Jingyan Elaine Yuan
Biographic Data
| ID | 4018030 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jingyan Elaine Yuan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jingyan Elaine |
| FAMILY NAME | Yuan |
| SIGNATURE | YUAN J E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3404-7731 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Whither China
Platformize Asia-Reimagining Asia in Platform Capitalism
This introduction repositions "platform" and "Asia" as unstable, contested imaginaries rather than fixed objects of analysis. Bringing platform studies into dialogue with Asian studies, we argue for a double move of deconstruction and reconstruction: interrogating how platforms are historically framed through metaphors, archives, and business genealogies, and how "Asia" has been imagined through colonial, Cold War, and postcolonial projects. Usin…
From Platform Capitalism to Digital China
The 'platform turn' across various disciplines has introduced a new framework for analyzing the global digital economy. This special issue critically engages with existing discussions by adopting a broad political-economic perspective on the platform economy in China. Aiming to deconstruct and contextualize the dominant concepts of 'platformization' and 'infrastructuralization,' we focus on three central themes under the overarching framework of …
Neither 'Platformization' Nor 'Infrastructuralization
Critically engaging with the prevalent theses of 'platformization' and 'infrastructuralization' in the mainstream platform studies literature, this empirical study identifies socio-economic actors and examines their relations in digital governance mediated by data-driven platforms in the Chinese context. Through a case study of 'the digital reform' in Zhejiang Province, and the affiliated smart city project-City Brain-in Hangzhou, the municipal c…
The many histories of Alibaba
This essay provides brief accounts of some critical historical moments of Alibaba, one of China’s leading platforms, against the backdrop of the country’s accelerated market-oriented reforms since the 1990s. These accounts illustrate three theoretical approaches to explain the political-economic prerequisite of Alibaba’s growth: the neoliberal model, the developmental state, and the market transition theories. The essay concludes with challenges …
Making virtual celebrity
Focusing on intermediation in cultural production in a digital ecology consisting of multiple platforms mediating simultaneously converging and diverging industries, this study critically engages with the thesis that platforms act primarily as a disintermediation vector in a linear value chain within a single industry. With two empirical cases of intermediation in the emerging virtual celebrity sector – one organizing the recursive loop of prosum…
Entrepreneurs in China’s ‘Silicon Valley’
This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in ZGC …
The Web of Meaning
Dynamics of Digital Markets
The focus of this panel is the material, organizational, and cultural conditions of digital markets. While the notion of economy refers to the more general production, distribution and allocation in society, the idea of markets represents specific contexts of economic exchange typical of capitalist economies (Carruthers & Babb, 2013). A more elaborate understanding of digital markets and their relationships with digital platforms can expand our u…
Debating the Two-child Policy on Sina Weibo
The two-child policy profoundly impacted on many aspects of Chinese society, ranging from population structure to economic development. Social media served as a public symbolic space for diverse viewpoints on the issue. Situated in a revised public sphere framework, this study explores how the two-child policy was contended by various publics using a semantic network analysis of Sina Weibo posts. The results demonstrate relationships among the va…
Governing risk society
This is a critical comparative analysis of the systematic ways in which technology and big data practices are employed in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in China and South Korea. This study argues that the success of the strategies depends not on isolated applications of technological tools but the responsive socio-technological webs of a wide range of actors and resources mobilized and coordinated through well-functioning technological,…
The R/evolution of civic engagement
This study explores the role of social media as mediating structures for civic engagement. A network analysis of 2829 Facebook groups joined by 600 randomly sampled occupy Chicago (OC) participants shows that OC is embedded in diverse interconnected voluntary groups mediated by social media. The observed patterns of interconnection reveal a loosely connected, fragmented, and clustered structure. Such a structure may enable publics, as self-organi…
A Network Analytic Approach to Audience Behavior and Market Structure
