LUCC News, February 2026
The February 2026 edition of LUCC's newsletter is out.
You can receive our newsletter via the mailing list - just send an email to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk
Welcome to the first newsletter of the New Lunar Year! The 25-26 academic year has so featured research events featuring academics from China, Europe, and America, as well as leading UK China scholars such as Andrea Ghiselli (Exeter) and Hannah Theaker (Plymouth).
We have a further series of exciting events lined up for this term, with Prof Wang Zheng of Dundee University on March 4 examining The Cost of State-Coordinated Altruism in China, and Dr Mike Gow of Edge Hill University speaking on China’s New Quality Productive Forces on March 11.
On the afternoon of March 6, LUCC will hold a special workshop-style seminar series on Chinese Arts organised by LUCC Doctoral Fellow Jing Hui, featuring PhD researchers from the Leeds, Newcastle and Macau.. Topics include, Chinese Music in the UK, Chinese Calligraphy and Dance Micro-Dramas, "Shuanggan" (Instant Gratification) in Chinese Digital Content, and Chinese Urban Folk Dance. The workshop will run from 1pm-5pm on March 6 - please send an email to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk if you’d like to join!
We are also excited that three LUCC Doctoral Fellows will attend the International Doctoral Symposium on Asian and African Studies (IDSAAS) at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan on March 17-19. We greatly appreciate the support of Tohoku University in enabling LUCC's PhD researchers to attend. See the Engagement section below for more on the IDSAAS conference, and the LUCC participants' papers.
Read on to meet the new additions to LUCC's community, and the latest research from LUCC scholars.
With best wishes for a rollicking Year of the Horse!
Research Seminars
4 March 2026
The Cost of State-Coordinated Altruism in China
Professor Wang Zheng
(University of Dundee)
Time: 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Place: TRH - Roundhouse B02
This seminar is co-hosted by Lancaster University Confucius Institute and Lancaster University China Centre.
Please register at the LINK if you intend to come.
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6 March 2026
Chinese Art PhD Seminar Series
Time: 1:00pm to 5:00pm, 6 March 2026
This LUCC PhD Seminar Series on the theme of Chinese art brings together doctoral researchers from around the UK to present and exchange ideas on topics including:
- Chinese Music in the UK: Sound, Culture and the Erhu (Wen Li, University of Newcastle)
- From Brush to Body: Flow in Chinese Calligraphy and Dance (Xueting Luo, University of Leeds)
- Micro-Dramas, "Shuanggan" (Instant Gratification), and Emotional Value in Chinese Digital Content (Gao Yiwei, Macau University of Science and Technology)
- Chinese Urban Folk Dance: A Form of Transcultural Dance (Jing Hui, LICA / LUCC)
Lunch provided – please register if you intend to come: china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk
Or h.jing2@lancaster.ac.uk
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11 March 2026
Corporate Socialist Responsibility? China’s Mobilisation of Multinational Corporations in Pursuit of “New Quality Productive Forces”
Dr Mike Gow (Edge Hill University)
Time: 3pm-4pm, 11 March 2026
Place: B59 County South
RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk
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People
LUCC is delighted to welcome Linxiao Zhang and Derek Ng as Doctoral Fellows. LUCC also congratulates doctoral fellow, Dr Xue Bai, who graduated in January. Dr Bai's acclaimed PhD thesis Political Consumerism in Contemporary China: Boycott, Buycotts and Motivations for Participation can be accessed from the Lancaster University research repository (see Research section below).
Linxiao ZHANG
Linxiao Zhang's research focuses on gender, sexuality, and education, with a particular interest in the experiences of Chinese students in UK higher education.
Desmond Ng
Desmond Ng Yong Sheng is a PhD researcher in the School of Global Affairs, focusing on Southeast Asian authoritarianism, right-wing politics, and hedging, particularly in Malaysia.
Profiles of all LUCC’s fellows are available at our People page.
