Fan Liang

Journal Article Media Culture and Society · October 1, 2025 This study examines the relationship between content creators and multi-channel networks (MCNs) in China’s platform economy through the lens of labor coercion. While previous literature has mainly addressed the flexibility and precarity of creators, little ... Full text Cite

Trust in Information Sources and Parents' Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) of Children's PCV13 Vaccination in the Yangtze River Delta Region, China.

Journal Article Vaccines (Basel) · September 4, 2025 Background: Trust in information sources is essential to enhance an individual's understanding of the message and boost their willingness to change or act on specific health behavior, including vaccine uptake. This study explores the association between tr ... Full text Link to item Cite

Geopolitics in Platform Governance: Algorithmic Sovereignty and Data Localization in China and the United States

Journal Article Policy and Internet · September 1, 2025 Previous research on platform governance often focuses on issues such as moderation, misinformation, and privacy, with little attention to its geopolitical dimensions. This study bridges the gap by analyzing the governance of Chinese platforms through a ge ... Full text Cite

Decentralized and Network-Aware Task Offloading for Smart Transportation via Blockchain.

Journal Article Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · September 2025 As intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) evolve rapidly, the increasing computational demands of connected vehicles call for efficient task offloading. Centralized approaches face challenges in scalability, security, and adaptability to dynamic network ... Full text Cite

China Defenders From Abroad: Exploring Pro-China Foreign Political Influencers on X/Twitter

Journal Article Social Media + Society · July 2025 Political influencers are social media users who attempt to shape others’ political attitudes and behaviors through personal influences. While prior research has mainly examined political influencers in Western democracies, this study shifts attent ... Full text Cite

Media framing and public support for China’s social credit system: An experimental study

Journal Article New Media and Society · February 1, 2025 Although China’s social credit system (SCS) is widely portrayed by Western media as repressive surveillance, recent studies show that it receives high levels of support among Chinese citizens. Previous research suggests that people support the SCS because ... Full text Cite

Navigating Through The Fog: Reflexive Accounts on Researching China’s Digital Surveillance, Censorship, and Other Sensitive Topics

Journal Article Journal of Contemporary China · January 1, 2025 Researching China’s sensitive topics, such as digital surveillance and censorship, exposes scholars to mounting challenges including difficult field and internet access to quality information, scrutiny and security of research participants and researchers, ... Full text Cite

Explaining the technological acceptance of 5G: Quantitative and qualitative insights from China and the United States

Journal Article International Communication Gazette · December 1, 2024 This study examines people's acceptance of the fifth generation (5G) of wireless and mobile communication technologies at a time when such services and devices were just approaching consumer availability. It utilizes the Technological Acceptance Model to t ... Full text Cite

"Voices Help Correlate Signs and Words": Analyzing Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) TikTokers' Content, Practices, and Pitfalls

Conference Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings · May 11, 2024 Video-sharing platforms such as TikTok have offered new opportunities for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) people to create public-facing content using sign language - an integral part of DHH culture. Besides sign language, DHH creators deal with a variety ... Full text Cite

Examining Active News Avoidance Across Countries: A Multilevel Moderation Analysis of News Interests, News Trust, and Press Freedom

Journal Article Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly · January 1, 2024 Previous studies have identified various individual factors explaining news avoidance, but the understanding of how these factors function within the broader political information environment is limited. This study, leveraging a large-scale cross-national ... Full text Cite

Manufacturing influencers: the gatekeeping roles of MCNs (Multi-channel networks) in cultural production

Journal Article Information Communication and Society · January 1, 2024 This study examines the revolutionary role of MCNs (multi-channel networks) in China's influencer market, focusing on their impact on cultural production. While existing scholarship has explored influencer precarity and platform dependency, the role of MCN ... Full text Cite

Cultural porters and banyun in Chinese fandoms on Bilibili

Journal Article Transformative Works and Cultures · December 14, 2023 Banyun is the grassroots transnational media flow of foreign media content on Chinese platforms, particularly Bilibili. In this case study, we explore the role of the practitioners of banyun, the "cultural porters," in relation to other fans and th ... Full text Cite

The Effects of Flagging Propaganda Sources on News Sharing: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Twitter

Journal Article International Journal of Press Politics · October 1, 2023 While research on flagging misinformation and disinformation has received much attention, we know very little about how the flagging of propaganda sources could affect news sharing on social media. Using a quasi-experimental design, we test the effect of s ... Full text Cite

