Reorienting Communication Research: Toward a New Knowledge Paradigm for the Global South—Interview with Yuezhi Zhao

The Harare Forum for Africa as a paradigm-shifting academic exchange platform

Although the exclusive Bellagio conferences were highly sought after by scholars worldwide, that experience convinced me that academic forums should engage more directly with social realities, and that autonomous agendas emerging from China and the Global South should have a rightful place. If Bellagio represented a site where global scholars, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, conducted research and debate that shaped international academic agendas, then, in the same era of ascendant neoliberal globalization, another picturesque European town—Davos—hosted the famous World Economic Forum. There, political, economic, and technological elites gathered annually to deliberate on the future of the world at a broader, more explicitly power-laden level. Viewed together, Bellagio and Davos came to symbolize the pervasive dominance of Western centrism across both political economy and knowledge production.

Of course, neoliberal globalization inevitably generated counter-movements. In the Global South, the World Social Forum emerged—held in Brazil, India, Venezuela, and elsewhere—as a direct response to Davos. It was propelled by left intellectuals and grassroots social movements in the Global South, emphasizing social justice and Global South agendas. Yet the Forum also contained anarchistic tendencies, and its dominant discursive mode was negative critique rather than constructive. More importantly, as a Chinese scholar, I had long noticed that—with the exception of a few Chinese left scholars—Chinese voices were largely absent from the World Social Forum.

Against this backdrop, I began to imagine: could we create a new kind of global forum? One that could respond to Global South agendas without falling into anarchism; one that could retain the academic depth of a Bellagio-style meeting without retreating into an ivory tower; one that could connect government, industry, and academia, combining theory with practice; in short, conducting real social investigation and engaging with reality.

With this in mind, in 2014 I returned to my place of birth, Jinyun County in Zhejiang Province, China, and established the Heyang Institute for Rural Studies. Jinyun County is deeply rooted in China’s agrarian civilization, blessed with rich natural landscapes, and, more importantly, is at the forefront of rural revitalization. I attempted to institutionalize what I imagined as a “Bellagio + World Social Forum + rural fieldwork” model by founding the Heyang Forum. By 2024, the Forum had successfully held its tenth edition, developing a reputation as an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, and praxis-oriented venue for organized field visits and inclusive scholarly dialogue on cutting-edge rural development issues, and fostering a scholarly network with hundreds of young scholars.

In 2022, I sought early retirement from Simon Fraser University and joined Tsinghua University full-time. This change of academic home provided me with a new platform to pursue more field-based research and praxis-oriented work. In the summer of 2023, as an experiment in bringing my transcultural political economy of communication to the “last mile” of practice, I initiated a “China–Zimbabwe–Jinyun Transcultural Dialogue,” enabling Zimbabwean and Chinese scholars to conduct joint rural fieldwork and engage in intercultural exchange. In 2024, together with Professor Hu Yu, I led Tsinghua students and a team from Jinyun County—including a rural woman entrepreneur recognized nationally for poverty alleviation achievements—to Zimbabwe for field research. As the culmination and final segment of that trip, we convened the First Harare Africa Forum, realizing the “upgrading and internationalization” of the Heyang Forum.

There was also a coincidental factor behind choosing Zimbabwe—I have long felt a special personal connection to the country. On 18 April 1980, as a 15-year-old middle school student in rural China, I heard China National Radio announce, in an impassioned voice, that Zimbabwe had gained independence. This news ignited my imagination of the “Third World” and filled me with curiosity about Zimbabwe. In 2023, shortly after the pandemic, I attended a Spring Festival event in a mountain village in Jinyun, where I happened to meet Tungamirai Eric Mupona, a Zimbabwean doctoral student studying in Zhejiang University. With his assistance, we invited the group of Zimbabwean scholars mentioned earlier to conduct research in China. These scholars, in turn, became leading speakers at the inaugural Harare Forum for Africa.