Research News
Investigating pragmatic learning opportunities and outcomes in different SCMC modes
- Yuhong Lei
Forty-eight Chinese EFL learners, divided into video-chat and text-chat groups, conducted four interactional role-play tasks in which they engaged in dyadic discussions on the writing of four requests to a third party. Results indicate that the learners more frequently discussed pragmalinguistics in video rather than text mode. Regarding the outcome of request-making, emojis occurred more frequently after the text chat when the learners were making requests to friends. It was also found that the video-based interactions provided more opportunities for discussing the pragmalinguistic features, which led to increased use of internal modifications to mitigate requests made to high-status requestees; text-based interactions provide opportunities for discussing situational and social features and were related to increased use of upgraders to intensify requests made to friends.
International Law as a Driver of Confrontation? UNCLOS and China’s Policy in the South China Sea
- Andrew Chubb
Could international law contribute to interstate maritime conflicts? A close tracing of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) policies in the South China Sea suggests so. China’s early interactions with the emerging maritime legal order in the 1970s expanded the scope of its interests from disputed island territories to comprehensive jurisdiction over vast swathes of maritime space. Ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1996 prompted Beijing to develop new bureaucratic and enforcement capabilities designed to realize sweeping claims inspired by, though not limited to, UNCLOS entitlements. When these capabilities came to fruition in the mid-2000s, they enabled a sustained, increasingly coercive push for control over the PRC’s maritime periphery, which has continued to the present. Four representative cases of China’s new and ongoing patterns of behaviour demonstrate in specific detail how China’s interactions with the legal regime have contributed to its confrontational on-water behaviour. In short, the PRC’s campaign to control vast swathes of East Asian maritime space was rooted in the party-state’s internalization of concepts of maritime rights through the UNCLOS process, coupled with a rejection of its corresponding limitations.
Political consumerism in contemporary China: boycotts, buycotts and motivations for participation
- Xue Bai
This thesis explores the origins, nature, and motivations of political consumerism in China. Although more than 210 boycotting and buycotting cases occurred in China between 2000 and 2024, the phenomenon has received little attention in the political consumerism literature. My research addresses four key questions: 1) What is the historical development of China’s political consumerism? 2) Who engages in contemporary political consumerism in China? 3) How does political consumerism relate to political participation in China? 4) What motivations drive individuals to engage in nationalist political consumerism in China? I adopt an eclectic, question-driven approach drawing from the historical documentary sources, contemporary online observation, semi-structured interviews, and previously overlooked survey data to argue that political consumerism offers Chinese people, especially the under-represented groups, a limited alternative channel for political participation within a tightly controlled regime. Boycott participation, I find, is a supplement for contentious participation, and a substitute for institutionalised participation. Counterintuitively however, although most cases of political consumerism in China involve patriotic or nationalistic themes, participants’ decisions are not always predominantly driven by political considerations. To capture this complexity, I distinguish a fourfold typology of consumer motivations – political, ethical, self-related, and economic. This gives me a structured lens for analysing political consumer behaviour. These diverse motivations undermine the dominant view of China’s political consumerism as simply an exclusionary instrument of top-down policy.
- Aiqing Wang
The comprehensive intervention of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into the educational ecosystem represents far more than a mere technological iteration; it marks a discontinuous mutation in the history of curriculum design, comparable in profundity to the advent of the printing press or the internet. We are cur rently witnessing a fundamental reset of the ”value” assigned to cognitive tasks. As the marginal cost of content generation approaches zero, the premium in education is shifting drastically from the retrieval and accumu lation of information to its evaluation, curation, and synthesis. This report, based on an exhaustive review of global educational frontiers—including empirical cases from Singapore, China, and Western higher education institutions—provides an in-depth analysis of the educational landscape in the Post-GPT era. The analysis in dicates that traditional capabilities centered on rote memorization and linear execution are depreciating at an accelerated rate. Conversely, skills emphasizing high agency, evaluative judgment, and human-machine col laboration are rapidly climbing the value chain. Future curriculum design must achieve a paradigm shift from ”AI as Oracle,” where students passively receive answers, to ”AI as Partner” or ”Cognitive Mirror,” where stu dents actively critique and refine outputs. This transition is essential to address the increasingly severe risks of cognitive offloading and skill atrophy.