Engineering care in pandemic technogovernance: The politics of care in China and South Korea’s COVID-19 tracking apps

Journal Article New Media and Society · June 1, 2023 This article critically examines South Korea and China’s COVID-19 tracking apps by bridging surveillance studies with feminist technoscience’s understanding of the “politics of care”. Conducting critical readings of the apps and textual analysis of discurs ... Full text Cite

From Citizens to Users

Chapter · May 22, 2023 Full text Cite

The Dynamics of Event-Based Political Influencers on Twitter: A Longitudinal Analysis of Influential Accounts During Chinese Political Events

Journal Article Social Media and Society · April 1, 2023 The study examines the dynamics and multiplicity of political influencers on Twitter by focusing on the discussion of six China-related political events between 2017 and 2020. We consider influence as communication practices aimed to shape the flow of onli ... Full text Cite

From Citizens to Users: The Algorithmic Turn in China’s Surveillance Apparatus

Chapter · January 1, 2023 The development of new information technologies has profoundly altered how personal data are collected and analyzed by states. This chapter explores the changes by focusing on the algorithmic turn of China's citizen surveillance. We argue that citizens hav ... Full text Cite

The making of “good” citizens: China's Social Credit Systems and infrastructures of social quantification

Journal Article Policy and Internet · March 1, 2022 This article examines citizen scoring in China's Social Credit Systems (SCSs). Focusing on 50 municipal cases that potentially cover 210 million population, we analyze how state actors quantify social and economic life into measurable and comparable metric ... Full text Cite

From Persuasion to Deliberation: Do Experiences of Online Political Persuasion Facilitate Dialogic Openness?

Journal Article Communication Research · July 1, 2021 Research has long considered the role interpersonal persuasion plays in shaping how citizens form their political opinions and cast their votes. Yet few studies have examined how experiences with online persuasion might influence broader deliberative orien ... Full text Cite

The globalization of TikTok: Strategies, governance and geopolitics

Journal Article Journal of Digital Media and Policy · June 1, 2021 This article examines the rise of TikTok in three aspects: globalization strategies, data and content policies, and geopolitical implications. Instead of focusing on app features and uses within the platform proper, we situate and critically analyse TikTok ... Full text Cite

The Impact of Social Endorsement Cues and Manipulability Concerns on Perceptions of News Credibility.

Journal Article Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking · June 2021 Social endorsement cues (SEC) offer information about how online users have engaged and evaluated online content. Some view that SEC thus can serve as useful heuristics when users evaluate the credibility of news content on social media. At the same time, ... Full text Cite

The Platformization of Propaganda: How Xuexi Qiangguo Expands Persuasion and Assesses Citizens in China

Journal Article International Journal of Communication · January 1, 2021 This study examines China’s ambitions to strengthen propaganda by creating a platform called Xuexi Qiangguo. Though platform studies have explored the important role of the U.S.-based platforms, we know very little about the intervention of state power in ... Cite

COVID-19 and Health Code: How Digital Platforms Tackle the Pandemic in China.

Journal Article Social media + society · July 2020 As COVID-19 is rapidly spreading around the world, some countries have launched or plan to implement contact-tracing apps to detect exposure risks. In China, the government relies on Health Code, developed by Alipay and WeChat, for identifying people poten ... Full text Cite

The New Silk Road on Facebook: How China’s official media cover and frame a national initiative for global audiences

Journal Article Communication and the Public · December 1, 2019 The New Silk Road has been considered as China’s core foreign policy since 2013. This initiative is paralleled by the expansion of China’s official media on Western networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. These projects indicate China’s ambitious p ... Full text Cite

Social media expression and the political self

Journal Article Journal of Communication · February 1, 2019 Expression has the power to shape how we see ourselves. In this paper, we argue that the dynamics of political expression on social media can influence not only political behavior, but also citizens' more fundamental political self-concepts. Specifically, ... Full text Cite

Book review: Can the Internet Strengthen Democracy?

Journal Article Global Media and Communication · December 2018 Full text Cite

Constructing a Data-Driven Society: China's Social Credit System as a State Surveillance Infrastructure

Journal Article Policy and Internet · December 1, 2018 Big data technologies have been adopted by both the public and private sectors to develop and expand surveillance capacities. This article traces the institutional processes and political-economic interests of the public and private stakeholders involved i ... Full text Cite