About

I am a Ph.D. student in Media and Communication in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at Warwick. I got my Master’s degree with distinction in Communication Studies from Northeastern University in the USA and I obtained Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Nantong University in China. During my undergraduate programme, I studied at Daegu University (South Korea) and the University of Edinburgh (UK) as an exchange student. I was interned as a Research Assistant in several projects regarding Communication and Media at the University of California Los Angeles, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Stanford University, etc.

Research Interests

My current research project aims to examine how social media affects Chinese contemporary feminist practices. Since 2014, with the rise in the prevalence of social media, online feminist movements have developed within China despite strict ideological surveillance and political sanctions. In particular, the #MeToo movement flourished on Weibo and marks Chinese feminism transferring into digital feminism, which had previously sprung up in Europe and North America since 2008. The distinctive feature of digital feminism is the combination of digital technologies and grassroots feminist strategies. This project attempts to fill two gaps in feminist research linked to these developments. First, most studies explored the collaboration between feminism and technologies including the changes in women’s identity through the interaction with social media, such as Wajcman’s (2006) Technofeminism and Gajjala’s (2012) Cyberfeminism. However, these feminist theories were developed in North America and Europe and can fail to properly explain the new feminist trends developing in East Asia. Besides, in some areas (e.g. China), due to the patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity, it is more common and necessary that women utilize social media to resist gender disparities in the public sphere while protecting themselves in a relatively safe private space.

Accordingly, my project is dedicated to advancing the understanding of Asian feminist movements whilst providing an understanding of contemporary feminist theory in unique social, political and economic environments. I noticed the majority of feminist research in China focuses on middle-class women while neglecting economically disadvantaged women in rural areas (Banet-Weiser, 2008; Gill, 2016; Meng, 2020). My project takes into account the marginalized groups of women in the Chinese context and analyzes the empowerment and constraints of social media to their lives. I have determined three research objectives. First, I investigate the uniqueness of contemporary Chinese feminism merged with social media by comparing the #MeToo movement on Weibo and Twitter. Second, I scrutinize the affordances of social media in China that can both enable and constrain awareness of feminist ideas and encourage collective activities by examining three vernacular media platforms (WeChat Official Accounts, Dating App #TaShuo, and Douban Female Talk Group). Third, I will seek to explore deepen understanding of the first two objectives through empirical research that examines the lived experiences of women in multiple social, political and economic circumstances within urban and rural China.