The Politics of Chinese Media: A Discussion with Bingchun Meng

Feeling betrayed by liberal ideals in the US and UK, how are Chinese international students dealing with rising racism during the pandemic? Bingchun Meng from LSE talks to Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD student at NIAS, about her latest research project, “Mediated Experience of Covid-19”, based on her students' real stories and their sophisticated reflections. The author of the book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation (Palgrave, 2018) shares her views on the commonalities and differences between Chinese and western media against the backdrop of a rising Chinese threat narrative. She also comments on how Chinese tech giants, such as Huawei or ByteDance’s journey expanding their businesses overseas have implicated in global geopolitics. Dr Bingchun Meng is an Associate Professor in the Department for Media and Communications at LSE, where she also directs the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Research Center. Her research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. She has published widely on these topic areas in leading international journals. She is currently working on a book project about technology industries in China. Joanne Kuai is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden. She is a media scholar with a research focus on data and AI for media, computational journalism, and social implications of automation and algorithms. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk