Participatory Democracy in the Chinese Cyber World: Case Studies from Weibo

This thesis discusses features of citizen communication on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, and its relationship to participatory democracy in China. Weibo is a complex social space due to the interplay of different forces and social actors. On the one hand, Weibo provides the space for bottom-up political participation: it expands the horizontal discursive space where plural discourses coexist and interact; provides a social sphere where counter-discourses are created; a space where the culture of resistance is formed; and serves as an alternative source for information. On the other hand, the vertical political control of the state, and the digital divide produced by capitalist power, are forces that constrain citizen participation. The thesis examines the interplay of these dynamics in three online ethnographic case studies: the response to street vendor Xia Junfeng’s death sentence, the sanitation workers’ strike in Guangzhou, and the anti-trash incineration protest in Yuhang, and triangulates the results with an online survey and examination of the extant literature

China’s Weibo: is faster different?

The popularization of microblogging in China represents a new challenge to the state’s regime of information control. The speed with which information is diffused in the microblogosphere has helped netizens to publicize and express their discontent with the negative consequences of economic growth, income inequalities and official corruption. In some cases, netizen led initiatives have facilitated the mobilization of online public opinion and forced the central government to intervene to redress acts of lower level malfeasance. However, despite the growing corpus of such cases, the government has quickly adapted to the changing internet ecology and is using the same tools to help it maintain control of society by enhancing its claims to legitimacy, circumscribing dissent, identifying malfeasance in its agents and using online public opinion to adapt policy and direct propaganda efforts. This essay reflects on microblogging in the context of the Chinese internet, and argues that successes in breaking scandals and mobilizing opinion against recalcitrant officials should not mask the reality that the government is utilizing the microblogosphere to its own advantage

THE SURVIVAL AND DEVELOPMENT OF CHINESE NEW MEDIA BUSINESS: AMONG STATE, MARKET, AND PUBLIC

Master'sMASTER OF ART

Modelling fashion microblogs to increase the influence of social media marketing in Ireland and China

With the breakthrough of social media in the 21st century, microblogging has become an influential medium for marketing fashion brands and products online. For this reason, this study explores ten Irish and another ten Chinese fashion microblogging influencers’ microblogs using Text Mining and Netnography. By this comparison, the study finds a current model of how fashion microblogs influence fashion consumption in Ireland and China. With the help of this model, the study proposes a typology of Irish and Chinese fashion microblogging influencers and their basic microblogging strategies. The proposed typology intends to help fashion marketers to model their fashion microblogs in order to increase the influence of social media marketing in Ireland and China. Furthermore, the proposed typology is applied to develop a digital artefact that not only can deal with Irish and Chinese fashion microblogs at the same time but also show the results employing text visualisation. This bilingual digital website tries to make up for the lack of attention to text analysis on fashion-related words in the development of text mining tools. Finally, the methodological combination of Text Mining and Netnography employs digital tools and computer programming to conduct studies in the field of arts and humanities. The success of methodological combination in the study opens up a bright prospect for interdisciplinary research methodology

Social Media Use, Media Credibility and Online Engagement Among Young Adults in China

Drawing on data collected online in China, this dissertation consists of four studies that deal – from different angles – with relationships between media use and repertoires, traditional and social media credibility, and online engagement in politics, culture, and health among young adults. In a nutshell, I investigated how much young adults trust the various media outlets at their disposal and how this affects behaviors and forms of engagement vis-à-vis topical issues in the fields of politics, culture and health in the country’s contemporary media environ

Exploring the intersection of translation and music: an analysis of how foreign songs reach Chinese audiences

The thesis looks into the practice of song translation, which occupies a peripheral position in translation studies (TS) despite its commonplace occurrence and significant impact on the global spread of songs. Foreign songs enjoy enormous appeal in China, where different methods have been adopted to translate them with the aim of enhancing listeners’ full reception. In particular, the practice of writing Chinese lyrics anew and setting them to the foreign tunes regardless of the semantic relationship between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) has proliferated over the past decades. Some translated songs capture the gist of the original lyrics omitting minor details whereas some sever their relations with the original. This blurs the boundaries between translation, adaptation and rewriting lyrics. Another noticeable phenomenon is the emergence of self-organising communities, whose involvement in translating song lyrics and circulating subtitled music videos (MVs) cannot be overlooked in today’s digital landscape. Song translation can be understood as a field with its own “rules of the game” and exchange of different forms of capital following a Bourdieusian perspective. Adopting a case study methodology, the thesis investigates the particular field of song translation with special reference to the translation practices of a veteran song translator named Xue Fan 薛范, online amateur translators, and a professional lyricist from Hong Kong called Albert Leung 林夕. These case studies have been conducted for providing an in-depth analysis of China’s song translation activities through time and the dynamics of the power relations in the field. To translate a song from one language and culture into another invariably involves the losses and gains of certain elements, given the song’s semiotic richness. Against this backdrop, the thesis attempts to examine how the interplay of different meaning-making modes in a song has been dealt with by different agents under various circumstances through close examination of the relationship between STs and TTs. This will allow a better understanding of the production, circulation and reception of song translations in respective historical, ideological and social contexts. It is hoped that the thesis can provide new insights into our understanding of ‘translation’ in relation to music, and further shed light on how translation evolves at the convergence of music and technology in the globalisation era