ABSTRACT This study examines how the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL) conducts soft propaganda on Douyin by integrating emotion and entertainment to advance ideological narratives. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of 174 emotionally coded videos, this study demonstrates how the CCYL crafts affective messages through binary lexical priming, syntactic design, and multimodal formats. This effect is achieved by merging patriotic language with memes, music, and popular entertainment. Furthermore, by employing affective storytelling, emotional ritualization, and strategic polarization, the CCYL transforms emotions such as grief and outrage into public performances of political loyalty. This study contends that the CCYL, as a vanguard of the Chinese Communist Party, tactically employs emotional mobilization, ideological entertainment, and platform engagement to achieve non-coercive persuasion.

ABSTRACT Traditional culture has become a salient symbolic resource in contemporary Chinese advertising, yet evidence remains limited on whether and how traditional value oriented imagery in advertising texts shapes consumer responses. Drawing on cultural embeddedness theory, this research introduces Traditional Cultural Harmony Imagery (TCHI), the extent to which advertising texts evoke harmony-oriented traditional meanings through identifiable linguistic cues, and examines its effects on brand attitudes and purchase intentions. Across three experimental studies (N = 521) using multiple product categories and operationalizations, embedding TCHI in advertising texts systematically enhances brand attitudes and purchase intentions, even after controlling for demographics, prior cultural exposure, and cultural orientation. Both explicit and implicit TCHI cues outperform non-TCHI texts, while explicitness provides no additional benefit. Parallel mediation analyses show that TCHI increases brand attitudes and purchase intentions via subjective norms and brand cultural identification, indicating socially and culturally grounded pathways. These findings operationalize a text based cultural meaning cue and suggest that in the intelligent era characterized by increasingly standardized content, harmony oriented cultural meaning cues can remain effective resources for strengthening consumer responses.

ABSTRACT As users increasingly criticise the opacity of black-boxed algorithms and resist algorithmic curation, platforms have introduced official videos and websites to explain their algorithmic systems. While previous research has examined how these transparent initiatives affect content creators’ strategies for gaining visibility, this study shifts the focus to ordinary users, exploring how they interpret platform-led algorithmic disclosures and how their algorithmic imaginaries and online interactions are influenced by these official explanations on Douyin. This study employed a content analysis of 316 official algorithm explanation videos and articles on transparency websites, as well as a diary-interview approach with 22 Douyin users who watched algorithm explanation videos published by ByteDance’s official accounts. It found that Douyin’s transparency discourse selectively presents algorithmic information and shifts responsibility to automated systems, content creators, and state regulation. Based on participants’ interpretations of official discourse and their interactions with algorithms, this article argues that the platform’s discursive construction of algorithms, rather than fostering critical user agency, reinforces users’ perceptions of algorithms as an ‘objective,’ computational mechanism, thereby eliminating users’ digital irritation to algorithmic problems (e.g. irrelevant curation, content moderation) that discourages user resistance to the platform and legitimises the platform control through a carefully crafted illusion of transparency.

ABSTRACT In climate communication, governments are emerging as the principal actors in guiding public engagement with climate actions. In China, characterised by a ‘strong government–weak society’ structure, the government plays a dominant role in climate communication; therefore, understanding China's government-led online climate communication and its impact can improve public engagement. To that end, this study conducted a quantitative frame analysis of Chinese ministry-led climate communication on social media and explored the association between various frames and public engagement, focusing on the account of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment on Weibo, the largest social media platform in China. Findings showed that, over time, the Chinese government has increasingly preferred highly politicised frames that emphasise its responsibilities and actions. However, these politicised frames have not attracted significant public engagement. Despite being used less and less frequently, frames emphasising individual responsibility have attracted greater public engagement, such as more supportive comments, while the public sphere has remained elusive in government-led climate communication. This study provides a government-centred, diachronic framing perspective to explain why public engagement is difficult to achieve in a strong government–weak society political context like China's.

ABSTRACT Guided by intergroup contact theory, this survey study investigates how White American adults’ (N = 697, Mage = 44.42, SD = 14.6, age range = 18–67) social media intergroup expression frequency and valence, direct contact quality, and perceptions of institutional bias were associated with behavioral and affective attitudes toward ethnic Chinese during COVID-19. Structural Equation Modeling analyses indicate that social media intergroup expression valence and direct contact quality play a critical role in improving intergroup attitudes toward ethnic Chinese directly, and indirectly through building empathy and/or reducing anxiety. In addition, analyses demonstrate the negative role of social media intergroup expression frequency, which had: (1) a direct negative effect on behavioral attitudes and (2) an indirect negative effect on both attitudinal measures through increased anxiety and decreased empathy. Lastly, perceptions of institutional bias were negatively associated with affective attitudes through increased intergroup anxiety. Overall, findings reveal the dynamic interplay of the intergroup processes between social media intergroup expression, intergroup contact, and perceptions of institutional bias in shaping intergroup anxiety, empathy, and attitudes during COVID-19.

ABSTRACT Research focusing on China’s media system has mainly discussed the influence of the Party on media’s editorial sectors. This study directs its attention to the Party’s impact on the non-editorial sectors of Chinese media. Econometric analysis of the panel data collected from 30 state-owned listed media companies (2016–2020) found that the Party’s involvement in profit-making and image-managing activities of media companies improved the latter’s financial and social performance; such effects differ significantly across regions with different marketization levels. It was found that the CPC is acting as a ‘supporting hand’ in non-editorial sectors, presenting the emergence of a new state-media-society relationship in China. Such findings demonstrate the analytical role of econometrics for scholars to theorize the impacts of party-media relationship in contemporary China as well as lay an empirical foundation for the prediction of the next steps of China’s media reform.

ABSTRACT This study examined the role of the ‘filter bubble,’ an algorithm-mediated YouTube video suggestion system, in political polarization and the presence of echo chamber patterns in public engagement. We examined the mechanism by which automated YouTube recommendations augment selective exposure to ideologically similar content and the network-based dynamics of collective polarization. We collected lists of videos recommended by conservative and progressive news media and the accompanying replies using YouTube application programming interfaces (APIs) embedded in YouTube Data Tools and Webometric Analyst 2.0. The study examined similarities in content of related videos and conversation networks between commenters, as well as the relationships between the videos, channels, and commenters. Almost half of the videos had content similar to the original videos offered by both conservative and progressive news media. The filter bubbles in progressive media were not as strong as those in conservative media. More than 30% of the videos recommended by progressive media were from legacy media, while this figure was 25% for conservative sources. This study has significant implications for reverse engineering studies because it collected data through APIs, which are neutral and can access YouTube servers without logging into individual IDs.