 duinei) to a more international oriented one (对外 duiwai).

This article focuses on WeChat, which remains China’s most iconic mobile application. After offering a short history of WeChat’s development and growth, the next section reviews popular narratives of Tencent’s messaging app--ranging from its role as an exemplar of Chinese innovation to its pioneering embrace of a centralized platform model. I then engage with recent analyses that identify in WeChat traits typical of digital and social infrastructure. [...] If WeChat is indeed becoming (or it has already become) an infrastructure, what kind of infrastructure is it? Which affordances does it provide, and how?

This book aims to identify the most important political, socio-economic, and technical determinants of Internet development in China, through a historical approach that combines political economy, cultural, and public studies.  Firstly, the book looks at the most important strategies that compelled the Chinese government to invest in the construction of the Internet infrastructure. Secondly, it examines the relationships between the development of the Internet in China and the emergence of a nascent civil society. Finally, attention is given to three different Chinese online platforms in three different historical periods.  This three-pronged approach presents a coherent set of analyses and case studies which are committed to the investigation of the complex process of change undergone by Internet development in China.

There are not many CEE game producers that tried to enter Chinse mobile game market. Game developers from CEE countries that look for the opportunities of growth in the foreign markets should consider entering Chinese market which has recently become the biggest in the world. Chinese online game market is not yet as developed as European or American, but also not as competitive, and far from saturation, so the perspectives of exporting products to China are very promising.

This chapter is an attempt to pull together the three contexts sketched above: the multitude of practices experienced in one’s infra-ordinary use of social media; the sensationalist narratives mustered under buzzwords throughout news media narratives; and the scholarly representation of a variety of practices often described as deceiving, confrontational, offensive, negative, disruptive, abusive, unethical, non-normative, deviant or antisocial. A reader might be expected to ask: What is trolling? Why do some social media users troll others? Is trolling good or bad? How can trolling be stopped? Unfortunately, my contribution is not meant to answer any of these questions. As I summarize in the first half of this chapter, more than twenty years of research into problematic social media practices have already tackled many of these interrogatives, providing a wide variety of comprehensive answers, and producing a rich and detailed cartography of the possibilities of academic approaches to trolling. The broader theoretical question that this chapter addresses is, rather: Where next? How can we write about trolling, and about other problematic social media practices, while avoiding both the oversimplification of popular media narratives and the overdetermination that results from academic treatments?

El objetivo de este trabajo es presentar el ecosistema digital chino. Se inicia con una breve explicación del concepto “ecosistema digital” para luego describir distintos componentes fundamentales de la escena digital: sus actores clave, la expansión en la adopción de tecnologías, las preferencias en los dispositivos y usos digitales, el desarrollo del comercio electrónico, la evolución de la competitividad, la inclusión digital y las políticas gubernamentales orientadas a la primacía de la soberanía y el control. Se concluye con algunas ideas que sintetizan lo analizado y abren nuevos aspectos para futuros trabajos.

Zhang Yimou's Under the Hawthorn Tree (2010), an adaptation of a popular 2007 internet novel, drew polarized responses in China for its portrayal of passionate, self-sacrificing  and ultimately tragic love during the late stages of the Cultural Revolution. Media and audiences seized particularly on the invocation in the official marketing campaign of 'ganjing [de] aiqing' or 'pure love' as the film’s central topic. Concepts of purity served to publicise not only the film itself but also the off-screen story of its production, in particular Zhang Yimou’s reported difficulty in finding a sufficiently 'pure' actress to play the female lead. However, many online amateur and professional reviewers of the film rejected and mocked the film’s pretentions to ‘purity’, questioning its modes of sexual storytelling and its politics of sexual citizenship in a China increasingly tolerant of pre-marital sex. This paper analyses online comments on Hawthorn posted to the popular Douban movie review website, finding that styles of contention found more broadly on the internet in China can characterize online movie reviewing too, albeit with particular attention in this case to notions, on the one hand, of sentimental romanticism, and other the other, of a young generation’s sexual self-assertion.