The Forum also depended on critical support from local partners in Zimbabwe. Xuezhi Du is my doctoral student at Simon Fraser University. He has been conducting fieldwork research in Zimbabwe since the end of 2023, where he met Steve Zhao, Chair of the China–Zimbabwe Exchange Center—an entrepreneur who has worked in Zimbabwe for nearly three decades and is widely respected for his long-standing commitment to China–Africa people-to-people exchange. With Steve Zhao’s strong support and his team’s extensive local networks in Zimbabwe, we were able to realize the plan to transform and scale up the Heyang Forum into the Harare Forum for Africa. The inaugural Forum not only received high recognition from the Chinese Embassy in Zimbabwe but also quickly earned broad support from Zimbabwe’s mainstream society, including senior officials, academia, and the media. Its success made it both natural and necessary to convene a second forum.

From Jinyun to Harare—through the shifting perspectives “global to village” and “village to global”—my aspiration has been to deepen a Global South epistemology and enhance our autonomous knowledge production capacity. In the process of founding the Heyang Forum, I proposed a new model of academic gathering that integrates interdisciplinary theory with social practice. The aim was to build a cross-sector platform linking government, industry, education, and research, to cultivate a new generation of communication scholars with both socialist subjectivity and a global perspective, and to contribute to sustainable development in the Global South and a more just global communication order. Although this vision may sound ambitious, I believe that by setting long-term goals while advancing through grounded practice, meaningful change is achievable.

Why “in Africa”? Because Africa is special. Africa is not only the cradle of humanity; it is also the continent most severely damaged by colonialism. Challenges such as nation-state building, modernization, debt, and climate change are particularly acute in Africa. In other words, many of the world’s problems appear in their most intensified forms on the African continent. Borrowing from Raymond Williams’s notion of “militant particularism,” (Harvey & Williams, 1995) viewing the world from Africa thus allows us not only to grasp the particular, but also to move from the particular toward the universal. This is what I mean by “Understanding the World through Africa.” At the same time, this slogan is not limited to understanding the world. I have always hoped to encourage scholars to move beyond the armchair and engage with social practice—so that, on the basis of a more accurate understanding of the world, they can also contribute, however modestly, to its transformation.

There is also another question: why us, and why China? As I suggested earlier, while I have long identified with the agenda of the World Social Forum, I was also aware of the fact that Chinese voices have largely been absent from it, and that the forum itself has struggled to sustain momentum in the 21st century. Influenced by Western capitalist ideology, many Western leftist scholars and NGOs approach China with blind spots or entrenched biases. I believe this gap calls for the active participation—and potential leadership—of Chinese scholars. By connecting the Global South’s social justice agenda with China’s development experiences, we can enable broader engagement with China’s theories and practices, including rural revitalization. Without this engagement, left-wing critiques risk converging with right-wing narratives that dismiss the value of the Chinese path and the pivotal role of organization.

The World Social Forum has a slogan: “Another world is possible.” I have always believed that “Another world is already under our feet.” What is this “other world”? It is the socialist theory, institutions, and practices that exist in reality as outcomes of the international communist movement—the alternative path pioneered by the Soviet Union and represented by the actually existing socialist countries such as China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, as well as scattered socialist forces around the world. Through a platform like the Harare Forum for Africa, I hope to provide an opportunity for global left solidarity—to help them break out of Western mainstream media stereotypes about China and see the real possibility of socialism through Chinese scholars’ voices and China’s practical road.

For this reason, Chinese scholars with socialist ideals and commitments should play a more active role. They should not be content with merely “showing up” at routine, Western-dominated international academic conferences. The Harare Forum for Africa aims to enable scholars at different stages to engage in sustained field research and meaningful exchange in Africa, allowing China’s voices and experiences to reach African academic, political, business, and civil society communities, as well as local Chinese communities. In turn, it aims to allow Chinese scholars and rural development practitioners to learn about Africa.

From an academic perspective, communication is a highly interdisciplinary field that functions as a hub. It draws on methods from anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines while engaging shared core questions. This gives communication scholars a distinctive capacity to integrate diverse perspectives and to establish a common analytical vocabulary across fields.