- Run Li
Encouraging healthy eating has become a key area in China’s efforts to curb rising obesity levels among the population. Previous research highlights the importance of media in shaping dietary behaviors, yet few studies examine official digital platforms. This study critically examines how ‘健康中国’ [Healthy China], the official WeChat account of the National Health Commission of China, represents food and eating in weight loss content to guide public food choices. Theory: Guided by the theoretical concept of ‘nudges’, which are soft and subtle interventions designed to improve food choices while maintaining freedom of choice, this study applies the approach of multimodal critical discourse analysis. Healthy eating is conceptualized as extending across epistemic, material, moral, and emotional dimensions. Method: A total of 66 posts from ‘健康中国’ [Healthy China] were analyzed. The analysis focused on how textual, visual, and interactive elements construct four eating discourses: educated eating (teaching the public to make informed food choices), tailored eating (integrating specific backgrounds of different groups), moral eating (emphasizing duties in food choices), and affective eating (enjoying healthy food with love and security). Results: There are four identified eating discourses, which are ‘educated eating’, ‘tailored eating’, ‘moral eating’, and ‘affective eating’. These discourses are mobilized to produce nudge effects, subtly guiding dietary behavior while preserving individual autonomy. Discussion: This study provides insights into how multimodal, culturally specific eating discourses in China are enacted as soft, paternalistic nudges, revealing their dual role in promoting public health while reinforcing weight stigma and individualizing responsibility, thus offering a critical perspective on the ethical and social implications of nudge-based health communication
Rethinking Language and Culture Education for a Reglobalising World (Keynote Speech)
- Derek Hird
As the world enters a new phase of selective deglobalisation, marked by shifting geopolitical alliances, technological competition, and military crises, the concept of reglobalisation has emerged to describe the reconfiguration of global flows rather than their retreat. In this context, language and culture education must be critically re-evaluated. Traditional models have often framed language learning in terms of national identity, fixed cultural content, and native-speaker norms. More recent models have been predicated on globalisation’s openness to linguistic and cultural exchange. Both approaches have their strengths, but both are also partly misaligned with shifting transnational realities and limits on global communication and intercultural interaction. This paper argues for a paradigm shift in language and culture education—one that embraces a pragmatic engagement with the agendas of both nation-state realpolitik and idealistic visions of global openness and exchange, recognising the opportunities and downsides of both perspectives. Drawing on recent work in critical pedagogy, decolonial theory, and multilingual education, the presentation outlines a framework for rethinking the positioning and content of language education in a reglobalising world. Rather than seeing language education as a neutral skillset or a cultural heritage project, this talk proposes a more dynamic, justice-oriented vision: one in which language learners develop the ability to navigate complexity, critique power relations, and contribute meaningfully to global conversations. Transformation of curricula, pedagogical aims, and assessment practices are considered in the context of interdisciplinary programmes that integrate language learning with global challenges such as climate change, health inequalities, and digital transformation.
The spectre of the sissy: heteromasculine anxieties in Chinese beauty vlogging for men
- Derek Hird
Male beauty vlogging is flourishing in China despite fears of a masculinity ‘crisis’, sissyphobia and LGBT crackdowns. Key questions arise: To what extent does male beauty vlogging challenge the notion of a crisis of masculinity and offer new, positive gender expressions for men? To what extent does it reinforce hierarchical and oppressive formations of gender and sexuality? This article analyses three male beauty vloggers’ promotion of a ‘fake-natural look for straight men’ involving nonvisible makeup, to allay straight-identifying men’s fear of being called ‘sissy’. A further discussion examines a male beauty vlogger’s critique of the feminisation of visible makeup-wearing men. The analysis is informed by an understanding of how the heterosexual matrix shapes emerging hybrid, ‘inclusive’ masculinities that reflect cosmopolitan desires and anxieties. The vloggers extend the boundaries of ‘straight masculinity’ with a new aesthetic for straight men: a fresh, clean, refined, elegant, confident and energised look that seeks to replace stereotypical twentieth-century models of ‘tough guy’ masculinity and to shift gender stereotypes that associate makeup and skincare solely with women. Yet, the vloggers also reinforce existing gender and sexual inequalities through explicit rejection of male femininity and use of sissyphobic language.
