[Air-L] PhD Scholarship in researching China's social media (The University of Hong Kong)

[kwfu]

Funded PhD studentship available at The University of Hong Kong

Submission deadline: August 31, 2019
Start date (the latest): January 1, 2020
Online application: https://www.gradsch.hku.hk/gradsch/notices/2nd-clearing-round-application-deadline-august-31-2019
The basic level of scholarship is HK$16,660 (US$2,117) per month. More details: https://www.gradsch.hku.hk/gradsch/

Background:
Recent years have witnessed China's rapid development and its evolution as a global power. Applying the World Bank's measure of purchasing power parity to evaluate GDP, China is now the largest global economy on the planet. It has become one of the most important participants in the global financial system as well as in international affairs, for example by initiating the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road initiative. China's enormous "sharp power" in manipulating other countries and international organizations has recently stirred a new wave of global attention.

While China's influence has become global, an understanding of various approaches used by Chinese governments to interact with the country's news media, online media, and public discourse is urgently needed. Such understanding will inform the global community on how to engage with this new global power. With the rapid development of digital technologies and smartphone, China's "we-media", for example Weibo, WeChat, Youku, and Douyin, has become an emerging citizen media technology in China, nurturing a networked space where individuals, non-state media organizations, and even state media are technically and financially enabled to engage with a mass audience. Despite a vigorously regulated Internet, the emerging media has profoundly shaped the landscape of Chinese journalism as well as public discourse. It has generated substantial social impact, for example, empowering online activism on one hand, e.g. #metoo campaign and vaccine scandal in 2018, while extending the reach of propaganda and surveillance on the other hand, i.e. social credit system.

The proposed research seeks to investigate China's state-society relation through the lens of the "we-media". We will particularly scrutinize the growth of news media WeChat public accounts. Deploying a mixed method approach in a combination of computational text analysis, machine learning techniques, and qualitative methodology, we aim to describe, characterize, and investigate the nature of we-media in China.

Great opportunity for those who are interested in using Weiboscope and Wechatscope data for academic research.
Weiboscope: https://weiboscope.jmsc.hku.hk<https://weiboscope.jmsc.hku.hk/>
WeChatscope: https://wechatscope.jmsc.hku.hk

Enquiry:
King-wa Fu
Journalism and Media Studies Centre
The University of Hong Kong
Email: kwfu at hku.hk<mailto:kwfu at hku.hk>