Danmei is the Chinese term for boys' love, a genre of male-male romance created by and for women and sexual minorities. This commentary focuses on Xianqing, a well-known danmei forum established under the aegis of a womenoriented literature website in 2003. Although mainly dedicated to popular media consumption, Xianqing has over the years become both a part of the larger online public sphere in China and a unique queer public sphere that defies any simple classification, offering pleasures, meanings, and identities to numerous diehard danmei fans residing in and out of China, despite recurrent technical problems, managerial failures, and increasing censorship. Through revealing some of the paradoxes and ambiguities of this alternative public sphere, we seek to highlight the understudied gendered dimension of the online public sphere in China and question the rigid distinction between politics and entertainment in academic discourse.

This dissertation presents the account of a qualitative research project about the media practices of vernacular creativity of digital media users in contemporary Mainland China. The research project is based on a review of two decades of multidisciplinary research about the Internet in China, and positions its research questions at the intersection of three disciplinary domains: area studies, media anthropology, and Internet studies. The investigation has been conducted drawing on an ample methodological toolbox of established and experimental qualitative research strategies, including ethnographic participation, digital methods, and curatorial data collection. The principal topics discussed in this dissertation include the everyday experience of networked communication devices in different Chinese cities, the adoption and articulation of digital media platforms by Chinese Internet users, and the practices of linguistic and cultural creativity emerging from the use of these technologies. The main findings of this research project suggest that the Internet is experienced by Chinese users as a complex ensemble of devices, platforms, services, practices and possibilities of access; that the usage of digital media platforms in Mainland China is articulated through personal engagements with these complex media ecologies; and that user-generated content produced and consumed by a large majority of Chinese digital media users is creatively interpreted and negotiated across individual repertoires of semiotic resources. The conclusion of this dissertation theorizes the trivial aspects of everyday communication on digital media as media practices of vernacular creativity, and argues for the need of more ethnographically situated research on the topic in different local contexts.

This paper examines national Internet control from a policy regime perspective. The mechanisms through which governments attempt to control the Internet may be developed and implemented by different institutions and agencies, or fall outside of a formal regulatory structure entirely. As such, the totality of the institutions and practices of national Internet control is best conceptualized not as a regulatory regime, but as a control regime. After a survey of the critical policy and control dimensions, a six-part typology of control regimes is proposed. The purpose of this study and typology is exploratory. With comparative research about Internet control regimes at a relatively early stage, this paper aims to enable the formation of concepts and hypotheses about the interrelationship, or co-presence, of key distinguishing variables in different Internet control regimes.

In Mandarin Chinese, egao literally means “making bad” or “evil doing.” Popularized along the developments of participatory online platforms in the country, egao indicates an online-specific genre of satirical humor and grotesque parody circulating in the form of user-generated content. From its beginnings as a form of vernacular creativity developed by humorous Internet users, egao has become a widely popular phenomenon generating fleeting celebrities, circulating across mass media, and crossing national and linguistic borders.

The diverse ways in which technologies are modified and appropriated into local contexts are an important theme in CSCW research. Today, translocal processes such as the formation of international corporations and the movement of people and ideas across nation states increasingly shape these local contexts of technology use and design. We draw from prior work on appropriation in CSCW and meld it with work from transnational studies to illustrate appropriation as a cultural phenomenon and as it unfolds in relation to emerging translocal processes. We ground our explorations in findings from ethnographic research on collaborations and exchange among IT professionals in urban China. This work makes two main contributions. First, it expands CSCW's focus on socio-technical systems by taking seriously socio-political and socio-economic processes. Second, it contributes to debates on crosscultural and global technological development by employing transnational imagination as an analytical tool.

