Chinese Culture on Tiktok: Expression Mechanisms and Content Construction

By Qiong Dang

This book examines how Chinese ethnic culture is expressed, mediated, and reconstructed on social media platforms, with a focus on short-video environments. Drawing on a mixed-methods research design that integrates digital ethnography, computational text analysis, and video content analysis, the study analyzes video titles, audiovisual content, and audience comments to reveal the multi-layered mechanisms shaping cultural communication in platform contexts. The findings show that ethnic culture undergoes a process of platform-oriented translation before entering circulation, where algorithmic visibility logics and tagging systems structure expressive forms. At the level of content construction, cultural practices are visually filtered, narratively reorganized, and aesthetically processed, resulting in symbolic and spectacularized representations. Audience interaction further reproduces and stabilizes cultural meanings through affective affirmation, experiential association, and participatory negotiation. Based on these results, the book proposes a three-layer model of the digital communication of ethnic culture, highlighting the recursive relationship among platform structures, mediated representation, and audience meaning-making. The study contributes to cultural representation theory, platform studies, and research on digital ethnic communication, while offering insights for cultural dissemination and tourism communication in the digital age.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9819244234
• ISBN13: 9789819244232
• Release Date: February 2027
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 237 Pages