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China’s ‘Generation Y’ are the first to grow up with computer technology and the Internet. More affluent and better educated than their parents, and often the only child in the family, they consider individuality a highly sought-after quality, which has given rise to a ‘me culture’ primarily concerned with self-expression and identity exhibition. Drawing from a combined content and discourse analysis in conjunction with personal interviews with Chinese Gen Y bloggers, this study seeks to provide a qualitative examination of Chinese youth and their use of personal blogs. It fills a lacuna in current studies that focus largely on blogging in western contexts. The study elucidates how China’s youth use blogs in their own symbolic identity construction and self-presentation based around notions of individualism and consumerism — key features of China’s entry into its postsocialist age — and probes the motivations behind their blogging practices.

This article explores how, in times of crisis, Chinese journalism is still heavily influenced by the Maoist era in which the news media served as the mouthpiece for government propaganda. From the seasonal flooding of China's great rivers to international controversies such as the 2001 US Spy-Plane incident, China's state-controlled media has called upon a complex interweaving of Chinese 'values' incorporating them into a patriotic narrative of nation-building. In times of adversity these familiar narratives operate within conceptual frameworks that serve to mobilise the masses and, ultimately, present a positive outcome in which 'the enemy' (a foreign aggressor, corrupt official or Mother Nature) is defeated. China's struggle against its foes becomes embodied in the heroic actions of a select individual or group. This article proposes that despite indications of a move from ideology to profit, the Chinese media returns to such 'hero narratives' in emergencies as a deliberate and considered means of operationalising existing frameworks for the control of mass audiences.

Transnational magazines have enjoyed enormous success with readers in Singapore

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