Global Media and China
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Ltd (GB) |
| ISSN | 2059-4364 / 2059-4372 |
| Scopus | 21101005180 |
| Wikidata | Q58239243 |
| OpenAlex | S4210218940 |
| Website | https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/global-media-and-china/journal202494 |
| Total publications | 319 |
| Coverage period | 2016 - 2026 |
| Country | GB |
| Language | EN |
| Access | Open Access • Diamond OA |
| Indexing | DOAJ indexed • Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 5 |
| Impact factor | 1.661 |
| SJR | 1.183 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 1.787 |
| CiteScore | 5.9 |
| h-index | 1 |
| Female authorship share | 56.4% |
This journal focuses on media, communication, and cultural studies within a global and Chinese context. It aligns with cultural studies and area studies, which are cognate fields with regular anthropological intersection
Communication · Cultural Studies · Asian Culture and Media Studies · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · Cinema and Media Studies · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Digital Economy and Work Transformation
Augmented Scenes
This article proposes the notion of ‘augmented scene’ to describe music scenes whose digital and analog practices and aesthetics are mutually constitutive, a dynamic increasingly characteristic of contemporary music cultures. Digital platforms are now central to the production, circulation and promotion of music worldwide, yet offline activities remain fundamental to musical life for producers and fans alike. Research on music platformization, ho…
Reimagining Belonging on rednote
In early 2025, a wave of American users migrated to the Chinese platform rednote, creating a highly visible and politically charged case of cross-cultural digital movement. Drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 29 American rednote users, this study integrates Media System Dependency Theory and Cross-Cultural Adaptation Theory to examine how participants made sense of the move, reorganized their media-related goals, and adjusted t…
Bingeing on Daydreams
This study examines how frequent micro-drama viewers in a Chinese tier-3 city negotiate identity through binge-watching so-called daydream-style micro-dramas. Drawing on experience sampling, in-depth interviews, and 4,189 online comments, the analysis identifies four identity positions that take shape as viewers move between pleasure and rationality, as well as between grassroots belonging and upward aspiration: aspirational dreamers, pleasure hu…
Platform City
The increasing integration of digital platforms into the functioning of urban cities has sparked significant scholarly and public debates. This article has emphasized the attendance of social media platforms in urban affairs, analyzing the practices of social media platforms across both digital and physical spaces, particularly within the Chinese context. Drawing on a methodological framework which includes a walkthrough of the use of RED, a crit…
Douyin Forgot Me
This article examines how older content creators on China’s Douyin platform develop and act upon their understandings of algorithmic systems, revealing a paradox where sophisticated platform knowledge intensifies rather than alleviates vulnerability. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 23 creators and 1-month ethnographic observation, we demonstrate how participants construct anthropomorphic “algorithmic imaginaries” that frame platform algorithm…
Commentary
This Commentary argues that, in studying artificial intelligence in the creator economy, we need to consider more than questions of technology, artistic innovation, or markets. We need also to confront questions of political order, collective governance, and the varieties of creator policies that arise in response to AI. We need to reflect upon what is entailed by justice and what is meant by democracy in the management of AI. In short, as well a…
Hidden Labor in Chinese-Contracted AI Training
The global triumph of Chinese AI depends on a hidden workforce of data annotators in the Global South. This comparative study examines the lived experiences of 38 workers in Egypt, Morocco, and Kenya who label images, transcribe speech, and refine datasets for Chinese tech companies through cross-border chains. Drawing on semi-structured interviews analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis, four themes emerged: (1) a layered architecture of su…
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in the Creator Economy
Artificial intelligence is ever more integrated into the creator economy, shaping the conditions within which creative work is produced, circulated, valued, and recognised. As AI is incorporated into creative tools, platforms, and cultural production, creators are encountering new opportunities alongside renewed uncertainties about authorship, occupational roles, creativity, and artistic value. Four interrelated themes are introduced as a framewo…
Oriented Toward “My World”