I am not an “Africa specialist,” but a scholar of global and international communication. This position entails a responsibility to understand how different countries and regions are situated within global communication structures. This is precisely the strength of global communication research: it allows us to move beyond methodological nationalism while drawing on insights from area studies and mobilizing the interdisciplinary capacities of communication studies.

Moreover, in today’s AI era, the importance of communication has become even more pronounced. Historically, communication has never been peripheral, and Africa has never been external to communication research. It has long been central to both development communication and international communication studies, while resistance movements from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have shaped critical communication theory and practice. Within the Third World movement, debates evolved from calls for a New International Economic Order to demands for a New World Information and Communication Order, underscoring the central role of communication in historical change. Notably, the first MacBride Round Table on Communication was held in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1989.

During our recent visit to Morocco, there was a moment that deeply moved me. We met with a Sinologist who played for us a recording from 1960, in which the Moroccan Crown Prince spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in support of “People’s China.” He argued that excluding 600 million Chinese people from the UN was fundamentally unjust. That moment powerfully illustrated the power of communication and the central role of African nations in shaping the global order.

From Western Marxism to Chinese Marxism

Since your early retirement from Simon Fraser University in 2022 and your full-time appointment as a Humanities Chair Professor at Tsinghua University, your engagement with Western communication scholarship appears to have become less frequent. At the same time, you have increasingly focused your research on rural China, the Global South, and the teaching of Marxist theories of journalism and communication. What prompted this reorientation of your scholarly agenda? What goals are you pursuing through this shift? What drives this change of your academic home? Is there any “break” from your previous research agenda and underlying theoretical framework?

Of course, my theoretical framework has also evolved over time, along with changes in the course of China’s reform process. In my doctoral dissertation-turned first book, Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line (Zhao, 1998), my primary analytical dimensions focus on state and market relations in the media. I critiqued both the simplistic binary opposition between state and market and the linear historical view that equates marketization with Western-style democratization. I rejected the liberal assumption that media marketization in China would necessarily weaken Party leadership or lead inevitably to an “end of history.” My key argument at the time was that the Party’s role was not passively “eroded” by the market; instead, the Party was actively embracing and steering the process of media commercialization and marketization.

Later, in 2001, in my article with Dan Schiller, “Dances with wolves? China’s integration into digital capitalism” (Zhao & Schiller, 2001), my framework began to move beyond state–market relationship by bringing in the historical legacies of the Chinese revolution, ongoing social struggles, and the anti-hegemonic elements in Chinese nationalism. I argued that, on the one hand, China has a deep socialist historical legacy and ongoing social struggles were still being fought out; on the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party is constrained by its own official ideology and it could not completely abandon its socialist commitments. Earlier still, Dallas Smythe’s influence on me was crucial; he helped me see the internal contradictions, the twists and turns, or the zig-zag nature of China’s socialist path. My 2007 article in the Hong Kong journal Communication & Society—“State, Market and Society: Rethinking China’s Traditions and Power Relations from a Global and Critical Perspective” (Zhao, 2007)—further emphasized these dimensions.

In my book Communication in China: Political Economy, Power, and Conflict (Zhao, 2008), I consolidated a newer analytical framework: I no longer stayed only at the level of state–market relations; I placed people’s struggles, and China’s socialist historical legacy at the core. The book’s analysis of how communist ideas circulated among grassroots social groups demonstrates how ordinary people mobilized the socialist discourse in concrete struggles. I emphasized at the end that the struggle was far from over—hence the final chapter title, “The Trees Want to Be Quiet but the Winds Won’t Stop.” In 2009, in a book chapter contribution on the directions of Chinese communication I proposed the “five Rs”—“re-root in history, re-embed in the Chinese social terrain, redefine agency, reengage with meaning and community, and finally reclaim utopian imaginations” (Zhao, 2009). Together, these works mark the gradual enrichment of my theoretical framework, moving beyond a reductive political-economic logic.

