I enjoy contributing chapters to edited volumes.

A few articles I wrote in the past couple of years are coming out in several different volumes in the next few months. I will mention two in this update.

First, in less than a month, Routledge will release the volume East Asian Media Culture in the Age of Digital Platforms: Narratives, Industries, and Audiences edited by Dal Yong Jin and Kyong Yoon. My contribution, entitled "Narratives as Platforms," argues that stories can serve as platforms just like social media (and we ought to turn to stories more).

In October, Bristol University Press will publish the volume The Digitalisation of Memory Practices in China: Contesting the Curating State edited by Maximilian Mayer and Frederik Schmitz. My chapter  “How Do Netizens Remember: Digital Memory Work in the History of the Chinese Internet” examines several forms of digital memory work, from the future-oriented curatorial practices in the 1990s and early 2000s to the backward-looking nostalgic memories of the mid-2000s and finally the many creative forms of digital memory during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two other forthcoming chapters are: “The Ambivalent Art of Living with Chinese Social Media: Digital Vulnerability and Practices of Self-Care,” in Decolonising Approaches to Users and Audiences in the Global South Context, Theory and Method, edited by Tarik Sabry, Winston Mano, and Andrea Medrado and "Networked Repetition and Grassroots Struggles for Alternative Digital Futures" in The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Democracy, edited by Zizi Papacharissi. More details coming in my next update.

I enjoy contributing chapters to edited volumes. They often result from small workshops (this is the case with both articles listed at the top), where participants have the luxury of presenting their work and getting good feedback through intimate conversations and interactions. The volume editors can never be thanked enough for doing an incredible amount of work in what is often a long process leading to publication. Their work significantly reduces the workload and stress of contributing authors. I also enjoy reading nicely edited volumes, because they usually present a variety of perspectives on a common theme from a diverse group of authors. 

July 2025 updates

1. "Two Maoisms," published in Los Angeles Review of Books (June 7, 2025),  is my review of two new books, Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China by Linda Jaivin and How Maoism Was Made: Reconstructing China, 1949–1965 edited by Aaron William Moore and Jennifer Altehenger. Since I'm lingering on LARB, I'd like to re-up Yangyang Cheng's wonderful review essay about my Wuhan book  "Viral Stories: On Guobin Yang’s 'The Wuhan Lockdown,'” published on February 9, 2022.

2. 《国际新闻界》(Chinese Journal of Journalism & Communication) published a special section on Chinese internet histories in its issue No. 4, 2025. My introduction to the special section, entitled "Ordinary Life in the Study of Internet Histories," highlights, well, the importance of studying ordinary life.

3. I can't help sharing this interesting AI generated trailer on Xiaohongshu (RedNote) created by HSS Online about my article on the contemporary significance of Professor Wang Zuoliang's views of literary histories. 

4. In 2017, with Rosie Clark-Parsons, PhD, Jasmine Erdener, and Elisabetta Ferrari, we wrote a long entry "activist media" for Oxford Bibliographies. Last year, Yuan Xu (incoming PhD student at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania) joined the team and worked with me to update the entry. The newly updated entry is now live online (it's paywalled. Message me if you need a pdf). 

5. If you notice that my two recent updates include a few articles in Chinese and even an interview in Spanish, that is because I believe in the value of publishing in non-English languages, as well as in English. Despite all its problems, AI is a useful tool for instantaneous translation. The online platform where the above-mentioned AI-trailered article was published provides instant AI translation of all Chinese texts into English.

Updates about some recent publications, in English, Chinese & Spanish

Can't believe I haven't updated this blog for almost three years! Here are a few updates about recent publications, in reverse chronological order:

1. The May 2025 issue of Foreign Literature (外国文学) just published a special section in commemoration of Professor Wang Zuoliang (王佐良), who passed away 30 years ago in 1995. I contributed an article on Professor Wang's views about how to develop a Chinese paradigm of writing foreign literary histories. My piece discusses how Prof. Wang's work speaks to contemporary academic scholarship in both the humanities and the social sciences. If you don't read Chinese, you will find that the online platform where the journal is published has instant AI translation of Chinese texts into English. It's amazing, and certainly very convenient. The multilingual platform is called HSS Online and was launched last year by Foreign Language & Teaching Press in Beijing. 

2. I'm extremely pleased to have an interview about Chinese internet and social media published in the May 2025 issue of Revista de la Universidad de México. The interview was done with Sandra Barba in English but was published in Spanish because the journal is in Spanish.

3. Another interview was done in Chinese with two scholars in Nanjing University where we discuss my 2020 English article "Communication as Translation." They also asked me about my intellectual trajectories. The interview was just published in the March 2025 issue of Chinese Journal of Journalism & Communication (国际新闻界). The articles in this journal, as well as in Foreign Literature, are open-access.

4. This is also a good time to mention a second interview done recently in Chinese, entitled "Lived Experience, Inter-Disciplinary Knowledge Production and Critical Reflections in an Age of Uncertainty." It was published last year in the Hong Kong-based journal Communication & Society. The second part of the article is the English version.

5. Last year, together with two colleagues (Jingyi Gu and Junyi Lv), we guest-edited a special issue on "Thirty Years of the Internet in China" for the journal Communication and the Public. You will find the first part of the special here, all open-access.

6. Also last year, with two other colleagues (Bingchun Meng and Elaine Yuan), we edited a book entitled Pandemic Crossings: Digital Technology, Everyday Experience, and Governance in the COVID-19 Crisis. It is included in the "US–China Relations in the Age of Globalization" series of the Michigan State University Press edited by Stephen Hartnett. We thank Stephen for his excellent editorial guidance.  And congratulations to Stephen on his forthcoming new book The Lost Chance in China and the Rise of Cold War Populism.