AI application development platforms incorporating generative artificial intelligence into their technology stack are reconstructing software development paradigms. Drawing on the convergence of platform studies and infrastructure studies and engaging materially attentive political-economic critique, this study combines theoretical literature review with hands-on experience in building AI agents on the Coze platform to propose the concept of “Lev…
Cultivation games and cosmotechnics
In Chinese fantasy narratives spanning literature, animation, and games, characters will often practice martial arts and meditative techniques to become stronger and extend their lives. This process is called cultivation. This paper explores Chinese cultivation games, a unique genre of videogames deeply rooted in Chinese culture and cosmology. Through the theoretical lens of cosmotechnics, the analysis aims to elucidate the cultural complexity an…
Play to earn
The prosperity of China’s digital gaming ecosystem would be impossible without the contributions of large numbers of informal gamer-workers through their play-to-earn labor practices. We define gamer-workers as individuals who occupy a vast gray area between casual play and formal employment. Though they come from diverse social backgrounds and are driven by varying motivations, gamer-workers closely tie their gaming practices to the pursuit of a…
Broadcasting your virtual self
The rebuilding of ludic practices is evident with the rise of virtual worlds. “VTubers,” (virtual YouTubers) use virtual reality (VR) hardware and software to create 2D or 3D anime-like avatars for live-streaming. By moving the focus from real-person live streamers to virtual live streamers, the case of VTubers adds a new aspect to understanding “authenticity” in virtual intimacy. Through ethnographic methods, this study examines how VR technolog…
Reimagining heterosexuality and femininity
This article explores how Girl Top/Boy Bottom (GB) genre in hetero-romance games creates critical spaces where fans actively engage in counter-heteronormative gender and sexuality politics. Using the concept of “constructive fantasy,” this paper examines how women fans negotiate and experiment with gender roles and sexuality in hetero-romance and how their efforts breach the boundary between fantasy and reality. We identify three ways in which co…
(Re)Platforming subcultures
In this paper, I argue that while regional platformisation often takes a utilitarian role, replacing services which are not offered as readily outside of global platforms’ strong reach, there is also an underemphasised performative role as these same online websites become integral to platform-dependent subcultures and their identity formation. I look at board game geeks, who share a culture as much about playing games as it is about performing a…
Fan translation of video games in China
Following the Chinese State Council’s ban on commercial gaming consoles and the rise of computer game piracy, foreign video game companies began to withdraw from investing in Chinese game translations in the early 2000s. In response, fan translation emerged as an alternative for Chinese gamers. ‘Fan translation’ refers to unofficial translations produced by enthusiasts for various types of media. Specifically, fan translation of video games invol…
Grieving World of Warcraft ’s Chinese server shutdown
Twenty years of game scholarship established that players form profound attachments to the virtual worlds and inhabitants of Massively Multiplayer Online [MMO-]games, that are near-indistinguishable from their attachment to offline relationships. However, the shutdown of World of Warcraft ’s Chinese servers on January 24th, 2023, ended those attachments on a massive scale for millions of players, after 18 years. How did Chinese players experience…
Proceduralized Intimacy
Using the framework of procedural rhetoric, this study combines the walkthrough method, participant observation, and in-depth interviews to examine how idol subscription platforms restructure fan–idol intimacy within Chinese K-pop fandom. The findings reveal that idol subscription platforms, exemplified by Bubble, operationalize intimacy through paywalled one-on-one rhetoric, asymmetrical interaction, and simulated directness. Fans purchase in Bu…
Artificial Intelligence as a Printing Press Moment
Artificial intelligence (AI) fundamentally transforms who communicates and how meaning circulates. Yet the field risks missing this inflection point by treating AI as merely another empirical context for existing frameworks rather than as a phenomenon exposing those frameworks’ limitations. This commentary argues that AI reveals ontological parallelism—the tendency for communication research to address emerging phenomena through isolated paradigm…
The expectation-evaluation gap
This study explicates and examines a hypothesized discrepancy in public perceptions of the normative roles of journalists and evaluations of journalists’ actual performance. We argue that journalistic functions and public perceptions are mutually constituted, a point that has been largely ignored in existing journalism studies literature. We theoretically connect the expectation-evaluation gap with the public assessment of media credibility in a …
