Love NBA, hate BLM : racism in China’s sports fandom

This article aims to explore how racism plays out in China’s sports fandom in the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement sweeping across the globe. To this end, we conducted a case study of basketball fans’ postings on the most popular Chinese-language sports fandom platform, Hupu. The research discovered that the often-negative assessments of the BLM movement posted on Hupu were largely informed by racism deeply held in traditional Chinese thinking, which provided the grounding for Chinese sports fans to appropriate racial discourses to assess progressive equal-rights politics in Euro-American societies. The trajectory of such a discursive practice was twofold, enabling these sports fans to rationalize their political views pertaining to both international and domestic arenas. The research findings urge scholarly attention to the dynamic interplay between regional popular cultures and global equal-rights politics in the digital age in China and beyond

Negotiating the boundaries of news reporting: Journalists’ strategies to access and report political information in China

As Chinese politicians hold the power to control the dissemination of political information, beat journalists must guard their relationship with the authorities to expand the boundaries of news reporting; that is, to gain more access to political information and report more sensitive news. What remains a puzzle is how beat journalists can possibly expand these boundaries. Data from participatory observation and in-depth interviews with journalists reveal that in order to gain more access to political information, they not only serve as political advocates but also seize the opportunity to act as watchdogs. To report more sensitive news without being sanctioned or denounced by the authorities, they coordinate with peers both within and outside the news organization

COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE OF CHENGZHONGCUN VILLAGERS IN CHINA : A CASE OF GUANGZHOU, GUANGDONG PROVINCE

The purpose of this study was to examine the factors contributing to the emergence and persistence of collective action in chengzhongcun (literally known as “village(s) amid the city”) in China. Based on a one-and-a-half month fieldwork in Guangzhou, China, this study was designed to answer the questions of what triggered collective action in chengzhongcun and how and why chengzhongcun villagers could sustain their collective resistance under a repressive local state. While not denying the importance of the structural opportunity for collective action in chengzhongcun, rational considerations of the villagers and their cultural features were taken as crucial factors in triggering and sustaining collective action in chengzhongcun. First of all, rational considerations of the villagers had spurred them to converge and rejuvenate a social network which had long been weakening, while the cultural features embedded in the social network had strengthened solidarity of the protesters, leading to the emergence of collective action. Later on when the local authority repressed the collective action, rationality and the cultural features of the villagers had together led to labor division among them, which in fact helped to sustain the collective action in chengzhongcun

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic has made globally visible our worldwide interconnectedness as well as the multifarious range of interrelated problems pertaining to health inequality, economic uncertainty, human rights, and collective emotional and physical shock [Watson et al., 2020]. The latitude of the Covid-19 emergency has reminded us of the crucial role that journalists can play for individuals and society, but also of the importance of providing economic support to news providers especially in times of crisis [Olsen et al., 2020]. This book brings scholars from areas that have long been characterized by social and political instability to discuss what it takes to teach journalism in conditions of instability, risk, and restraint. We hope to demonstrate that it is perhaps this struggle and the many contradictions that journalism educators are caught up with that make the pedagogy of journalism in the Global South a disciplinary area in its own right that deserves more attention and integration in contemporary debates about Western-dominated journalistic and educational paradigms. The authors put under scrutiny journalism education in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Mexico, Philippines, Slovenia, and Turkey

Love NBA, Hate BLM : Racism in China’s Sports Fandom

This article aims to explore how racism plays out in China’s sports fandom in the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement sweeping across the globe. To this end, we conducted a case study of basketball fans’ postings on the most popular Chinese-language sports fandom platform, Hupu. The research discovered that the often-negative assessments of the BLM movement posted on Hupu were largely informed by racism deeply held in traditional Chinese thinking, which provided the grounding for Chinese sports fans to appropriate racial discourses to assess progressive equal-rights politics in Euro-American societies. The trajectory of such a discursive practice was twofold, enabling these sports fans to rationalize their political views pertaining to both international and domestic arenas. The research findings urge scholarly attention to the dynamic interplay between regional popular cultures and global equal-rights politics in the digital age in China and beyond