This study adopts a network analytic approach to understand media audiences in relation to media markets, bridging the literature on audience behavior and media economics. Using audience data in the Chinese and U.S. markets, we apply multi-level measures to compare audience fragmentation patterns, a key indicator of market structure, across television channels. Drawing on McQuail's four–stage fragmentation model, we find the Chinese television ma…
“Privacy” in Semantic Networks on Chinese Social Media
Unprecedented social and technological developments call into question the meanings and boundaries of privacy in contemporary China. This study examines the discourse of privacy on Sina Weibo, the country's largest social medium, by performing a semantic network analysis of 18,000 postings containing the word “ (privacy).” The cluster analysis identifies 11 distinct yet organically related concept clusters, each representing a unique dimension of…
Recent literature on new media and intercultural communication
As the Internet, along with related network and mobile communication media, continues to spread across the world, we have experienced a greater diversity of social actors who communicate within as
From “Perpetual Contact” to Contextualized Mobility
This study charts culturally shaped mobile communication in Chinese society. It finds that Chinese mobile users maintain an open network of contacts comprising not only private relations but work relations and peripheral social ties. Mobile phones are used to define and negotiate in-group membership, maintain social cohesion through mediated rituals, observe relational hierarchies, and preserve social harmony through the use of mobile etiquette d…
Online Journalism in Social Transformations
This framing and discourse analysis documents the news coverage of a fire in Shanghai by the Chinese press, represented by a party-organ newspaper and three metro dailies. The findings illustrate the way commercial metro dailies side with their urban civic-minded readers to create an alternative news discourse that differs from that of the party journalism in China. The discourse analysis provides an empirical illustration of a new constructionis…
A culturalist critique of ‘online community’ in new media studies
This essay provides an overview of the theoretical perspectives and trends in the study of online community. It traces the genealogy of the community concept, addressing the conflicting views of community as a morally valued way of life and as a complex of social relationships in Western sociology. The essay also critiques the network approach to online community for its inadequate conceptualization of culture, which provides a particular traditi…
News Consumption Across Multiple Media Platforms
The recent trend of media convergence poses serious challenges to existing theoretical frameworks, such as uses and gratifications and the agenda-setting theories, for media choice and effects. This study adopts a repertoire approach to news consumption in the complex contemporary media environment. This approach emphasizes patterns of multiple media use, rather than single media selection, for accessing the news. A computer-aided telephone surve…
Diversity of exposure in television viewing
Chinese television has gone through tremendous growth and change recently. The new media environment has the potential to reshape patterns of television consumption and, in turn, affect the democratic development of Chinese society. This study examines audience fragmentation and polarization, two measures of diversity of exposure, in Guangzhou by conducting a secondary analysis of people meter data. The results show that structural changes have i…
A culturalist critique of ‘online community’ in new media studies
This essay provides an overview of the theoretical perspectives and trends in the study of online community. It traces the genealogy of the community concept, addressing the conflicting views of community as a morally valued way of life and as a complex of social relationships in Western sociology. The essay also critiques the network approach to online community for its inadequate conceptualization of culture, which provides a particular traditi…
From Platform Capitalism to Digital China
The 'platform turn' across various disciplines has introduced a new framework for analyzing the global digital economy. This special issue critically engages with existing discussions by adopting a broad political-economic perspective on the platform economy in China. Aiming to deconstruct and contextualize the dominant concepts of 'platformization' and 'infrastructuralization,' we focus on three central themes under the overarching framework of …
The many histories of Alibaba
This essay provides brief accounts of some critical historical moments of Alibaba, one of China’s leading platforms, against the backdrop of the country’s accelerated market-oriented reforms since the 1990s. These accounts illustrate three theoretical approaches to explain the political-economic prerequisite of Alibaba’s growth: the neoliberal model, the developmental state, and the market transition theories. The essay concludes with challenges …
Making virtual celebrity