The Mandarin Chinese term biaoqing, or ‘expression’, categorizes genres of visual content ranging from emoticons and emoji to stickers and custom images. This article is grounded on ethnographic research and approaches biaoqing in terms of their circulation across Chinese digital media platforms. By formulating a comprehensive typology of biaoqing genres, I foreground the situated socio-technical specificities of their circulation: the creative play with typographical compositions, the affective repurposing of graphical emoticons, the platformed monetization of proprietary stickers, and the user-driven proliferation of custom images. Drawing on this typology, I argue for the need to recognize the circulation of biaoqing as an emergent and malleable category of semiotic resources profoundly shaped by two decades of development of the Internet in China.

Староcтина, А. Б. (2020). Летучая мышь как мировое зло: фейковые новости о причине пандемии и их источники. Фольклор и антропология города, III(1–2), 203–213. DOI: 10.22394/26583895-2020-3-1-2-203-213.

В статье представлено описание того, как эволюционировал в интернете слух о супе из летучей мыши. Отмечена связь актуальных фольклорных нарративов о летучей мыши со стереотипами культурного расизма вне Китая и с неприязнью к богатым потребителям мяса диких животных внутри Китая. Рассмотрены источники слуха о супе из летучей мыши, связь этого слуха с фейковыми новостями, а также особенности его
распространения в Рунете. Всплеск интереса к слуху о супе из летучей мыши как источнике эпидемии пришелся на январь 2020 года. После серии опровержений слуха в мировых СМИ циркуляция его версий, имевших агрессивную окраску, несколько ослабла. Широкое распространение мотива «супа из летучей мыши» привело к тому, что его сокращенное упоминание может использоваться для нейтрально-иронического маркирования начала эпидемии. В Китае одним из результатов хождения слуха
стало превращение летучей мыши в символ диких животных, находящихся под угрозой из-за их употребления в пищу. В Рунете мотив «супа из летучей мыши» наиболее активно эксплуатировался в шутках и анекдотахю

The article describes the evolution of the “bat soup” rumor on the Internet. It outlines the connection of current folklore narratives about “bat soup” with stereotypes of cultural racism outside of China and with hostility towards wealthy consumers of wildfowl and venison in mainland China. The article studies the sources of this rumor, its connection to fake news, and the characteristics of its spreading in Russian-speaking segment of the Internet.
A surge of interest in the “bat soup” rumor occurred in January 2020. After a series of contradictions of the rumor in news media worldwide the circulation of its aggressive versions diminished somewhat. The wide distribution of the “bat soup” motif led to using of the concise version of it to mark, in a neutral/ironic way, the start of the pandemic. In China one of the consequences of the circulation of the rumor was that bats became a symbol of wild animals endangered due to consumption of them by humans. In Russian-speaking segment of the Internet the “bat soup” motif was mostly exploited in jokes and anecdotes.

