Global Media and China

In this special issue, we would like to take this opportunity to demonstrate the value and strength of a conversation between digital anthropology and communication studies around the topic of visual communication and the use of the smartphone.

The smartphone is perhaps one of the few items that can define our time in terms of its ubiquity and mobility. The photographic feature of various types of smartphones has also drawn the attention of consumers and manufacturers in recent years, with the consecutive upgrades of built-in cameras, photo-editing and sharing apps. From the taking, retouching, to publishing a photograph, smartphone photography, coupled with social media, has become important in understanding the relationships between digital image and sociality, aesthetics and identity. This article examines several new developments such as the rise of ‘professional amateurs’ and the selfie within the Chinese context. It then attempts to develop theories of smartphone photography that incorporate these developments. Using ethnographic analysis and interviews, this article aims to theorize smartphone photography as a series of practices that reveal local and individual specifications that traverse technicity, sociality and aesthetics. It shows how this has had a significant impact on Chinese people’s economic and social life.

From the perspective of communication and media studies, this article explores a comparison between the image of older adults presented on media and online self-representation facilitated by the use of smartphones. The qualitative textual analysis was conducted with a sample (228 posts, from 1 January to 31 December,2019) selected from a representative WeChat Public Account targeting at older adults in China. The results demonstrate that leisure and recreation is the most frequently mentioned topic (58%) with memories of past life receiving the least references (3%). The striking features of popular posts among older people include a highly emotional tone, bright colours and multimedia. Sentiment analyses shows 68.42%, 13.16% and 18.42% of positive, neutral and negative emotions, respectively. A generally positive attitude of self-representation is in a sharp contrast with the stigmatic media image of older adults. The article concludes that the visibility of Chinese older people may help to reduce the stigma surrounding old age in China.

This article addresses the centrality of images in the definition of a new paradigm for ageing, when health (measured by autonomy) becomes a condition for freedom (associated with youth). Based on a 16-month ethnography conducted with older people (aged 50–80) in a middle-class district in São Paulo, Brazil, I found that smartphones empower older people to craft a health identity by engaging and producing content that highlights the positive aspects of ageing. In this community, health is a concept deeply associated with productivity, and social media becomes a space for participants to present themselves as busy, giving visibility to all of the activities they engage with. On WhatsApp groups, participants can also work as curators, sharing content that is in the public interest, which improves their collective experience of ageing and restores their sense of utility and dignity. I found that smartphones also allow participants to manipulate the mechanism of social comparison used to classify who is healthy and who is old. Often, when they have a condition or frailty, they confine themselves to online interactions, hiding from view the ageing body that could compromise their performance. By doing that, their declines are kept on the backstage of their social interactions, allowing participants to extend their presence within the third age, which is associated with freedom and autonomy, while the decline related to the fourth age is kept in the shadows.

Through the smartphone, the production and circulation of digital visual media have become as costless and accessible as audio and text-based communication. It would be challenging to be a contemporary ethnographer without engaging with digital practices which in Japan and China at least, tend towards being highly visual. Digital visual communication is recognised in literature as an effective and accessible form of communication, with an increasing number of studies in the field of digital anthropology, media studies and Internet studies exploring the consequences of digital images on social media. There is a pressing need to understand local forms of visual communication in the digital age, where the visual has become an essential part of daily communication. This article deals particularly with the rise of visual digital communication among older adults in China and Japan. Drawing on 16-month ethnographies conducted simultaneously between 2018 and 2019 in China and Japan, this article contributes to the discussion of visual communication in light of this semiotic shift happening online, which is then contextualised within people’s offline lives. The ethnographies in both China and Japan find that, first of all, visual communication via digital media enables more effective and efficient phatic communication and emotion work. In addition, the ethnographies point to a question about ‘authenticity’ in interpersonal communication. The ethnographies show that in some cases, the deployment of visual communication via the smartphone is not so much about being able to express ‘authentic’ personal feelings but rather, in being able to effectively establish a digital public façade according to social norms.

India has long been known for its prestigious Mumbai-based film industry, namely Bollywood, and remains by far the largest producer of films in the world. With the growing global reach of Indian cinema, this study looks at an intriguing Indian-film fever over the last decade in the newly discovered market of China. Through examining key factors that make Indian films appealing to Chinese and exploring the opportunities and challenges of Indian cinema in China, this article draws upon insights gained from the narratives of local audiences. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 32 Indian-film audiences residing across 14 different cities in mainland China. Thematic analysis identified the following five appealing factors, which explain why the Chinese enjoy Indian films: content-driven story, social values, star power, audience reviews and cultural connections. While a comprehensive list of opportunities was derived showing the potential future of Bollywood in China, results found that China’s unique institutional context and an ongoing India–China geopolitical tensions also present challenges, which in turn add to the overall complexity of films’ success in the Chinese market. This article argues the powerful role of Bollywood in bridging cultures and improving India–China ties, as Indian films have made Chinese people more aware of India in a favourable way.

In China, a few posts related to #MeToo movement survived and remained online well after its peak and the state’s response in July 2018. This article proposes a theoretical framework that pays attention to discursive meaning-making and employs a broad notion of empowerment, referred to as ‘empowerment through discourse’, in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of the low-profile #MeToo movement in the Chinese context. This framework is used to analyse a corpus of uncensored #MeToo material, which appeared on Chinese social media. This article combines a discourse analysis of these posts and interviews with feminists from activist collectives to critically examine feminist empowerment by reflecting on survivor/victim narration and storytelling practices, digital media’s capacity to facilitate critical dialogue between witnesses and survivors/victims and activist collectives’ organising role in opening up a dialogic space for collective reading, listening and healing. These reflections lead to broader considerations on how notions of empowerment can spur collective action and structural change. In short, this article demonstrates the potential possibility of discursive change and reflects on this mode of feminist politics as a way to speak to empowerment in the Chinese context.