At the same time, together with Paula Chakravartty, we proposed the “transcultural political economy of communication” framework in the 2008 co-edited book volume Global Communication: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy (Chakravartty & Zhao, 2008). We argue that capitalist globalization should neither be categorically rejected nor uncritically celebrated. What matters instead is how it becomes grounded in specific local social systems, where its frictions and encounters with historical experiences, social structures, and cultural traditions generate new possibilities and produce multiple modernities. The three sections of our book emphasize, respectively, the state and communication politics in multiple modernities; embedded markets and cultural transformation; and civil society and multiple publics—highlighting the mutual constitution of state, market, and civil society, the plurality of modernities, as well as the plurality of social struggles. The framework of transcultural political economy seeks to move beyond Western centrism in political economy and beyond “culturalism” in postcolonial studies, emphasizing the integration of political economy with postcolonial cultural analysis.

Let me recall a historical moment in my academic trajectory. In 2013, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, in my capacity as the School’s Associate Director I led the organization of a commemorative conference entitled Communication, Crisis, and Global Power Shifts. In addition to featuring several indigenous scholars as keynote speakers, we also invited Raka Shome, an emerging postcolonial scholar, as one of the keynote speakers. As she addressed themes such as “the Global South” and subaltern studies, it suddenly occurred to me her understanding of the Global South was not the same as that of my own. The subaltern studies paradigm, developed primarily in the Indian context and centered on a “history from below,” cannot be directly applied to China. In addition to China’s long and continuous dynastic history, China went through a socialist revolution, and to describe Chinese workers and peasants as “subaltern” risks downgrading the political subjectivity of the Chinese working class and its constitutionally entrenched peasant alliance. As one scholar once insightfully reminded me, in China the question should not be that of Spivak’s (1988) “Can the subaltern speak?” but the answer was already given, that is, “the subaltern could shoot!”—after all, China’s grassroots social forces had carried guns in a protracted armed struggle and won a revolution. This led me to realize that, just as communication research in China should not simply import Western models, there is a wide range of postcolonial experiences in the Global South, research grounded in Chinese experience cannot simply reproduce existing postcolonial approaches.

Another “break” that I consider particularly significant emerged from my further reflection on the internal configuration of Western Marxism. That is, as I engaged myself more deeply with Western Marxism, especially critical political economy of communication as both a research paradigm and a scholarly community, I increasingly felt a sense of alienation and detachment, along with a profound disjuncture between Western Marxism and Marxism as it is practiced in China. This sense was brought into sharp focus in my recent reading of Gabriel Rockhill’s (2025) volume I of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, published by Monthly Review Press. The book systematically reveals that during the Cold War, relevant American state agencies and American foundations intentionally promoted certain strains of Western Marxism, with the aim of steering Marxist scholarship into a purely theoretical and culturalized tradition, separating it from practical and revolutionary Marxism—what some call “Eastern Marxism.” The logic was clear: given the extraordinary mobilizing power of communism, the strategy was to absorb it—depriving it of its practical and revolutionary dimensions, and reducing it to theory and cultural criticism.

It was in the context of my intellectual dissatisfaction with the Western academy and the limitations of Western Marxism that I returned to China and shifted toward rural research. There were two drivers. First, I became increasingly aware of the central importance of rural issues; furthermore, I was immediately able to connect my “rural turn” with China’s century-long intellectual tradition of rural reconstruction, Second, as I mentioned earlier, I had grown dissatisfied with remaining within abstract theoretical debates in the Western academia. On this, I found myself completely in line with Samir Amin, who once put it, “I am not an armchair Marxist; I am a revolutionary and practical Marxist.” Amin was a rare Marxist who dared to stand with China and with the Third World. In retrospect, as somebody who was brought up in rural China and educated in Chinese Marxism, an awareness of the divergence between revolutionary, practice-oriented Marxism and theoretical, armchair, cultural Marxism was a natural outcome. In this context, rather than remaining entangled in discursive debates, I chose to return to China and engage directly in practice. This practice-oriented turn also resonated with my own academic lineage—one of my doctoral co-supervisors, Pat Howard, had conducted practice-based research in Lijiang, Yunnan, China in the 1990s, while I was completing my doctoral research.

