Research on the Politics and Media of East Asia
Explore the different research projects of PoliticsEastAsia.com. From the complex interactions of states and societies to processes of international relations, from mass-mediated mega events to the politics of popular entertainment, PoliticsEastAsia.com introduces you to ongoing research and debates. Learn more about the projects of the editor Florian Schneider, and about the work of his colleagues from Leiden University and beyond.
We invite scholarship that assesses the state-of-the-field in digital Asia research and its blindspots, to propose avenues of future scholarship.
In this interview with Taiwan's cyber-minister Audrey Tang, Florian Schneider discusses participatory politics, social technology, and the legacies of the Sunflower Movement.
Call for papers: contribute to the 2019 special issue of Asiascape: Digital Asia, on the theme of 'digital spatiality'.
What roles do digital technologies play in the construction of national sovereignty? Who gets to shape the meanings of 'homelands' and 'territories' in the East Asian region? Join us for an online discussion with students from Leiden University.
In May 2018, Leiden University will host a series of conferences and debates that deal with digital media and technological change in Asia. Check out the conference calls.
Call for papers: Leiden Uni and the IIAS welcome contributors to the 3rd Asiascape: Digital Asia conference, on 'Rethinking Communities in the Age of the Digital'.
Call for papers: Leiden Uni will welcome the 16th annual Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC16) on 22-23 May 2018. CIRC16 will explore the theme ‘modes of connection’, across social, economic, and political fields.
How powerful are platforms in the East Asian region and beyond? How does platform power reshape society? These are the questions we are debating in this online discussion with students from Leiden University.
For the academic year 2017-2018, I am looking for two student assistants interested in social media and social movement research.
In this discussion, Leiden University grad students debate how nationalism fairs when it is updated for the information age.
In this discussion, our graduate students at Leiden University take a look at China's search engines and their role as knowledge filters in the PRC.
As Asia scholars, digital research methods can provide exciting windows into the topics we study. But what counts as 'data', how can we get access, and what are the ethical and practical pitfalls of studying the digital, for example in the case of digital China?
This short overview of the 2016 special issue of Asiascape: Digital Asia introduces the theme 'digital play' and discusses how digital technologies, gaming practices, popular culture, and contemporary political and economic dynamics are intricately intertwined in the Asian region.
This article examines how Chinese websites shape online discourse on two Japan issues (the Nanjing Massacre and the East China Sea conflict), and what these sites can tell us about the leadership’s strategy for managing digital communication. It finds that the authorities apply a Leninist mass-communication logic to the web, turning the internet into an 'info-web' that brings digital media into the fold of China’s ‘traditional’ mass-media system.
Call for papers: our next special issue of Asiascape: Digital Asia will explore video games in Asia. Find out about this exciting topic, and about our "best research article" prize and "best article by an emerging scholar" award.
Where might we find ‘Digital Asia’? This article examines the online presence of higher education institutions in Greater China, showing how it can be fruitful to search for 'Digital Asia' in its communication networks and digital interfaces.
This introduction to the 2015 special issue of the academic journal Asiascape: Digital Asia discusses the contributions to the special issue theme "Where Is Digital Asia?"
This post reviews what the international academic conference on "Informal Political Actors in East Asia, Russia, and the Middle East" at Sheffield University in January 2015 can tell us about international politics.
This video picks up on a debate I recently participated in at Leiden University, during the Leiden Global Day on 27 November 2014, where we discussed the complex factors that shape how we use digital tools in our societies today.
This article examines current streams of Chinese International Relations theorising and asks what these approaches to world order can contribute to our understanding of the territorial disputes in the East China Sea.
Are social science and humanities scholars too removed from the realities on the ground to be able to contribute to ongoing debates about current affairs in a dynamic region like Asia?
This book chapter, co-authored with Jay Hwang, analyses how China’s propaganda specialists have used popular entertainment to frame China’s historiography by invoking discourses of modernization and a 'Road to Revival'.
This book chapter asks what visions of the world came together at the Shanghai Expo, how they were formed, and what role the Chinese authorities played in framing the event.
This article, co-authored with Jay Hwang, examines the ways in which various cultural products present the Sichuan earthquake and asks what meanings national crises have in the Chinese discourse on political legitimacy.
