ECREA16-Abstract_book

276 / 658

274
Friday, November 111 4 : 3 0 – 1 6 : 0 0
FIS PS Poster session
PS 060 How Does WeChat Go Abroad? The Nexus of Technology, Culture and Market in Internationalizing China-Originated Social Media
D. Ji1
1 Communication University of China, National Centre for Radio and Television Studies, Beijing, China
Launched in January 2014, WeChat has so far gained more than 650 million monthly active users including around 100 million from foreign countries. No
matter how successful WeChat was promoted internationally by its creator and owner Tencent - one leading internet company in China, and howWeChat
has been articulated within different localities, despite the geographical unevenness, with distinctive cultural traditions, the fact is thatWeChat has become
the first social media originated from China but soon been widely used outside China. This international success implies a huge potential for the possible
power shift of social media landscape on a global stage whereas less scholarly attention has been paid to this emergent phenomenon in a broadly defined
field of international communication, which has been overwhelmingly dominated byWestern academics and their inclination towards the 'embeddedness”
of Western-originated social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in respective societies in the world. Assuming that defining the 'social” instead of the 'media”
is at stake in understanding the role of social media in different circumstances, this paper will entail a multi-dimensional analysis of WeChat going inter‑
national since its inception. Based on in-depth interviews with employees of Tencent’s WeChat department and a sample group of WeChat users overseas,
the paper aims to formulate an interpretive framework encompassing the following dimensions: Combing technical and commercial advantages, WeChat
is considered as a successful synthesis of diverse social media functions, including both basic services like instant messaging and audio/visual chatting as
provided by other popular social media and new services fulfilling the communicative needs of Chinese society, exemplified by Friends’ Circle and Wallet
(online payment). By doing so, WeChat is diffused internationally in an unprecedented rate, particularly amongst oversea Chinese communities and their
connections with foreigners. Besides, Tencent attempted new technical and market strategies to make WeChat more appealing to local communities as I
observed in Southeast Asia. In a cultural sense, WeChat does capture the essence of Chinese society, namely the ways of how Chinese are organized and
socialized. The crystallization of this 'high culture”feature is reified in the function of Friend’s Circle. The formation of different circles onWeChat follows and
exaggerates the principles of how Chinese people organize themselves into different circles offline in an acquaintance society, including the pattern of dif‑
ference sequence rooted in a long-standing rural society (Xiaotong Fei, 1946) and the institutional dependency in a socialist urban society (AndrewWalder,
1986). Those organizing principles onWeChat not only flourish in the existing Chinese communities overseas, as demonstrated by the recentWeChat-based
coalition of Chinese Americans protesting against the former NYPD cop Peter Liang's GuiltyVerdict, but also prevail in the massive people exchange between
China and other countries, for example, the enlarging population of Chinese merchants, tourists, scholars and students going aboard as a outcome of Chi‑
na’s deep integration into global economy. Beyond a nationalist perspective, this paper tries to interrogate the nexus of technology, culture and market in
driving the (uneven) internationalization of WeChat, a typical China-originated social media application.
PS 061 Europeanness in Chinese Eyes: An Imperialist Nightmare or a Utopian Myth?
F. Qi1
1 University of Pompeu Fabra, Communications, Barcelona, Spain
Europe in Chinese eyes symbolizes an image in constant change. From China’s diplomatic fiasco in the Paris Peace Conference which incited the May Fourth
Movement protesting against imperialism to China’s collaboration with some European countries in the SecondWorldWar; from isolation and xenophobia
after the founding of the People’s Republic of China to the increasing political, economic and cultural communications with Europeans after opening-up,
Chinese attitude toward Europe has not been consistent in the last century. This paper will examine this changing Chinese interpretation of Europe on
the basis of Chinese historical context and its foreign policies towards Europe. The paper mainly employs the methods of interview and textual analysis to
discover Chinese perceptions of Europeanness and specific European images in Chinese cultural texts. Starting with the world mapping, Europe has been
adopting a Eurocentric value ever since the Renaissance, when Europeans started to take pride in their achievements and civilizations. By placing Europe
at the top and the centre of the world with an disproportionately enlarged continent, maps in the 16th century Europe displayed an immodest sense that
Europe is not ‘an equal part of the world’, but rather a dominator of it. Not surprisingly, this self-centric geographic portrayal exerted its larger impact on
European psychology and intellectual on the whole, as well as Europe’s relationship with other continents in the following centuries. A Eurocentric psy‑
chological superiority, backed by industrialization and capitalist power, has dominated much of Europe’s encounter with other cultures. As its earliest and
richest colony, the Orient has traditionally been perceived by theWest, especially the Europeans, as the Other.The Orient often becomes an object of Europe’s
fantasies and inventions and the ‘Oriental myth’ is often depicted with intended exoticism and romanticized beliefs. Since the opening of the New Route
sponsored by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs during the 15th and 16th century, the Orientalist discovery accompanied by European imperialism
started to take off. Europe took the initiative and started the active exploration of the Oriental lands after conquering oceans and navigating distances, thus
and so defined most of the Occidental-Oriental encounters after the 16th century, where the subject Occident remained for a long time the active observer
approaching a comparatively passive object the Orient. The consistent Orientalism calls into question the relationship between the ‘West’and the ‘East’and
invokes the curiosity into the other side of the problem, namely the Eastern construction of the West. Under the discursive strength of Eurocentrism and
Orientalism , the world was too often perceived from a Eurocentric perspective where the Oriental China had been pictured and defined for numerous times
in European cultural texts, with its color, sound, or motion imagery filtered into the Western aesthetic, sociological, historical and political constructions;
while in comparison the reversed studies about a Chinese construction of Europe have been considerably less. Hence it seems that a gap-filling research
of an exclusive image of Europe, particularly of how a specific ‘Europeanness’has been perceived and represented in China is quite needed.