Thus, I increasingly positioned myself as a scholar of praxis, and a participatory action researcher. However, this did not occur abruptly. In fact, when I first studied “communication and development” abroad, I systematically engaged in participatory action research theory. Later, I worked on related projects for the Status of Women Canada, attempting to reconstruct media frameworks for covering domestic violence against women through media interventions. More than 20 years ago in 2005, when Paula Chakravartty and I attended the Second Phase of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, and we worked together and contributed to the revision of its Civil Society Declarations. In Canada in the late 1990s, I worked for many years as a board member of the NGO IMPACS: Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society, working with members of parliament and media professionals to promote “communication empowerment,” with the slogan “tuning up the volume of civil society.” These experiences are logically consistent with the work I later initiated at the Heyang Institute for Rural Studies.

My practice unfolds on two main fronts—the classroom and the countryside—and has taken shape across four interrelated domains. First, teaching: I relinquished a Canada Research Chair position, which required teaching only one course per year, to undertake intensive teaching at Tsinghua University. Second, public-oriented writings and media engagements, with widely circulated essays and televisual appearances as a guest scholar. Third, rural development and cultural empowerment praxis, including the ongoing compilation of a 10-volume oral history series on Jinyun County. Fourth, field-based teaching and action-based research engagements in Africa and the broader Global South. Through these practices, I have become increasingly self-conscious of my own departure from the tradition of Western Marxism.

Why, then, did my practice ultimately extend to Africa? In my view, this move represents an effort to “go back to the roots of the problem.” In China, the roots of many structural issues lie in the countryside; globally, crises of food, ecology, and sustainability are deeply intertwined with the worldwide urban–rural divide. From the perspective of a transcultural political economy of communication, it is impossible to grasp the structural dynamics of global capitalism and multiple modernities without conducting in-depth research on Africa. Africa is not only a cradle of humanity but also a pivotal site in contemporary struggles for human emancipation.

At the same time, my work on rural China has reached a transitional stage. A decade of practice in Jinyun has played an agenda-setting role in communication research in China by bringing renewed attention to rural–urban relationship. More importantly, since 2017, China has elevated rural revitalization to a national strategy, accompanied by comprehensive policy implementation and institutional support. Under these conditions, my current effort has been to draw more Chinese scholars to pay attention to “global rurality,” and to the broader terrains of the Global South. Therefore, whether in rural China or in Africa, my personal academic interests resonate to a considerable extent with China’s national-level development agenda. I regard my exploration as a return to an anti-imperialist, revolutionary, and practice-based Marxism.

Intersecting Global South with global rurality in a new knowledge paradigm

In this sense, I propose the concept of “global rurality,” first and foremost as a way to prevent the “Global South” concept from degenerating into a purely geographical category. If “the Global North,” in symbolic terms, corresponds to “global cities,” then, by analogy, “the Global South” is closer to “global rurality.” Moreover, the “global rurality” I refer to does not exist only in Global South countries; it also exists within the Global North.

Take the United States as an example. “Global rurality” includes agricultural communities increasingly marginalized under monopoly-capitalist agribusiness. It also includes areas ranging from inland Indigenous communities to the Rust Belt—regions that, through deindustrialization, have experienced a form of “re-ruralization.” From this perspective, the concept of “global rurality” not only has practical relevance for many Global South countries; it can also incorporate and integrate those regions within the Global North that are deeply trapped in structures of uneven capitalist development, thus carrying an important inclusive and integrative potential.

In fact, regardless of how uneven rural–urban development is within different countries, almost all countries face rural–urban differentiation driven by global capitalism, and all contain an internal need for “rural revitalization.” JD Vance’s (2016) Hillbilly Elegy contains a mobilizing depiction of the economic depression, social disintegration, and spiritual crisis in communities that experienced “re-ruralization” after deindustrialization.

Moreover, the significance of global rurality is not limited to correcting a geographically defined North–South divide. More importantly, it points to the ultimate human concerns embedded in rural life. From the perspective of civilizational history, the divide between agrarian and industrial civilizations—and the continued persistence of agrarian forms of life—constitutes a shared human condition that has not been fully transcended by history. Indeed, we still live within this civilizational divide today.