Focusing on intermediation in cultural production in a digital ecology consisting of multiple platforms mediating simultaneously converging and diverging industries, this study critically engages with the thesis that platforms act primarily as a disintermediation vector in a linear value chain within a single industry. With two empirical cases of intermediation in the emerging virtual celebrity sector – one organizing the recursive loop of prosum…
From “Perpetual Contact” to Contextualized Mobility
This study charts culturally shaped mobile communication in Chinese society. It finds that Chinese mobile users maintain an open network of contacts comprising not only private relations but work relations and peripheral social ties. Mobile phones are used to define and negotiate in-group membership, maintain social cohesion through mediated rituals, observe relational hierarchies, and preserve social harmony through the use of mobile etiquette d…
Whither China
A Network Analytic Approach to Audience Behavior and Market Structure
This study adopts a network analytic approach to understand media audiences in relation to media markets, bridging the literature on audience behavior and media economics. Using audience data in the Chinese and U.S. markets, we apply multi-level measures to compare audience fragmentation patterns, a key indicator of market structure, across television channels. Drawing on McQuail's four–stage fragmentation model, we find the Chinese television ma…
Diversity of exposure in television viewing
Chinese television has gone through tremendous growth and change recently. The new media environment has the potential to reshape patterns of television consumption and, in turn, affect the democratic development of Chinese society. This study examines audience fragmentation and polarization, two measures of diversity of exposure, in Guangzhou by conducting a secondary analysis of people meter data. The results show that structural changes have i…
News Consumption Across Multiple Media Platforms
The recent trend of media convergence poses serious challenges to existing theoretical frameworks, such as uses and gratifications and the agenda-setting theories, for media choice and effects. This study adopts a repertoire approach to news consumption in the complex contemporary media environment. This approach emphasizes patterns of multiple media use, rather than single media selection, for accessing the news. A computer-aided telephone surve…
From “Perpetual Contact” to Contextualized Mobility
This study charts culturally shaped mobile communication in Chinese society. It finds that Chinese mobile users maintain an open network of contacts comprising not only private relations but work relations and peripheral social ties. Mobile phones are used to define and negotiate in-group membership, maintain social cohesion through mediated rituals, observe relational hierarchies, and preserve social harmony through the use of mobile etiquette d…
Online Journalism in Social Transformations
This framing and discourse analysis documents the news coverage of a fire in Shanghai by the Chinese press, represented by a party-organ newspaper and three metro dailies. The findings illustrate the way commercial metro dailies side with their urban civic-minded readers to create an alternative news discourse that differs from that of the party journalism in China. The discourse analysis provides an empirical illustration of a new constructionis…
A culturalist critique of ‘online community’ in new media studies
This essay provides an overview of the theoretical perspectives and trends in the study of online community. It traces the genealogy of the community concept, addressing the conflicting views of community as a morally valued way of life and as a complex of social relationships in Western sociology. The essay also critiques the network approach to online community for its inadequate conceptualization of culture, which provides a particular traditi…
“Privacy” in Semantic Networks on Chinese Social Media
Unprecedented social and technological developments call into question the meanings and boundaries of privacy in contemporary China. This study examines the discourse of privacy on Sina Weibo, the country's largest social medium, by performing a semantic network analysis of 18,000 postings containing the word “ (privacy).” The cluster analysis identifies 11 distinct yet organically related concept clusters, each representing a unique dimension of…
Recent literature on new media and intercultural communication
As the Internet, along with related network and mobile communication media, continues to spread across the world, we have experienced a greater diversity of social actors who communicate within as
A Network Analytic Approach to Audience Behavior and Market Structure
This study adopts a network analytic approach to understand media audiences in relation to media markets, bridging the literature on audience behavior and media economics. Using audience data in the Chinese and U.S. markets, we apply multi-level measures to compare audience fragmentation patterns, a key indicator of market structure, across television channels. Drawing on McQuail's four–stage fragmentation model, we find the Chinese television ma…
