CIRC 2023 - Digital Asia Hub

Digital Asia Hub hosted the 20th anniversary instance of the Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC), a global network for emerging and senior academics studying digital life in China.

This year, the Hub took on the mantle as CIRC organiser, partnering with The Faculty of Mass Communication at Chiang Mai University as local hosts. The focus was on the Chinese Internet in the Global South, with the goal of understanding the technological, geopolitical, and cultural implications of China’s technology stack around the world, particularly the majority world. CIRC 2023 welcomed over 70 scholars to Chiang Mai in July, selected on the basis of an open call for papers and panels.

HOSTS

KEYNOTES

The two keynote speakers were Pirongrong Ramasoota, Commissioner, Thai National Broadcasting and Telecommunication Commission (NBTC), and former Vice President of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, and Ivan Franceschini, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Botswana, and founder of the Made in China journal.

BEST STUDENT PAPER WINNERS

The winners of the CIRC 2023 Best Student Paper awards were: Jindong Leo-Liu & Biying Wu-Ouyang, PhD students, the School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, for their paper Negotiating Chineseness in a Social VR Platform: Acculturation of Chinese Nationals and Overseas in a Sinophone Community on VRChat.

The runner-up was: Nowmay Opalinski, PhD student, Paris 8 University, French Institute of Geopolitics (IFG) for his paper The making of a “Digital CPEC”: empirical findings on Chinese tech companies’ adaptation strategies in Pakistan.