This article examines the structures and possibilities of love, friendship, and fraternity in a sexual relationship between men in the late imperial Chinese zhiguai tale (strange tale) Huang Jiulang. Huang Jiulang is a short fictional supernatural story by Qing Dynasty writer Pu Songling (1640-1715) about a homosexual love affair that takes place between mock brothers, a fox spirit Huang Jiulang and a human He Shican, first published c.1740 in the third volume of Pu's zhiguai tale collection Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio). In China there is a long tradition of people who were not blood related but shared a fraternal bond, for instance by becoming sworn brothers or sisters due to their shared interests, ambitions, or responsibilities. In terms of the wulun (five Confucian interpersonal relationships) brotherhood is superior to friendship. By converting friendship into this mock kinship of brotherhood, the relationship was able to become both more enduring and more affectionate than ordinary friendship. In other words, taking such an oath allowed people to establish a non-kinship family bond. In Huang Jiulang, however, Pu Songling uses the relationship between a human and a fox figure to demonstrate that mock brotherhood could in fact be quite complex by showing the existence of slippages between homosociality and homosexuality, i.e., male friendship, fraternity, sex, and romantic love in late imperial China. In this article, we argue that for Pu Songling, when mock brotherhood became caught up with erotic relations, it signaled a crisis in Confucian masculinity and consequently created a disciplinary model that restricted masculinity to the familial domain and marriage. This takes place within a late imperial Chinese context where marriage was of the gravest importance to both families and society, as well as being important for the cultivation of virtue.

In this article, the authors explore the popular animation Nezha (2019), examining the idea that it typifies the ‘national style’. Expanding the work of other scholars who have demonstrated the changeability of the ‘national style’, here they examine this notion in regard to the way in which Nezha (2019) represents ‘Chineseness’ at this particular socio-political moment. Methodologically, they focus their analysis largely upon the film’s narrative and aesthetics, drawing on a number of reviews as counterpoints for the way in which it was interpreted to situate it in popular discourses. The authors argue that Nezha (2019) presents a national image in which traditions and modernity are interwoven, and the focus upon the ‘technological’ – its digitality – constitutes a refiguring of animation in China as symbolic of modernity. Narratively and aesthetically mediating between the past and the present, Nezha (2019) embodies a ‘national style’ which is on one hand hybrid in its inter/nationality, but also culturally delimited in terms of which cultural heritages are held up as emblematic of the nation.

After recent reports emerged of a third arson attack on stray dog kennels in China’s Shandong province, those who have shown both hostility towards and support for the dogs and others involved in this event on Chinese social media have appeared. By analyzing posts and user attitudes on China’s Weibo and Baidu Tieba towards such kinds of media reports of stray dog cruelty, this article answers what the differing outlooks are on cruelty to stray dogs in contemporary Mainland China. The purpose of this article is therefore to attempt to increase a deeper understanding of the portrayal and response to certain forms of misconduct to stray dogs in user-generated contents in social media today. Several thematic demonstrations of cruelty are identified, and criticism/activism, compassion, and animosity are included. These themes are not limited, with some reports including aspects of several themes.

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International social exchanges have always been important to China’s cultural soft power and image construction overseas. This study focuses on an internationally renowned mega influencer Li Ziqi and her vlogs on YouTube. These orchestrated vlogs tell stories of rural Chinese life and construct a desirable traditional Chinese rural culture for netizens at home and abroad. Informed by framing and cultivation theory, this study examines how user-generated content on national images can affect social media users’ perceptions of reality. Content analysis is used to analyze the visual portrayals of Chinese rural culture, including its customs and values, aesthetics, and cultural and scenic places in Li’s vlogs. Discourse analysis is further used to examine user comments and demonstrate her vlog content’s impact on user perceptions of Chinese rural culture. This study sheds light on how a complex and hybrid national image with ‘Chineseness,’ and a personal image with self-Orientalized and performed ‘soft but independent’ Chinese rural female image, is constructed by a social media influencer Li Ziqi with affective associations. At a conceptual and practical level, the findings of this study contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussions on how China engages with the globalized world through cultural diplomacy from the bottom-up, while existing research primarily takes a top-down approach.

Using Van Gennep’s theory of Rite of Passage as its framework, this article examines the impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Chinese culture as depicted through death and mourning in Wang Fang’s (penname Fang Fang) recently published Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. As part of the efforts to control the outbreak, the Chinese government took over the managing of the deceased, which triggered heated discussions on Chinese social media. Fang Fang’s diary, originally written as daily entries on Chinese social media platform Weibo, serves as a voice for those suffering during the pandemic, mediating between personal accounts, accounts of friends, family and those living in Wuhan during the pandemic. These flesh out how the virus has not only been disturbing for Chinese people’s lives but also disrupted the death rites and mourning rituals for those who have passed. Our article infuses a digital ontological reading with an anthropological twist that helps to understand how the diary mitigates the disturbances to mourning rituals inside and outside the confines of digital metaphysics. We argue that the digital diary mitigates these disruptions by allowing Chinese people to nourish their sorrow by identifying with the symbolic rites of passage and mourning rituals online at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan. In doing so, this article examines three stages of rite of passage, including separation, liminality and integration as they unfold in the diary, through which discourses and subjectivities based on collective and individual traumatic experiences are built, as a form of digital mourning that could reconcile both the official and the alternative voices of anonymous narratives about the handling of this crisis.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections worldwide. The HPV vaccination has been widely advocated around the world since the vaccine is beneficial in avoiding diseases, including some sexually transmitted diseases, brought on by HPV infections. For most Chinese, the HPV vaccine is still a relatively new concept, having only been made available to the general public in 2016. Despite the vaccine’s increased prominence, there is still a lack of investigation about how the public is influencing the conversation about HPV vaccines and the public’s perception of this vaccine. With the theoretical construct of the Health Belief Model, this study conducts both quantitative and qualitative content analysis to investigate the existing media narratives around HPV vaccines in China and the changes in public opinion by looking at users’ contributions on Weibo, one of China’s most popular social networking sites. It was found that different groups of Weibo users had contributed to diverse narratives surrounding HPV vaccination. Though the public awareness of HPV vaccination had been improved along with increasingly active communication practices and enhanced public health services, public knowledge about HPV remains inadequate. Therefore, to facilitate the popularisation of HPV related knowledge, more effort should be invested in tailoring and disseminating messages that communicate responsive and comprehensive HPV related information.

This paper situates the ‘Blind Box’ consumption, collection and prosumption practices in China within globalisation and the ‘media-mix’ fandom, which is to consume and resell media merchandise in opaque packages as probability goods. We re-centre the focus of fandom studies on the then much neglected ‘missing child’ and now the ‘emerging adult’ in a globalising world. We argue the Chinese emerging adult consumes, collects and resells Blind Boxes as a generative and agentic collection and fandom practice, defined as ‘probabilistic and elastic prosumption’ in a quasi-social and quasi-individual manner. We then critically examine and unpack the cultural production and meaning making process undertook by collectors who also accumulate sociality and form identity through affective and economic investments, mediated collection and exchange of figurines in a post-socialist and consumerist society.