The R/evolution of civic engagement
This study explores the role of social media as mediating structures for civic engagement. A network analysis of 2829 Facebook groups joined by 600 randomly sampled occupy Chicago (OC) participants shows that OC is embedded in diverse interconnected voluntary groups mediated by social media. The observed patterns of interconnection reveal a loosely connected, fragmented, and clustered structure. Such a structure may enable publics, as self-organi…
The Web of Meaning
Dynamics of Digital Markets
The focus of this panel is the material, organizational, and cultural conditions of digital markets. While the notion of economy refers to the more general production, distribution and allocation in society, the idea of markets represents specific contexts of economic exchange typical of capitalist economies (Carruthers & Babb, 2013). A more elaborate understanding of digital markets and their relationships with digital platforms can expand our u…
Debating the Two-child Policy on Sina Weibo
The two-child policy profoundly impacted on many aspects of Chinese society, ranging from population structure to economic development. Social media served as a public symbolic space for diverse viewpoints on the issue. Situated in a revised public sphere framework, this study explores how the two-child policy was contended by various publics using a semantic network analysis of Sina Weibo posts. The results demonstrate relationships among the va…
Governing risk society
This is a critical comparative analysis of the systematic ways in which technology and big data practices are employed in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in China and South Korea. This study argues that the success of the strategies depends not on isolated applications of technological tools but the responsive socio-technological webs of a wide range of actors and resources mobilized and coordinated through well-functioning technological,…
Entrepreneurs in China’s ‘Silicon Valley’
This study problematizes the paradox of coexisting market dynamisms and the strong state in China’s ICT industry through an empirical inquiry into the history and practices of ICT entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC), an alternative geo-imaginary to that of Silicon Valley. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews and participant observations between 2015 and 2020, we situate the post-2008 rise of ICT entrepreneurship in ZGC …
The many histories of Alibaba
This essay provides brief accounts of some critical historical moments of Alibaba, one of China’s leading platforms, against the backdrop of the country’s accelerated market-oriented reforms since the 1990s. These accounts illustrate three theoretical approaches to explain the political-economic prerequisite of Alibaba’s growth: the neoliberal model, the developmental state, and the market transition theories. The essay concludes with challenges …
Making virtual celebrity
Focusing on intermediation in cultural production in a digital ecology consisting of multiple platforms mediating simultaneously converging and diverging industries, this study critically engages with the thesis that platforms act primarily as a disintermediation vector in a linear value chain within a single industry. With two empirical cases of intermediation in the emerging virtual celebrity sector – one organizing the recursive loop of prosum…
Whither China
Platformize Asia-Reimagining Asia in Platform Capitalism
This introduction repositions "platform" and "Asia" as unstable, contested imaginaries rather than fixed objects of analysis. Bringing platform studies into dialogue with Asian studies, we argue for a double move of deconstruction and reconstruction: interrogating how platforms are historically framed through metaphors, archives, and business genealogies, and how "Asia" has been imagined through colonial, Cold War, and postcolonial projects. Usin…
From Platform Capitalism to Digital China
The 'platform turn' across various disciplines has introduced a new framework for analyzing the global digital economy. This special issue critically engages with existing discussions by adopting a broad political-economic perspective on the platform economy in China. Aiming to deconstruct and contextualize the dominant concepts of 'platformization' and 'infrastructuralization,' we focus on three central themes under the overarching framework of …
Neither 'Platformization' Nor 'Infrastructuralization
Critically engaging with the prevalent theses of 'platformization' and 'infrastructuralization' in the mainstream platform studies literature, this empirical study identifies socio-economic actors and examines their relations in digital governance mediated by data-driven platforms in the Chinese context. Through a case study of 'the digital reform' in Zhejiang Province, and the affiliated smart city project-City Brain-in Hangzhou, the municipal c…
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (13 works) · China (9 works) · Social Media and Politics (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Advertising (5 works)