The early 2000s was a time when internet access became popular in mainland China. Among the bulletin boards frequented by Chinese architects and architectural students, the ABBS Architectural Forum was the most popular. With more than half a million registered usernames, ABBS offered participants using monikers a semi-anonymous venue for public discussion and self-publication, at a time when conventional publication was still managed by state bodies and universities. “Uncle Nomad” was a prominent participant in ABBS and became one of the earliest cyber-celebrities in the field of contemporary Chinese architecture. This essay is the first theoretical assessment of Uncle Nomad’s writings as a form of cultural interaction. First, the use of Nomad as a moniker is set in the context of Deleuze’s concept of nomadicism. Second, borrowing from the work of M. M. Bakhtin, the multi-vocal and hybrid nature of the discussions in ABBS is considered as a form of heteroglossia. Third, Nomad’s writings are considered in the light of the ideas articulated by Roland Barthes: the “professor of desire” (as distinct from the purveyor of booklearning) and “writing makes thinking festive.” Finally, the significance of Nomad is discussed in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s idea of counter-hegemonic narrative.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Yaoi or BL (Boys’ Love) is a genre of Japanese subculture presenting in comics, videogames, novels and fan art which describe the fantasy erotic and romantic relationships between men. This is a female-oriented subculture which originated in Japan in the early 1970s. It has spread globally and has become a phenomenon in China through websites hosting countless fan fictions.
This presentation will report on one potential explanation for the popularity Yaoi in China – that it creates an ideal romantic relationship for young women to enjoy. First, in contrast to heterosexual romance, that between two men might more easily be presented as a relationship between two equal individuals. This allows the romance to jettison or revise conventional gender roles. Second, most relationships in Yaoi avoid reproduction. This makes the relationship independent of family expectations for (grand)children and offers a challenge to pro-family rhetoric. Third, male-male romance establishes the hurdle of social disapproval that the partners must surmount together. Hence, theirs may be presented as a particularly strong love because it has to endure many sacrifices.
Although Yaoi as ‘ideal romantic relationship’ is likely to be attractive to women across the world, this may be particularly so in China. China has a strongly traditional culture while, on the other hand, has massively improved the education and life expectations of girls over the last 2 or 3 generations. Hence, many young Chinese women may see in Yaoi the kind of relationship they aspire to with a man while they are, at the same time, subject to social and family pressures to maintain tradition roles of wife and mother.

This article reviews theorizations of civil and uncivil society and highlights their underpinning in the ideal of civility, then introduces the Chinese concept of wenming [civilization] and outlines a history of what is considered bu wenming [uncivil] on Chinese online platforms. It then juxtaposes these definitions to a series of ethnographically grounded snapshots of media events and user interactions revolving around uncivil media practices. Drawing on firsthand accounts of the harassment of a foreign social media celebrity, a " Sticker War " between nationalist publics, a group chat about patriotism, and a BBS discussion of online incivility, the author argues for a shift from the prescriptive definitions of online civility and incivility to the situated understanding of how forms of uncivil sociality are articulated by digital media users in relation to various everyday practices, behaviors, and events.

Scholarship to date agrees that the internet has weakened the Chinese
Party-state’s ideological and discursive hegemony over society. This article documents a recent intervention into public discourse exercised by the Chinese state through appropriating and promoting a popular online catchphrase—“positive energy” (zheng nengliang). Analysing the “positive energy” phenomena using Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony and discourse, the authors argue that the relative effectiveness of this hegemonic intervention rests on the semantic versatility of “positive energy”, which enables “chains of equivalence” to be established between the label’s popular meanings, on the one hand, and its propagandist meanings, on the other.

The thesis submits that current modalities of Internet governance are failing because they are predicated on political ideas, economic systems and legal structures which no longer reflect twenty-first century existence. The paper advances this argument in four main ways. The first is by examining the ideology and cartographic technology of the Westphalian nation-state and the challenge posed to its underlying logic by the spatial and multi-jurisdictional nature of cyberspace. Second, the paper interrogates the legal, ethical and philosophical basis of the post World War II system of international relations, submitting that its founding principles are being superseded by the interrelated forces of globalization, privatization and programming code. At the same time the logic of state competition is resulting in Internet fragmentation, surveillance, censorship, information subversion and ‘norm-regression’ (Deibert, 2012). Thirdly, the thesis demonstrates that current multistakeholder approaches to Internet governance are lacking in democratic accountability, effectiveness and legitimacy, often serving to reify networks of private-capital and state power in the developed and developing world. The thesis concludes by submitting that the future systems of Internet governance will seek legitimacy by providing services to the billions of users of cyberspace, and will be constructed inside the network, rather than imposed externally from above and without.

“Content” is one of the central protagonists of Web 2.0 and its media ecologies. In media and communication studies, the vernacular content resulting from the creative practices of digital media users has been chiefly interpreted in terms of viral contagion and memetic diffusion. This paper draws on ethnographically grounded insights into the making of vernacular content on Chinese social media platforms to argue against the prevailing viral and memetic metaphors. Through a dialogic engagement with the social and semiotic practices of sharing, interpretation and modification sustaining the genre repertoires of biaoqing images, the author argues for a move from diffusionist to circulationist understandings of vernacular content.