Short videos, big impact
In the contemporary media landscape in China, short video platforms (SVP) have emerged as significant news sources, especially among young audiences. Anchored in an understanding of news literacy as situated knowledge, this study investigates how Chinese youth (aged 13–18) perceive and engage with news content on these platforms. Based on qualitative interviews with 30 middle and high school students across five provinces in China, we found that …
For a Political Ecology of Communication
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has sparked both enthusiasm for their potential to drive economic, social, and cultural transformation and concern regarding their environmental implications. While AI is often celebrated as a driver for productivity and efficiency, its environmental footprint, particularly in terms of resource extraction, energy consumption, and electronic waste, presents significant challenges. Th…
“Strike with visual bullets”
The bullet comment refers to a real-time built-in comment system attached to online video services on the Chinese Internet. It provides a mechanism transforming online spectatorship into an “audiencing” experience. This study interviews 16 bullet comment users to explore the digital media practices in bullet comments. We argue that the “audiencing” subjects are involved as players in the imagined communities through emotional invitations, implici…
‘What would they think of us?’ The impact of the China threat narrative in Australian media on PRC migrants and social cohesion
This paper engages closely with the perspectives of a particular cohort of Chinese-Australians: first-generation Mandarin-speaking migrants in Australia from the PRC. It aims to examine their responses and reactions to mainstream English-language news stories about their community and about the PRC. Drawing on data from a large quantitative survey, 20 in-depth interviews, and three group discussions, the paper explores three dimensions: how membe…
Beyond Barbie
This article examines how Western brands and white Western entrepreneurs employ representations of whiteness in advertising their products on China’s social media platforms. While research has effectively revealed the prevalence of white hegemony in advertising, few studies have addressed the representation of whiteness in non-Western contexts such as China. Focusing on the largest and highly digitized retailing industry in Asia, this article exa…
Game studies do not need disciplinary cohesion
Global China and everyday mediation in the Global South
Combining online and offline data collection during six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Mozambique in early 2021, this paper explores how media and its everyday use in the Global South are impacting on, and are in turn being transformed by China. It specifically looks into the creative and personalised ways in which Chinese-made garments are sold and promoted in Mozambique via the messenger service WhatsApp. Examining how Mozambican …
The cultural politics of race in Chinese cinema
Research on whiteness in Western cinema has effectively revealed how cinematic representation contributes to formulating, perpetuating, normalizing, and contesting white superiority in Western cultural discourses. However, little research considers how Chinese cinema imagines and negotiates whiteness. Using the visual-textual analysis method, this article examines the representations of white identities in Big Shot’s Funeral (2001, dir. Feng Xiao…
Game of text
This article situates Bruce Lee at the heart of the emergence of ‘martial arts’. It argues that the notion ‘martial arts’, as we now know it, is a discursive entity that emerged in the wake of media texts, and that the influence of Bruce Lee films of the early 1970s was both seminal and structuring of ‘martial arts’, in ways that continue to be felt. Using the media theory proposition that a limited range of ‘key visuals’ structure the aesthetic …
A narrative future for Europe–China economic relations after the financial crisis
This article provides a detailed comparative analysis of how leading European media outlets—three elite newspapers from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—reported economic news as it related to China from 2008, the beginning of the global financial crisis, until 2014. It illustrates the changing nature of European media perceptions of China and a growing interdependence between Europe and China after the financial crisis. Media messages dir…
Mass media, new technology, and ideology
Based on a nationwide survey, this study examines the mediated constructions of political ideology and its antecedents in contemporary China. The empirical findings offer insights into China’s future by examining political beliefs in the country. Our study found that most of the respondents share an inclination toward Liberalism, indicating that the general public harbors expectations not only for expansion of market competition to ensure the cou…