The platformization of socially constructed gender realities: the ‘Fat Cat incident’
- Aiqing Wang
This paper examines the “Fat Cat Incident” (2024), where a young Chinese gamer’s suicide after an online relationship breakdown sparked intense online discourse. Through inductive thematic analysis and qualitative sentiment analysis of 1,200 user comments from the female-oriented Xiaohongshu and male-dominated Zhihu platforms, we demonstrate how Chinese social media facilitate the social construction of polarized gender realities. Xiaohongshu users predominantly framed Fat Cat as an emotionally impulsive “hopeless romantic” while defending his ex-girlfriend’s right to financial compensation, whereas Zhihu users portrayed Fat Cat as a manipulated victim while characterizing his ex-girlfriend as a calculated “gold-digger” employing PUA tactics. The incident reveals three key processes: (1) gender norm construction via polarized discourse, (2) tragedy commodification into “liuliang” (traffic) and memes, and (3) transactional relationship normalization and digital gender segregation. This demonstrates how platforms shape social realities by reinforcing gender divides, monetizing emotion, and commodifying personal loss, offering critical insight into gender politics in China’s digital public sphere.
Outreach & Engagement
LUCC Doctoral Fellows in Sendai
We are also excited that three LUCC Doctoral Fellows will attend the International Doctoral Symposium on Asian and African Studies (IDSAAS) at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan on March 17-19. We greatly appreciate the support of Tohoku University in enabling LUCC's PhD researchers to attend. IDSAAS is held annually as a partnership bringing together doctoral candidates from Ca'Foscari University, Sapienza University of Rome, Heidelberg University, Tohoku University and Lancaster University. LUCC Fellows in Lancaster will also contribute mentoring to conference participants from the partner universities.
LUCC Doctoral Fellows presenting in the conference include:
- Hao Yang - "A Happy Excursion Against the China's Digital Leviathan"
- Hui Jing - "How Transcultural Concepts Shape Transcultural Dance: Evidence from Chinese Urban Folk Dance"
- Jinyuan Li - "The Logic of Control: Conceptualising Deterrence in China's Anti-Corruption Campaign"
(China’s Global Image—What 25 Years of Polling Across 159 Countries Reveal)
LUCC director Dr Andrew Chubb (朱波) participated in webinar (Chinese-language) with the Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis on February 11. Other guests included Dr Kong Yuan (孔元) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Associate Professor Xu Shaomin of Sun Yat-sen University, and Dr Lizzi Li of Asia Society.
Click below to watch the lively discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTJpg6MThnY&t=190s
Culture & Community
MINT Chinese Film Festival, Kendal
The MINT Chinese Film Festival, Kendal which takes place Friday through Sunday, 6-8 March 2025 is now up on the Kendal Brewery Arts website https://www.breweryarts.co.uk/event/mint-chinese-film-festival/
Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) preparation classes
The HSK preparation classes will take place from week beginning 12thJanuary to week beginning 16th March 2026 (10 classes in total).
Registration: Please email ci@lancaster.ac.uk to be added to the register.
HSK drop in (in-person)
Time: Tuesdays, 12.00-1.00pm
Location: Lancaster University Confucius Institute (The Roundhouse), room B03.
Registration: No registration required.
For further information regarding HSK tests at Lancaster University, please visit: Proficiency Tests - Lancaster University
Chinese Calligraphy Classes
Open to beginner and advanced level learners to learn and practice calligraphy together.
Time: Tuesdays, 6.15pm-7.45pm
Dates: 13th January to 17th March 2026.
Location: Lancaster University Confucius Institute
Registration: Cultural classes - Lancaster University
Tai Chi
The tai chi classes will not take place on 23rd January and 27thFebruary 2026.
Times: Wednesdays, 12.00-12.50pm
Dates: 14th January to 18th March 2026
Location: Lancaster University Confucius Institute
Registration: Tai Chi Classes - Lancaster University
Times: Fridays, 1.00-1.50pm (Beginners) and 2.00-2.50pm (Improvers)
Dates: 16th January to 20th March 2026.
Location: Garstang Arts Centre
Registration: Cultural classes - Lancaster University.
To register for this class, you must be a member of the Garstang Arts Centre. If you are not currently a member of the Arts Centre, please contact Garstang Arts Centre: https://garstangartssociety.org.uk/contact
Chinese Mandarin Language Classes
Starting from week beginning 12th January to week beginning 16thMarch 2026 (10 weeks).