For this reason, neither contemporary discussions of multiple “crises” nor expectations surrounding so-called “digital civilization” can bypass the fundamental structural divide between the urban and the rural. As the “Global South” concept puts more focus on inequalities between states and regions, “global rurality” further directs attention to inequalities within nation-states, and to relationships between humans, land, and nature. These questions of meaning, existence, and community are difficult for the “Global South” concept alone to fully encompass.

At the same time, I must stress a risk that requires serious vigilance: the rural is not inherently progressive. Rural societies often contain deeply embedded conservative cultural tendencies, which carry the potential to slide toward right-wing ideology or even fascism under certain historical conditions.

China’s experience is different precisely because rural issues were addressed through a socialist revolution. While China possesses a long-standing rural civilizational tradition, the reactionary and conservative elements embedded within rural society were profoundly transformed through the revolutionary historical process since the May Fourth Movement. In this process, Chinese peasants were reconstituted as modern subjects with progressive political orientations and as allies of the working class.

Thus, I proposed “global rurality,” first, to respond to the possible limitation of the “Global South” in geopolitical terms: geopolitical liberation does not automatically lead to human liberation; and anti-imperialism framed solely at the level of the nation-state is insufficient. Second, the concept seeks to draw on a broader civilizational perspective to examine how rural societies may move toward different political directions under varying historical conditions.

Let me give an example. During recent fieldwork in Tangier, Morocco, we visited a site where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea. An art installation there bore the phrase “multi-dimensional encounters.” I found this deeply resonant: it vividly captures what a transcultural political economy seeks to demonstrate, and it reaffirmed for me the framework’s broad relevance and strong explanatory power in Global South research. At its core, this framework focuses on the encounters and frictions between capitalist modernity and various social formations of the Global South.

Within these encounters, I place particular emphasis on the fact that peoples and communities in traditional, non-Western societies are not passive recipients of capitalist modernity. They possess the capacity for resistance and cultural transformation. This framework foregrounds the possibility of multiple modernities, as well as the possibility of emancipation. It is a theoretical tool rooted in historical and dialectical materialism, rearticulated through the integration of the political economy of communication and postcolonial cultural studies. Equally important, the framework treats practice as a central method—this is precisely why the Harare Forum for Africa came into being.

Another issue worth close attention is the encounter between tradition and modernity in contemporary contexts. An example in point is Chefchaouen, a small old town we visited in northern Morocco and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. After Morocco implemented visa-free entry for Chinese citizens, large numbers of Chinese tourists arrived. In a sense, the town was “re-activated” by Chinese social media, especially spectacular photos of it in Chinese social media platforms. In response, many locals have learned how to interact with Chinese tourists, and even hotels and shops began to display Chinese signage. This then points to another interesting phenomenon. In the past, it was often said that during World War II, American soldiers who carried chewing gum into different parts of the world, became informal carriers of America’s national image or US soft power. Today, as Chinese tourists travel globally, ordinary Chinese people themselves are increasingly becoming transmitters of Chinese national image. Going one step further, the Belt and Road Initiative has not only facilitated the circulation of infrastructure, but has also activated people’s subjectivities. Countries along its routes are able to reimagine their positions within the global system and increasingly see themselves as “connecting states.” Behind these developments lies a rich set of communication research questions that merit in-depth study.

So, there are certainly many issues. But the key point is that they don’t come from abstract thinking; they emerge from being on the ground and engaging with real practice.

So, the first step toward a new knowledge paradigm is to recognize that we once had our own forms of knowledge, and that these forms genuinely shaped global knowledge, rather than remaining confined to the role of “research objects.”

Second, on this basis, we must acknowledge and respect multiple forms and paradigms of knowledge. This is precisely what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006) calls the “Epistemologies of the South”: opposing the single, reductionist epistemology constructed by hegemonic Western knowledge systems, and advocating a knowledge ecology composed of multiple knowledge systems.

