EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 210 Berg Daria (University of St. Gallen) Social Media and New Cultural Entrepreneurs in Twenty-first Century China Key words: Social media, cultural entrepreneurs, consumerism, celebrity This paper sets out to examine howChina’s new cultural entrepreneurs—writers, bloggers, Internet authors and artists—use social media for marketing, self-fashioning and communicating with their target audiences. China’s Internet population reached 668 million netizens in June 2015 with a 49% penetration rate (CNNIC 2015), providing Chinese citizens with new avenues to communicate through non-official channels. This study examines how bestselling authors—such as Han Han and Guo Jingming—use social media to invent themselves as ‘consumption celebrities’—in Guy Debord’s (1992) sense of the word—whose personae epitomise the many facets of consumer culture. The new writers—including Mian Mian, Chun Shu and Muzi Mei—use blogs and microblogs including Weibo and We Chat to inform their fan base of their latest activities. Guangzhou journalist Muzi Mei for example first made blogging popular in 2003 by publishing her notorious intimate diary online. She today uses social media to make a living for herself by dispensing advice on love and sex through an online advice column. This study analyses first, how China’s cybersphere produces a new type of celebrity; and second, how online writings create a media spectacle. This media spectacle exists on three levels: first, as the public spectacle of literary or artistic self-fashioning, casting the new writer as a media celebrity; second, as a literary reflection on the economic reforms and globalisa- tion; and third, as the epitome of the social rise of China’s new cultural entrepreneurs. This research will shed new light on China’s changing cultural scene in the era of global media. This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the cultural and social negotiations surrounding cultural entrepreneurs in China’s new mediasphere. Bulfoni Clara (University of Milan) Lexical Borrowing from English in the Internet Era Key words: Chinese language evolution, Computer-Mediated Communication, Technically Mediated Communication, Lexical borrowings, Language identity The paper focuses mainly on the Chinese language evolution and transformation due to the influence of computer science in the Internet era. Internet started spreading through China in the 1980s, bringing with it an unprecedented degree of innovation. The impact of this medium was so great that it galvanized the other means of information, as can be seen from the fact that at present almost all Chinese newspapers provide an online edition. Although, during the centuries, Chinese lexicon has already absorbed a large number of loans, the recent phenomenon is causing huge changes in the Chinese morphology and in its synonymic and stylistic systems as well. In the evolution of modern Chinese, the rapid advancement of computing technology and global communication play a substantial role in the acquisition of new terms and borrowings especially from English. Since Chinese has a logographic script, words in the roman script must be transformed into expressions in Chinese characters when they are introduced into Chinese. Beside, additional changes have been brought about the use of acronyms, and other alphabetic short forms (such as text messages) especially in Internet communication. The Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), and, more generally, the new electronic communication, including the chat and SMS varieties — called Technically Mediated Communication (TMC) being now available many devices — is a sector that has