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  • 2025 Volume 47 Issue 7
    Published: 23 July 2025
      
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  • Intercourse (Verkehr): A Core Concept of The German Ideolog
    CHEN Lidan ZHANG Yue
    2025, 47(7): 6-26.
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    In their work The German Ideology, Marx and Engels creatively introduced several core concepts, including “intercourse” (Verkehr) and a range of compound words derived from it.These concepts played a crucial role in the development of the materialist conception of history and communist theory. However, due to historical circumstances, both “intercourse” and its related compounds have long been obscured. The discourse on historical materialism has largely been dominated by terms such as material production, productive forces, and relations of production, while Marx’s sociological insight that “ human nature is the true community of men” has been overlooked. This article discusses four reasons for the neglect and misinterpretation of the concept of “intercourse.”; examines all 168 instances of Verkehr in The German Ideology along with their corresponding Chinese translations; analyzes 608 occurrences in Marx and Engels’ other works and their Chinese translations; briefly surveys 1,119 instances found in their published notebooks (most of which remain untranslated); and studies the textual variants compiled in MEGA2. These investigations collectively demonstrate that “intercourse” ( Verkehr) and its compound forms constitute one of the core concepts of The German Ideology and of the theory of historical materialism
  • Research on the Construction of the CPC’s International Image Identity
    LIU Xiaoyan LI Jing CHENG Chang
    2025, 47(7): 27-44.
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    Based on a clarification of the connotations and essential characteristics of the CPC “international image construction” and “international image identity construction”, this paper conducts an overseas survey to examine international perceptions and identification with the CPC’s image. It further investigates the underlying factors influencing such identification. The paper argues that the essence of the CPC’s international image construction lies in the Party’s behaviors and the interpretations of those behaviors by both the CPC itself and the “others”. The essence of international image identity construction refers to the CPC’s efforts to “cultivate” “guide” or “attract” recognition from international audiences through its own actions, while counteracting the “disidentification” generated by externally constructed narratives. At present, there exists a considerable gap between the actual international recognition of the CPC’s image and the ideal projection. This gap is manifested in a range of perceptions among foreign publics, including a lack of understanding and curiosity, fear or anxiety, “hostility”, as well as varying degrees of recognition and support. The major impediments to international identification with the CPC’s image stem from low levels of strategic trust caused by conflicting interests; ideological aversion rooted in systemic and institutional differences; value divergences across cultural contexts; and cognitive and attitudinal barriers arising from both intentional distortions and unintentional misinterpretations.
  • A Fleeting Participatory Experiment in the Digital Age? A Case Study of a News Start-up Adopting Participatory Production
    FAN Yingjie LI Yanhong
    2025, 47(7): 45-67.
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    Participatory production is held in high regard in journalism academia, yet it is less commonly applied on a large scale in professional news organisations, where participation is a mirage. In recent years, the development of digital technology has further empowered productive audiences, and new startups born in the Internet arena have ignited a new wave of enthusiasm for participatory journalism. This paper focuses on a news startup in China that adopts a participatory production model, and examines the process of the participatory experiment in this case, providing a typical sample for an in-depth understanding of the occurrence, development, and change of participatory journalism in the digital era. Based on multiple research methods over time, it is found that this organisation, which is on the fringe of the journalism field, has adopted a full-scale participatory production model since its inception, attracting many people to participate in the process of video news production, but this model has been gradually transformed into a networked and flexible system of employment in the course of subsequent development, with the scale of the model being greatly reduced and the connotation of participation being dissolved. This process of decline suggests that, similar to traditional professional news organisations, entrepreneurial digital-native media are still unable to move beyond the dilemma of participation, which is ultimately moving towards professional domestication and normalisation. However, the public role of participatory journalism has not been weakened by the domestication of professionalism, but rather shows the synergistic public-enhancing effects of professionalism and participation. This case study enriches the understanding of participatory journalism in the digital age and responds to academic explanations of why participation is limited.
  • Comparison on the Journalistic Production Time: Timeliness Discrepancies and Temporal Values
    DAI Ruimin
    2025, 47(7): 68-89.
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    In the fast-paced world of journalism, time constitutes a critical issue of professional legitimacy. Existing studies have examined the influence of technological transformation, organizational routines, and user relations on the pursuit of timeliness, often critiquing the alienation of time within news production. However, the explanatory scope of timeliness remains to be further explored. Drawing on in-depth interviews and textual analysis, this study investigates the causes of the alienation of time in news production through three relational dimensions: the relationship between individuals and information, between individuals and others, and between individuals and time. The findings reveal that timeliness encompasses three dimensions: type, perspective, and medium. Furthermore, temporal value in news production is shaped by tensions between normative expectations and lived experiences across physical, social, and economic domains. While timeliness and temporal value constitute the explicit framework and implicit logic of journalistic production time respectively, the overloaded meaning of timeliness obscures the underlying sources of the alienation of journalistic production time. In contrast, the notion of temporal value provides a potential pathway for addressing this issue. A comparative analysis of the temporal reference systems underlying timeliness and temporal value suggests that understanding the alienation of time in news production requires an embodied perspective that takes into account the life courses of journalistic practitioners.