Third, on the basis of recognizing knowledge plurality, knowledge production must be grounded among the people and carried out with them, and even by them. Ordinary people are themselves producers of knowledge. Much local knowledge—about herbal medicine, ecology, and land use, for example—has been accumulated through long-term practice and generated in everyday life.

Fourth, knowledge production for the Global South should not be one-directional. It must be interactive. Intellectuals of the Global South need to engage with one another to co-produce what I would call “people’s knowledge.” Drawing on Zhao Tingyang’s notion of “mutual subjects of knowledge production,” this means that it should not be only Chinese scholars studying Africa; African scholars should also study China. Knowledge must be produced through genuinely equal dialogue and collaboration. For example, I once invited Zimbabwean scholars to conduct field research in rural Jinyun, where we jointly discussed China’s “Two Mountains” theory of ecological development and examined whether—and how—this approach might be relevant to Zimbabwe’s own development context. This is precisely what I want to emphasize: local knowledge can inspire global practice. Different forms of local knowledge may not be easily universalized, but their producers can engage in dialogue and learn from one another. Whether in women’s emancipation, ecological governance, or community development, diverse local pathways of practice deserve to be treated as knowledge in their own right.

Finally, I want to emphasize that applied forms of knowledge—knowledge generated through practice—are equally indispensable. This also means that knowledge production should not take place only among scholars; it must be a cross-boundary process in which scholars, practitioners, and community members all serve as knowledge-producing subjects. As Antonio Gramsci (1971) famously noted, “everyone is an intellectual”; in the Chinese context, an even more fundamental reference point is Mao Zedong’s (1937/1965) On Practice. We therefore must continually ask: What is knowledge, and what is it for?

The new knowledge production paradigm I advocate for the Global South is not intended to generate another seemingly “universal” abstract theory, nor is it meant for Chinese scholars to “set new rules for the world.” Rather, it seeks to root knowledge production in the concrete practices of the Global South, to respond to real-world problems, and to be continuously tested and revised through practice itself.

Challenges for communication research

In China, a particularly prominent problem is that American-style positivist methods have been imported on a large scale without being critically digested or transformed in relation to China’s own realities. This mechanical transplantation has led to the fragmentation of communication research, leaving it increasingly incapable of addressing the major structural transformations taking place in China and in the world.

The second problem is about the influence of Western Marxism or critical scholarship on Chinese communication research. In recent years, with the passing away of major figures such as Robert McChesney and Vincent Mosco, the influence of Western political economy of communication has, in a symbolic sense, reached an endpoint. Much of the Western Marxist theory currently being imported into China has already lost its critical momentum within Western academia itself. Its discussions tend to circle around a narrow set of issues—such as digital labor. While these issues are not completely irrelevant to China and they do carry certain critical power with China’s deep entanglement in global capitalism and the resultant capitalistic social relations, the related theoretical frameworks are increasingly inadequate in explaining China’s complex realities. Above all, they are ill-equipped to engage with the socialist transformations currently taking place in China. The Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing efforts to regulate and discipline capital represent a new historical condition that Western Marxism struggles to comprehend, let alone explain.

Consequently, the application of Western theories in the Chinese context has generated two key disjunctions. Methodologically, positivism struggles to grapple with macro-structural transformations; theoretically, Western Marxism remains fundamentally misaligned with “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Let me turn to the state of Western scholarship on communication in China. Put bluntly, much of the English-language academy today has largely lost the capacity to understand and explain Chinese socialism. After Dallas Smythe, there have been virtually no left-leaning Western communication scholar who are both willing and able to conduct long-term empirical research in China while maintaining a basic sympathy for, or serious engagement with, China’s socialistic practices. Whether so-called “liberal left” or Western Marxists, they may have in an intellectual sense “lost China.”

Current English-language research on Chinese communication is dominated by two broad approaches. One consists of ideologically driven critiques that lack empirical grounding, often relying on Cold War frameworks such as “imperialism” or “state capitalism,” while ignoring the lingering impact of China’s socialist revolution and the Chinese state’s continuing reliance on a socialist ideology for its legitimacy and its concrete policies that do have socialistic orientations, let alone the fact that many among the Chinese population still have deep attachment to socialist ideals. The other is largely produced by Chinese or Chinese diaspora scholars, who are often compelled to conform to prevailing norms of “political correctness” in Western academia and therefore focus on narrowly defined, micro-level empirical topics. Neither approach is capable of explaining the core dynamics shaping the contemporary development of communication in China.

