Dr Bingchun Meng - London School of Economics

Manchester China Institute

Dr Bingchun Meng has written extensively about Chinese social media and its subjects. She provides a profound analysis of topics such as knowledge production, gender research and power structure, social science studies standpoints and academic awareness in different social contexts in China and the West. Her recent publication, The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), offers an analytical account of the consensus and contestations of the politics of Chinese media at both institutional and discursive levels. It considers the formal politics of how the Chinese state manages political communication internally and externally in the post-socialist era, and examines the politics of news media, focusing particularly on how journalists navigate the competing demands of the state, the capital and the urban middle class readership. The book also addresses the politics of entertainment media, in terms of how power operates upon and within media culture, and the politics of digital networks, highlighting how the Internet has become the battlefield of ideological contestation while also shaping how political negotiations are conducted. Bearing in mind the contemporary relevance of China’s socialist revolution, this text challenges both the liberal universalist view that presupposes ‘the end of history’ and various versions of China exceptionalism, which downplay the impact of China’s integration into global capitalism.

About the Speaker

Dr Bingchun Meng is a Professor in the Department for Media and Communications at LSE, where she also co-directs the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Research Centre. Prof Meng is currently the Director of LSE PhD Academy and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP).

Dr Meng has a Bachelor's in Chinese Language and Literature (1997) and a Master's in Comparative Literature (2000) from Nanjing University, China. She obtained a PhD in Mass Communication (2006) from the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Before joining the LSE, she was a post-doc fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked at the Centre for Global Communication Studies and also taught courses on Chinese media.

Dr Meng’s research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. She has published widely in these topic areas on leading academic journals. From 2020 to 2021, she served as a Senior Fellow of Global Governance Futures 2035 organized by Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin under the sponsorship with Bosch Foundation. Her book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation was published by Palgrave in early 2018. She is currently working on another monograph under contract with Columbia University Press about AI industries in China.