  • Verification at Work: The Institutional Maintaining and Cognitive Interpretation of Verification in Instant News
    WANG Yue
    2025, 47(7): 90-117.
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    As a worthy “old-yet-new” question in digital journalism studies, there is still a lack of empirical studies on journalistic truth from the perspective of journalistic practice. Drawing on the “institutional work” theory, this study focuses on “verification”—a typical practice of journalistic truth, and explores how and why Chinese instant news practitioners in professional media maintain the institution of verification in their work. Findings indicate that practitioners have found it increasingly strict and difficult to verify information in recent years. As a response, they have strengthened the review process and the oral culture of verification within the newsroom, and intensified or transformed verification in individual practice, including verifying channels, news sources and ways of presentation. The institutional maintaining of verification is a result of the interaction between practitioners, organizations, and the institutional norms, as well as a kind of practical adjustment to the current institutional environment so as to ensure factual accuracy, obtain core information and avoid uncertain risks. Aside from the internal motivation to maintain cultural authority, the imagination of perfect journalistic truth and irrational anti-press pressure from external expectations are affecting verification more directly.
  • Empathetic Practice of Generative Emotion: Human Emotional Perception and Empathy towards Affective AI Agents
    ZHANG Liping ZHANG Litao
    2025, 47(7): 118-139.
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    Unlike existing human–computer interaction studies focused on functional exchanges,this research investigates emotional relationships between humans and computers. It examine show users, driven by psychological motivations and needs, engage in emotional transmission and communication with Affective AI Agents (AI agents with emotional communication capabilities) within specific contexts, thereby exploring the possibility and mechanisms of human-computer empathy. Focusing on users’ recent generative emotional empathy practice with Affective AI Agents, the study employs in-depth interviews to gather empirical data on emotional communication. It analyzes human emotional perception and empathy toward Affective AI Agents, alongside the underlying empathy dilemma. Key findings reveal that users’ psychological motivations are central to Affective AI Agents’ generation of emotional responses, with the agents’ “digital memory” serving as the primary basis for expressing and responding to human emotions. Concurrently, users’ contextual framing and agents’ capture and interpretation of situational cues emerge as critical elements for empathy generation. As human-computer empathy becomes a social strategy in an alienated society, fluid emotions arise from the interplay between flesh and computer. The “sense of witnessing” engendered by technological embodiment forms a vital foundation for empathy and offers new directions for re-evaluating the ethics and values of intelligent agents.
  • Shared Knowledge as Antecedent of Empathetic Dialogue and Reciprocal Understanding: Theoretical Promises and Practical Implications
    PENG Zengjun ZHOU Yan WANG Yuqi
    2025, 47(7): 140-157.
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    The rise of social and networked communication has increasingly blurred the boundaries between public and private spheres. The interplay of rationality and emotion among diverse actors posed significant challenges to traditional social and communication theories, which are largely based on the assumption that consensus and agreement emerge from human reasoning and rationality. As a result, the goal of communication has shifted from consensus-building to fostering connectedness and reciprocal understanding, with empathy conceptualized as a key factor in facilitating meaningful connections, dialogue, and understanding. We argue that empathy does not arise spontaneously. Instead, the emergence of empathy requires specific antecedent factors as prerequisites. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of common ground and common knowledge from the field of psycholinguistics and game theory, we use shared knowledge to encompass the key connotations of both theories. We explore the antecedent role of shared knowledge, both foundational and emergent, in digital interactions, and discuss the impact of experiential appeal and linguistic expression and cultural identity on the formation of shared knowledge. On this basis, an entry point with theoretical value and practical significance is proposed for common and reciprocal understanding and even consensus in the present and future. Compared with traditional theoretical frameworks of interaction, such as intersubjectivity and rationality of interaction, shared knowledge is more adaptable, explanatory and practical in the ecology of digital interaction.
  • Social Justice, the Right to Memory and Communication Ethics: Shaping a Just Memory Culture in the Digital Age —An Interview with Anna Reading and Noam Tirosh
    LI Andong
    2025, 47(7): 158-176.
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    The right to memory refers to the rights of individuals and collectives to tell the public about past experiences or historical narratives in their own way. With the development of this concept in English-speaking scholarship, the notion of the right to memory has begun to encompass a range of related obligations, principles, interventions and social practices. Media and communication have emerged as key areas of inquiry in the study of the right to memory. Emerging digital platforms not only offer new opportunities to safeguard this right but also introduce new inequalities and blind spots. By considering the different facets of collective and individual memory, the right to memory seeks to safeguard all aspects of memory processes through a right-oriented discourse that respects the plurality of memory narratives and promotes the free expression and dialogue between different memory stories. In terms of media and communication, at the practical level, the right to memory provides memory activists with discursive resources for mediated action. At the official level, it calls for media policies and regulations to protect the media accessibility of disadvantaged groups. At the conceptual level, it advocates a communication ethic of tolerance, openness and mutual respect.