"The purpose of this work is to develop a theoretical framework to examine virtual community participation using the concept of subaltern public spheres. The theory of subaltern public spheres directs attention to the internal dynamics and external interaction of virtual communities. Internal dynamics first refers to the inclusiveness of participation by looking at the access to virtual communities and the profiles of their participants. The nature of participation, as another aspect of internal dynamics, is estimated
through examining the styles of the discourses and the types of participatory acts. The external interaction becomes another major focus of this theoretical framework and urges researchers to study how virtual communities interact with government apparatuses, commercial entities, the dominant public sphere, and other subaltern public spheres through discursive engagement and other means. The theoretical framework
is applied to analyze a case of Chinese online public spheres to illustrate the framework’s utility."

This study examines novel databased models of governance emerging from the Global South, specifically India and China, enabled by net-based technologies. The first model, the Biometric Identity Scheme or ‘Aadhaar’ project in India consolidates citizens’ digital identities to serve as the prime portal to access all government services such as welfare benefits. R. S. Sharma, the secretary of the Department of Electronics & Information Technology in India declared that, “digital India is not for rich people . . . it is for poor people.” The second model is China’s Social Credit System. By combining the citizens’ financial records, online shopping data, social media behavior and employment history, the system will produce a ‘social credit’ score for each citizen. This rating system will be used to measure the citizens’ trustworthiness. This research unpacks these value-embedded systems intended to build citizenship through the lens of political participation, inclusion and representation to address what constitutes as democracy in the global and digital age.

The development of mobile media and social networking platforms in China is going through a process of miniaturization leading many to speculate about the inception of a new era in local communication technologies. In Chinese this has been referred to as a weishidai, a “micro-era” of ubiquitous, pervasive and lightweight digital media. Inspired by the popularity of the prefix wei (“micro”), and entering common parlance through popular culture, weishidai is a useful shorthand to describe the contemporary configuration of digital media in China. In the micro-era of Chinese digital media, the ubiquity and pervasiveness of miniaturized communication technologies allow personalized articulations of micro-sociality and new forms of engagement with content and leisure.

This article proposes visibility as a new lens through which to examine the politics of Internet censorship in China. It focuses on the practice of recoding, that is, the use of code words and images to circulate information that is deemed “sensitive”
and therefore removed from the web. While commentators in the West have often described censorship-evading practices like this as a form of “resistance” against state domination, little academic attention has been paid to how and why recoding holds political and cultural significance. The prism of visibility, by conceptualizing recoding as a cultural response
to censorship, opens up a more critical perspective to comparatively analyze examples drawn from both China and the United States. It therefore invites a careful rethinking of China’s Internet censorship beyond the framework of the nation-
state, by calling attention to the social dimension of meaning making and the negotiation of power in a transnational context.

This short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted as a slang term for "cute") as a case in point for a contextual analysis of elements of digital folklore in their transcultural flows, local appropriations, and social practices of signification. One among many other neologisms that enter Mandarin Chinese from seemingly nowhere and gain a widespread popularity in everyday online and offline linguistic practices, meng belongs to a specific genealogy of Japanese animation fansubbing communities, and owes its rapid popularisation to its adaptation to local contexts in different syntactic forms. The resulting inclusion of meng in the changing repertoire of wangluo liuxing ciyu ("words popular on the Internet")—the online vernacular common among Chinese Internet users which is often the target of semantic or structural analyses—is in fact just the last step of processes of networked production and social signification happening across digital media and online platforms.

