While the Chinese Government bans most popular foreign social media services, it does not underestimate the strategic role of these networked technologies, particularly their potential to strengthen China’s communication with the world. In recent years, leveraging foreign social media platforms has become a common practice in the foreign-aimed reporting sector in China. This essay explores how Chinese foreign-aimed journalists—individuals who are expected to use and normalise foreign platforms at work—navigate a changing work environment as their journalistic practices and traditional routines are increasingly platform-based and digitally oriented.

With the lifting of pandemic-related travel restrictions, international researchers are now returning to China. While the end of ‘Zero-Covid’ opens new possibilities for mobility and access, China remains a challenging environment for fieldwork; given current geopolitical tensions, mounting anti-foreign (and anti-Chinese) rhetoric, and an ever-growing list of ‘sensitive’ research topics, it seems unlikely that conditions […]

On 1 July 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping stood atop Tiananmen Gate and thrust his fist in the air while saying: ‘Long live the great, glorious, and correct Chinese Communist Party.’ It was the dramatic conclusion to his speech commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Descriptions of the […]

Change and continuity are interrelated dynamics. All social scientists grapple with this interrelation. How is continuity embedded in change? How does change enable continuity? In struggling with such issues, social scientists, along with everybody else, create concepts to depict the dynamics of change and social continuity. These concepts are never a perfect match with the […]