Kecheng Fang

Chinese University of Hong Kong | CUHK · School of Journalism and Communication

In 2016, Little Pink has emerged as the label for a new wave of female-led cyber-nationalism in China. While increasingly popularized in media and online discourses, little is known about the evolution of this label and its significance for our understanding of China’s digital activism. This article takes the first step at unraveling the Little Pin...

In the reform era, management of information by the Chinese Communist Party has been continuously moving away from explicit, crude tactics of the past toward more subtle and orderly mechanisms of the present. This study examines one facet of this transformation in the online sphere: digital persuasion. Drawing on three emerging trends in online per...

A cultural phenomenon called ‘mo ha’ (toad worship) has been increasingly popular on the Chinese Internet since 2014, with ‘the toad’ referring to former Party and country leader Jiang Zemin. His memes have gone viral. To examine the toad worship fever, I propose a two-dimensional framework: on the one hand, it differentiates the political and apol...

Digital innovation has been widely considered as a key solution to the current journalism crisis. While most innovation projects in democratic regimes receive funding from media organizations, venture capital firms, and foundations, many of China’s digital journalism projects are funded and led by the state—a model we define as “state-preneurship.”...

The goal of this article is to reflect on and challenge some key presumptions in the existing research on digital China, and to critically extend this line of inquiry by engaging with the transnational perspective. We argue that the transnational lens, while acknowledging the vital role of the state, can reveal a more diverse set of actors and thei...

This study introduces the concept of “strategically ambiguous collaborative influence operations” to examine the phenomena of wangbao (cyberbullying) and jubao (reporting) in China. These operations involve the intertwined efforts of state and non-state actors to suppress critical voices in the online sphere. They are characterized by the strategic...

Despite severe political pressures on journalism and civil society after the implementation of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, over 20 community newspapers have continued their operation. Through content analysis of 60 issues of the papers and in-depth interviews with over 20 individuals involved in their establishment and operation, this s...

To amplify their audience reach, far-right outlets need a calculated and coordinated array of acts to set the stage for audience attention and to build a communication network that spreads their messages. We examined the Facebook newsfeed history of The Epoch Times ( N = 117,274 posts from 2013 to 2020), which transitioned from a niche anti-China p...

This study proposes a sociotechnical framework to study digital media and social movements and uses it to analyze the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Informed by actor-network theory, this framework examines media technology as infrastructure, practice, and text, and discusses its relation to other actors/actants in the network of social movements. Bas...

This study aims to explain the puzzling discrepancy between the large number of female journalism students and the comparatively fewer female journalists in the workforce in China today. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 graduates in journalism from the same class, we investigate the female students’ professional socialization process and analyz...

This article uses the theory of affective news to examine social media live streaming during the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. We argue that this specific form of affective news was enabled by the affordances of the Facebook Live platform, collectively produced by journalists who were not bound by conventional detache...

Despite its importance in both practical and theoretical senses, to date, the co‐optation of fact‐checking by political power is still largely understudied as compared with other political aspects of disinformation and fact‐checking. In this chapter, the author aims to fill this gap by using the case of China's propaganda during the COVID‐19 pandem...

“Zimeiti” (we media or self-media) is a buzzword in China that has never been clearly defined. It generally refers to non-institutional content providers on social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo. I conducted a systematic analysis of metadiscourse about zimeiti, including industry reports and conference speeches by important figures in thi...

The rise of the ‘alt-right’ (alternative right) and their communications on the Internet are not unique to the West. This study follows a mixed-methods approach combining topic modeling, social network analysis, and discourse analysis to analyze the discursive and network structure of an online Chinese alt-right community on Weibo. We summarize the...

With the rapid decline of traditional media in China, the party-state faces the growing challenge of shaping public opinion online. This article engages with one response to this challenge – a state-sanctioned digital media experiment aimed at creating a new form of journalism that appeals to the public and helps to disseminate Party propaganda. We...

This exploratory study investigates the landscape of media bias in China. First, I propose a new conceptual framework for identifying media bias that is more comprehensive and less context-sensitive than existing models. The framework includes two independent dimensions: an ideological dimension, which is organized as clusters rather than a continu...