Roundtable Discussion of “Media Narratives and China’s Future”
China’s position on international intervention
Chemical weapons use was a red-line that Damascus-directed forces crossed in the current and ongoing Syrian civil conflict. Russia and the United States disagreed not only about whether the weapons had indeed been used, but also regarding whom to identify as the weapons use perpetrators. That the United States and Russia would find themselves diametrically opposed initially on policy and military prescriptions regarding Syria is generally and the…
Neighboring competitor? Indian image in Chinese media
Despite being two of the most populous and neighboring countries in the world, India and China have long been unfamiliar about each other. Although both of them are tagged as “emerging economic powers” in today’s world, China and India are much different in terms of political system, social structure, and cultural traditions. Owing to such differences and even prevalent stereotypes between the two countries, most of the information about them is …
The impact of digital media on newspapers
Chinese newspapers are beginning to feel the effects of digital media both on their circulations and advertising revenues. In contrast to the west, where newspaper circulation has been problematic for some years, this represents a new situation since they have enjoyed 25 years during which both circulation and advertising grew very rapidly. The response of Chinese newspapers has some similarities with that experienced in the West, and notably the…
The state of China’s collective rights management in the context of the United States and Japan
With the rapid expansion of China’s economy, China’s music industries have shown rapid growth, and new companies have entered the marketplace. As these companies have had little pre-existing experience with the music industry—not to mention that music industry is a relatively new concept in China—the expansion has been not only rapid but also disordered and chaotic. One component of a mature music industry are collective rights management or perf…
An ecosystem lens
The digital disruption of the global music industry hits the value chain for recorded music hard. In China, new digital service providers began to amass large user bases, offering a variety of services based on e-commerce and social messaging applications. In a low-intellectual property environment, these services have become the primary sources of digital music streaming via the Internet and increasingly through mobile telephony. This article re…
Music industry and copyright protection in the United States and China
From the standard economic rationale, music copyright supports the rights of authors and creators to exclude competitors and the public from accessing and copying their works to the extent necessary to provide incentive to recover the investment they made in creating those works. The necessary extent in music copyright is from the interplay of three historical drivers of copyright policy—technology (which makes things possible), the market (which…
A report on Beijing’s cultural and creative industries media clusters
China’s rapidly developing cultural and creative industries have generated a boom in clusters; that is, companies with similar or complementary interests congregating around one another. Driven by government policy and market opportunities, investors and entrepreneurs have flocked to form and build clusters in order to accelerate economic growth. This “In Focus” report defines and categorizes Beijing’s cultural and creative industries media clust…
Entertainment media, cultural power, and post-globalization
The concept of soft power has been highly influential in recent years, both as a concept to inform understanding of the cultural dimensions of international relations and as providing a practical guide to state investment in the international expansion of both news and entertainment media. One of the places where it has been most influential has been China, where is has been used to support the international expansion of China Central Television …
Dissenting public or engaged citizens? Predictors of general and contentious online political expression in China
Online political engagement in China has been explained as both conventional and contentious forms of political participation. Depending on the explanations, potentially contradicting factors are assumed to promote online political engagement. To resolve this contradiction, this research distinguished general and contentious online political expression. The analyses of two datasets showed that general online political expression positively relate…
Portrait of justice
Some scholars doubt whether China has much of a legal tradition, and others have opined that China lacks legal subjectivity from a Western legal perspective. However, various dramas have delineated a legal culture and form of legal subjectivity in China present since ancient times. Unfortunately, relatively less research has been conducted on legal themes in Chinese drama, and even less scholarship has explored Chinese legal tradition through an …
