“You Are First a Chinese Citizen, Then A Consumer”: Presenting and Balancing Identities Online as Chinese International Tourists

This paper is based on the analysis of 261 video and word posts collected from four popular social media sites on which Chinese tourists shared their consumption-related experiences during and after the trip. It investigates Chinese international tourists’ diverse presentations of self to a broad audience online through explaining their shopping experiences and product reviews. Tourists are expected to balance multiple identities carefully when they project themselves online as consumers—on the one hand, they present themselves as global consumers and trendsetters who are strategic and savvy; while on the other hand, they still need to preserve and even emphasize their national identity as Chinese patriots. Providing the much-lacking qualitative insight, this study enhances our understanding of international tourists and their consumption behaviors, the construction and presentation of a digital self, and how globalization operates at the micro-level.

Prototype Citizen

This chapter shows how the desire to achieve parity with the West brought the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and the grassroots tinkerers of China's early hackerspace and coworking space into a paradoxical and often highly ambivalent alignment in their respective projects to assert China as innovative and creative. It covers the years 2007 through 2011, when a collective of Chinese artists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and internet bloggers began to experiment with the ideals of the American free culture movement, participatory design, and eventually, open source hardware and making. Their work of transplanting Western ideals of participatory, open, and democratized technology production into contemporary China created an affective connection between China's history of manufacturing and its future as a global economic power. Their early experiments with participatory design, coworking spaces, makerspaces, and open source, open innovation, and open design, were aimed at prototyping a “new” Chinese citizen, i.e., the utilization of technology to cultivate an optimistic, forward-looking, entrepreneurial Chinese citizen, at last freed from connotations of lack and low quality. These attachments to technological promise are deeply intertwined with China's ambivalent relationship to the West, marked both by histories of colonialism and by revolutionary imaginings of alternative modernities.

Identity-based Earning Discrimination among Chinese People

Hukou registration is an instrument to control nonplanned population and capital movements, which the Chinese Communist Party has been exploiting extensively since the 1950s. It requires that each Chinese citizen be classified as either an agricultural or nonagricultural hukou inheritor and be distinguished by their location with respect to an administrative unit. Hukou distribution used to be entirely determined by birth, but nowadays, Chinese citizens can self-select their hukou status based on their ability that causes selection bias in conventional wage decomposition by hukou types. To avoid this bias, I estimated hukou-based earning discrimination by matching Chinese individuals based on a rich set of individual-, family-, and society-level characteristics. By deploying a recent nationally representative dataset, this paper finds that significant earning discriminations exist against agricultural hukou people. I further investigated the impact of hukou adoption within work ownership, work and employer types, and labor contract conditions. I argue that earning difference by hukou is not due to rural–urban segregations; rather, it is systematic and institutionally enforced. This is because, contrary to self-employment and no labor contract conditions, discrimination exists only when others employ them and where a labor contract condition is enforced. Moreover, they face discrimination only when they work for the Chinese government, not when they work for private firms, and they face higher discrimination in nonagriculture-related professions compared to agriculture-related professions.

COMPARISION COGNITIVE IDENTITY BETWEEN HONGKONG CITIZENS AND CHINESE DIASPORA IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

In this paper, my topic is related to the cognitive identity case in Hong Kong. To research this topic, the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia will also be discussed and compared to illustrate what factors may caused the case occurred in Hong Kong. The topic of this paper will be discussed in terms of historical development, with this comparison, I will explain how the historical development of cognitive identity in Hong Kong from the colonial era to the present. Meanwhile, unlike the case of Hong Kong which is disappearing their cognitive identity which is national identity in China, there are Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia who still consider themselves as the successors of Chinese culture. With this comparison, I want to find a solution to avoid cases like this that occur in Hong Kong so that the cognitive problem of identity of people who has followed the Hong Kong case will also be changed and also truly be considered their identity as Chinese citizen. To research this topic, I will use the literature review method.

Online and Offline Religion in China: A Protestant WeChat “Alter-Public” through the Bible Handcopying Movement

Studies of digital religion frequently take democratic regime settings and developed economic contexts for granted, leaving regime and economic development levels as background factors (Campbell 2013). However, in China, the role of the authoritarian state, restrictions on religion, and rapid social change mean that online and offline religious practices will develop in distinct ways. This article analyzes the 2019 Bible handcopying movement promoted through China’s most popular social media WeChat as a way to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of China’s most widely used translation of the Bible. Drawing on interviews by and communication with the movement’s founder, the co-authors participated in and collected postings from a 500-member WeChat group from March to August 2019. We argue that while offline handcopying is an innovation in religious practice due to Chinese cultural and historical traditions, the online group constitutes a micro-scale “alter-public” (Chen 2015; Warner 2002), a site for religious discussion, prayer, and devotion that strengthens an “alternative” Protestant identity alongside that of Chinese citizen of the People’s Republic of China.

Prosumers in a digital multiverse: An investigation of how WeChat is affecting Chinese citizen journalism

This article examines how WeChat, contemporary China’s most popular mobile phone application, is affecting digitally enabled citizen journalism. Based on focus-group research with WeChat users, and building on the insights of previous studies of digitally enabled citizen journalism within and outside of China, we find that WeChat’s integration of multiple communicative networks renders it a multiversal space where citizen journalistic practice can bleed across public, semi-public, and private spheres. We show that WeChat offers diverse communicative affordances facilitating practices of “metavoicing” as a form of citizen journalism, blurring divides between news production and consumption. This dynamic affects users’ experiences of news and can influence news agendas story lifecycles. WeChat also faces important limitations as a citizen journalism platform: it is a space where political discussion can be readily reported, where the tone of current affairs coverage is often sensationalized, and where the reliability of content can be difficult to discern.

Nation-building, Ethnicity and Natural Resources

The Mongolian economy has grown rapidly in recent years, thanks to a mining sector based on abundant resources like coal, copper, and gold. The mining boom has been stimulated by Mongolia’s energy-hungry southern neighbour China, which plays a significant role, not only through importing natural resources but also through capital investment in the growing economy. In recent decades some inland port towns, such as Chehee/Shiveehüree and Ganchmod/Gashuunsukhait have grown up along the border between the two countries. Scenes of trucks lining up at customs posts to transport Mongolian coal to China are common. The trade in natural resources clearly has significance not only for the economy but also for nation-building and ethnicity construction. This paper examines the role of ethnic Mongols from China in the economic cooperation between the two countries. It will focus on the story of an ethnic Mongolian trucker, formerly a herder in western Inner Mongolia, discussing the ways in which he has experienced interactions with Chinese and Mongolian nationals, as he identifies himself as a Chinese citizen and an ethnic Mongol.