Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

This ethnographic study uses long-term intensive fieldwork on charitable organisations to explore how e-commerce platforms change the moral landscape of Chinese society by creating a novel culture around doing good. Expanding beyond a simple communication channel, social media platforms in China allied with charitable NGOs to standardise the presentation of disadvantaged groups in a commercialised format. By closely examining the documentary practices through which charitable projects are classified and framed, this study probes the development of the internet-based charity sphere in China. It highlights the moral dimension of social-mediatisation in a non-Western context. Methodologically, it proposes a new approach to capturing the dynamic processes of socio-technical transformations.