Was There a Countersphere in China’s Nationalist Narration of the Covid-19 Pandemic in 2020? A Perspective from Feminist Internet Studies

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic in China, a nationalist discourse emerged across leading social networks, portraying female medical personnel as self-sacrificing heroines. Female activists not only questioned this media coverage and successfully launched online fundraising campaigns to support female doctors and nurses, but also raised attention to patriarchal structures within Chinese society. However, most feminists’ attempts to decentre nationalist discourse were either censored by algorithmic forms of social control or ignored by mainstream media. Hence, intercultural studiesinvestigating China’s global entanglement need to consider these restrictions on communicative possibilities and forms of censored resistance, to ensure nationalist discourse does not overshadow the transnational struggle that women face against patriarchal oppression, spurred by the pandemic

‘The Middle Kingdom on the High Seas’: On the Value Crisis of Modern Chinese Society

Against the background of current transformation processes of Chinese society in the course of modernization and globalization, the paper argues that there is a value crisis in contemporary China. We suggest potential solutions for the educational field in order to bridge the gap between ‘incoming’ Western values and ‘internal’ traditional Chinese values. In a first step, several studies from the field of health communication are presented, including the psychology of “cold-nest” children of migrant workers, that suggest the value crisis is associated with a number of serious societal and cultural problems in China, such as an alarming rise in mental health problems among young people, ranging from children to college and university students. Secondly, Western values of Enlightenment thinking are contrasted with the spiritual heritage of Confucianism. Finally, we suggest how the value conflict can be overcome by (i) engaging in civilizational dialogues, (ii) by formulating universal values and by (iii) adopting an integrated value system in the practical education of values

Tech Imaginations

Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter, Christoph Borbach, Max Kanderske und Prof. Dr. Benjamin Beil sind Herausgeber der Reihe. Die Herausgeber*innen der einzelnen Hefte sind renommierte Wissenschaftler*innen aus dem In- und Ausland.Technologies and especially media technologies are pervasive in modern societies. But even more omnipresent are the imaginaries of modern technologies – what technologies are thought to be capable of or what effects they are supposed to have. These imaginations reveal a lot of the political and ideological self-descriptions of societies, hence the (techno-)imaginary also functions as a kind of epistemic tool. Concepts of the imaginary therefore have experienced an increasing attention in cultural theory and the social sciences in recent years. In particular, work from political philosophy, but also approaches from science and technology studies (STS) or communication and media studies are worth mentioning here. The term "techno-imagination", coined by Vilém Flusser in the early 1990s, refers to the close interconnection of (digital) media and imaginations, whose coupling can not only be understood as a driver of future technology via fictional discourses (e.g. science fiction), but much more fundamentally also as a constitutive element of society and sociality itself, as Castoriadis has argued. In the first part of the issue several theoretical contributions add new aspects to the discussion of socio-technical imaginaries, while in the second part a workshop held in January 2022 at the CAIS in Bochum is documented, in which the case of the imaginaries of “Future Internets” was discussed

Arts in health revisited: A sketch of art practices in ancient and contemporary Chinese healthcare from an intercultural perspective

Recent efforts to internationalize the discourse on art practices in health have neglected Asian countries and China in particular. This is due to language barriers on the side of Western researchers, as well as the pilot stage and isolation of Chinese research within its own native publication platforms. Similarly, the discourse of arts in health is marked by a Euro-American perspective presenting this area of practice as a modern invention of the West. Firstly, the paper provides a sketch of the ancient medical canon to recount the Chinese history of art practices used alongside health. Next, based on a systematic review of current literature, I develop and apply an analysis grid to survey the functions of arts in health in contemporary China. Given that some art practices apply East Asian medical thought and have culture-specific functions, future research needs to investigate the non-Western world to develop cross-cultural approaches to art-in-health interventions

Travelling Media Structures

The flow of communication structures across various media formats can be traced back to the printing press culture of early modern Europe, where three distinct media features appeared: disagreement, sensationalism, and self-reference. These features continue to characterize health communication in today’s online media (Bogen 2011; 2013). This study investigates whether these media structures also characterize contemporary health communication in non-Western countries like China, which are undergoing a modernization process. By taking European structures of healthcare communication as a point of reference, I will analyze how Chinese healthcare communication differs from its European counterpart. This paper takes SARS (the first globally emerging infectious disease of the 21st century) as a case study. While the SARS discourse illustrates the existence of these communication structures in the Chinese media and indicates some convergence between East and West, it is clear that these media structures have been adapted to a specifically Chinese cultural program of modernization. Moreover, I will identify ‘non-European’ structures that can be explained by China’s specific cultural background, and explore the processes of transfer and demarcation that occur when media structures are adapted across cultures

Was There a Countersphere in China's Nationalist Narration of the Covid-19 Pandemic in 2020? A Perspective from Feminist Internet Studies

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic in China, a nationalist discourse emerged across leading social networks, portraying female medical personnel as self-sacrificing heroines. Female activists not only questioned this media coverage and successfully launched online fundraising campaigns to support female doctors and nurses, but also raised attention to patriarchal structures within Chinese society. However, most feminists' attempts to decentre nationalist discourse were either censored by algorithmic forms of social control or ignored by mainstream media. Hence, intercultural studiesinvestigating China's global entanglement need to consider these restrictions on communicative possibilities and forms of censored resistance, to ensure nationalist discourse does not overshadow the transnational struggle that women face against patriarchal oppression, spurred by the pandemic.Der Ausbruch der Covid-19 Epidemie in China wurde von einem nationalistischen Diskurs in prominenten sozialen Netzwerken begleitet, der das weibliche medizinische Personal als sich selbst aufopfernde Heldinnen porträtierte. Feministische Aktivistinnen hinterfragten nicht nur diese Berichterstattung in den Medien und initiierten Spenden, um die Ärztinnen und Pflegerinnen zu unterstützen, sondern richteten die öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit auch auf patriarchische Strukturen in der chinesischen Gesellschaft. Doch der Versuch der Feministinnen, Chinas nationalistischem Diskurs entgegenzusteuern, wurde entweder von algorithmischen Formen der sozialen Kontrolle zensiert oder von den Mainstream-Medien ignoriert. Deshalb sollten interkulturelle Studien, die Chinas globale Verflechtung untersuchen, diese Einschränkungen der kommunikativen Möglichkeiten und Formen des zensierten Widerstands ins Auge fassen, um zu verhindern, dass der nationalistische Diskurs den transnationalen Kampf von Frauen gegen patriarchische Unterdrückung überschattet, welcher durch die Pandemie weiter angefacht worden ist