Media, Place, Sociality, and National Publics: Chinese
MARTIN, Fran. “Media, Place, Sociality, and National Publics: Chinese International Students in Translocal Networks,” in Koichi Iwabuchi, Olivia Khoo and Daniel Black eds., Contemporary Culture and Media in Asia, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield (2016), pp. 207-224. Accepted draft One Saturday afternoon in the bedroom of the purpose-built international student apartment in Carlton, Melbourne that she shares with three Chinese classmates, 20-year old Ying, an Arts student from Hebei Province, connects via her laptop to a popular media download site based in China. While downloading several recent movies and TV series episodes (from China, Thailand and Hollywood), Ying opens up her QQ account and makes a video call to her parents back home. Speaking with her mother, she catches up on the latest news and gossip from her family and hometown. Ying then posts a comment on an ex-schoolmate’s status update on WeChat (the Chinese WhatsApp-style platform): ‘Nice pic! You and your BF are such a cute couple, haha. Miss you. Message me!’ She then scans a favourite gossip account to catch up on celebrity news from China. Once Ying’s downloads are complete, she spends the rest of the afternoon immersed in the latest episodes of the Chinese TV comedy series that screened back home the previous week. Yaqi, a 20-year-old from Liaoning Province, sits by the window on a suburban train travelling from the leafy eastern suburb of Camberwell, where she lives in a homestay, to Melbourne’s Central Business District, where she studies actuarial studies. Yaqi is engrossed in the screen of her smartphone, where she scrolls through recent posts on her Weibo feed (the Chinese Twitter-like platform), catching up on the details of a recent political scandal involving a prominent member of the Chinese Communist Party.
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