Suchergebnisse

Leaving Home (2017), a Chinese reality television show focusing on narrating Chinese family stories with an emphasis on Chinese family cultures, became popular among audiences in 2017. Simultaneously, the show triggered large-scale public attention and heated debate on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media site. This commentary analyses how Chinese family cultures have been represented and framed in Leaving Home, and how the show has influenced and shaped public discourse on social media platforms such as Weibo. A content analysis is used to interpret stories in Leaving Home while textual analysis is deployed to analyse the discussion microblogs on the Weibo topic page of Leaving Home. Three types of Chinese family cultures have been foregrounded through examining the narratives of Leaving Home. The analyses of microblogs have demonstrated that Leaving Home's constructions of narratives and emphases on certain topics can affect public discourse on Weibo and shape them in specific directions. Leaving Home has inspired people to interpret its stories and embedded Chinese family cultures and values in their own ways by expressing their opinions on Weibo.

Rapid digitalization and an aging population are leading to an increasingly prominent age-based digital divide among the world's elderly population. This study focuses on China, one of the most rapidly aging and digitalizing countries in the world. Employing a mixed-method approach, this research examines how elderly individuals experience the digital transformation and the associated digital divide. The findings suggest that the elderly interviewees encounter multiple barriers to learning and using digital technologies, which highlights the significant role of social support and networks in facilitating their adaptation to the digital society and lifestyle. Attitudes toward digital engagement and digitalization vary greatly among the elderly, ranging from being optimistic to feeling left behind and having multiple concerns. Our findings further reveal that the Chinese government has implemented numerous digital apps tailored to the demands of the elderly and provided training opportunities to bridge the gray digital divide. This emphasizes the responsiveness and adaptiveness of Chinese authorities in addressing pressing societal issues. However, we identify a gap in digital outreach, as most elderly interviewees have limited awareness of government digital inclusion policies and programs. This article contributes to digital divide research and offers practical implications for countries grappling with the gray digital divide.

AbstractOver the past decade, China's central and municipal governments have consistently supported the development of social credit systems (SCSs). While research has highlighted the Chinese public's high approval and backing of SCSs, their engagement with these digital projects has not been fully explored. Based on 44 semi‐structured interviews, our research examines Chinese citizens' digital participation in government‐run SCSs at the local level. Our findings suggest that, despite perceiving SCSs as accepting and positive, most interviewees do not actively engage with local government‐run SCSs. Multiple factors can explain the gap between the high acceptance and low participation rates, including a lack of awareness regarding local SCSs, a perception that registering and maintaining a decent credit score requires major effort, various concerns involving data privacy and safety, algorithm accuracy and fairness, potential risks, unappealing benefits offered by SCSs, and the voluntary aspect of participating in local SCSs. Our research adds to the existing literature on digital governance in authoritarian contexts by explaining why Chinese citizens do not necessarily engage with state‐promoted digital projects.

Since the reform and opening up, China has actively participated in the Global Value Chain (GVC) division of labor system and achieved rapid economic growth and moderate industrial upgrading. However, with the rapid development of GVC, more and more countries are participating in the global competition, and China's manufacturing industry is facing the serious challenge of "two-way squeeze" from the return of high-end and low-end transfer. This paper constructs a theoretical framework of GVC embedding and innovative human capital accumulation affecting manufacturing upgrading, and empirically examines the impact of GVC embedding location enhancement and innovative human capital accumulation on manufacturing upgrading from the perspective of product upgrading and efficiency upgrading. The findings show that innovative human capital accumulation enhances the positive effect of GVC embedding on product upgrading and efficiency upgrading. The extent of this effect varies across types of industries; for product upgrading, the positive regulating effect of innovative human capital on the positive relationship between embedded location and China's manufacturing upgrading is most pronounced in labor-intensive industries; for efficiency upgrading, innovative human capital plays a more significant positive regulating effect in capital-intensive and technology-intensive industries. Based on the above conclusions, the Chinese government should strengthen diversified investment in high-level talents and invest in the expansion of cooperative learning platforms in the upper, middle and lower reaches of the global value chain manufacturing industry, establish and improve relevant laws and regulations on intellectual property protection and transformation of innovation results, and solve the problem of deviation of talents from optimal allocation, so as to better exert the regulating effect of innovative human capital and promote the upgrading of China's manufacturing industry.