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In an attempt to examine the issue of glocalisation in contemporary Chinese media practice, the article develops a tripartite framework which examines the discourses of global/Western vs. local/Eastern interactions in news reporting along three dimensions: the nature of the news event reported, the stance adopted in reporting the news, and the move structure involved in the reporting. The projection and discursive management of the international news reports by two prominent broadcast media channels in Cultural China, i.e. the Chinaowned and Beijing-based station, CCTV-4, and the Hong Kong-based channel station, Phoenix TV, have been selected for the investigation. It is found that globalisation in these two pan-or pro-Chinese government broadcasting practices has taken place only marginally. In trying to demonstrate a global vision and readiness for change and challenges, the Chinese broadcasters no longer evade news of a negative nature, and have also largely adopted the globally prevalent pattern of a dialogic news story-telling structure, most evident in the news construction done by Phoenix TV, though less so by CCTV-4. Nonetheless, the value of harmony, the normative Chinese value of journalistic practice, has a strong presence in the media practice of both channels, as is evidenced particularly in the use of a supportive reporting stance, rather than the critical reporting stance favoured by Western journalism.

This study attempts to explore how celebrities manage rapport with followers through an array of speech acts in microblogging – the essential building blocks of virtual identity on social media. Six months of postings of eight of the most-followed Twitter and Weibo celebrities from USA and China were retrieved and analysed. A taxonomy of nine speech acts for rapport management was identified to give a categorised descriptive snapshot of celebrities’ microblogging discourse. The results revealed that the celebrities from both countries employ self-disclosing speech acts extensively to report events, anecdotes, or initiate small talk with fans for solidarity building. In addition, the attention fostered by the personalised, affective, and eye-catching self-disclosure posts is frequently directed to the posts promoting their professional activities or products to commercialise the solidarity as much needed for maintaining a strong fan base. In general, the celebrity practices in USA and China display a converging trend as the prevalent speech acts are largely overlapping across cultures, while culture-specific microblogging behaviours were also identified from the less frequently performed speech acts.

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