A new model for understanding global media and China
The topic of this article and title of this journal are the same: ‘global media and China’. Although ‘global’ suggests a single universal unit, adding ‘China’ necessarily creates a difference, especially in the context of the ‘Great Firewall’, which creates a well-defined boundary between global media and China. Should our title read ‘Global Media versus China’, suggesting that the apparent universality of ‘global’ phenomena may be an illusion in…
The bumpy road towards network convergence in China
The decoupling of content and distribution platform has changed television irrevocably. Potential opportunities promised by the integration of telecommunications, broadcast and Internet networks means television has become a strategic highland for relevant stakeholders including industry players and state regulators. In China, network convergence has been on the state agenda since the turn of the century, but has remained stubbornly hard to move …
Temptation of control in the globalizing culture industries
Trans-border televisual musicscape
This article focuses on the regionalization of reality TV I am a Singer from China to Hong Kong. It explores the features of a successful flow of a reality singing contest with the concepts of mediascape, televisuality and cultural memory of pop music. The three research questions: what format structures of televisuality are being integrated in I am a Singer; how locals in China and Hong Kong interpret and appropriate I am a Singer to their exper…
Korean–Chinese Film Remakes in a New Age of Cultural Globalisation
Since the early 2000s, the Korean Wave (aka Hallyu) has influenced Greater China in enterprising and complex ways that diverge from the ways in which Hallyu has impacted other markets. At the same time, since China joined the Word Trade Organization in 2001, art, culture and media production have been largely transformed from vehicles for state propaganda into new gateways for producing and showcasing popular commercial entertainment. Korean prod…
Casting an ‘Outsider’ in the ritual centre
Recent years have seen the rise of the ‘processual approach’ in media ritual studies, which focuses on the making of media rituals through various ‘ritualised actions’ rather than assuming them as isolated events distinctive to ordinary broadcasting. This article advances this line of argument by shedding light on a previously less-discussed form of ritualised action: the ritualised casting. It examines how the character of ‘rural migrant’ has be…
Comparing the use of space in selfies on Chinese Weibo and Twitter
Selfies are a ubiquitous practice worldwide in which social media users create and share cultural artifacts that go beyond mere idealized or narcissistic self-presentations. As a cultural phenomenon, selfies reflect not just personal impressions but also communal values of modern life. This study analyzes the use of place in selfies as a defining visual element of self-representation in the United States and China. In particular, this research ex…
Perceptions and attitudes of Chinese journalists about gender equality
This study provides a contemporary portrait of Chinese journalists’ perceptions and attitudes about gender equality, including their perceptions and attitudes about gender/equality and the status of gender equality in China; attitudes about media and professional practices; journalists’ preference for news; journalists’ ideas about the influence of media content on audiences; the role of journalism in gender equality; gender-related training amon…
New questions emerge amidst rapid changes
Framing China
China has emerged in the early 21st century as arguably the most important partner and rival to the United States. Increasingly, the United States perceives China’s rise on the world stage as a threat to US global hegemony. US national discourse has constructed China, we argue, as a potential enemy Other—an ever-present threat with whom we cautiously partner with. This article situates this flexible construction within the history of Orientalism …
Business, soft power, and whitewashing
Applying the grounded theory approach, this study identified three major themes– business, soft power, and whitewashing–in the US media coverage of “The Great Wall” film, which is the biggest co-production between Hollywood and China in history. It also discussed the interconnections among the three themes and the implications of these interconnections. The connection between business and soft power revealed China’s strategy of enhancing its soft…
Environmental disputes in China
Environmental disputes have surged in China over the past few years. For many scholars, this trend indicates the proliferation of “Not In My Back Yard” resistance among ordinary Chinese citizens. Yet, to what extent does the “Not In My Back Yard” label accurately reflect the complexity of Chinese environmental activism? This article seeks to address this question through a case study of the 2012 Ningbo anti-para-xylene protest. By analyzing how t…