Over the past decade, computing devices and digital media platforms have entered the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users. From a privileged and expensive form of information access, shang wang (going online) has become an ordinary experience for an increasingly large percentage of the PRC's population. This momentuous change has been widely discussed under larger the narratives of ICT development or informational democratization, but the everyday lives of Chinese digital media users have been rarely approached anthropologically. This talk presents the results of an ongoing ethnographic research project following the variegated everyday media practices of Chinese digital media users, and focuses in particular on different forms of vernacular creativity. From slang terms to animated GIFs, from selfies to WeChat stickers, a large part of digital media content results from the everyday creative practices of users, and different forms of "doing" are behind the sociotechnical construction of vernacular repertoires of digital folklore. Drawing on years of participation in different digital media platforms and a long-term curatorial data collection, I will outline how the Chinese Internet reshapes the classical idea of anthropological fieldsite, discuss how to study the circulation of vernacular content in its own terms, and offer a few provisional conclusions on how local users experience, inhabit and shape the peculiar media ecologies of today's China.

This paper introduces a set of data analysis experiments and reflexions aiming at exploring and classifying memes from a large corpus of social networks messages. Sina Weibo Ddifferent approaches to track and detect memes, then we describe ways of The field of SNA is growing fast: a literature review In this paper, digital objects can be studied in the perspective of practices of writing, and furtermore as speech acts. we will introduce an algorithm to detect and visualize memes from a large data set of tweets.

Despite the global reach of its iconicity, the history of Pepe — from its origins in independent comics to its moment of mainstream limelight on the social media accounts of celebrities like Nicky Minaj or Katy Perry — has for the most part been narrated as a thoroughly American story. Throughout the 2016 US Presidential election year, the archetypal meme frog has experienced a further bout of popularity after being adopted as a humor device by Donald Trump supporters, identified by the Hillary Clinton campaign as white supremacist iconography, and condemned by the Anti-Defamation League as an “anti-semitic symbol” — all the while being continually repurposed as the protagonist of increasingly complex and self-referential genres of Internet memes including “Rare Pepes,” “Cult of Kek,” and “Beta Uprising.” Repeatedly interviewed about the political reappropriations that turned his iconic character into a “culturally thick object,” Matt Furie has minimized this phenomenon as “just a product of the internet.” And yet, years before its spells of mainstream popularity and its contested political interpretations, Pepe had already found its way to Chinese social media platforms with surprising outcomes.

The history of computing has been witnessing growing interest in people versus machines, in the anonymous multitude versus the “great men,” and in everyday life versus science and business. To those writing user-centric histories, China provides a curious case about the profound implications of the underlying conceptions of the user figure, and thus highlights the importance of the historian’s critical awareness.

Final publication slightly differs from author's pre-print version.

"After the worst anti-China violence for 15 years took place in Vietnam this month, it took China’s propaganda authorities nearly two days to work out how the story should be handled publicly. However, this was not a simple information blackout. The 48-hour gap between the start of the riots and their eventual presentation to the country’s mass audiences exemplified some of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) sophisticated techniques for managing information during fast-breaking foreign affairs incidents in the Internet era. Far from seizing on incidents at sea to demonstrate China’s strength to a domestic audience, the official line played down China’s assertive actions in the South China Sea and emphasized Vietnamese efforts to stop the riots, effectively de-coupling the violence from the issue that sparked them. This indicated that, rather than trying to appease popular nationalism, China’s leaders were in fact reluctant to appear aggressive in front of their own people. [1]

By framing the issue in this way, China’s media authorities cultivated a measured “rational patriotism” in support of the country’s territorial claims. In contrast to the 2012 Sino-Japanese confrontation over the Diaoyu Islands, when Beijing appears to have encouraged nationalist outrage to increase its leverage in the dispute, [2] during the recent incident the Party-state was determined to limit popular participation in the issue, thus maximizing its ability to control the escalation of the situation, a cornerstone of the high-level policy of “unifying” the defense of its maritime claims with the maintenance of regional stability (Shijie Zhishi [World Affairs], 2011). "