On 24 & 25 January, we invited leading scholars to join us at Leiden University to revisit the emancipatory potential of digital media in Asia and discuss the digital turn in Asian studies. Read more about the discussions and ideas that accompanied this Asiascape: Digital Asia event.
On 23 and 24 January 2014, Leiden University will be holding this international conference on digital media in Asia - view the conference programme here.
Does the Chinese government with its Internet controls make full use of the potentials that digital communication networks hold? This post looks at the PRC's "Chaoyang model" of managing information flows, which is very much the same model that has informed media management in China throughout most of the 20th century.
What does the "digital turn" mean for scholarship and teaching in the arts and humanities? This post discusses the trend towards "digital humanities", the criticism that this trend has created, and the ways in which digitally informed scholarship can address such criticism by honouring the humanist tradition of philosophers like von Humboldt.
From 24 to 26 October 2013, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou hosted the Fourth International Conference on Multicultural Discourse. This post reviews some of the discussions on discourse analysis that featured prominently at this academic event.
What does the 2013 German election have to do with North Korea? A lot, suggests a recent political comic that links non-voting to authoritarian politics. This post discusses what informs such arguments, and takes a closer look at the action of non-voting as a form of political critique.
This post examines the recent series of Chinese propaganda attempts to promote Xi Jinping's slogan of the "China Dream", and discusses how and why these attempts draw from Maoist iconography to relay their message.
The academic journal Asiascape: Digital Asia (DIAS) welcomes scholars from the area studies, communication sciences, cultural studies, humanities, and social sciences, as well as from multi-disciplinary backgrounds, to this international conference on digital media in Asia.
In this video interview, Florian Schneider and Russ Glenn discuss China’s military modernization in the context of changing PRC foreign policy goals. The interview follows up on the 2013 US report on China's military, the PRC’s 2013 White Paper on the Armed Forces, and the discussion of China’s role in the world that these publications have elicited in the English-language press.
This post will introduce you to the theory of semiotics. Using examples from East Asia, it explains key words of this "science of the sign", and shows why semiotics might be a useful way to conceptualize political communication, whether in East Asia or elsewhere.
This paper examines the theme pavilions at the Shanghai World Exposition - a large-scale political communication effort that the Chinese government initiated as a core part of its public relations strategy for the 21st century.
Did the 2010 Shanghai Expo present visitors with a dominant story of world order? This intro to a research article argues that Expos do not work that way.
Is the way we understand mass communication content entirely subjective, or are there patterns in movies, TV broadcasts, pop music, or mass events that lend themselves to analysis? This post discusses what characterizes communication, and why media content analysis is a useful approach to understanding mass-communicated political discourse.
Watch this video blog for an introduction to discourse analysis, including many examples from actual research.
This article analyzes how the Chinese Communist Party shifted its legitimacy discourse during the 60-year anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
Introduction to Asiascape: Digital Asia, a new peer-reviewed academic journal that explores the political, social, and cultural impact of digital media in Asia. Bringing together inter- and multi-disciplinary research in the social sciences, arts, media and communication studies, information and computer sciences, and area studies, the journal examines the role that information, communication, and digital technologies play in Asian societies, as well as in intra-regional and transnational dynamics.
China has more internet users than the EU has citizens. This has created a vibrant online sphere, but also forums for nationalist sentiments. Focusing on Sino-Japanese history, this project analyses how nationalism works in an emerging Great Power’s digital networks.
The politics, economics, and cultures of East Asian societies today play a profound role in international relations. Consequently, ideas from the region on how to structure international politics have not only become more prominent in academic discussions, they increasingly affect how world affairs work.
"Mass-Events in China" (MEC) explores the large-scale media-events that have become a corner stone in China’s 21st century PR strategy. By analysing production backgrounds and media contents, and by engaging with theories of mass-communication, MEC examines what the political, economic, and cultural implications of this strategy are.
What happens to politics when it is mass-communicated? In East Asia, new ICT are changing the way that political actors communicate their policies and justify their agendas. PoliticsEastAsia.com provides a forum to analyze and debate how messages across different media shape political discourse in diverse East Asian settings.