At a deeper level, the problem lies in multiple constraints shaped by ideological positions, knowledge structures, and even racial identity. Many Western scholars lack basic interest in, or sympathetic understanding of, Chinese socialism. They either assume from the outset that China is “not worth serious study,” or begin their research with predetermined conclusions and fundamentally Western-centric academic frameworks. Under such conditions, genuine understanding is almost impossible, let alone the possibility of using China’s developmental experience to challenge or reshape existing academic paradigms.

It is precisely in this sense that Dallas Smythe’s work appears especially valuable. In the 1970s, he broke through the constraints of the Cold War order to come to China in person, undertaking long-term and serious field research. Positioning himself as a member of the “socialist family,” he offered candid and constructive advice to China’s leadership. This not only demonstrated a rare degree of intellectual courage and scholarly innovation, but also embodied a spirit of internationalism that has become increasingly scarce today.

By contrast, an interesting trend has emerged in recent years. People who are not traditionally seen as “knowledge producers”—such as young Western social media content creators and ordinary Internet users—are beginning to rediscover China through advanced media platforms and their own firsthand experiences. From the American YouTube influencer IShowSpeed’s livestreamed trip to China, to the 2025 wave of so-called “TikTok refugees” moving to Xiaohongshu (RedNote), these cases point to new ways of transcultural understanding. This shift also suggests that traditional—and increasingly conservative—academic intermediaries in the West are becoming less capable of interpreting the contemporary world, and are no longer trusted or needed by younger generations. Perhaps what we can expect next is Western publics directly encountering and discovering a “people’s China.”

Today, however, the situation has changed. As China transforms itself rapidly both in its domestic and foreign policies, the knowledge structures on which Western critical scholars rely are increasingly unable to provide adequate theoretical resources for understanding or guiding China’s ongoing transformations. The same problem exists in the realm of knowledge production. In The Rise of the New Global Left, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006) offers an important diagnosis, but his analysis goes only halfway: he recognizes anarchist anti-globalization forms of resistance, yet fails to engage with the socialist practices unfolding under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

It is for this reason that I remain committed to building the Harare Forum for Africa and to advancing a practice-oriented transcultural political economy of communication.

Looking forward: advice for young scholars in the Global South

So finally, what advice would you offer to young scholars who aspire to work in the political economy of communication today? In particular, for communication scholars from the Global South, what do you see as our missions and objectives? Where should we begin in concrete practice? And in contrast to transnational bourgeois discursive alliances, how can we work toward building a knowledge-producing community of the Global South?

First, faith. Young scholars need a firm commitment to the ideal of a shared future for humanity and to human emancipation. The more you stand with the oppressed, the more you ultimately liberate yourself.

Second, standpoint. This means holding the “two combinations”: the combination of Marxism with concrete social practice, and the combination of Marxism with one’s own local and historical cultural traditions.

Third, method. Drawing on discussions with colleagues during our recent fieldwork in Morocco, I would highlight at least three essentials: close reading of texts, deep engagement with fieldwork, and getting close to people’s lived experiences. Whether one conducts oral history or grassroots research, the core task is always to reach the human heart.

Fourth, I place particular emphasis on integrating history, theory, practice, and one’s intellectual life. A scholar’s work should be rooted in the questions they study, the historical moment they live in, and real-world practice. In this sense, we are living in an era when Chinese scholars can—and must—take up their historical responsibility. Without corresponding advances in China’s own knowledge production and intellectual leadership, China’s rise as a developmental power will be incomplete.

Finally, we must engage with scholars from other countries—especially from the Global South—with genuine equality, respect, and sincerity. We are living in a time in which shared knowledge production is of paramount importance. This also means that English language alone is not enough—in-depth transcultural research demands multilingual competence and cultural immersion in Global South societies.